Pro-Abortion Rights Protesters Hit Catholic Churches: Why You Didn't Read About It
People protest outside the Minnesota Capitol building in 2019 against laws curbing abortion. Photo via Fibonacci Blue/Wikipedia Commons
(ANALYSIS) If there was ever a doubt that Americans are living in two separate news universes, then the past two weeks certainly crystallized that reality even more than the polarizing presidential elections of 2016 and 2020. Americans who lean left politically, comfortable with reading just The New York Times or Washington Post, have been treated to apocalyptic news stories and opinion pieces — it is often hard to tell which is which — stemming from the leak of the draft decision that could overturn Roe v. Wade.
Did you know that gay marriage is now at risk? Did you know that this incarnation of the U.S. Supreme Court is illegitimate? For these elite news organizations and their readers, reversing the right to abortion is just the first attack by fascist Republicans — you wait and see.
On the right, conservatives who watch opinion shows on Fox News Channel or read Breitbart can’t get enough of how President Joe Biden has been an abject failure, particularly when it comes to inflation.
READ: Is Roe V. Wade About To Be Overturned? If So, What Are The Implications?
Have you seen how high gas prices are? Did you read about the baby formula shortage? To those news organizations, it’s all about fixing these problems by “owning the libs” and getting the GOP in control of the House and Senate in the November midterm elections.
I have friends on both sides of the political aisle, and it’s shocking to me how much one side doesn’t know about what the other is reading and thinking. It often takes weeks for stories that one side repeatedly reported on to ever make it into the pages and onto screens of the other side. It’s not a failure of our politics. Those have always been polarized. This is a failure of journalism.
Let me explain how these two news universes, while great for the bottom line of news organizations catering to their bases, led to a major news story being totally ignored by many mainstream news sites.
The protests — deemed an issue with “a lot of passion” by the White House — over abortion spilled over into houses of worship, especially Catholic churches. Is the First Amendment right to protest on private property more important than freedom of religion? Not according to the Constitution, and that’s what the news media should be concerned with reporting, not with managing narratives.
It’s therefore not a surprise that pro-abortion rights folks protesting outside churches — and in some cases disrupting Mass — received little to no coverage in most mainstream national news organizations. The Catholic press, most notably in this case the National Catholic Register, should be lauded for its comprehensive (and frequently updated) coverage through May 8.
Not all the protests were “peaceful,” an adjective the mainstream press often rushes to use for whenever progressive causes are championed. For example, the abortion rights group Ruth Sent Us had called on social media for activists to “stand at or in a local Catholic church” and even vowed on Twitter to burn the Eucharist.
CBN News, a Christian media TV network and production company that is part of the empire founded by televangelist Pat Robertson, reported this roundup:
The leaked Supreme Court draft opinion signaling the end of Roe v. Wade made Mother's Day last week an anxious one for churches and pro-life groups across the country.
In Madison, Wisconsin, vandals attacked the offices of the pro-life group Wisconsin Family Action on Sunday with an arson attack and a spray-painted warning that “If abortions aren’t safe, then you aren’t either.”
Earlier in the week in Boulder, Colorado, crews worked to remove graffiti, paint, and broken glass left behind after a night of vandalism at Sacred Heart of Mary Church.
In the D.C. area this weekend, dozens protested outside the homes of conservative Justice Brett Kavanaugh and Chief Justice John Roberts.
Sen. Ted Cruz accused Joe Biden of tacitly encouraging the violence by not condemning it. “It was shameful that the White House refused to condemn violent protestors threatening families of the Supreme Court,” Cruz told the program Sunday Morning Futures.
The Pillar, a great place for Catholic news events and topics to be put into context, took on the topic this way:
There were last week widespread reports that pro-abortion demonstrators were planning to protest at Catholic Churches across the country this Sunday. Many parishes brought in security guards or local police departments to prepare for what might come, and most of them wound up pretty bored.
There were not waves of protestors descending on every single American parish, and that was probably never going to be the case. As you probably expected, the demonstrations were mostly limited to cathedrals and large urban parishes, with just a few exceptions.
