A Los Angeles-based artist and writer, Jackie DesForges, has founded a new “church” for the express purpose of worshipping abortion.
According to Insider, “At a renegade art and literary festival in Bombay Beach, California, Jackie DesForges knelt and prayed with passersby at the inaugural mass of her new church. Reading aloud from a sermon re-written using Supreme Court language, the group didn’t merely celebrate — they worshipped abortion.”
Des Forges is calling her “church” the Church of Potential Life and has co-opted Catholic imagery, motifs, and terminology. She has an “altar” and refers to her service as a “mass.” Behind her altar are figures from Catholic iconography, including Our Lady of Guadalupe — which is particularly ironic, because she is considered to be the patroness of the unborn by faithful Catholics.
DesForges was raised Catholic, but has apparently abandoned that faith. She said, “I used to be so anti-everything Catholic and everything church; I had a lot of complicated feelings for a while without it, and now I’m very much in the place where I can kind of take what I need from it and leave the rest behind.”
Among the things she has evidently left behind is Catholic teaching on abortion. The Catechism of the Catholic Church states:
Since the first century the Church has affirmed the moral evil of every procured abortion. This teaching has not changed and remains unchangeable. Direct abortion, that is to say, abortion willed either as an end or a means, is gravely contrary to the moral law.
Des Forges said she first got the idea for her “church” after the draft opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, the Supreme Court decision which overturned Roe v. Wade, was leaked. According to Insider, “The anger and sense of grief over the loss of abortion rights, she said, inspired her to create the provocative symbol of hope, which took shape over the next year.”
Exactly how a so-called church dedicated to worshipping the killing of preborn children represents a “symbol of hope” was left unexplained.
