Christina King

ST. ALBERT — “Right now, in our culture, the family is under attack,” says a well-known pro-life speaker.

“The enemy is very clever. He realizes that if he can destroy the family, he’s won (half) the battle,” pro-life speaker Christina King said at Protect Life’s first annual pro-life conference at Holy Family Church.

King said the evil one has started his plan of destruction at the core of the family unit. “We’ve come to know whom God the Father is through our own fathers in our life,” she said. “If the enemy can destroy fathers, he can destroy the family.”

But we, in our own ways, also contribute to the destruction of the family, lamented King.

FAMILY DINNER

“We are so busy that we don’t take that time to have dinner with one another to reconnect. In our busyness we have failed to make our family the number one priority in our lives.”

King found it ironic that we have numerous technological gadgets to make things easier and faster for us. “Yet we seem to have less time than people did in the 1950s to raise our families.”

King is a Catholic presenter who has been speaking to teens and parents since 1996. She tackles anything from parenting and pro-life to chastity and motherhood. At the pro-life conference, she spoke on a wide array of topics, including almost an hour on the virtues of Our Lady of Guadalupe.

Protect Life, a group of mainly young people who want to raise awareness about life issues, organized the event. About 90 people, most of them youth, registered for the conference, which also included adoration, rosary and Mass.

The enemy is also clever at using pornography, King said. “Do you know that 70 per cent of kids aged 18 to 24 have already seen pornography?” she asked. “Young boys see their first pornography image online at age 11.”

WOMEN’S PURPOSE

One purpose of pornography is to get women to deny the reason why they were made women, King said. “It’s written right into the design of our bodies as women; we are called to receive and to give life to the world.”

King says all women are called to motherhood, either spiritual motherhood or physical motherhood — sometimes both. She is living her own yes to God through her physical motherhood of eight children.

THEOLOGY OF THE BODY

“It was through the teachings of Theology of the Body that I began to understand that love must be freely given, it must be totally given and it must be faithful and fruitful,” she said.

Mother Teresa was spiritual mother to thousands and millions of people, King said. “So too are we as women called to motherhood.”

The evil one has effectively devoured the children of the future through abortion. “I think we are at 1.5 million abortions a year in the United States,” King said, noting that in the encyclical Humanae Vitae Pope Paul VI warned that increased use of birth control would result in the breakdown of the family.

AZTEC SACRIFICES

She compared the abortion industry to the Aztecs, who sacrificed thousands of children to appease the gods.

The abortion and birth control mentality, she said, has brought about a materialistic society that has taken people’s focus off of the reason God created us, which is “to love God and to serve God.”

In the beginning God created us male and female. His first commandment was to go forth and be fruitful.

“The key to understanding how to love and serve God is to know how we as women are called to give our own ‘yes’ in a uniquely different way than men. We are equal in dignity but complementary in nature for a reason.”

“If we are going to overcome a culture where life is disposable, where children can be thrown away, where women can be seen as objects for personal pleasure and gratification, then we have to start to see the ‘person’ in other people,” stressed King.