Anti-Abortionists Call for Recruits for ‘Rescue’ Sit-Ins

With evangelical fervor, Randall Terry, founder of Operation Rescue, brought his graphic message of guilt and repentance to a gathering of 400 potential anti-abortion activists Monday night at a Roman Catholic church in Orange.

Terry, 29, a former used car salesman who has headed the recent wave of anti-abortion sit-ins across the nation, including one earlier this month in Los Angeles, accused Christians of doing nothing since the U.S. Supreme Court ruling, Roe vs. Wade, legalized abortion in 1973. In graphic language, he told those present at St. Norbert Catholic Church that 4,500 babies each day are aborted.

“Their blood is on our hands,” Terry said.

Southland Swing

Based in Binghamton, N.Y., Terry spoke during a swing through Southern California to gain converts willing to be arrested in sit-ins blocking entrances to abortion clinics. He will speak tonight at St. Lawrence Martyr Church in Redondo Beach.

The aim of the two rallies, which have been organized from the group’s ad hoc headquarters in Garden Grove, is to raise troops for a “National Holy Week of Rescue” scheduled March 22-25 in Southern California.

Terry predicted that the actions at as-yet-unidentified clinics around Southern California will draw 2,000 anti-abortion volunteers from around the country.

Sit-ins at health centers that perform abortions began as a small Catholic movement in the 1970s on the East Coast. But under Terry’s leadership in the last 2 years, Operation Rescue has grown to an umbrella organization with several hundred national affiliates and has become predominantly an evangelical Protestant movement.

‘Legalized Child Killing’

If Operation Rescue continues to grow, Terry predicted “the end of legalized child killing.”

A Feb. 11 sit-in at a Los Angeles health center drew 600 religious protesters and nearly an equal number of demonstrators supporting a woman’s right to choose whether to end a pregnancy. No one was arrested.

Operation Rescue has revitalized the widely felt Catholic “responsibility to defend the unborn,” said Lu Cortese, an organizer of the St. Norbert rally. “With their fire and enthusiasm, they are now lighting the flame for our Catholics.”

Cortese said Terry “is unifying us again. He’s helping the babies, and he’s teaching us how to do it.”

Monday’s local rally was inspired by a sermon at St. Norbert by Father Joseph Horn, a Norbertine teacher at St. Michael’s Preparatory High School in Orange. Horn compared abortion to pre-Civil War slavery.

“Back then, slave owners considered slaves property and felt they had a constitutional right to do whatever they wanted to do with them,” Horn said. “Today you hear people say, ‘It’s my body, I’ve got a legal right to do with my body whatever I want.’

“In both cases, they’re forgetting someone. They forgot slaves were actually persons, and today, they’re forgetting the fetus is a person.”

At first, Horn said he considered Operation Rescue an extremist group whose volunteers got arrested for no purpose, but he was convinced by the group’s reasoning that trespassing is allowed when a danger to life is involved.

“It seems to be,” he said, “as far as the letter of the law and the spirit of the law, that there’s actually no violation (of laws against trespass) involved. Obviously, the clinic would feel otherwise.”

Horn said a member of the priest’s council told him that Bishop Norman F. McFarland, primate of the Diocese of Orange, would say Mass for any priest arrested during an Operation Rescue activity. Diocese spokesman Lawrence Baird confirmed this and added that the bishop will also hear confessions of any priests arrested.

The movement has created controversy among Christian groups. For many Protestants, Operation Rescue is an “unknown quantity,” religious broadcaster John Stewart said. Some such as himself are sympathetic but harbor reservations about civil disobedience, preferring sidewalk counseling outside the clinics.

The Right to Life League of Southern California has neither supported nor condemned Operation Rescue.

Father Ronald E. Royer said a similar rally in January at his St. Pancratius Catholic Church in Long Beach drew criticism from some Catholics who believe that a secular rally should not be held in a place where the blessed Eucharist--consecrated bread representing Christ--is present.

At St. Norbert, the Eucharist was removed, Cortese said.