Pro-Life Requiem: A History of the Anti-Infanticide Movement in the US

Originally published in the May 2021 edition of Culture Wars Magazine – republished with permission of the author.

I first met Joe Scheidler at a Judie Brown American Life League, conference in what must have been 1982 or 1983. I don’t remember his speech although I’m sure he gave one. I do remember getting into a cab with him after the conference was over and both of us were on our way to the airport. He was well-known at the time, having made a name for himself as a leader of the prolife movement; I was unknown, and so it was natural that he would ask what I did for a living.

“I edit a magazine called Fidelity,” I said, referring to the same magazine which would quote him five years later.

“And what kind of magazine is that?” he asked.

“It’s a Catholic magazine, but,” I added in way that may have sounded defensive at the time, “one that’s serious about intellectual issues.”

Joe responded with a laugh. He never told me what he found funny, and I never mentioned his response in subsequent conversations with him. Now he’s gone to his eternal reward.

Joe Scheidler died on January 18, 2021 surrounded by his family at his home after refusing to be intubated at the hospital where he had been taken in Chicago. He was 92 years old.

The date of his passing was significant as the national holiday which commemorated the life of Martin Luther King and the role he played in what has come to be known as the Civil Rights Movement, which has gone on to become the civic religion of the United States of America. Joe Scheidler attained whatever modicum of fame he enjoyed in this world as a stalwart of the prolife movement which came into existence in 1973 in the aftermath of Roe v. Wade.

As Scheidler’s autobiography, Racketeer for Life: Fighting the Culture of Death from the Sidewalk to the Supreme Court, made clear, the Right to Life movement which he did so much to shape was modeled on King’s nonviolent campaign to end segregation in the South.

Scheidler was one year older than King. Their paths crossed in 1965 when Joe took a group of students from Mundelein College, where he was teaching journalism, to march with King from Selma, Alabama, to the state capital in Montgomery in protest against “the glacial pace of civil rights reform and the harassment and violence meted out to demonstrators.”¹

Scheidler and the Mundelein students stayed at a local Catholic high school, which also served as the location for a rally attended by the elite organizers of the march and entertainers like Harry Belafonte and Peter, Paul, and Mary. Scheidler remembers the stark contrast between the enthusiasm at the rally and the hostility he encountered when he showed up at a local bar.

When it became apparent that Scheidler was not only an outsider but also a Yankee “outside agitator,” a potentially violent mob began forming around him, and he might well have ended up like Violet Liuzzo, a Detroit native who got murdered that same night. Scheidler talked to the crowd, which defused the danger, and learned something from the exchange when someone said, “You don’t know anything about our problems. We’ve got to keep Blacks in their place. If they ever take over . …”²

For Scheidler, “the point was clear. Even the slightest acknowledgement of a black person’s basic human dignity could destroy the whole system.”³ Equally clear in Scheidler’s mind was the connection between segregation and abortion: “Years later, this same attitude surfaced in the abortion debate. If the unborn have any rights at all, pregnant women—all women—would be relegated to second-class status.”⁴

Scheidler’s perception of the similarities was not shared by the people who determined national narratives on issues like this. To them, groups like the National Organization for Women or NOW were the successors of King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference, not its antithesis, as Scheidler claimed when he wrote that NOW:

will do everything they can to make sure that the murdered unborn are not recognized as human beings. When Roe and Doe were handed down, I saw a parallel between a pro-abortion society and the Jim Crow South. The nation was deciding to limit its definition of who counted as a person and who was entitled to equal protection under the law. Just as we’d done in the civil rights movement, activists were going to have to agitate for the people who were discarded by their government. But unlike the civil rights movement, these victims could not stand up for themselves.⁵

In 1989, Fidelity Magazine came up with similar conclusions, “Does NOW really oppose violence against women? Or are they willing to condone it as a way of preserving abortion?” The article by Suzanne M. Rini documented allegations of police brutality in Pittsburgh against female prolifers, including gross accusations of molestation and grave physical abuse.

These injustices were overseen by such figures as police commander Gwen Elliott who had been a board member of an abortion clinic in Pittsburgh, and covered up by District Attorney Bob Colville, who refused to prosecute the jail warden involved in the abuses. “NOW and their unsubtle allies in the courts, police departments, and official offices use RICO suits to choke up more protection money. This they do, in both cases, to ruin lives.”

