Reclaiming Our Children: A Blog About Healing After Abortion

Look to him that you may be radiant with joy,
and your faces may not blush with shame.
When the poor one called out, the LORD heard,
and from all his distress he saved him.

 An excerpt from our newest pamphlet "The Grace of Shame."

Shame is not necessarily a bad thing. It can be signal of a wrong doing and a motivating factor for those impacted by abortion to seek help.

Celebrating the Feast of St. Ignatius with fellow Jesuits, Pope Francis said, “We look at the wisdom of Christ and our ignorance, at his omnipotence and our weakness, at his justice and our inequity and at his goodness and our badness…  We ask for the grace of shame, the shame that comes from a continuous conversation of mercy with him, and the shame that makes us blush before Jesus Christ.”   

The remedy for shame is humility. An admittance of what we have heard over and over in the scriptures. A deep acknowledgment that without God, we are all capable of any sin and that it is Him and His love and mercy alone that brings us out of the darkness, that of ourselves we are nothing, but through Him all good things come.   

If we truly believe this, we would see the “grace” of shame for we would know that each and every one of us, no matter what the sin, is saved only through the grace of God. Our sinfulness would not surprise us, but instead humble us knowing our need for dependence on Him. Then, the brilliance of the light of His glory will surely outshine this shame leaving us gazing at the goodness of the Lord instead of ourselves.