News

Image

April 11, 2012 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Friends of longtime pro-life activist Fr. Norman Weslin are asking for prayers for the elderly priest as his health declines.

Weslin, 81, is the founder of the Lambs of Christ and estimates on his group’s website that he has been arrested 70 to 80 times in peaceful civil disobedience against abortion.

Jean and Kathy Plourde of Gabriel’s Corner on Tuesday asked for intercession for Fr. Weslin, who is expected to enter hospice care as soon as this week. The pro-lifers say that the priest currently is staying at an Alzheimer’s care facility in Michgan, where he has been for about the past two years.

Although a longtime veteran of the pro-life movement, Weslin became an icon during the Notre Dame scandal as the priest caught on amatuer video being roughly hauled off the school grounds by security personnel when he refused to end his peaceful pro-life witness.

Prior to his ordination in 1986, he was a Lieutenant Colonel in the U.S. army and married to another pro-life activist, who died in a car accident in 1980. In honor of his wife, Weslin converted his Council Bluffs, Iowa home to “The Mary Weslin Homes for Pregnant, Unwed Mothers,” which has housed over 300 mothers in crisis pregnancies.

In 2007 Weslin was cleared of violating the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act after entering the abortion facility of late-term abortionist Leroy Carhart and counseling women not to abort their children.  He was convicted of the same charge in 2001 and sentenced to five months in prison after kneeling in prayer within a 60-foot buffer zone outside a Buffalo abortuary.