For 10 months, we as a church family are participating in a season devoted to learning great hymns of the faith. Memorizing hymns is one of the ways we can obey Scripture’s command to “let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God” (Colossians 3:16).

We’re doing this project because we want to benefit not only from the songs written in our lifetime, but also from hymns that have served the people of God for generations and will endure long after we’re gone. They are time-tested and true. They speak to every circumstance of life and point us to the wisdom, love and power of our gracious God and Savior.

Each month, we will highlight a different hymn in corporate worship and seek to learn it together by memory. We encourage you to sing these hymns with your family, your Care Group, and on your own to drive these truths deep in your heart.

Songs are available for download and additional information is available here.

From Fr. John Jay Hughes, serving in the Archdiocese of St. Louis, Missouri

A good entry point for persuading people that abortion is wrong is pointing out the chilling similarities between the arguments for slavery in the 1850s and those used to defend abortion today. Like today’s pro-choice people, slaveholders said they weren’t forcing others to own slaves. They simply pleaded for the right to do what they wanted with their “property.” That word disguised, of course, the fact that human lives were at stake. The question of pro-choice people today, “Doesn’t a woman have a right to do what she wants with her body?” similarly disguises the fact that exercising these so-called rights involves taking a human life.

The slaveholders’ pro-choice argument also lives on today in the bumper stickers that read: “Against abortion? Don’t have one.” Would those who display that sticker display one which said: “Against slavery? Don’t own one”? They’d be ashamed. (For further information about the parallels between pre-Civil War slaveholders and pro-choice people today, see the book by federal judge John T. Noonan, A Private Choice.)

When Americans are as ashamed of abortion as we now are of slavery, the battle will be won.