Newspaper Page Text
Catholic Archdiocese of Atlanta
Voi. 22 No. 26
Thursday, July 19, 1984
$10.00 Per Year
Camp Promise Keeps Kids On The Go In Two Parishes
IN AND OUT - Summer pastimes take place on the basketball court at St. Anthony’s and a classroom at Our Lady of Lourdes.
BY MARY BETH MARINO
In 1981 a plea was issued to all neighborhoods, schools
and churches on behalf of the needs of Atlanta children
who would roam the streets when school was out.
This cry was in response to a city-wide crisis of missing
and murdered children. Coalitions were formed and
barriers of religious differences dropped in a united effort
to elicit support for the children.
The result of this effort was the birth of the “Help the
Children” project which originated when 105
congregations of all denominations, and twenty-nine
(Continued on page 14)
STATEMENT
Letter To Geraldine Ferraro
Dear Mrs. Ferraro:
First of all, you are the first-chosen. That is
always exciting . . . exciting for you, for us and,
in this particular case, for the nation. As the first
woman to run for a presidential office, you have
broken new ground and are to be congratulated.
We are also proud that this pioneering position
has been given to a Catholic who, by the way, is
an Italian-American Catholic. That is another
first. Never before has an American of Italian
descent had the honor of running for presidential
office.
So, there is excitement afoot as new political
ground has been courageously broken and
opportunity has at last been given where
previously it had been denied.
Having communicated that fervent feeling, let
me now offer this picture to you. Last week in
Atlanta I sat across the table having coffee with a
young woman who is slowly dying because she is
abusing hard drugs. This woman has abandoned
her husband and her young family. She has been
treated over and over again, and last year
courageously put many clean exhilarating months
together. But now she is back to her cocaine,
morphine, speed and whatever mood-changing
hard drugs she can get. I wish you could have
looked, as I did, at her scar-ridden arms and her
glassy eyes.
We talked about her fading hopes. “You don’t
know what I have to carry around,” she said.
“You don’t know the pain I have endured and the
pain I have caused. What about all the guilt and
the shame, will it ever go? What about the babies
I have killed?”
I asked what she meant about killing babies.
"I've had two abortions,” she said. "They were
my babies and I’ll never know what they were
like.”
I wish you had been there as that woman, who
was raised far from Catholic doctrine or teaching,
wept over a guilt that has been imposed on her,
not by any church affiliation, but by the natural
human instinct that goes with being a woman or a
mother.
As I looked at her, and I have listened to many
like her, I had once more to ask myself, “Was the
taking of human life, those two abortions, the
real cause of her present journey to
self-destruction?”
You, Mrs. Ferraro, are a devout Catholic. Your
pastor speaks highly of you and your family. You
are personally against abortion but publicly, in
your dealing with others and in your legislative
acts, you are pro-choice. You handle the
destruction of human life like it was merely a
religious issue to believe in or not. Your
statement is as follows, "I have no right to impose
my beliefs (on others).”
You certainly do not have to get into a faith
argument with my addicted friend. When it came
to the destruction of her unborn fetuses, she
believed without question that children had been
killed.
If privately you believe that abortion is the
actual destruction of human life, then publicly
how can you support legislation that eliminates
that life on a daily basis, leaving us death on the
record and broken lives on our streets?
We liberals (there are still a few around) are
just like all the other interest groups ... we pick
and choose our absolute beliefs. Would we have
told Wallace or Barnett in 1965 that his
transportation system or his public
accommodation facilities did not have to be
integrated? Absolutely not. We wanted civil rights
for everyone, even though it was the imposition
of our minority views on a dissenting majority in
geographic regions. There was no question we
demanded our way; others would accept what we
believed. Let me say, thank God they did.
We have a similar dilemma now. The courage
that was needed then by public people,
legislators, senators, presidents, vice-presidents, is
needed now. We do not need a nation where
leaders will believe one thing and do another. We
need leaders who tell us who they are and walk
that difficult ethical road carrying their
convictions openly, unchangingly for all to solidly
see.
Again, you are the first. May your pioneering
role glitter as history seeks to give you a notable
place on its pages. Monsignor Noel C. Burtenshaw
