Maybe it has something to do with this:
"On our way back to Milwaukee, Edmund and I passed Saint Nicholas Albanian Orthodox Church. For months in this church, an icon of the Virgin had been weeping. Streams of an oily liquid formed at the bottom of the Virgin's eyes and streams of tears flowed down the painting and onto the shoulders of the baby Christ held in her lap. St. Nicholas Church became a pilgrimage center as thousands came to view the miracle. Edmund and I decided to ask a priest of the church to bless the aborted babies with the Virgin's tears. We knew our request was unusual. We left the box of approximately forty bodies in the car and went into the church hall. We thought it best to leave the aborted babies in the car until we had explained our request. We saw a priest, perhaps in his mid-fifties, in a long black cassock and wearing an eastern rite pectoral cross. He was across the small hall in conversation with a nun in a flowing gray habit. We approached them. The nun finished speaking to him, then took the priest's hand and kissed it. I was impressed with her happiness and with the obvious fondness and deference she had for the priest. She left quickly and the priest turned his attention to us. We told him we were in possession of the bodies of aborted babies and explained that we had taken them out of the trash behind an abortion clinic in Chicago. The priest was horrified and he blessed himself several times imploring the mercy of God. He then exclaimed in a charming, almost childlike way: "Did you call the police? They should know about this. They should be told."
"The clinic is not doing anything illegal. I mean it's legal to kill the babies and its legal to throw them away," I explained.
"Well, what can I do?" asked the priest.
"Will you bless the bodies with the oil coming from the Virgin's eyes?" Edmund asked.
"The kindly priest told us that the priests of the church had discerned that the Virgin wanted her tears to be used to anoint people for healing purposes and that it was a little late for that in our case. Edmund asked the priest if he would bless the bodies in the sanctuary with holy water near the weeping icon. The priest agreed. Edmund went to the car and came back with the box. We entered the church, crossing a threshold from the profane world into the sacred. Out on the street, with the cars whizzing by, was the busy material world filled with distractions. But when we entered the church we were instantly enveloped by a sacred space. The icon-covered walls and ceiling drew us into the things of heaven--all that was holy, noble and mysterious. The small church was lit only by the many pilgrim's tapers. Their dancing flames bathed the church in a warm amber glow.
"The priest told Edmund to place the box on a chair that was in the left part of the sanctuary space. The priest opened the box and was exposed to the blood-filled bags. He blessed them. He blessed them solemnly and carefully, sprinkling the holy water on them as he pronounced a blessing in the name of the Trinity.
"With the ritual finished the priest looked up at us.
"God bless you, Father," I said.
"He stood near the weeping icon and turned to leave. He glanced upon us for a second. His own eyes glistened with tears. He was overcome with emotion, and in silence he exited into the darkness of the sanctuary.
"In the night the babies lay in the middle of a trash barrel. The next day they lay in the middle of a shrine. Between the night and day the tortured moral drama of our age had been played. What is man that God should be mindful of him? So asked the biblical author. The abortion ethic has an answer to this question when its deacons of death consecrate human life to the waste containers. Only what is useful or purposefully chosen by our wills is meaningful. In the abortion ethic the human will creates the value of life. And in this war over the meaning of human life, we gave the bodies of the aborted unborn to a priest who returned them to the God who had made their lives sacred in His image.
I just stumbled across that trying to find out more about what happened in the little church in Chicago and if anyone had figured out why. I didn't mean to hijack your thread off topic, but that's where my search tonight took me.
Your post was beautiful and made me cry. Thank you so much for sharing that story. It is worth a post of its own.