Never be silent, never cease praying, never despair

On Jan. 22, 1973, when the U.S. Supreme Court issued its landmark decisions erasing centuries of protection for innocent human life, I was not yet a priest. I was studying theology at St. Mary Seminary in Baltimore. It would be two more years before I would be ordained by Bishop Vincent Leonard.

I can still remember where I was when I heard the news. Following supper, I was returning to Room 210, my room at the seminary, when I heard actually two “sound bites” of shocking news.

The first headline: Lyndon Johnson, former president of the United States, was dead, suddenly, from a heart attack.

The second headline: The Supreme Court justices of the United States did the unthinkable! They legalized abortion! And unlike President Johnson, who died of natural causes, countless others would die in ways that would challenge the civility of who we are as human beings.

Like so many Americans, I was shocked by what Justice Bryon White famously described in his dissent from Roe v. Wade as “an act of raw judicial power.” The Supreme Court had decided to force on America unrestricted abortion, just as most Americans were making it clear that this was not what they wanted. The small movement to legislatively legalize abortion from state to state had ground to a halt well before 1973. State after state had rejected attempts to legalize abortion.

Within those handful of states where abortion had been made legal, strong legislative efforts were under way to reverse that direction. In May 1972, legalized abortion in New York just barely survived when there were not enough votes to override Gov. Nelson Rockefeller’s veto of a bill passed by New York’s House and Senate that would have put an end to it there.

Gruesome act of violence

That was what made Jan. 22, 1973, so shocking. So many believed at that time that the movement to legalize abortion was finished. Few anticipated that, on that one day, the Supreme Court would go so far in its attempt to impose its opinion upon the morality of our nation. The abortion decision by the court was so unbalanced and so extensive that even those who were pro-abortion were overwhelmed. Those decisions were a blanket endorsement of a gruesome act of violence perpetrated on two victims: mother and child.

Like so many people, I found myself in a profound state of conscientious objection. But what to do? What could those who shared a fundamental respect for the sacredness of human life now do in the face of these decisions? We knew that the Supreme Court in the past had made decisions that were profoundly wrong. The court had turned a blind eye to slavery, refused to end child labor, protected reprehensible monopolies, endorsed a legally segregated society. But where to begin to reverse these decisions? As the pro-abortion media crowed that the Supreme Court had resolved the issue once and for all, how do we set about telling America that innocent life must be protected, that these decisions put us on a path — a “slippery slope” — where no life is sacred, where all life will be judged by someone else’s definition of utility?

I confess that on that day the task seemed not merely daunting, but well-neigh impossible. As a young man in 1973, I didn’t quite understand the full meaning of Scripture when we were told that “nothing is impossible with God.”

Keeping the issue alive

Thirty-five years later and the issue that we were told was resolved in the stroke of a pen by the Supreme Court has not disappeared. In our nation’s capital this past Tuesday, people gathered once more as they do each year on the anniversary of the court’s decision to stand proudly for life. This year, I joined to pray, to march, to teach and to learn together with our seminarians and thousands of Pittsburghers in Washington, D.C. The pro-life movement in the United States, sparked by those decisions 35 years ago, remains the most profound, selfless, grassroots, prayerful, dynamic and, yes, entrenched social action the country has ever seen. For 35 years, despite countless moments of both hope and dashed hopes, we have remained ever constant.

On the one hand, people may say we have not achieved success. The decisions that the Supreme Court made on that fateful day in 1973 are still on the books. Tragically, well over a million abortions take place every year in this country. And they take place in our own commonwealth, in our own city, in our own communities. With that horrible reality, some may see what we were forced to begin 35 years ago as a failure.

But I do not. We have worked, cried, prayed and marched to keep this issue alive. We have built up an extraordinary web of services for any person forced to consider by those rulings what would never have been considered before. We have won innumerable hearts and minds to the cause of life. We have awakened in each succeeding generation since that January a deep commitment to human dignity and the sacredness of life. We have refused to allow abortion — and all the myriad life issues that surround it — to disappear from the national consciousness.

We are people of life 24 hours a day, seven days a week, every day of the year. We have been here for 35 years. We will continue to be here for as long as the sacredness of life from natural conception to natural death is challenged. We are here to stand for humanity, to stand for every individual life. We will never be silent, we will never cease praying, we will never despair. Because we know that nothing is impossible