In 1966, one year after Scheidler and other Catholics helped Martin Luther King out in Selma, King repaid the favor by showing up in Marquette Park as part of a campaign to break up Catholic ethnic neighborhoods in Chicago. Sensing that he was in trouble with Chicago’s Catholics, Martin Luther King called Father Theodore Hesburgh, president of Notre Dame university, and asked him to come to Chicago to show his support.

The result was what would become the iconic photo of King and Hesburgh with arms locked together singing “We Shall Overcome,” which became the de facto mission statement for Notre Dame and liberal American Catholicism. The photo had two levels of meaning. For Notre Dame alumni like Joe Scheidler, it meant that Notre Dame, which had always been afflicted with the heresy Pope Leo XIII called Americanism, was now fully supportive of the Civil Rights Movement which had become America’s de facto civic religion. But for those in the know, for the oligarchs whose favor Hesburgh was so eager to court, the photo showed that Notre Dame was fully supportive of the race-based social engineering which would go on to destroy Catholic parishes and therefore Catholic political power in big cities like Chicago.

In a Wall Street Journal article, Notre Dame alumnus Bill McGurn commented on the Hesburgh-King photo as the essential expression of Notre Dame’s post Land O’ Lakes raison d’etre:

In the National Portrait Gallery of the Smithsonian, there is a wonderful photograph of Father Ted Hesburgh – then Notre Dame president-linking hands with Martin Luther King Jr. at a 1964 [sic, 1966] civil-rights rally at Chicago’s Soldier Field. Today, nearly four decades and 50 million abortions after Roe v. Wade, there is no photograph of similar prominence of any Notre Dame president taking a lead at any of the annual marches for life. Father Jenkins is right: That’s not ambiguity. That’s a statement.

When Notre Dame President, Rev. John Jenkins, C.S.C., was asked to lead the Notre Dame student delegation to the National Right to Life March, his response was “when exactly is the pro-life march?” In 2009, Fr. Jenkins invited President Barack Obama to give the commencement address and receive an honorary degree, which, according to Scheidler, “flew in the face of the University’s professed Catholic character” because Obama had a “100 percent pro-choice voting record.”

Consequently, Joe and hundreds of other protestors marched, picketed, rented billboards and sponsored flyovers to free the 88 that were arrested. Consequently, I wrote the article “ObamaNation at Notre Dame” documenting the fall of Notre Dame and comparing successful revolutionaries like Fr. Hesburgh and Martin Luther King to unsuccessful revolutionaries like the prolife protesters marching on campus.

In that 2009 article, I filled in what was missing from Joe’s account of the Civil Rights Movement. Martin Luther King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) became the most successful part of a 60-year-long attempt by Jews working at organizations like the NAACP and the Communist Party to turn Negroes into revolutionaries.

In his book What Went Wrong? The Creation and Collapse of the Black-Jewish Alliance, 1994, Murray Friedman, the Jew who helped eliminate prayer in public schools in Abington School District v. Schempp, explained the “Jewish science” behind the Civil Rights Movement: “Felix Frankfurter, Chief Justice on the Court which handed down Brown, was a German-speaking Jew from Vienna who had served on the NAACP’s legal committee.”

“Martin Luther King’s strategy … in effect the whole campaign against segregation in the South is predicated on one event … the Brown v. School Board … decision of 1954.” In other words, “Without the backing of the Supreme Court, there would have been no Civil Rights Movement. King’s strategy involved playing the state courts and legislatures against their federal counterparts.

Murray Friedman, also once head of the AJC (American Jewish Committee) in Philadelphia, further explained how the Jews at the NAACP were intimately involved in the Brown decision: “Jack Greenberg of the NAACP, drew the assignment to find experts in the Midwest for the landmark case Brown V. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas.” Kenneth B. Clark, the black psychologist whose study of black and white dolls indicated that students were harmed by segregated classrooms was cited in Brown, had been funded by the AJC. Clark’s study led the court to conclude that “the average black American had been scarred by self-hatred,” and that “segregation … inflicted vast psychic damage on both white and black children.”

