BY Ian Dunn | June 1 | 
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Draw inspiration from athletes on this Day for Life
Archbishop Mario Conti has asked parishes around Scotland celebrating the Day for Life this Sunday to draw inspiration from the athletes competing in this summer’s Olympic Games in celebrating the human body.
Those competing in London this summer, he says, are clear examples of ‘the importance we should place on healthy living and the respect we should show for the body from conception to natural death.’
The theme of this year’s Day for Life is the human body and Pope Benedict XVI has encouraged Catholics to participate in such activity as ‘a training ground of healthy competition and physical improvement, a school of formation in the human and spiritual values, a privileged means for personal growth and contact with society.’
To this end, Archbishop Conti of Glasgow has written to every parish in Scotland encouraging them to mark the Day for Life appropriately while celebrating the human body.
“The Olympic Games in London this summer will draw attention to the gifted nature of our physical reality, as will the preparations for the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow in 2014,” the archbishop writes. “Athletes are undergoing training as they did in St Paul’s day, when he illustrated how our spiritual efforts should emulate their physical preparations: ‘Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one gets the prize? Run in such a way as to get the prize. Everyone who competes in the games goes into strict training. They do it to get a crown that will not last, but we do it to get a crown that will last forever.’”
The archbishop added that this Biblical message should remind us of the importance of healthy living.
“The messages which the theme presents for our reflection includes the importance we should place on healthy living and the respect we should show for the body from conception to natural death,” he writes. “In so doing, we give thanks to God for our own bodily existence and for that of the human family made in the image and likeness of God. We are reminded to show compassion to those who are bodily weakened, thinking no less of them, but on the contrary, sharing with them our bodily strengths. Indeed this human solidarity is an aspect of a genuine ecology which embraces also the whole of creation.”
The tradition of marking a Day for Life was introduced by Blessed John Paul II in his great magna carta on life issues Evangelium Vitae in 1995.
— The full message for Day for Life 2012 can be found online at http://www.dayforlife.org
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