By Robert Royal.

But first a note: The following is excerpted and adapted from an address given in Chicago on September 25, 2025, at the annual benefit dinner of the Aid for Women Pregnancy Centers and Maternity Homes.

Now for today's column...

People often ask me what they can do - or what should we all be doing - to deal with the many challenges we face, not only the obvious ones like wars, injustices, poverty, and so forth, but fundamental questions about what human life is and what our lives mean. There's no simple answer because the world is complicated, as is every human life. And that's not a bad thing. It's how God has chosen to arrange things for us.

There's a famous passage in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, where Frodo laments that the Ring ever came to him and that the fellowship has been called upon to destroy it:

"I wish it need not have happened in my time," said Frodo.

"So do I," said Gandalf, "and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us."

There's no simple answer, but there's an easy one, easy to understand anyway, if sometimes hard to put into practice. Then again, no one ever said living a Christian life would be easy.

I believe the first answer for all of us is to recognize that there will be - and need to be - innumerable initiatives of various kinds to respond to our situation. And given how things are these days, we shouldn't expect the government, the Vatican, the hierarchy, or other large entities to start them. Aid for Women was founded right after Roe v. Wade. A lay initiative like this is not only a very Catholic thing, it's a very American thing. We see something that needs to be done, and roll up our sleeves.

There are at least two large categories of such initiatives, one a ministry of action, and the other is like it, a ministry of truth. We need to work at both as much as the gifts God has given us allow.

Here's St. Paul to the Ephesians:

But to each one of us grace has been given as Christ apportioned it. . . .Christ himself gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the pastors and teachers, to equip his people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ.

That wasn't just intended for back then. It's the life-giving truth now, if also a daunting task.

One way of viewing all that, however, is that God has a high opinion of us, higher than we have of ourselves. HE believes we can do things that WE don't believe we can. (And in truth, a life without significant challenges would be a boring life.) So even as we feel the immense gap between what we can do and what we think needs to be done, we can also recognize that we're in training for something we can't really imagine. The kind of perfect peace, illumination, love that God originally intended for us.

C.S. Lewis called this the "weight of glory," a great phrase that reminds us that we are going to be weighed down by challenges so that we can rise up - a typical paradox of Christianity.Lewis describes this as "a load so heavy that only humility can carry it, and the backs of the proud will be broken."

What we're faced with today is the re-conversion of our whole society, something like how the early Christians converted the Roman Empire. We know that Christians practiced conspicuous charity, caring for the elderly, the sick, the poor, the marginalized, those in prison, babies no one wanted. Many came to Christianity because of those corporal works of mercy and love. You are continuing that tradition.

But there were other factors. One I think especially important for us to recall is that as a result of these Christian ministries more Christians simply were born and survived - they weren't aborted or exposed or allowed to perish.

The original Hippocratic Oath, taken by a...