AJC-sponsored studies provided the theoretical underpinning of Brown v. School Board. In fact, AJC-sponsored psychological studies festoon the decision from one footnote to another. Friedman concluded 50 years after the fact that Clark’s research was flawed. Flawed or not, the Jewish-sponsored research that made up the theoretical underpinning for the Brown decision had gotten the job done. Brown created both an atmosphere conducive to revolution and a weapon that could be used against the South.

According to Friedman, “The Court’s May 17, 1954 decision would spur the civil rights revolution that followed.”

Before long “Jew” and “Communist” had become synonyms in the South. Unlike the good southern Jews, the New York Jews had gone south with one purpose in mind, to stir up the Negroes and turn them into communist revolutionaries.

In addition, Friedman noted that:

In 1948 a prominent member of the Daughters of the Confederacy’s North Carolina chapter circulated a letter charging that most of the Communists in the United States were Jews and that most agitators stirring up southern Negroes were of Jewish origin. Jews also supplied most of the money for such activities.

The suspicions of the Southerners were, in fact, justified, but they were demonized for having them nonetheless. In Travels with Charley, a book John Steinback dedicated to New York publisher and NAACP supporter Harold Guinzberg, Steinbeck runs into a cab driver in Louisiana who tells him that “them goddam New York Jews come in and stir the n—-s up.” When Steinbeck picks up a cracker hitchhiker, who tells him he sounds like a “Commie n—-r lover,” Steinbeck loses no time in expelling the man from his RV.

Up until the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955, Jews dominated the Civil Rights Movement. Indeed, the NAACP, which was founded in 1909, did not have one black lawyer on its staff until 1933. After Montgomery, however, “The black masses now became the shock troops and the central force in the civil rights revolution.”

As if to prove that Steinbeck’s cab driver was right all along, Friedman cites the case of Bayard Rustin, a Black Quaker homosexual, who attended City College of New York, with its Stalinist and Trotskyite cafeteria alcoves, and “joined the young communist league” after he arrived in New York.

In the summer of 1956, Rustin introduced Martin Luther King, Jr. to Stanley Levison, a “political radical who had worked on behalf of the convicted atomic bomb spies Ethel and Julius Rosenberg” who was also “a financial pillar of the Communist Party and other radical causes.”

Levinson became “enormously influential behind the scenes and throughout King’s career.” He became “King’s closest white friend and most reliable colleague for the remainder of his life” and “would epitomize the black-Jewish alliance’s new look.”

Levinson got his start in politics shortly after the war when he became a financial contributor to the Communist party. By 1953 he was assisting in the management of party finances, a job which included creating business fronts which would earn or launder money for the party. J. Edgar Hoover believed that Levinson was under party discipline when he entered the King movement.

When Martin Luther King announced the creation of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1957, it was Levison and Rustin who “labored behind the scenes in New York” to provide the $200,000 a year the SCLC needed for its operations in the South. Eventually, Rustin and Levison were joined by Jack O’Dell, a black communist, and Harry Wachtel. Together they came up with a list of 9,000 donors who were willing to make semiannual contributions to the SCLC to fund its operations.

On June 22, 1963, three months before the March on Washington, the Kennedy brothers, Jack and Bobby, met with King in the White House, where they told King in no uncertain terms that his organization had ties to, and was possibly controlled by, the Communist Party. Robert Kennedy claimed that SCLC’s fundraiser Stanley Levison “was acting on Soviet orders to weaken the United States by manipulating the Civil Rights Movement.”

John Kennedy, who was under pressure from Southern Democrats to rein in the Civil Rights Movement, named O’Dell as “the number five Communist in the United States” and claimed that Levison was his handler. Under pressure from the Kennedys, King fired O’Dell on July 3 but maintained covert contact with the less dispensable Levison.

Four months later, Joe Scheidler was sitting in his office at Mundelein College looking through the newspaper when the news flash came over his Philco radio announcing the murder of John F. Kennedy, causing him to say: “Something was jarred loose in America with Kennedy’s assassination … the world changed.”⁶

In 1946, Scheidler arrived at Notre Dame as a 19-year-old veteran just out of the Navy ready to have Uncle Sam pay for his education through the GI Bill. Notre Dame, he tells us:

was very Catholic in those days, and it was a great time to attend a men’s college, since so many students there were mature men who had served in the war. Few were looking for a four-year extension of their adolescence. Nearly everybody on campus seemed to have a goal, and their faith was central to that goal.⁷

In a memoir which was written 66 years after he graduated from Notre Dame, Scheidler stresses the maturity of Notre Dame students who studied there in the wake of World War II. What he doesn’t mention is the effect that the social engineering which invariably accompanies military training had on the ex-soldiers’ ability to think according to principle rather than by templates established for them by CIA organs like TIME magazine and other instruments of psychological warfare, as David Wemhoff pointed out in John Courtney Murray, TIME/LIFE and the American Proposition: How the CIA’s Doctrinal Warfare Program Changed the Catholic Church, Fidelity Press, 2015.

