Dublin, Ireland, Jan 13, 2019 / 04:18 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- With the dawn of legal abortion in Ireland, the pro-life movement in the country is beginning a fight that their U.S. counterparts have been engaged in since 1973.
For more than 40 years, pro-life Americans have staged marches, prayer vigils, sidewalk counseling, and political protests. Now, pro-life advocates in Ireland must determine how a robust pro-life movement should look in their country when abortion is legal.
Earlier this week, after hearing news of a group of pro-life protesters who gathered outside of a medical center in Ireland for several hours, holding signs with slogans such as “Say no to abortion in Galway,” Archbishop Diarmuid Martin of Dublin urged caution.
While everyone “has a right to make a protest,” he told The Irish Times, General Practitioners perform surgeries for “everybody…for all sorts of reasons.”
He added that he is “not a person personally for protest, what the Church should be doing is strengthening its resolve to help women in crisis and to educate people.”
The word “protest” is a touchy one in the pro-life world. It can conjure up images of angry mobs with torches and pitchforks, so some pro-life people prefer terms like “witness” or “sidewalk counselor,” or simply a faithful person at a prayer vigil.
But for many in the U.S. pro-life movement, it is dialogue and prayer – not protest – that are at the heart of what they do.
Mary Fisher is one of those people.
Fisher had an abortion herself, that caused her deep regret, anger and pain for years. After she found healing through a Bible study, Fisher now works as a regional coordinator for Silent No More, an organization that gives women who regret their abortions a platform from which to tell their stories, and connects women who have had abortions to healing ministries.
While Fisher participates in pro-life activism, she is opposed to the term “protest.”
“Protesting is kind of an anger thing. That’s the way it’s perceived,” Fisher told CNA. “This makes me mad, so I’m going to go out and protest, because it makes me so mad.”
But there is already so much anger from people who are pro-choice or who have had an abortion, that the only way to win them over is with love, Fisher said.
“Our world is so full of anger, and it’s like, ‘Oh my gosh, I’ve got this baby inside me that I don’t want, and everybody says it’s just a bunch of cells. So I’m just going to flush it down the toilet.’ And we do it in anger.”
Fisher herself experienced that anger after her own abortion.
“I lived as an angry woman for so many years, that one of my daughters actually moved from Colorado…to New York to get as far away from me as possible, because I was just so angry at everything.”
Fisher said the only thing that will win over those who are pro-abortion is to love them.
That doesn’t mean Fisher does not participate in the pro-life movement. She’s planning on attending her local March for Life, with a sign that says: “I regret my abortion. Ask me why.”
She also participates in 40 Days for Life prayer vigils, she shares her story through talks, and she helps connect women in need of healing from abortion to bible studies or retreats that can help them.
But ultimately, she says, abortion will never change through political protest, because abortion is not fundamentally a political issue.
“Abortion is not a political issue. Abortion is a heart issue. And until we get to the heart, nothing’s going to change,” she said.
“Protest is how we create friction. Just the word protest… just the thought of a protest is angry people, angry people with knives and swords and forks out to fight. This is a fight against principalities. It is not against flesh and blood.”
Shawn Carney is the president and CEO of 40 Days for Life, a popular form of pro-life activism that holds prayer vigils outside of local abortion clinics throughout the United States. The 40-day long campaigns of “prayer, fasting, and peaceful activism” have the goal of “repentance, to seek God’s favor to turn hearts and minds from a culture of death to a culture of life, thus bringing an end to abortion,” according to their mission statement.
It’s not a protest, it’s a prayer vigil, Carney told CNA.
“We take the approach of praying in front of the (clinics) because abortion is overwhelming. And it ends the life of a human being and it causes a woman to think she has no other option than to pay a physician to end the life of her child. And so in that great hopelessness, our Lord is the answer. And his joy is the answer, and his mercy is the answer,” Carney said.
The campaign has seen great success in turning the hearts of both abortion doctors and women considering abortions. Since its beginning in 2004, the organization knows of some 200 abortion facility workers who have had a change of heart and left their job, and over 15,000 women who have chosen life, during a 40 Days campaign.
It’s also often an entry point for people who have never participated in any kind of pro-life activism, Carney said.
“We’ve had 800,000 people participate in 40 Days for Life around the world in 50 different countries, and 30 percent of them said this is the first thing they ever did in the pro-life movement,” Carney said. “It has served as a great point of entry because it is peaceful and because it’s effective.”
But there is one word from Archbishop Martin’s comments that Carney does take issue with: caution. “I don’t agree with using the word caution with opposing abortion right now in Ireland,” he said.
“I think they need to do just the opposite…and I think that the Irish have been too timid and a little too cautious with their approach to abortion. Now they have it. And that happened to us here in the United States. Shamefully, we’re the example of this. We were cautious. We were timid. And now we have 61 million children that have been aborted.”
