Fifteen bishops joined participants in a strong show of support for unborn life while demonstrators disrupted the opening Mass and protested alongside the London march.
LONDON — A high attendance at the U.K. March for Life on Saturday, coupled with the most intense visible counterdemonstrations by pro-abortion protesters witnessed at the annual event, shows that life issues are becoming a central focus of British public life, the pro-life event’s founder has said.
The protesters, most of them masked, then accompanied much of the rally, chanting through loud hailers and deliberately making noise to drown out pro-life speakers. London’s Metropolitan Police were criticized for allowing them to protest in close proximity and to have a location in Parliament Square directly in front of the March for Life stage, where they caused further noise and disruption and provoked pro-life participants.
But Vaughan-Spruce told the Register that she did not see the protests in themselves as “necessarily a bad thing” because she took them to be “an indication that abortion is becoming more of a live public issue.”
“For too long there’s been an extraordinary complacency surrounding abortion in Britain,” she said. “It has been treated as something that should simply be accepted. But that seems to be changing.”
Reflecting on the high attendance, Vaughan-Spruce, who has prayed for many years outside of abortion facilities and is currently facing prosecution for doing so, said the march showed that “people are finding it culturally acceptable” to be pro-life. They are seeing it as “increasingly necessary to voice concerns about abortion” and are “beginning to find the courage to challenge the culture of silence that has surrounded abortion for so long.”
Unprecedented Pastoral Presence
A record 15 Catholic bishops took part in the event this year. They concelebrated the opening Mass, whose chief celebrant was Archbishop Richard Moth of Westminster, and 14 walked the entire march, offering the final prayer and imparting a blessing at the end.
In his homily at the Mass, Bishop Frank Dougan of Galloway, Scotland, warned against succumbing to the temptation to “believe in the inevitability of things only going in one direction and that our arguments and our statement and our witness aren’t getting anywhere.”
“That temptation is the enemy of hope,” he said. He urged the faithful to look to the example of saints such as St. Monica, to “keep doing what we’re doing, keep saying what has to be said, and to keep speaking up for those who cannot speak for themselves.”
Remarking on the protests at Mass, one of the bishops said that while the protesters “may not understand the truth about the dignity of human life, they do seem to understand where the heart of their adversaries lies: in the Catholic Church and, particularly, in the Eucharist.”
To fervent applause, Pope Leo XIV also sent a message of encouragement and good wishes, assuring the participants of his prayers and imparting his apostolic blessing. Every truly just society is “built upon the recognition of the inviolable dignity of the human person,” he said, adding that it “belongs to every human being by the very fact of their existence.” For this reason, he continued, “it must guide every positive legal decision. When this certainty is obscured, the most vulnerable are the first victims, and the law loses its deepest meaning to serve and protect every human being.”
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