But what did happen should not be discounted, and it should be expected to continue.
Churches and crisis pregnancy centers in some areas were vandalized this weekend. Protestors donned costumes to disrupt Masses at cathedral in LA and San Francisco, held “interpretive dance” demonstrations outside Old St. Patrick’s in New York, and got into a confrontation with security guards and police outside St. James Cathedral in Seattle.
More troubling than those demonstrations is that offices of political advocacy groups - Oregon Right to Life and Wisconsin Family Action - were subject to arson attacks, though in both cases damage was somewhat limited, since the arsonists seemed to have trouble keeping their Molotov cocktails aflame.
This next part will be especially stunning to traditional Catholics of all kinds:
Also this weekend, at a parish in Katy, Texas, a tabernacle was stolen, with the Blessed Sacrament inside. It’s not certain the theft is related to what’s happened, but a pro-abortion group called Ruth Sent Us said Saturday morning it would be “burning the Eucharist to show our disgust for the abuse Catholic Churches have condoned for centuries.”
It is possible — though not proven — the group’s threat of sacrilege might have inspired the theft of the Texas tabernacle.
Still, more is coming.
News consumers, in need of some sanity, could also rely on Compact for this context. Compact is a new online political opinion journal founded by Sohrab Ahmari, a conservative convert to Catholicism. In a piece written by columnist Malcom Kyeyune, he argued the following:
For today, American Christian conservatives believe themselves to be fighting on the side of transcendent law and authority, against people whose primary motivations are thought to be the uncompromising gratification of the self. In this conflict, the progressive Peter Pan is pitted against the conservative Father, who is hated precisely because he represents the existence of laws, duties, and rules that are anathema to life in Neverland. But this view of the conflict is, quite frankly, delusional. To understand why, we must also understand why Christianity so successfully supplanted its pagan predecessors.
It’s this type of violence and vandalism that could beget even more of it in the coming weeks and months, part of a larger trend that I have documented in this space the past few years. Those past attacks have received local news coverage in the places where they took place, but national trend pieces by the likes of The New York Times and Washington Post have never been published.
The opinion journal First Things addressed vandalism in a piece called “Why anti-abortion activists desecrate churches.” Here’s the thesis:
The church service is not simply a convenient place to intimidate pro-life campaigners. To attack a worship service is not simply to annoy the participants. It is to profane the sacred. It is to enact that which abortion itself represents. It is to spit on the very identity of those worshipping and thus upon the God whom they worship. It is to strike at the very heart of what Christians believe it means to be human, a dependent creature in the presence of a holy God. It is to strip away the aura that shrouds the mystery of life. It is to attempt to make ridiculous that which reminds us we are creatures defined first and foremost by obligations to others — to God and to those dependent upon us, such as the unborn child in the womb. It is an act of intentional amnesia. More than that, it is an act of desecration.
Of course, profanation of the sacred is the standard approach of many of our political elites. President Trump’s casual attitude to marriage is one example. President Biden’s preference for the pieties necessary for election as a Democrat over the rather clear teaching of his own church is another. The scorn for the Supreme Court in recent days among elected officials, denizens of Hollywood, and opinion columnists indicates that this rot runs very deep among our ruling class. And it is no surprise that the profaning of the sacred is trickling down through society as institutions are treated with more and more contempt by all. The January 6 rioters and the ridiculous “handmaids” disrupting Masses have at least one thing in common: a moral vision that has no place for the aura that must surround our institutions, religious and secular, if they are to have any authority.
This is all good context to what came next. The aggression of some against churches was ignored, while the possibility of violence on the part of anti-abortion forces got plenty of coverage. The abortion debate will rage on in the coming weeks and months, and all of this will surely impact the midterm elections.
At some point, the Supreme Court will officially make its decision public. Whatever that final draft looks like, it will trigger another round of protests. Churches, once again, will need to be on alert. That’s to be expected. If the events of the past two weeks are any gauge, you should not expect mainstream news coverage of church service disruptions, attacks and vandalism. This is the new reality.
This post originally appeared at GetReligion.