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About The Georgia bulletin (Atlanta) 1963-current | View Entire Issue (Oct. 12, 1989)
PAGE 5 — The Georgia Bulletin, October 12, 1989 Nicholas O'Connor Saturday Outside The Abortion Clinic Commentary An ashen-faced, very young teenager wrapped in a brown blanket and supported by an older woman walks carefully down the front steps of the clinic. The two sit on a low wall that runs along the clinic entrance. The girl lays her head and shoulders on the woman’s lap. After 15 long minutes a van pulls up and the two leave. The girl had arrived much earlier when the air was soft with the coolness of the morning. At 7 a.m. Saturday at the Atlanta Surgi-Center, five escorts have already assembled in the parking lot next to the red brick building on Spring Street. Mostly young girls in their late teens or early 20s, they are dressed in comfortable sum mer clothes, shorts and T-shirts or blouses. Each wears a blue vest with Escort printed across the front. So far there are only two pro-life people, a man and a woman in their 30s. The couple, referred to as counselors by pro-life advocates, are also dressed comfortably, but they wear no identifying title. They do, however, carry packets of information presenting alternatives to abortion, with the names, addresses, a location map, and phone numbers of 24 organizations that will assist the young mothers if they decide to carry their babies to term. In the case of the Surgi- Center the packets contain copies of newspaper articles citing a threat by the State Department of Human Resources to revoke the clinic’s license. A car drives into the parking lot, which is on the opposite side of the building from the clinic’s entrance. An escort directs the car to a parking place. Two girls about 20 years old emerge. The escorts immediately converge on the two, engage them in conversation, then completely surround them in a tight cordon of bodies as they walk with them across the parking area. The woman pro-life counselor walks along the edge of the clinic’s property line, which bisects the lot, and calls to the girls. “We have a free packet of information about alternatives to abortion. Please take it, and think about this very serious step you’re taking.” She holds out the packet. The escorts are laughing and attempting to distract the girls from listening as they hurry them toward the sidewalk in front of the clinic. “Please just look. They can’t stop you from reading it,” the counselor calls again. As soon as the girls and their cluster of escorts reach the sidewalk the male counselor is waiting. He holds up an Atlanta Journal article headlined “Abortion Clinic Faces Revocation of Permit.” “This clinic has a history of problems. Read this article. There is still time to turn back. You're about to have a serious operation with lifelong consequences. Please reconsider,” he implores. The escorts, still surrounding the girls, push aside his prof fered literature, and continue talking constantly until they have them back on the clinic property. Their tactics succeed. The girls are distracted, and they walk with their heads down, never looking at the counselors. They are hustled up the front steps, and through the clinic doors, as the two counselors wait helplessly on the sidewalk, prohibited by law from set ting foot on the clinic property. By ten o’clock more of the abortion clinic’s escorts have ar rived; they number the full 15 now. More pro-life advocates appear as well. A small group of four women and one man walks back and forth on the sidewalk in front of the clinic praying the rosary. Three more counselors, two men and a woman, join the original two. Another woman stands at the entrance to the parking lot carrying a sign saying, “Pro- Choice is a Lie." Two policemen, one on a motorcycle, one in a patrol car, watch the proceedings impassively. They leave, but return periodically throughout the morning. During the intervals when no clients are arriving, the pro life counselors talk to the escorts. “Have you heard about post-abortion syndrome? Did you know that a quarter of the women in the United States who commit suicide have had abortions? Is this what you want to be a part of? Look at the blue sky. The babies being killed here will never see that sky, or smell the air or laugh or cry. That’s what pro-choice means. Do you really want to be here?” The escorts pretend to ignore their questioners, but the counselors know their words have an impact. Many of the escorts don't come back a second time. It’s 11:30 a.m. and hot. The packets of pro-life information the counselors offer are becoming wrinkled and moist from their perspiring hands. Twenty-four girls have come for an abortion, and none of them has been persuaded to turn back. There are days when their efforts meet with success, and a girl does change her mind. Today isn't one of them. Nicholas O'Connor, a member of the Cathedral of Christ the King parish, is active in the Atlanta pro-life movement. Ivan J. Kauffman Praying “This is how you are to pray: ‘Our Father in heaven...’ ’’ — The Gospel According to Matthew Many Catholics are not at all sure why Catholic Church leaders so often speak out on political and social issues. Things like foreign policy, economics, civil rights, the arms race — problems that often involve political controversy. Frequently you hear comments like, “Why don’t they stick to religion and leave these other problems to the experts? Why not let the military take care of defense, let our elected political leaders make the laws, let businessmen run the economy?” Every time the bishops issue a statement on any subject those who disagree are almost sure to say this topic is none of the Church’s business — that the bishops shouldn’t even deal with the problem. “It violates the principle of separation of church and state,” people often say. But clearly the bishops — who believe strongly in separa tion of church and state — also believe they have not only a right but an obligation to both speak out, and to act, on cer tain social and political