Hysteria reigns (on one side)

RICHARD A. SOKERKA

“Any country that accepts abortion is not teaching its people to love, but to use any violence to get what it wants.”
— St. Mother Teresa

Watching the evening news over the weekend and seeing a video of police cruisers parked outside St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City with a reporter’s voiceover telling viewers they were placed there due to possible violent pro-abortion protests against Catholics attending Masses on Mother’s Day was both chilling and sad.

The protests were planned in response to the leaked draft opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which signaled that Supreme Court justices are poised to overturn Roe v. Wade, which legalized abortion nationwide in 1973.

In New York City on Saturday night as Mass was being celebrated, pro-abortion activists rallied and denounced Catholics in front of the entrance to the Basilica of Old St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Lower Manhattan. They chanted and held signs and banners that taunted Catholics, such as “I’m killing the babies!,” “Abortion is a gift,” “RIP Jesus, Killed by a ‘Woke’ Deadbeat Dad,” “We Love Abortion,” “Thank God for Abortion,” “Help Me Abort My Babies,” and “God Killed His Son, Why Can’t I?”

This was just one example of many across our nation that emanated from the pro-abortion group, Ruth Sent Us, which on social media called for activists to “Stand at or in local Catholic Churches” on Mother’s Day, May 8. “Whether you’re a ‘Catholic for Choice’, ex-Catholic, of other or no faith, recognize that six extremist Catholics set out to overturn Roe,” the group tweeted on May 3. The tweet included a video clip of women shouting in the middle aisle of a church, “Abortion on demand without apology.” This same group on Saturday vowed on Twitter to “burn the Eucharist” in another affront to Catholics. Targeting private citizens at their houses of worship in this way is obviously intimidating but it is also blatantly wrong and a violation of our religious freedom.

Those pro-abortion zealots do not care that a recent Knights of Columbus/Marist Poll survey, 83 percent of Americans want some kind of limit on abortion. Only 31 percent of Demo­crats, 1 percent of Republicans, and 19 percent of independents said a woman should be able to obtain an abortion at any time in her pregnancy. And, according to a Wall Street Journal poll published in April, more voters favor the idea of a 15-week abortion ban (at issue in the Dobbs case) than oppose it.

The leak of the draft of the expected decision of the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade is news that I think many of us did not think we would live to see. If it stands, and well it should, it will be the answer to the prayers of so many millions of us, who have prayed unceasingly to protect every child in the womb and save them from death through the horrors of abortion.

However, this good news needs to be tempered by the fact that all pro-life people must continue in prayer and in action in their efforts to educate and to help pregnant women and, with mercy and compassion, assist those who have had abortions. If we act in this manner, we can change hearts and minds so that the triggered histrionics of the radical pro-abortion activists and the extreme positions of politicians that border on the demonic in demanding abortion up and until the birth of a child, may end in our nation and civility prevails.

Only then will our nation’s moral compass, now broken, be restored for future generations.