A Pastor’s Reflections was created in 2015 by Reverend W. Ross Blackburn, who has been a pastor in the Anglican Church in North America for 20 years, and a longtime contributor to the Human Life Review. It was then expanded to Pastoral Reflections, with contributions from a variety of clerics and religious who write on abortion and other grave moral transgressions that not only hurt individuals but deform the culture and threaten religious liberty. We are expanding again, this time to include the lay faithful, in our new feature Faithful Reflections. We look forward to continued wisdom from our pastors as well as thoughtful reflections from those for whom faith is foundational. 

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Articles

Heavenly Sounds of Silence

  Robert Cardinal Sarah wrote a wonderful book, The Power of Silence: Against the Dictatorship of Noise, in which he reminds us that we need to escape from the tyranny of endless distractions produced by constant sound. We must learn how to...
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The Hearts of the Faithful

  This essay first appeared in Pins in the Liberal Balloon, a 1990 collection of essays from Fr. Canavan. ____________________________________________________________________________ The face of the earth has changed over the centuries and...
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Pride and Penance

(This is a reprint from July 8, 2024) Last week, we celebrated the 248th anniversary of our nation’s Declaration of Independence, a bold act of defiance that ultimately, after eight long years of revolutionary war, resulted in Great Britain’s...
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Failures Real and Imagined 

   This past Tuesday marked the third anniversary of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, the 2022 Supreme Court decision revoking the “constitutional right” to abortion invented by Roe v. Wade. For those of us who want to see unborn children...
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Teach Truthfully and Minister Mercifully

    Let’s be honest. Congregations, as well as their pastors and priests, are hesitant, even unwilling, to address abortion either publicly or from the pulpit. We are afraid that we might make somebody in the local church mad....
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The Gift of Age

    The room is not quite big enough for everyone who has come. In her reclining chair, the 95-year-old woman takes it all in, with smiles. Her hearing is spotty, her eyesight rather darkened, and her walker ever close to hand. But she is...
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Livin’ Easy in God

  “Summertime, and the livin’ is easy . . .” So goes the opening aria in George Gershwin’s 1935 opera Porgy and Bess. Summer is upon us now and easy it is—or is supposed to be! School is out; vacation time beckons. It is the season to...
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Reflection for Pentecost

  Receive the Holy Spirit. Whose sins you forgive are forgiven them. (John 20:22-23) The scene of our Lord’s first resurrection appearance to the disciples, when all of them are together, from the Gospel of John, is sometimes called “St. John’s...
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The Sermon on the Mount

  The late John Courtney Murray, S.J., once told me that at a convention he attended, a Protestant theologian said to him in a rather worried tone of voice, “I don’t see how we can base a foreign policy on the Sermon on the Mount.” Replied...
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