problems. What’s more they keep tell ing us we all have a responsibility, as Catholics, to get involv ed in these same issues. Why? One way to understand the connection between Catholic faith and political activity is to think about the first two words "Our Father” in the prayer we most often use — the Our Father which Jesus himself taught us. When we address God as “our Father” we not only acknowledge how close we are to God, we also acknowledge how closely related we are to each other. There's a big difference between praying “my Father” and praying “our Father.” When we pray “our Father" we’re recognizing that my father is also your father. We’re confess ing, whether consciously or not, that the whole human race has a single creator. And that means we’re all brothers and sisters, members of a single human family. In a real sense the whole social doctrine of the Church is contained in those first two words of the Our Father. The words which follow remind us of its implications. We don’t ask for “my daily bread,” we ask for “our daily bread.” We don’t ask that we as individuals be made safe and secure, we ask that God’s will be done on earth, just as it is in heaven where God is completely in charge. This sense of human connection is what the word solidari ty, so often used by Pope John Paul, is all about. Solidarity at bottom means that if you’re hungry, I’m hungry. It means that if you’re homeless, I’m homeless. If you’re sick, I’m sick. If you’re in jail, I’m in jail. And it also means that if you’re hap py, I’m happy. Monsignor George G. Higgins It's Not My Fault Whatever became of sin? In a 1974 book bearing this provocative question as its title, Dr. Karl Menninger, the grand old man of American psychiatry, argued that while the word “sin has largely fallen out of favor and at least in the United States is no longer in common usage, there is nevertheless “a general sentiment that sin is still with us, by us and in us somewhere.” That’s a healthy sign, for it would seem to indicate that, while our vocabulary in this area may have become rather fuz zy, self-serving and self-deluding, we haven’t completely lost touch with reality. Menninger contends, however, that for the sake of our own mental and moral health and for the good of society, we ought to revive the word “sin” for those transgressions that truly deserve to be called by that name. “The disappearance of the word ‘sin,’” he says, “involves a shift in the allocation of responsibility for evil.” And this, he suggests, can be very harmful not only to the individual but to society as well. There is something wonderfully old-fashioned about Menn- inger’s approach to the problem of sin. Yet he is not a finger- wagging moralist hellbent on putting the fear of God in recalcitrant sinners; to the contrary, he is an amiable, highly realistic reformer, whose goal is not to chastise or frighten readers but to encourage them to live up to their own highest standards and ideals. If there is something old-fashioned about Menninger’s ap proach, there is also something new about it, something very modern. He lays great stress on “sin as collective irresponsibility,” and under this heading speaks of our common involvement in the collective sins of war, latter-day forms of slavery, en vironmental waste, economic injustice, etc. Because of the complexity of modern life, Menninger says, acknowledgment of personal involvement In these collective sins “eludes our attention and seems to make sin disappear.” By that he means “if a group of people can be made to share the responsibility for what would be a sin if an in dividual did it, the load of guilt rapidly lifts from the shoulders of all concerned Others may accuse, but the guilt shared by Making Peace The Church gets involved in social and political issues because people are directly affected by the specific laws which are passed, the way taxes are spent, the way public in stitutions are administered. Any of us who were subject to a law making it illegal to be a Catholic, or which penalized our children for attending Catholic schools, would certainly think that law should be changed. If one of our brothers or sisters were affected we’d feel the same way. But when we pray “Our Father” we’ve accepted the fact that every victim of injustice and neglect is one of God’s children —.and therefore one of our brothers and sisters. Once you’ve accepted that reality it’s only natural to want to do something about injustice, whether it affects you directly or not. And in our times often the only way to deal with in justice is to become involved in political activity. The Church doesn’t get involved in dealing with things like poverty and racism simply out of duty. It does so because that’s the only realistic thing to do. How can anyone look at the pain or humiliation of relatives and say, "Their problems are none of our business. We don’t have to get involved.” When we pray “Our Father” we make the whole human race into a single family. And family members do whatever they have to to take care of each other. The Yardstick the many evaporates for the individual. Time passes, Memories fade. Perhaps there is a record somewhere, but who reads it?” Menninger says that “society is so organized that most of us don’t encounter poor people except on the television screen.” Well, better that we encounter them there than not at all. If only at a safe and comfortable distance, we are led to think about “sin as collective responsibility” and about our own personal involvement, however indirect or marginal, in various forms of human exploitation. Menninger is at pains to remind us that “acknowledgment of sin is a start, but it is not enough.” That’s true, of course, but if we are ever going to make any progress in developing a sense of our own involvement in col lective evils and a sense of personal responsibility for cor recting them, we have to begin somewhere. But first we need to become aware that these evils still exist, even in the wealthiest nation in the history of the world. Copyright (c) 1989 by Catholic News Service
