Pray that Barack Obama, Tony & Cherie Blair, change to become ambassadors for the unborn

Breda Laffey, a leading Catholic evangelist from Ireland, has made a call for prayer for Barack Obama, the US President-elect - that he will have a change of heart on abortion and go on to become a great US president. Breda was speaking before Mass at a prayer group last night in north London which Josephine, my wife, and I have been attending these last sixteen years. As a Catholic myself, at a time of unprecedented danger for humanity, I strongly support that call. The threat to countless millions of lives following the outcome of the US presidential election is serious and growing ever constantly, as I have been reporting recently. We must use every effort, intellectual, political, and spiritual, to confront this danger.

I also urge my fellow-Christians and believers in God also to pray for Tony and Cherie Blair - that they too will have a change of heart and join the campaign against legalized abortion.

Last week I described how Tony Blair (pictured) was reinforcing his pro-abortion links. I have frequently mentioned his refusal to repudiate, since his reception into the Catholic Church, the anti-life laws and policies he supported and promoted as prime minister and as a Member of Parliament.

Also last week, I pointed out Cherie Blair's long track-record of supporting anti-life and anti-family causes, when I drew attention once again to the scandalous invitation to Mrs Blair to speak at a conference in the Angelicum, a leading Catholic university in Rome.

From the initial reports of the conference, it seems that at no point in her remarks did Mrs Blair state an opposition to abortion, nor did she explain why she has supported the leading pro-abortion organisations IPPF, FPA UK and Human Rights Watch. Neither did she explain her specific endorsement, on her own website, of the inclusion of reproductive rights in CEDAW (the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women), which the CEDAW committee inteprets to include abortion.

It also seems that a concerted effort may have been made at the conference to caricature critics of Mrs Blair's invitation as being unable to distinguish between abortion and contraception and Mrs Blair's position on them. It should be noted that forms of contraception, by their manufacturers' own admission, can kill newly-conceived human life. The Vatican made the same point last Friday, in their newly published Dignitas Personae.

I fear that the conference may well have been stage-managed so that Mrs Blair did not have to explain her track-record of endorsing pro-abortion organisations, enabling her and others to bubble-wrap her dissent from Catholic teaching. I will be writing to Mrs Blair to put to her the questions which were conspicuously not put to her at today's conference.

I am deeply concerned that both Tony Blair and Cherie Blair may be manipulating the Catholic Church at a time in human history when its uncompromising witness on the sanctity of human life is being threatened by governments and politicians - like Barack Obama - with laws which seek to criminalise conscientious objection to destroying human life.

However, today, as the great feast of the birth of Jesus Christ approaches, who like Barack Obama, Tony and Cherie Blair, and the rest of humanity, lived for nine months in His mother's womb, I put all these matters aside. I appeal to you to follow Breda Laffey's lead. Pray for Barack Obama and for Tony and Cherie Blair: that they will have a change of heart - and that they will use their influence in the world to save lives and become powerful ambassadors in the world for the unborn and for the value and inviolability of human life.

With the election of Barack Obama, this is a time of unprecedented danger for humanity. Christians may like to join me in saying one Our Father daily for the US president-elect and for Mr and Mrs Blair. Write to me at johnsmeaton@spuc.org.uk to let me know if you will join me in this daily prayer. And please share this message with others.