Angelus News | February 9, 2024 | Vol. 9 No

NOTES OF
REDEMPTION
How a local composer’s experience of sin
and forgiveness gave birth to the Requiem
for the Unborn.
Local composer John Bonaduce leads the choir
at the annual Requiem for the Unborn Mass at
the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels Jan. 20. |
VICTOR ALEMÁN
BY ANN RODGERS
For a generation, Catholics from
the Archdiocese of Los Angeles
have sung, prayed, lit candles,
and wept each January during the
Requiem Mass for the Unborn.
Offered at the Cathedral of Our Lady
of the Angels for two decades, and in
parishes before that, the Mass mourns
every unborn child killed by abortion
during a single day in the greater Los
Angeles area. It began as a memorial
to one of those children — the son
or daughter of its composer, John
Bonaduce.
Now 72, Bonaduce is a church musician
known for combining traditional
and contemporary styles in a way that is
both reverent and unabashedly joyful.
After an early career in Hollywood, he
entered liturgical music fulltime in
1990.
The turning point of his faith journey
had come decades earlier, when at the
age of 26 he paid for his girlfriend to
have an abortion.
By that time, he had unthinkingly
slipped away from his Catholic roots. It
never occurred to him that an abortion
took a child’s life. His friends assured
him it was the best decision.
When he realized that there had been
a child, “my conscience was seared,”
he said.
That night he rushed to a church in
Santa Monica and pounded on the
rectory door. When a priest answered,
Bonaduce begged to make a confession
then and there.
“He was very good to me,” Bonaduce
recalled.
“It was genuine. I had come to it on
my own — that this was a bad thing
I had invested in. It’s 135 bucks for
an abortion to get me out of a jam. A
terrible, terrible idea. But embracing it
is powerful. And God is your friend on
a whole new level after you’ve acquired
this level of self-knowledge.”
20 • ANGELUS • February 9, 2024