There's your answer (California Catholic Daily reports on a conversation with Archbishop Wuerl)

My apologies to those who were there. As I said, I was not.

In 4th grade I remember that we attended a Mass commemorating the event of Roe v. Wade. However, the circumstance were not really explained to me. What I did understand was very abstract (that mothers would kill their own babies?).

The following years the issue pretty much fell off the charts, and while our parish was led by a very holy and pious pastor, who no doubt supported the cause for life. I am certain that the issue of how this topic may be tactfully presented to children and young people may have provided some difficulty. The world seemed quite a different place at the time.

It seems relatively easy for one to look back now and see the genesis of the annual March for Life and speculate on what may and might have been done. Certainly, it would have been another thing to be acting on it at the time.

At any rate, I do appreceate your trailblazing.

Joe,
It really was trailblazing in those early days of the 1970's.

I often think about it.

We had pro-life marches in our city sreets--shoulder-to-shoulder for blocks and blocks. We had street corner rallies. That was in the first years after Roe.

By 1981, we begin to see a much bigger picture than just public demonstrations. We begin to understand the necessity for broad education about the whole abortion milieu--the murder of the innocents, the soon-to-be discovered (and previously covered) truth about post-abortion trauma, the serpentine trails of Planned Parenthood in the broader picture, the necessity of finding--as you indicate--a way to educate the young without doing harm.

It was then that we begin to appreciate the power of prayer. Perhaps it was always there--in fact, no doubt it was. But I mean to say that we, in the pro-life movement, begin to marry prayer to action. Pro-life Vigils, Pro-life hours before the Blessed Sacrament, Pro-life rosaries begin to be encouraged and acted upon. The incipient need for prayer had became a reality.

Then came the centers set up by volunteers to help with the material and emotional needs of women and girls who either needed help because they chose not to abort and needed material assistance, or help through the post-abortion dilemma.

Then began world-wide conferences, such as HLI. And the rest is now a part of the pro-life history of Catholic faithful.

Now I can no longer walk, attend the rallies, or do volunteer work. But I can still do the spiritual works of mercy for pro-lfe.

It's time for the younger ones to take up the torch and from I see, they are doing it in great numbers.

In the weeks before the November election, I heard a female activist from Planned Parenthood talking to a talk show host in my area--she was lamenting the fact that when she went to South Dakota to encourage rallies against a ballot measure there, (I believe it was parental notification), she was amazed to find that the pro-life movement in South Dakota was made up almost enirely of young people, male and female, who had a lot of political savvy and she admitted that they were a force to be reckoned with. She even went so far as to comment that PP was going to have to abandon it's "1972 model" and look into post-abortion counseling and how the word "fetus" needed to be re-evaluated.

I encourage all who have the fortitude, the time and the fire of the Holy Spirit to work hard in the pro-life movement for the sake of the future--the future of all of us and for this country.

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