By Wanda Skowronska

Monsignor Reilly, the founder of the Helpers of God’s Precious Infants has often said that evil of great magnitude calls for a spiritual response of great magnitude. One could say his motto is ‘A spiritual war must be fought by spiritual means’. And yet how deeply do we as a society and as Catholics in Western society truly understand this? Do we understand that the spiritual war against life with all its aspects—abortion, contraception, sterilisation, euthanasia and embryonic stem cell research—has such a Goliath-like grip on our society that it pervades it at every corner. Many of our ‘normal’ activities actually are in the midst of the ‘new killing fields’ of Western society. We go to pharmacies where the morning after pill and ‘contraceptives’—which kill infants—are dispensed to numerous customers standing alongside us. When we drive through the suburbs, we pass modern abortion clinics doing ‘business as usual’. When we go to hospital to visit a sick friend genetic testing proceeds nearby sounding the death knell for unborn children. Invisible orphans surround us in the ‘frozen orphanages’ where embryos are stored in numerous suburban laboratories. In schools children are presented with sex education programs which prepare them to accept these realities as a matter of course.

Pope John Paul II in Evangelium Vitae sees our age as one of the ‘darkest moral blindness’, the consequence of calling ‘evil good and good evil’ and says ‘Faced with countless grave threats to life present in the modern world one could feel overwhelmed by sheer powerlessness…’. However in this encyclical and elsewhere he never ceases to exhort us to overcome evil with love and to use spiritual good to overcome the pervading darkness.

One spiritual means open to us all is the spiritual adoption of the unborn child. This does not require joining any organisation but is a simple effective means of using spiritual means in the face of the pervasive evil of our times. It is in fact an invisible golden spiritual thread that joins all pro lifers everywhere—the love of the unborn child and his/her mother, father and family. It is a spiritual act, not requiring much time or effort, whereby a person undertakes to adopt a child—the initial short prayer can be said at home or in a church—and to say a short prayer and decade of the Rosary daily (this can be part of one’s usual Rosary prayer) for nine months for a child whose name is known to God alone and with whom one will be inevitably linked for all eternity.

Just as the devastation of tsunami’s in the last few years called for our help for people who have lost everything and people responded with such good will, so these unborn children look at us helplessly and call on our good will—not asking for money or visible assistance—but brief daily remembrance.

The movement finds a home in Poland
The worldwide spiritual adoption movement took root in a big way in Poland in 1987 in the church of the Holy Spirit in Warsaw with the encouragement of Fr Francis Kolacz. Prior to this, even before Roe vs. Wade legalised abortion, U.S. Bishop Fulton Sheen promoted his own short prayer of spiritual adoption for those threatened in the womb. In the new millennium where we face the bitter fruits of the mass culture of death, the spiritual adoption movement continues to grow.

Its centre now is the Pauline Monastery at Jasna Gora in Czestochowa, Poland’s best known Marian shrine (whose icon of Our Lady is said to have been painted by St Luke, owned by St Helen, Charlemagne, Byzantine princes and a Polish prince who gave it to the Pauline monks in 1349) and one which the Holy Father used to visit often with his father in his youth (he lost his mother and older brother early in life). It is the site of a miraculous victory in 1655 against well armed Swedish invaders where outnumbered townspeople and monks sought the intercession of Our Lady of Czestochowa and won the battle.

Afterwards—something perhaps not much known in the West—Poland officially declared the Mother of God to be Queen of Poland and the ‘Jasna Gora vows’ were ratified by the army and both houses of parliament as well. In a further interesting historical link, King Jan Sobieski invoked the help of Our Lady of Czestochowa, staying at the shrine for three days before going to win a decisive victory in Vienna in 1683 against the invading Islamic army of Ottoman Turks. Czestochowa is a place where Our Lady’s help has been invoked against overwhelming odds and so it is a fitting place to be the home of the spiritual adoption movement.

