Every year in January a band of pilgrims travels from the mountains of Western North Carolina to the great buildings and broad spaces of our nation’s capitol to pray and march for those who have no voice for prayer, no means of marching. These silent ones have no legal representation at all on this earth. Though innocent of any wrongdoing, these most vulnerable of our citizens are judged and then given up to death. Last year, 1.4 million of them were put to death in the United States alone. In the last 28 years more than 40 million have died in our country.

I am speaking, of course, of the unborn and of the March For Life that occurs in Washington, D.C., on the anniversary of Roe v. Wade, that decision by the Supreme Court to allow abortion on demand in our country.

Although the pilgrimage itself is a pilgrimage of sorrow, a protest, and an act of reparation for a land sprinkled with blood and tears, the people who board the buses in Asheville are a hopeful and indeed merry band of pilgrims, an assemblage of humanity as varied as that collected by Geoffrey Chaucer for his Canterbury Tales 800 years ago. The pilgrims on this bus are young and old, black and white, professionals and blue collar workers, housewives and students.

We who ride this bus may be drawn together by a common cause, but like all who make pilgrimages, we harbor in our hearts different motives for our journey. My 12-year-old son told me that he wanted an adventure. Others among us want the prayer time, the grace of the Mass, and the all-night prayer vigil before the March; still others are drawn by curiosity. Mike Oligny, an Asheville builder, regards the pilgrimage as a prayer battle. “The more warriors we have on the front line,” he says, “the better off we’ll be.” Laura Sadelson, an Asheville teen who has participated in other marches and who often prays at the abortion clinic in Asheville, says that seeing so many Catholics at the Shrine helps her to be stronger in her faith. Her friend, Katie Janiczek, speaks of the impact the march might have on an individual. “Maybe some people will change their minds or hearts if they see the march,” she says.

And like all pilgrims, we mingle the spiritual with the corporal. On the bus we talk, read magazines and books, sleep, eat, and pray. The teens listen to music and play games. For the younger members of our pilgrim band we play a Veggie Tale cartoon on the overhead television. Three times we stop our activities to pray the Rosary together aloud, the joyful, sorrowful, and glorious mysteries, prayers which fill the bus with an incredible sense of peace, like lullabies murmured by a loving mother to drowsy children.

Pilgrimages inflict discomfort. They are meant to challenge, to shake us from our work-a-day lives. We endure our share of discomfort. The entire trip to and from Washington takes 45 hours, wearying many with lack of sleep. We camp out in the crypt of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, sleeping on marble floors surrounded by chapels, banks of burning candles, and several hundred other pilgrims. The evening Mass upstairs draws thousands of people, the largest crowd that has ever gathered in the Shrine, and for four hours -- two hours of waiting, followed by a two hour Mass -- we stand packed like commuters on a rush-hour train. For those sleeping in the crypt that night, the new day arrives at 5:30 in the morning with crowded bathrooms and the commotion of repacking the bus before taking the Metro to the March.

Along with the prayers and hardships come the blessings. For some in our group this is the opportunity to spend the night in vigil prayer, led hourly by young men from different seminaries. Some find their blessing in one of the seven confessional booths that continue to attract lines until the early morning hours. Some find it in the crisp clear skies of the new day. After a night in the Shrine, surrounded by people, I feel like a submariner in the old World War II movies, gulping in great lungfuls of air as I depart the church; some find grace and blessing in the clamorous, weaving march itself.

Each pilgrim carries away his own impressions of the journey. This is my eighth such pilgrimage, and for me it will always be the one marked by humorous incidents. I will always remember little Tommy Roberts, who looked up at his father after the two-hour wait for Mass and summed up the feelings of all about him by declaring, “I’m miserable.” I will remember the look on Helen Gordon’s face when, after a long search, we discovered what she assumed was a lost member of our party calmly eating breakfast; I will remember laughing through my confession at midnight with the priest laughing right along with me (my sins at that hour suddenly seemed both humorous and trivial); I will remember the faces of the marchers around me when I thought of the old Dickens quotation: “You’ll find us rough, sir, but you’ll find us ready.”

One common impression which everyone who attended this event carried away -- an impression remarked on by every speaker from the bishops and cardinals to Nellie Gray, who has organized all the marches -- were the hordes of young people who attended this event. People under the age of 20 were vastly in the majority of the hundred thousand or so marchers making the trek from the Ellipse up Constitution Avenue to the Supreme Court (The police, who clearly anticipated an even larger and more boisterous crowd than usual, had put a double line of men in blue on the Court steps.) These young people led chants, carried banners and signs, distributed pamphlets, and inspired all of us with the sheer exhuberance of their youth. Certainly few in our own party will ever forget the students from a Benedictine school in front of us, chanting “Hey, Hey, Ho, Ho, Roe v. Wade has got to go!” until their voices began breaking with the effort.

Since our return from the march -- we got back into Waynesville about 3 in the morning -- I have thought about how to write this column. I know that what I have said here will offend those who advocate abortion or who believe in a woman's freedom to choose. Those who know me know that I do not enjoy giving offense. But with compromise impossible -- like slavery, there is no middle ground in abortion -- I must write what another once said: “The weight of this sad time we must obey; Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say ...”

With each march I find that I have less understanding for the other side. In a country which claims to put its children first, in a country where we must allow massive immigration because we do not have enough people to fill jobs, in a country which strongly encourages sexual activity but cannot then find a way to care for the babies who result from that activity -- in such a country it is difficult to understand the arguments for abortion. I know these arguments. I know the argument that every child should be a wanted child. I know the argument that young women who do not want to “destroy” their lives must therefore destroy the lives of their unborn. I know the arguments regarding “reproductive freedom.” I know these arguments, and I say they are misguided, irrational, murderous, and wrong.

“Is this trip really worth it?” one of our younger pilgrims asked. I gave him the usual list of reasons regarding the efficacy of the march, explaining that someone has to speak up, that the country for at least one afternoon needs to remember what it has done to its unborn children, that abortion is morally wrong, that we do not have to win the war but we do have to fight it.

My answers to that young man seemed trite at the time. Sometimes, I guess, that’s the way truth works.

 

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