A tale of two demons

                Today at the abortion clinic, there is a large group of prayer warriors.  Some of the young pro-lifers have organized a procession for life around the clinic block.  They are doing it now on the first Saturday of every month, which coincides with our parish visits there.  So it is a big group today because of that.  That is good because the clinic parking lot is packed: many are there on this cold Saturday morning to get abortions.

                We are late and miss the start of the procession.  So we join in the rosary already going on in front of the clinic, led by Jim and Nina.  They stand there faithfully praying as they do every week.  There are three sidewalk counselors there also, patrolling around, praying their rosaries, watching what is going on.  It is soon after our arrival that I notice two young men in front of the clinic, smoking, and looking at us.

                We see the procession turn the block and the group joins us.  Now what was a prayerful group of seven becomes a prayerful group of almost fifty.  I still see the young men watching us.  They are smiling, they are smirking.  They gesture to us.  A member of our group walks up to one of the Truth Truck signs and flips it around so that the young men can see it.  They openly laugh at her.  For those of you who don’t know, a Truth Truck sign is a picture of an aborted baby.  This one is of a baby aborted at 7 weeks.  It is grotesque.  The limbs are no longer attached to the body and the head looks caved in.  Debates rage over whether it is ‘proper’ to even show these signs.  The truth hurts sometimes.  Most people feel sick when they see one.  But these young men just laugh at it.

                Still, she stands there, holding the sign.  They are defiant in their open hostility.  A couple of other young women come out of the clinic and join them.  They seem to all be people who have brought someone there to have an abortion.  They continue to stare at all of us.  At one point, we can see all four of them, watching us, smirking, looking at us as if we are crazy.

                And I thought, well, this IS how the world sees us, isn’t it?  Aren’t we crazy for spending a Saturday morning praying in front of a clinic when we all know it’s just a blob of tissue, that a woman has a right to do whatever she wants with her body, that abortion is the law of the land and nothing can be done to change it.  Many Catholics might stand there and look at us as if we are crazy too.

                The rosary continues.  I continue to notice the young men.  They are kind of scary to watch, not because I feel afraid of them but because it’s hard to be confronted with hostility like that sometimes.  You don’t usually encounter this sort of thing in everyday life.  And standing in front of an abortion clinic praying the rosary is not an everyday experience for me.  But maybe it should be.

I feel very sorry for them.  The power of the truth is right in their faces but they just ignore it, laugh at it, and watch it pass them by.  Sad, sad, sad.  How many more are out there missing the truth?

The rosary ends and I talk to the regular sidewalk counselor.  I mention the crowded parking lot and he says yes, it is crowded, but good news, we think two women saved their babies today, they left the clinic without getting the abortion, praise be to the Lord!  He also mentions some of the women who have chosen life for their babies in the past couple of months, how one mother named Paula has been diagnosed with a brain tumor and was induced to give birth early to a premature baby.    He asks us to pray for her and her family as the situation seems dire.

I ask him about the two young men in front and he says, oh, yes, those guys.  They are your typical cruel and callous souls.  They were threatening me earlier, all morning in fact.  I was told I would be run over by one of them in their cars. 

I ask him, do you think they know each other?  He says, oh, no…they both brought their girlfriends in to have abortions and met here.  You see this a lot, it’s a ‘pack’ mentality.  These callous guys get together like this and act like a cruel mob, more so than they ever would on their own probably. 

So two saves today, but two souls seemingly lost too.  The battle rages on.

And we’ll  be back.