Notre Dame was saved from the all-but certain financial ruin, which flowed from siphoning off 11 million young men into military service by the U.S. Navy, which established an ROTC program there during World War II.

The government rescue came at a price. The Navy would not pay for philosophy courses at the very moment when Notre Dame was positioning itself as having the premier Thomist philosophy department among American Catholic colleges. Faced with Navy intransigence on the issue, Notre Dame backed down and dispensed with the philosophy requirement for ROTC students. The philosophy department adopted Thomism as its official and exclusive philosophy in 1953 following the guidelines which Pope Leo XIII had established in his 1879 encyclical Aeterni Patris, which made Thomism normative for the entire Catholic Church. But at that point the Rev. Theodore Hesburgh, C.S.C., had become Notre Dame’s president, and Hesburgh was committed to proving to the WASP elite which ran the United States that he would do whatever was necessary to curtail Vatican influence over Catholic higher education in their interests.

To prove to them that his heart was in the right place, Hesburgh strangled Thomism at Notre Dame (see Logos Rising, Ch. 13-14) and in 1954 not only defied Alfredo Cardinal Ottaviani’s monitum against Rev. John Courtney Murray, S.J. by allowing Notre Dame University Press to publish a book containing Murray’s attack on the Church’s teaching on Church-State relations, The Catholic Church in World Affairs, but also “squirreled away in an attic somewhere” 500 unsold books when the Vatican told him to get rid of them, “to await the day when we would no longer have to worry about this kind of thing. But then, the books would probably be worth ten times the price.”⁸

But all of this, including Hesburgh’s tenure as president of the university, was over the horizon of the future. Scheidler remembered admiring Hesburgh as the Holy Cross priest who served as the chaplain of Vetville during Scheidler’s undergraduate days. Scheidler graduated with a degree in communication arts, “which was bolstered by courses in theology and philosophy”⁹ in 1950.

“All three reinforced each other. Central to each was the belief that truth existed and could be known. … Our goal was to find truth.”¹⁰

Unfortunately, by the time Joe arrived at Notre Dame, the Jews, who wanted America’s entry into the War every bit as much as the Roosevelt administration, had already demonstrated their control of the press by turning any American who dared criticize them, like American hero Charles Lindbergh, into a pariah, which stifled the search for truth.

Joe writes in his memoirs that “In May 1927, ten weeks before I was born, Charles Lindbergh landed the Spirit of St. Louis at Le Bourget Airport in Paris. The historic transatlantic crossing made Lindbergh an instant superstar on both sides of the Atlantic. In my preschool years, Lindbergh was featured often in the papers and on newsreels. …The Lindberghs seemd to be the living ideal of the perfect American family.”¹¹

Joe was only four years old when Lindbergh’s son was pulled through the second story nursery window and murdered, but he remembers the newsboys on the streets shouting, “Extra! Extra! Read all about it—Lindbergh baby kidnapped!”

But Scheidler, in his memoirs, does not remember Lindbergh’s speeches, such as the one given on September 11, 1941 when he identified the Jewish race as “not American” and wishing “to involve us in this war. We cannot blame them for looking out for what they believe to be their own interests, but we must also look out for ours. We cannot allow the natural passions and prejudices of other people to lead our country to destruction.”

