Wow! What a weekend.
I attended my first March for Life in Washington DC. Fifteen students from St Joseph’s Catholic School joined others from the diocese and huge numbers from all over America to protest our country’s abortion laws.
Highlights of the trip were the prayer vigil at the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception and the youth rally before the March where over 20,000 Catholic young people gathered at the Verizon Center in central DC for Mass. The place was packed not only with enthusiastic Catholic young people, but hundreds of seminarians, hundreds of priests, dozens of bishops and cardinals, loads of nuns and friars from the reformed orders and representatives from the new ecclesial movements. “The Church is alive! The Church is young!”
A couple of amazing moments were to hear a Jewish rabbi proclaim to hundred of thousands of marchers, “Now is the time for Pope Benedict to lead all the religioius people in the world in the fight against filth, the fight against immorality and the fight against the crime of abortion.” An Afro American preacher highlighted the disproportionate number of abortions that take place among the Afro American community saying it was like genocide. “If the Ku Klux Klan took a black man out and killed him their would be an outrage, but the men in white coats kill thousands and thousands of black men and women each year while they’re still in the womb. We’re dying!” he cried, “and they’re lying!”
A friend observed that the sixties and seventies radicals (who are now in their sixties and
seventies) like to whine that the young people of today don’t have any ideals and don’t go on protest marches. Hello?? The young people of today are doing just that in the March for Life, and what they’re protesting is the policies of self indulgent corporate suicide brought in by the sixties and seventies crowd.
The March for Life is Alive! The March for Life is Young!
Amy Welborn has links to some good photos and coverage
Check out this video by some young Dominicans
I attended the March for Life in ’96 when I lived in Washington. I was turned off by the slogans scrawled on bus after bus that read “Abortionists must die!” and all other kinds of garbage. And, while I was marching with an apostate group (PlAGAL – Pro-Life Alliance of Gays and Lesbians), I got spit at more than once by “Christians.” I’ll never go back.
p.s. to the above: while i’m now a member of *Courage* and tow the line with the teachings of the Magisterium, i still think it’s pathetic that “pro-lifers” treat others of a different mind (but support Life) like that.
I agree that such stuff is pretty disgusting. I didn’t see any of this. God bless you for the ‘Courage’ to live life as you do. Email me if you want to talk further…
The links at Amy’s site were wonderful. For the first time I think I’d like to make the trip; maybe next year I’ll warm up by going to the march in Columbia (SC).