By CatholicVote | Created at 2024-10-29 18:31:57 | Updated at 2024-10-30 21:27:30
1 day ago
CV NEWS FEED // A Catholic church in Missouri is offering prayers for the vandals who spray-painted over the pro-life signs in the parish yard.
KCTV5 interviewed Fr. Richard Rocha, the pastor of Saint Robert Bellarmine Church in Blue Springs.
“We prayed holy Mass for those who vandalized our property, our signs,” Fr. Rocha told the news outlet.
Vandals painted “yes” over the signs, which read, “Vote no on 3.”
Amendment 3 is Missouri’s pro-abortion ballot measure that would enshrine the procedure in the Constitution, a major shift from Missouri’s near-total ban on abortion, as CatholicVote previously reported.
Fr. Rocha added, “People can look at it as a political battle, Democrat versus Republican — blue versus red — but it really is a moral battle, and it‘s always been.”
He added, “The first thing I thought of, aside from ’who did this’ and ‘how dare them,’ was to pray, because it’s someone who really could be hurting from something and lashing out.”
“Our Catholic Church teaches that abortion is murder at any stage,” Father Rocha told KCTV5, “and the importance of amendment three and how people really need to educate themselves.”
Last year, the church’s pro-life signs were also vandalized. The parish is working with the local police department and the pro-life committee to find the vandals.
According to CatholicVote’s violence tracker, there have been 71 attacks on Catholic churches in 2024.