Following graduation, Joe cycled through Allied-occupied Germany, which had survived the Hungerjahre of 1946-7, when Henry Morgenthau, Roosevelt’s former Secretary of the Treasury, had tried to starve the Germans to death in an act of Jewish vengeance. The subsequent Marshall Plan had been in effect for three years, but German cities still lay in ruins, and a new and more insidious plan of social engineering had been put in place in ways that were all but invisible to those who were not in the know.¹²

Joe cycled through Munich, so he must have been aware of the magnitude of the devastation, but what he remembered was his visit to Dachau, “the Nazi concentration camp.”¹³ Joe had intended to spend the night in “the quaint, medieval Bavarian town,” but his experience of being at the camp was so “overwhelming” that he biked back to Munich that night: “The Reich’s policy of human slaughter had been conducted under a system of laws. I couldn’t sleep so near to the site of so much death.”¹⁴

Once he got back to Munich, Joe opened up a phone book and discovered that there were 18 listings which shared his name, causing him to wonder about their participation in what has come to be known as the Holocaust. “They had been there while Dachau was operating. What did they do? I wondered. Did they try to stop the trains, to stop the killing?”¹⁵ Joe then decided he would never let something like that happen on his watch, referring once again to what some would term the abortion holocaust half a century later.

In spite of the propaganda which was released at the time, no exterminations took place in Dachau, which served as a catch basin for Catholic clergy who were deemed disloyal to the regime. One of the inmates at Dachau was Karl Leisner who came from the town where I taught English at a Gymnasium in the mid-’70s.

The Catholics in Dachau included bishops and priests who carried on an elaborate liturgical life there, including the ordination of Karl Leisner, who died of tuberculosis two months after the camp was liberated by the Americans. A friend of my father was with Patton when the first American troops arrived in Dachau. I remember, as a child, seeing pictures of the naked corpses of people who had obviously died of starvation. There was no evidence of any apparatus of extermination.

The primary victims at Dachau were Catholics, not Jews. Joe mentions none of this, which would not be surprising coming from a newly minted undergrad in 1950, but he wrote those words 70 years later with no indication that he had learned anything from hindsight or research or experience.

Like the Civil Rights Movement, the Holocaust was a badly understood template which Joe used to confer not so much meaning as moral legitimacy on the subsequent issue of abortion by transferring victimhood from the Jew to the fetus. This inchoate strategy was doomed for a number of reasons, first and foremost because Jews were not victims in either instance, not at Dachau in 1945 and not in New York in 1967, when the Jewish-led abortion crusade began in America.

In fact, when it came to the abortion issue, Jews were the main “Taetervolk,” (group of perpetrators) if we can borrow a phrase from the post-World War II Holocaust debate in Germany. Joe certainly knew who Bernard Nathanson was, a notable abortionist who became “a big name in prolife circles”¹⁶ after he stopped performing abortions in 1974.

Not only did Scheidler read Aborting America published in 1979, in which Nathanson held Jews accountable for legalizing abortion in America, but during a prolife conference in Indianapolis, Nathanson invited Scheidler to have a drink at the hotel bar, where Scheidler spoke with the “Jewish atheist”¹⁷ and told him he couldn’t believe Nathanson performed 60,000 abortions without realizing they were babies.

“Think about the children they would have had. You wiped out a whole city!” In spite of this, and the contact they kept for many years – Nathanson called Scheidler to tell him he was converting to Catholicism in 1996 – Scheidler seems unaware or unwilling to mention what the Jewish convert had to say about the Jewish roots of the abortion movement.

That story began in 1967 when Nathanson met Lawrence Lader, another Jew who had been a protégé (and some would claim, lover) of the eugenicist Margaret Sanger. Impressed by Sanger’s mobilization of main line Protestants to legitimatize contraception, Lader decided to legitimatize abortion by mobilizing Jews like Nathanson and Betty Friedan, who had used the tactics she had learned from her days in the Communist Party to create feminism. To bring this about, Lader needed a villain, and the villain he chose was the Catholic Church in general and its hierarchy in particular.

By the late ’70s, when Nathanson wrote Aborting America, he was “heartily ashamed of the use of the anti-Catholic ploy.” Nathanson implicated the Jews in this “anti-Catholic ploy” by calling it a “Shandeh fah yidden” (“scandal for the Jews”). As if admitting the ethnic nature of the struggle, Nathanson later converted to Catholicism.

The use of anti-Catholic bigotry to promote abortion was more than “a reincarnation of McCarthyism at its worst,” it was “a keenly focused weapon, full of purpose and design.”

Lader divided Catholics into liberal and conservative factions and then used the former to control and discredit the latter. The “‘modern’ Kennedy Catholics,” who “were already using contraception,” could be browbeaten into a public “pro-choice” position without much effort.

