Opinion

May 29, 2014 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Few things devastate a human soul like betrayal by a father.  He is the earthly pattern we use for imagining the God who calls himself our Father.  Learning that “Dad” is human and flawed is a sad but normal part of growing up.  But what if what we discover instead is that he has shrugged off the solemn duty of self-sacrifice and is using his power selfishly—even against us?  Then we begin to suspect that God is dead, and that the universe might really be evil.

That is what children of domestic violence learn, and many children of abandonment and divorce.  It is what the victims of sex abuse learn from the father-figures (teachers, or coaches, or pastors) who turned them into objects of lust to exploit.  It’s the kind of lesson that many Catholics took away from their spiritual fathers, their bishops, when those men shuffled clerical perverts from parish to parish, instead of calling the cops.  Or when their bishops make statements mocking the faithful, and winking at the dominant culture of death.

It’s the lesson I learned as a teenager when I lost my child to a forced abortion.

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I tried my hapless best to be a real father.  When my high-school girlfriend broke the news to me that she was pregnant, I was just a boy with dreams of football, and a set of Scooby-Doo sheets.  But through some grace from God, I decided to man up and do the right thing.  My high-school girlfriend and I decided that she would wear baggy sweaters and take lots of vitamins, while I would drop out of high school and join the Army.  Then I learned, at Fort Benning, in a phone call mostly made of up of uncontrollable crying, that my girlfriend had been coerced into an abortion.  All my efforts at being a father had failed.  I had proven utterly powerless to defend my own child.

On the phone that day I made a promise which has guided me ever since: That I would fight abortion, that I would devote my life to defending the dignity of the child whose life I was powerless to protect.  As Mother Teresa once said, there is no one on earth more vulnerable and helpless than preborn babies.  They are truly the poorest of the poor.  And instead of government agencies, UN organizations, and billion-dollar charities trying (if sometimes failing) to help them, these poor children have all those powerful groups against them—trying to keep it legal for doctors to tear them apart.

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Who tries to help these weakest, most innocent members of the worldwide human family?  Little old ladies with rosaries standing outside clinics.  Callow-faced teens who freeze on the March for Life.  Harried volunteers who serve soup to desperate young mothers in women’s shelters.  The weak unite to try to save the powerless, and they do what good that they can.  But it’s never enough, and never will be.  Ten thousand “freedom riders” could not defend African-Americans from the scorn of segregation.  Their God-given human dignity demanded recognition and protection from the law. That is what law is for, to proclaim and defend the truth about human beings.  When law stops doing that, it becomes a farce.

That is why we need legislators with firm backbones, and activists, writers, lawyers, and generous donors, to strive to redeem the sacred force of law from the moral wilderness it entered when our judges and lawmakers decided to kick the poorest of the poor outside the circle of human empathy—to pile them up in dumpsters, or burn their bodies for heat.

Since all this is true, and since I know it deep in my bones, it is hard for me to express the outrage I feel at the remarks of Bishop Nunzio Galantino, the secretary-general of the Italian Bishops Conference—who scoffed at the humble efforts of people who pour out their time praying for strangers, enduring scorn and sometimes police harassment on the sidewalks outside abortion clinics.  This leader of the spiritual leaders of the land that contains the Vatican objects to the “expressionless faces” of those who pray outside clinics.  Does he have any idea what effort and self-control is required for those people to stand there, and witness the lines of women marching in (or being marched in) to “interrupt pregnancies”?  To stand there and simply pray, when what you want to do is howl in horror? To gnash your teeth and tear your heart, like Rachel, weeping?  Those people who simply stand, and quietly pray, are showing the same moral fortitude as the civil rights demonstrators who did not resist when racists beat them and chased them with dogs and water cannon.  They are helping Jesus to carry the cross, and they do so without complaint.

I spend much more time among America’s homeless than I do outside abortion clinics.  My prolife efforts are mostly directed toward funding pregnancy centers, making films that affirm the sanctity of life, and working at changing our laws.  But when I think of the people who do whatever they can, who stand outside the killing fields as silent, humble witnesses, all I can feel for them is love. And honor.  I am honored to join their efforts, in honor of my child, whom I lost.

And when I think of His Excellency Nunzio Galantino, all I can see is a father who betrays his spiritual children. If he has a shred of honor, he will do more than apologize. He will humble himself and join the men and women who pray outside the mass graves of the innocent—and will do so once a week, for a full year, as public penance. Failing that, he should simply resign. He has no place among our shepherds.

Jason Jones is co-author, with John Zmirak, of the upcoming book The Race to Save Our Century: The Great Campaign to Restore Human Dignity and Rebuild a Culture of Life.