The Holy Father and bishops of Poland have given great encouragement to spiritual adoption and there are several Polish websites recounting the date when parishioners en masse spiritually adopted children in an initial prayer in the church and then proceeded with mutual encouragement and nine months of prayer. A Carmelite-run parish in Krakow recounts how an entire week was recently devoted to spiritual adoption. In 1998 the Divine Mercy parish of Tarnow in south eastern Poland reported 1300 parishioners spiritually adopting a child each—an increase on 800 the previous year. At Czestochowa there have been spiritual adoption ‘events’ involving thousands of young people where a bishop leads the initial prayer. Also there are accounts where all candidates for the priesthood in seminaries spiritually adopted a child and recounted the profound impact this had on them.

Real life stories of hope
Wieslawa Kowalksa who lives in Warsaw has traveled to many surrounding countries to promote spiritual adoption—among them Russia, the Ukraine, Germany, Hungary, France and Byelorussia. She has many stories to tell—one of them being of a priest who had prayed for a spiritually adopted child for eight months and who then developed a lot of doubts about whether his prayers had any effect. He had a vivid dream one night of a baby in the arms of a man near a car wreckage. Not long afterwards this priest was called to a hospital to fill in for the chaplain who was sick. The first person he came across was the man he had seen in his dream who then thanked him for coming as he, his wife and child had recently survived a car accident. He took the priest to see his wife and child in another section of the hospital. The priest was astounded to recognise the child as the one he had seen in his dream. The child’s parents went on to recount how they were poor and had considered aborting their child early in the pregnancy. However while at home dis-cussing it, somehow, something just made them change their minds. The priest realised their change of heart coincided with the beginning of his spiritual adoption. He never again doubted that spiritual adoption and his efforts were real.

Not every spiritual adopter will see their child in dreams or reality—that is something for the next world. Nevertheless some have had rather strange experiences towards the end of the nine months of prayer. A Polish girl, Cecilia, who worked in a charitable organisation (not specifically linked with pregnancy help) recounts that one day a single mother about to give birth came through the door asking for help. She said it was an unusual kind of request and afterwards it dawned on her that she was approaching the end of her nine months of prayer. She said, while she could never give empirical proof, she had a strange sense that this was the child she had prayed for. She became very involved with the mother and her child and continues to be so until this day.

Wieslawa Kowalksa relates how very young children have spiritually adopted children. Also many women suffering from post abortion syndrome (women who have had multiple abortions—as many as 10 or even more—in the former Soviet countries) have also spiritually adopted a child and have been mysteriously and profoundly healed by welcoming into their lives this unknown infant who touched the deepest part of their souls. Some of these women say that spiritual adoption achieved what counselling and psychology could not.

Australians spiritually adopt
Australians are also welcoming spiritually adopted children into their lives. In Sydney in May 2004, Bishop Porteous, led over 120 people in a spiritual adoption prayer at St Brendan’s Catholic Church in Annandale during a celebration of the 10th anniversary of the Helpers of God’s Precious Infants. A man present that day recently related to me that when his nine months of prayer were up he had the most vivid dream of a baby being handed to him through a sawn out hole in a door that was locked. Shocked, he did not quite know what to do and went to tell his wife that they had to go to hospital immediately with this baby he had been given by someone. After he awoke, he felt he had been shown the child he had adopted.

Without the advantage of audible cries, we are being looked at in silent pleas that beckon us from the unseen world. Our adoption is an act of true spiritual power in the abortion holocaust—part of a spiritual Schindler’s list, a true act in time and eternity. While politicians are only waking up to the demographic winter facing the Western world because of decades of mass contraception and abortion, spiritual adoptive parents are rescuing children one by one. They ‘see’ their unseen children with their hearts, pray for them and in the midst of darkness light candles of love that will never go out.

About the writer: Wanda Skowronska is a registered psychologist working in inner city Sydney schools. For many years she has volunteered as a footpath counsellor with the Sydney Helpers.