Then “The stage was set … for the use of anti-Catholicism as a political instrument and for the manipulation of Catholics themselves by splitting them and setting them against each other.” NARAL would supply the press with “fictitious polls and surveys designed to make it appear as if American Catholics were deserting the teachings of the Church and the dictates of their consciences in droves.”

The main public relations weapon, however, was “identifying every anti-abortion figure according to his or her religious affiliation (usually Catholic)” while “studiously” refraining from any ethnic or religious identification of those who were pro-abortion. “Lader’s own religious beliefs” were “never discussed or mentioned,” but he identified Malcolm Wilson, the lieutenant governor of New York State in 1970 as “a Catholic strongly opposed to abortion.”

“Neither I nor Assemblyman Albert Blumenthal,” Nathanson continued, “was ever identified as a Jew, nor was Governor Nelson Rockefeller ever recognized as a Protestant,” even though the abortion movement was disproportionately Jewish and “from the very beginning of the abortion revolution the Catholic Church and its spokesmen took a considerable role in the opposition.”

Given the media’s liberal bias, “it was easy to portray the Church as an insensitive, authoritarian war-monger, and association with it or any of its causes as unendurably reactionary, fascistic, and ignorant.”

Nathanson thinks Catholics should have pointed out the religious bigotry at the heart of this double standard; they also should have explained that the pro-abortion side was overwhelmingly Jewish, and, therefore, un-American because:

In the public mind Protestant America is America, and had Protestant opposition been organized and vociferous early on, permissive abortion might have been perceived as somehow anti-American, the spawn of a cadre of wild-eyed Jewish radicals in New York City.¹⁸ 

The Civil Rights Movement identified a host of villains from Bull Connor to George Wallace. The Abortion movement, which arrogated the Civil Rights Movement’s oft contested mantle, identified Catholic bishops and actual Catholic doctors in New York like Hugh Barbor as their villains of choice.

Joe himself was identified for his prolife activism, and by 1989, Planned Parenthood had spent thousands of dollars to get his picture printed in full-page ads in TIME, Newsweek, newspapers, and other magazines across the country. “It was a picture of me at a rally in Atlanta, bearded and wearing my fedora with the caption, “Should a woman’s private medical decisions be made by a man with a bullhorn?”¹⁹

But Joe never identified the real villains in the anti-abortion struggle even though as a “former journalism instructor of the ‘old school’ of objective reporting, I have always believed in accurate, factual descriptions and definitions.”19a Scheidler’s autobiography appeared in 2016, decades after Nathanson wrote those words in Aborting America and seven years after I discussed Nathanson’s expose of the Jewish roots of abortion in my book The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit.

Dream Job at Notre Dame

In the summer of 1951, Joe decided to enter Our Lady of the Lake Seminary in Syracuse, Indiana, where he joined his brother Bob, but Joe eventually ended up at the Benedictine monastery of St. Meinrad’s in southern Indiana. Joining a monastery seemed like a natural choice for Joe, because as he put it, “Ordination ran in my family. Of the ten children in my father’s family, two of the eight brothers became priests. I had several cousins who were priests, and my mother’s brother, Leo Pursley, became the bishop of Fort Wayne-South Bend.”²⁰

In 1958, Joe took part in a session of discernment with a counselor who injected him with “a dose of sodium pentothal – truth serum – and started asking a raft of questions.”21 When Joe answered “no” to the question, “If your mother were dead would you still become a priest,” he realized that he did not have a vocation and walked away from St. Meinrad’s.

One year later, 1959, Joe got a call from Ed Fisher, his former journalism professor at Notre Dame, offering him a teaching position. Speaking with the benefit of 60 years of hindsight, Joe felt that “a dream job dropped in my lap” because “I had loved Notre Dame during my undergrad years and relished the opportunity to return to the campus.”²² The dream job evaporated within three years because Joe lacked a master’s degree and more importantly because his replacement had proven to be “such a hit with the department that my old job was no longer open.”²³

By 1964, Schiedler was in Chicago working as the PR man for the Great Society’s War on Poverty. Joe found the work “frustrating” because “Many of the city’s outreach programs looked good on paper but didn’t really accomplish much.”²⁴

As a result, he missed out on Hesburgh’s coup d’etat, otherwise known as the Land O’ Lakes statement which alienated Notre Dame from the Church. Land O’ Lakes was one of the most momentous changes in American culture and without a doubt the most momentous change in the history of the University of Notre Dame.

