A laudable marker of the National March for Life taking place May 14 in Ottawa is that its longevity can be measured in papacies.

Assembled marchers were minutes from leaving Parliament Hill to fill the surrounding streets last year when Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost was announced from the stage as Pope Leo XIV. (The crowd, reflecting the times, had already learned the news on its phones.)

Leo, of course, assumed the papacy vacated by the 2025 death of Pope Francis, who ascended to the Chair of St. Peter following the stunning retirement of Pope Benedict XVI in 2013. Eight years earlier, Benedict had succeeded the late Pope John Paul II, the pontiff in place when the March for Life began in 1998. 

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The Vicars of Christ on Earth have given way to natural human frailties but the March endures without fail through 29 iterations—even going virtual doing the COVID pandemic in 2020.

The continuing robustness is a credit to the organizational foresight of founder Campaign Life Coalition, and to the indomitable spirit of those who turn out en masse under both blue skies and pouring rain. It also raises a necessary, though perhaps uncomfortable, question: Why?

Against the background of papal imperatives (the first March occurred three years after John Paul II’s crusading encyclical The Gospel of Life lit up pro-lifers), and granting the understandable desire to do something, the annual event can still be fairly critiqued for an evident lack of concrete achievement.

A cold-eyed look at the expansion of the culture of death into aspect of Canadian life could, after all, justify concluding the March is a well-intentioned dead end.

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When it began, Canada had just missed restoring a degree of legal sanity around provision of abortion because Bill C-43 failed on a gut-wrenching tie vote in the Senate. Now, save for the day of the March, abortion is a discouraging word that never is heard on Parliament Hill or, indeed, throughout our political life.

In 1998, we could rest relatively easy knowing legalized euthanasia and assisted suicide had been kiboshed five years earlier by the Supreme Court of Canada’s Rodriguez decision. Today, the merchants of medicalized homicide have not only achieved a death toll approaching 100,000 but have us debating expanding the health care killing field to include the mentally ill. 

Not a record to run on, seen from a certain perspective. Yet that perspective itself can be shown to be irredeemably flawed. Anyone who has witnessed the March, after all, grasps that its essential purpose is not, and never has been, immediate political victory. The vast majority of those striding through the gates of Parliament Hill and setting out down Wellington Street know victory has already been won for them in Christ. Even those in the crowd who do not share that particular religious certainty are aware they are being borne on the tide of the virtue we call Hope.

To have Hope means to remain present and to remain present means to give feet, legs, arms and voice to Hope. (Faith and Charity are visible at the March, too, but for the purposes of this editorial, they’ve dropped back into the crowd to chat with a grandmother who brought her own small children to the very first rally so many years ago.)

Such Hope is indispensable in the face of the political triumphalism of the culture of death. It is also, and this cannot be overstressed, irrepressibly reasonable. Even from what is sometimes seen as Pascal’s cynical wager, if the inevitable end of life is death, surely reason demands doing everything to uplift life for as long as naturally possible. In short: Why give up too soon?

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But in the pages of this issue of the Register there’s a far more compelling argument for Hope based on a real world turn of events. In our Verbatim column, Gordon Friesen, president of the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition, writes about a Quebec playwright who was so shocked by her father succumbing to MAiD that she staged a theatrical piece raising questions about the acceptance of medicalized homicide. Among the uncomfortable questions: Why?

It would be euphoria to exaggerate one artist’s doubts as the onset of a second Quiet Revolution against the culture of death. But as Friesen notes, it is a step. And as the March for Life has demonstrated indefatigably through four papacies over almost 30 years, one step inevitably gives Hope that another will follow.