Bishop James Conley, on the Planned Parenthood brunch buddies video:

For decades, I have prayed outside of abortion clinics. During the days of Operation Rescue, I went to jail with brother priests and faithful men and women. I have seen men and women on their knees in snow, and rain, and blistering heat, praying for unborn children suffering agony and death. I have prayed for their mothers, their fathers, their grandparents. In the best circumstances, I have seen women turn away from abortion—choosing life, and choosing freedom.

Of course, I’ve prayed for those who perform abortions, or facilitate them. I’ve prayed for their conversions. And I’ve celebrated when men and women like Dr. Bernard Nathanson and Abby Johnson turn away from the practice of barbarism.

But until this week, I have never really grasped the degree to which people in the abortion industry are enslaved, corrupted, and abused by the culture of death. In the debate over Planned Parenthood’s legal compliance, and in the quibbling over the methods of the Center for Medical Progress, the people performing abortions should not be forgotten.

Anyone who can casually discuss tearing children to shreds while having lunch and a good cabernet is a victim of the father of lies. Anyone who thinks that divvying up murdered bodies does “a little bit of extra good” is a captive subject of the dictatorship of relativism. This video reminds me that anyone who traffics in abortion loses a vital and beautiful spark of humanity. Evil coarsens us and deadens us—robs us of the freedom life offers.

Maximilian Kolbe was a Polish priest imprisoned at Auschwitz in 1941. He spent four months there before dying a martyr’s death. During those four months, Father Kolbe was beaten with regularity. His cellmates were beaten as well. He prayed for his captors. He asked his cellmates to do the same. He reminded them that the same evil that destroyed the bodies of prisoners was destroying the souls of his captors. Many of the guards were young. Many of them were conscripts. Many of them chose profoundly evil acts, with full moral culpability. But each one of those who tortured Father Kolbe was a human being, an immortal soul, who had been seduced, ensnared, or possessed by the lies of the Evil One.

Father Kolbe prayed for his tormentors. They were not his enemies. Their salvation was the prize he hoped to gain by the witness of holy love, and holy martyrdom.

Read the whole thing. 

St. Nikolai Velimirovic, a Serbian bishop imprisoned by the Nazis at Dachau, once composed this prayer:

Bless my enemies, O Lord. Even I bless them and do not curse them.

Enemies have driven me into your embrace more than friends have.

Friends have bound me to earth, enemies have loosed me from earth and have demolished all my aspirations in the world.

Enemies have made me a stranger in worldly realms and an extraneous inhabitant of the world. Just as a hunted animal finds safer shelter than an unhunted animal does, so have I, persecuted by enemies, found the safest sanctuary, having ensconced myself beneath your tabernacle, where neither friends nor enemies can slay my soul.

Bless my enemies, O Lord. Even I bless them and do not curse them.

They, rather than I, have confessed my sins before the world.

They have punished me, whenever I have hesitated to punish myself.

They have tormented me, whenever I have tried to flee torments.

They have scolded me, whenever I have flattered myself.

They have spat upon me, whenever I have filled myself with arrogance.

Bless my enemies, O Lord, Even I bless them and do not curse them.

Whenever I have made myself wise, they have called me foolish.

Whenever I have made myself mighty, they have mocked me as though I were a dwarf.

Whenever I have wanted to lead people, they have shoved me into the background.

Whenever I have rushed to enrich myself, they have prevented me with an iron hand.

Whenever I thought that I would sleep peacefully, they have wakened me from sleep.

Whenever I have tried to build a home for a long and tranquil life, they have demolished it and driven me out.

Truly, enemies have cut me loose from the world and have stretched out my hands to the hem of your garment.

Bless my enemies, O Lord. Even I bless them and do not curse them.

Bless them and multiply them; multiply them and make them even more bitterly against me:

so that my fleeing to You may have no return;

so that all hope in men may be scattered like cobwebs;

so that absolute serenity may begin to reign in my soul;

so that my heart may become the grave of my two evil twins, arrogance and anger;

so that I might amass all my treasure in heaven;

ah, so that I may for once be freed from self-deception, which has entangled me in the dreadful web of illusory life.

Enemies have taught me to know what hardly anyone knows, that a person has no enemies in the world except himself.

One hates his enemies only when he fails to realize that they are not enemies, but cruel friends.

It is truly difficult for me to say who has done me more good and who has done me more evil in the world: friends or enemies.

Therefore bless, O Lord, both my friends and enemies.

A slave curses enemies, for he does not understand. But a son blesses them, for he understands.

For a son knows that his enemies cannot touch his life.

Therefore he freely steps among them and prays to God for them.