On a chilly November morning, the Archbishop of Denver Samuel Aquila led a Eucharistic procession around a Planned Parenthood health center in Denver’s Park Hill neighborhood ahead of the 2024 general election in which Coloradans will vote on enshrining the right to abortion in the state constitution.
The march was organized with the church’s educational office, Respect Life Denver, as part of the Denver Archdiocese’s 40 Days of Life campaign. This campaign is part of a national movement that, according to its website, “aims to end abortion locally through prayer and fasting, community outreach, and a peaceful all-day vigil in front of abortion businesses.”
The procession took place on Saturday, November 2, three days before election day when Coloradans will finish voting on Amendment 79, which would make abortion in Colorado a constitutional right and repeal an existing ban on state/local funding for abortion-related care.
The Archbishop offered a benediction and led those who had gathered around the Planned Parenthood facility, beginning at Marisol Health Denver, a women’s health clinic that is part of a network of Catholic Charities, which is located across the street.
Mass followed the procession in Marisol Health’s garden led by Rev. John Paul Leyba.
“The souls who walk into that facility [Planned Parenthood] over there, the mothers, the fathers, the babies. For a lot of them, the only love they have got in their lives is us. The only people who are willing to intercede on their behalf is us. The only people who will connect them to God is us,” Leyba told the crowd. “So it is our prayers, our love for them which we present to them. It is like the beginning of Mass, recognizing what is wrong with life, with us, what is evil within us, and the potential right. We recognize what is wrong, but we don’t stay there we move on to what is right and that is loving them [people who seek Planned Parenthood’s services].”
Archbishop Aquila left immediately after the procession, this article will be updated if his office returns our request for comment.
Although Aquila was not immediately available for comment, the Archbishop had previously released a statement urging members of his congregation to vote against Proposition 79. Aquila accused those advocating for the amendment, what he calls the ‘pro-abortion lobby’, of abusing “heartbroken mothers and families to advance their cause, claiming that medical care after a miscarriage or when an unborn child dies in the womb is equivalent to an abortion.”
Earlier in October, Archbishop Aquila made an appearance on the Dan Caplis Show where he urged listeners to vote against the proposed amendment. Aquila told the conservative radio host that he opposed the amendment for what he saw as an ‘ongoing erosion’ of parental rights and for allowing for abortion in the ninth month.
“Let’s say a woman was scheduled to have the baby at a certain date and then she decides two days before she wants an abortion. Even though that baby would be perfectly healthy and the mother would be perfectly healthy, she would have that right. It’s the destruction of a human life,” Aquila told Caplis.
Aquila added that he opposed the amendment’s repeal of a ban on state and local governments funding abortion services. As it currently stands, the ban on public funding for abortion, which was narrowly passed as a constitutional amendment in 1984, prevents state health insurance plans, like Medicaid and insurance provided to government employees, from covering abortion.
This provision impacts the coverage of 30,000 state employees, 59,899 K-12 teachers and principals, and 1,726,651 Medicaid enrollees.
Aquila is no stranger to the political arena. In 2021, the Archbishop condemned President Joe Biden and then Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) for their stances on abortion. The year prior, Aquila said that the only people who held pro-choice beliefs were people “whose consciences are dead” or have no conscience. Aquila has partially blamed sexual abuse scandals associated with the Catholic Church on “homosexuality”.
Archbishop Aquila also vocally opposes an amendment on this year’s ballot that would remove anti-same-sex marriage language that defines only marriage between a man and a woman as ‘valid’ from the Colorado constitution and supported a plethora of initiatives that would limit the rights of transgender and gender-diverse youth.
In the wake of the 2022 deadly mass shooting at Club Q, which has been recognized as an anti-LGBTQ+ hate crime, Archbishop Aquila wrote an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal defending the Church’s stance on queer issues, writing: “Our critics charge that the Catholic Church is discriminating against those who identify as gay or transgender, but it isn’t discriminatory to tell someone you think his beliefs don’t conform to nature—it’s an act of charity.”
One of the attendees of the procession was Marla Fernandez, a Republican write-in candidate in Colorado State House District 3, who told the Colorado Times Recorder that she was passionate about the issue of abortion in part because she was born prematurely. Fernandez, a paralegal, says that she finds no contradiction in being both pro-life and pro-choice, and offered a series of varied points before concluding with an anti-abortion position.
“The reason you can be pro-choice and you can be pro-life is because our founding fathers were brilliant and they needed to have common ground. In order to have common ground, in the Declaration of Independence, they all agreed that the Creator created us equal in his image,” Fernandez explained. “The Creator is God, they put it in that term of art because they knew not everyone agreed that it was God. They put the word ‘Creator’ to strategically say that every person is equal in his image and we all have equal rights and individual rights.”
“In the Bill of Rights, they put the church in the First Amendment, that the church has a right to be in society, and that the state has a right to be in society. But the state must protect the right of the church to freely be in society and speak, and the rights of individuals,” Fernandez added. “The only duty of the state, per the Declaration of Independence and per the Fourteenth Amendment, is that it must protect each and every person’s right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of property and happiness. The reason it [this framework] works with abortion is because if we are divinely created by God, then corporations are created by persons. Corporations can regulated, they’re fictitious persons. Persons who have rights are created by God and God gives us our rights, the government has no right to give us rights. The government only has the right to protect our rights. If we have a right to life and we have a right to liberty given to us by God to choose the path we want to go to, in abortion every woman absolutely has the right to choose abortion, but every unborn person, if the fetus is a person, has a right to life. So the state has a duty to protect the person’s life in the womb and outside of it as well.”
Fernandez is running a write-in campaign for HD-3, based around Englewood and Sheridan, which is currently represented by Rep. Meg Froelich (D-Greenwood Village).
