March 30--Day of Fasting and Prayer

The United States Bishops have asked us to add fasting and prayer to our abstinence from meat this coming Friday, March 30th, 2012 for the intention of religious freedom in the United States. I've talked a lot on The Well about the intense need for prayer and activism regarding the Obama Administration's HHS mandate, forcing religious schools and charities to pay for abortion, sterilization and birth control.

Something else interesting has recently come to light.  Fr. John Hollowell recently posted an article on Facebook and Twitter that tells of another March 30th Day of Fasting.  This was March 30, 1863 and the proclamation was signed by President Abraham Lincoln.  It reads in part:

We have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of Heaven. We have been preserved, these many years, in peace and prosperity. We have grown in numbers, wealth and power, as no other nation has ever grown. But we have forgotten God. We have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace, and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us; and we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own. Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us!

It behooves us then, to humble ourselves before the offended Power, to confess our national sins, and to pray for clemency and forgiveness.

Please join with the United States Bishops to fast and pray for religious freedom in the United States. We are at a time where religion is being persecuted as never before in this, a free country. Our rights are being taken away one by one. We need to make our voices heard, both to our politicians and as we cry out to God.