In the Mass preceding the Walk for Life West Coast, celebrated on January 24, 2026, in memory of St. Francis de Sales, the Archbishop of San Francisco, Salvatore Cordileone, placed the pro-life struggle on a terrain that is often forgotten when everything is reduced to strategy and confrontation: that of spiritual life and friendship with Christ. If the Christian does not learn to “give his life”—to humble himself, to sacrifice, to persevere with charity—he will end up defending life in a style that contradicts the Gospel.
Cordileone began with a simple, almost domestic question: if we knew we were going to die tomorrow, what would we ask of our friends? And he recalled Christ’s response at the Last Supper: “Love one another as I have loved you”.
Friendship with Christ is not sentimentalism
The archbishop warned that the contemporary world tends to read that command of Jesus as something superficial, reduced to affection and companionship. But he emphasized the criterion that Christ himself sets: “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends”.
In other words: true friendship is not emotion, but self-giving. And that self-giving has a price: “To give one’s life… that is, to sacrifice everything for the good of the other.” Hence the decisive question that the archbishop posed—without moralism, but without evasions—: Christ has made us his friends by giving his life; the question is whether we want to be his friends or prefer to live in a “self-centered” way.
St. Paul: humility as the condition for serving Christ
Cordileone put forward the example of St. Paul, who describes himself as “the least of all the saints”. The point was not to make a generic praise of the Apostle, but to show the logic of the Gospel: “giving one’s life” implies humbling oneself.
In that context, the archbishop recalled—through Scripture itself—the catalog of the Apostle’s sufferings (floggings, shipwrecks, dangers, fatigue, hunger, cold…) and his inner burden for the Churches. The guiding thread is clear: the Christian mission is not sustained by pride or prestige, but by humility. That is why Cordileone pointed out a very current obstacle: “Too many people are more concerned with their own prestige and with making themselves noticed than with making Christ seen and known in the world.”
St. Francis de Sales: firmness with meekness
Likewise, Cordileone recalled that St. Francis de Sales lived in a time of fractures and hostility toward Catholics, and presented him as a model of persevering meekness. He quoted the well-known maxim: “A spoonful of honey attracts more flies than a barrel of vinegar”
The archbishop evoked concrete episodes from his life—persecutions, assaults, and threats—to emphasize that patience is not weakness, but contained strength. He even mentioned that some Catholics criticized him for seeming “too soft” with sinners; his response, Cordileone recalled, was to refer to what Christ asks for: meekness and humility of heart.
The pro-life style: real charity in the face of a violent world
The final stretch was the most practical and, at the same time, the most uncomfortable. Cordileone described a world traversed by violence and warned that sometimes violent tactics are used to promote “one of the most violent offenses”. Without going into casuistics, the reference is transparent: the culture of death is also sustained by a climate of moral and emotional aggression.
And there came the concrete directive for pro-life Catholics: “Our response is not to return the shouts, the screams, the curses, and the insults in the same coin”, but to respond “with patience, kindness, and true charity” toward those who are “wounded in the depths of their soul” and have not yet attained healing or peace.
Cordileone defined that style as an everyday way of “giving one’s life” for friends, asking Christ for the grace that even those who are adversaries today may become allies “in the great cause of building a culture of life.”
Persevere: Christ’s “final desire”
The archbishop closed by returning to the origin: that sacrificial love is not a tactic, but Christ’s “final desire”. “This was the final desire of Our Lord” And he encouraged looking to the saints and martyrs as proof that this logic can be lived today: to persevere “with patience, humility, and charity”, to bear the suffering that comes “for the good of the Gospel of Life”, and to remember that it is then that the Lord calls us to rejoice, because the reward will be great.