Instead, he said, the Irish should not lost hope, and should cling to God and to their lively Irish heritage, and use that in their advantage to continue to fight legalized abortion.
“The last thing the Irish should do is to throw their hands up in the air…I think they need to get out there. The Irish are a courageous people,” Carney said, adding that he is of Irish descent.
“The Irish aren’t cautious with anything, right? They’re the loudest and they’re the most fun and they like to sing and they have hot tempers. And they take their history and their country seriously,” he said.
“And this, more than any other time in their history, they need to do the same and they need to joyfully go out and witness the love and the hope and the mercy to those women who now think that Ireland is just a free for all to have an abortion.”
There are forms of activism that don’t belong in the pro-life movement, Carney added. Anything violent or with an intent to do harm “aren’t part of the pro-life movement,” he said. He’s seen people driven away from even peaceful forms of pro-life activism after bombings or murders of abortion doctors have taken place, he added.
“And so the archbishop doesn’t want that in their country. Who does?” he said.
“No bishop or no politician or no pro-life advocate in any other country is saying, ‘I want violence in my country to oppose abortion.’ No one’s ever said that, but they all should encourage the peaceful, public opposition to this because abortion is certainly a public issue.”
Even though abortion is a heavy issue, Carney said his message to pro-life Ireland is to hope.
“There’s practical things: there’s 40 Days for Life campaigns they need to do in Ireland. They need to have a March for Life. They need to get to work and we can help them do that,” he said.
“But the bigger picture is looking down, going to your knees in prayer and reflecting: ‘What is going to be my response? What am I going to tell my children and my grandchildren now that I, as an Irish person living in this country that I love, we have abortion now. And what’s going to be my response?’”
“And for that, we need to go to the Gospels.”
[…]
Of course a headliner announcement, made in the likeness of a papal pronouncement. Card Hollerich’s premise that a happy medium will be found to appease those with their knives out is, rather than amelioration, the mistake that permanent truth, intrinsic evil, the revealed nature of the good acts necessary for salvation can be essentially adjusted.
We may, out of good will, empathize with Card Grech’s rejoicing over the joy in the eyes perceived in Synod participants. Sentiment, though a necessary feature of our humanness, does not determine good or evil, nor in itself the rationale. That belongs to the apprehensive capacity of intellect. While there is an attractiveness to an ordained women’s diaconate – for one I would not be blown away should it occur, whereas approval of adult homosexual relations, Hollerich’s pet proposal is intrinsic evil in any form of behavior – it does not find evidence in Christ’s institution of the laying of hands by Him, and transfer to the Apostles. After Vat II Catholic professors argued the ludicrousness of the ‘pipeline’ doctrine, the unbroken lineage of laying of hands. Although they offered zero argument for the validity of simply wishing to be an ordained minister of the Gospels. The truth is, revealed truth cannot be mitigated to make us all feel jolly. The truth of Christ requires effort, sacrifice, obedience, and the sine qua non of humility.
We read: “Grech said one bishop told him he saw ‘ice melt’ in people during the gathering.”
Not to throw cold water on the festivities and even the possibilities, but simply to notice that as a band continued to play, ice fragments also melted for a short while on the deck of the “unsinkable” Titanic.
RE: the vote on women deacons. I think so many voted FOR reviewing the issue in the future because an overwhelming number of lefties, lay and cleric, were invited to the synod by Pope Francis. He was packing the vote. We don’t need women deacons- we need more men to be encouraged to serve as deacons. Women do ENOUGH already. Move over and make room for the men (fathers).
Three men in our diocese applied to be permanent deacons. All three were rejected. Why? Well I don’t know about two of the men, because I have never met them (different parish, far away), but I am aquatinted with one of them. He leans toward “traditional”.
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Something tells me that has something to do with it.
Obviously, all are no aware that apostate Bishops and Cardinals are completely public in their open rejection of the commands of Jesus and The Holy Spirit’s revelation / commands against fornication and sodomy.
That apostasy is a given.
On the prospect of ordaining women as deacons, this is the more subtle form of manipulation. One convert Jennifer Ferrara, noted in her conversion story (in the book “There We Stood, Here We Stand”), that when she, as an orthodox-believing Lutheran pastor, read in 1996 that the ELCA had decided to cover the cost of all abortions in its health care plan for Church employees, she was stunned, in reading this response by a fellow-orthodox Lutheran pastor: “Resl Churches Don’t Kill Babies.”
Ferrara noted that though she was orthodox, that is, believed in the commands against fornication, sodomy and abortion, she was an oddity among ordained women in the ELCA, who were in the vast majority what she called “liberals,” particularly regarding sexual morality.
Within 2 years of accepting abortion, the ELCA entered into an “altar and pulpit fellowship” with the United Church of Christ, “which ordained practicing homosexuals.”
So, the result on display is that the women’s ordination thing is just a stalking horse for the sanctification of fornication, sodomy and abortion.
Chris, I should add to your last sentence: “abortion.”…all of which will tend to future sanctioning of ‘lawful’ transhuman promulgating and propagating, pedophilia, polyamory, trafficking and slavery and euthanasia of ‘recalcitrant’ persons or their offspring, etc. Venial sins tend to mortal when left unchecked.
-Sponsored and approved by the powerful lacking without soul, heart, or head.
The vote by this group proves nothing except how many of them lack a spine. That would be the majority. Too afraid to buck the very clear sentiments of the current Pope. Too afraid to be castigated by the press as being anti- woman and anti-woke. So, if these women are ordained deacons, where do they go from there? That’s assuming there is a “there” left, after disaffected Catholics take their wallets and leave over such a travesty. Or is this just a slippery slope down the hill to ordained women priests?? My opinion of this synod remains unchanged. Disgusting and unneeded.
There will be no change in doctrine or organization. Just cosmetic change whereby we are friendlier to gays and women. So what?
Francis is a pastor, not a cop. No real change, but less confrontation.
“Just cosmetic change whereby we are friendlier to gays and women.”
Ah, that explains the endless documents, constant meetings, month-long meeting in Rome (with another in a year). Makes perfect sense.
“Francis is a pastor, not a cop.”
Especially if you prefer traditional liturgy, think doctrine is important, uphold moral teachings, and think the constant chatter and bloviating about sexual devianc—er, diversity, women priests, women deacons, etc., is both confusing and counter-productive to authentic witness.
Less sarcastically: anyone paying attention to the Rupnik situation (as well as a host of others over the past decade) knows that Francis’s handling of it has been an abomination and is about as anti-pastoral as can be.
Yes, Rupnik was mishandled. Remember Marcial Maciel and so many others that were also mishandled by other Popes.
You seem to worry so much about Synods doing damage, but the clerical sexual abuse of minors scandals have done much more damage. A lot of people have just walked away in disgust. As that great American philosopher Yogi Berra said: “If people don’t come to the ballpark, how are you going to stop them.” Substitute Church for ballpark and I think it covers the situation.
“the clerical sexual abuse of minors” – translated = homosexual lifestyle of clergy.
I was told in a follow up comment to my recent lament that I was being “nonsensical” to hold the view I will now repeat whether it was well received or not the way I awkwardly expressed it when I was half asleep. (CWR might consider an edit option) When our Church orchestrates a performance for the whole world to take notice and advertise to the whole world that this is what the Holy Spirit is endorsing because our Pope says it is, and we blasphemously presume to dictate our ruminations to the Holy Spirit, yet we claim to have a Deposit of Faith that has been formed historically by a blood, sweat, and tears struggle of saints responding to the promptings of the Holy Spirit, and today we put on a buffoonish display before the world of committees “rethinking” that maybe God got it tragically wrong in the truth He endowed in the past to His Church and His people to give witness to the world, then it does not matter that no doctrines have been changed.
The integrity of God’s people giving witness, including our mission to witness such things like the sacredness of unborn life, now mystically divorced from sexuality at the behest of the morally bankrupt, has been made a laughingstock to the entire world. And consequences of mass murderous proportions are no laughing matter.
A renewed commentary well worth posting Edward.
IMO, Cdl. Hollerich has had his fifteen minutes of fame.
His Eminence Cardinal Jean-Claude Hollerich is blessed with a prophetic voice. Evangelization and conversion are ongoing and never ending opportunities. The Synod on Synodality has been an exercise in examination of conscience and discernment. Good things are bound to come from those who participated in the month long retreat and their supporters who have been praying ceaselessly for the success of the Synod. Tidings of comfort and joy are awaiting pilgrims here, there, and everywhere.
Dr. Coelho, that’s really effective satire. I couldn’t stop laughing. Keep it coming.
His Eminence Cardinal Jean-Claude Hollerich a “prophetic voice”? If pigs could fly…
The “success of the Synod” can come either through the synod, OR around it. One embedded agenda item about the “fly” (and endorsed by Hollerich) has been to “walk together” past the sexual abuse scandal to now abuse the Holy Spirit.
Well, bypassing or moving around this and other embedded agendas, things might be looking up, after all. Here’s a link to a critique by Cardinal Muller of the DRAFT synodal report, together with a later link covering changes in the FINAL report which, of course, is not final…
https://www.ncregister.com/interview/cardinal-mueller-says-synod-on-synodality-is-being-used-by-some-to-prepare-the-church-to-accept-false-teaching
https://www.ncregister.com/news/synod-on-synodality-what-changed