Joe remembers Griswold v. Connecticut, the Supreme Court decision which struck down state laws banning contraceptives because it was obvious how that decision was used to justify abortion:

Griswold had granted married couples’ access to contraception in 1965, and in 1972, Eisenstadt v. Baird declared that birth control had to be made available to single people as well. Justice William Brennan wrote in his Eisenstadt opinion that “if the right of privacy means anything . . . it is the right of the individual, married or single, to be free from unwarranted governmental intrusion into matters so fundamentally affecting a person as the decision whether to bear or beget a child.”²⁵

Joe’s 2016 memoir, however, indicates that he knew, or was willing to admit, nothing about the crucial role which Notre Dame played in undermining the Catholic Church’s opposition to contraception. From 1963 to 1965 Notre Dame hosted a series of secret conferences sponsored by the Rockefeller Population Council to overturn the Church’s teaching on birth control. In 1965 the Catholic theologians who had taken part in the secret conferences at Notre Dame issued statements to the effect that Catholic teaching on the issue was no longer persuasive. Their statements were issued to coincide with the Supreme Court’s Griswold decision as a way of blunting Catholic opposition.

Within two months of this announcement, in July 1965, Hesburgh arranged a private audience at the Vatican between Paul VI and John D. Rockefeller, 3rd, who took the occasion to volunteer to write the pope’s birth control encyclical for him. Two years later, during the summer of 1967, Hesburgh stole Notre Dame from the Catholic Church when he issued his now infamous Land O’ Lakes statement. I use the word “stole” advisedly, because of the response I got from John Cardinal Krol, then head of the committee for the reform of canon law, who referred to the “privatization” of Notre Dame which followed the Land O’ Lakes statement as “alienation of Church property,” which is a polite ecclesial term for theft. Land O’ Lakes claimed, among other things, that no power outside the university should determine university policy—unless, of course, that power outside the university happened to be the Rockefellers or other oligarchic interests, in which case they were given carte blanche.

One of the main dissenters from Church teaching on the issue of birth control was Father Charles Curran, who was at the time an adjunct professor at the Catholic University of America. When the bishops who comprised that university’s board of trustees refused to renew Curran’s contract, demonstrations erupted on campus causing the bishops to back down. Seeing the bishops’ intellectual cowardice and lack of decision, Hesburgh seized the opportunity he had been looking for and alienated the University of Notre Dame from the Catholic Church by placing it under a lay board of trustees during the summer of 1967 following the Curran tenure battle. The bishop who had jurisdiction over Notre Dame when this happened was Leo A. Pursley, Joe Scheidler’s uncle.

Hesburgh issued his Land O’ Lakes statement saying that no institution outside of the university shall determine the academic policies of a Catholic university, without telling anyone about the effect Rockefeller money was having at the university and the Church at large through their sponsorship of the secret conferences on contraception. Hesburgh downplayed his alienation of Church property as a legal technicality at the time, but it would have far reaching consequences for the Church, setting the stage for the eventual secularization of Catholic higher education in the United States, for the country, where it contributed to general moral decline, and for the Scheidler family itself, which now found itself caught in the middle of a conflict between Notre Dame and a member of their own family, namely the Bishop of Fort Wayne-South Bend. Because of his personal history at Notre Dame, Joe Scheidler must have been more affected than other members of his immediate family.

Confronted with a fait accompli, the Bishop of Fort Wayne-South Bend, Leo A. Pursley looked first to fellow bishops and then to Rome for support in countering Hesburgh’s move, but support was forthcoming from neither group. The bishops were awed by Hesburgh’s clout with the oligarchs of his day, something Scheidler witnessed first-hand and viewed positively during his days at Notre Dame:
In 1954, President Dwight Eisenhower appointed him to the President’s Science Advisory Committee and, when the US Commission on Civil Rights was created in 1959, to that committee as well. He served as head of the Rockefeller Foundation, and President Carter appointed him to an immigration reform commission.²⁶

In 1959, Hesburgh had both President Eisenhower and Cardinal Montini, who would become Pope Paul VI, as speakers at Notre Dame’s commencement. Paul VI was more than just a personal friend of Hesburgh. He was so infatuated with Hesburgh that he gave him his cardinal’s ring, hoping that Hesburgh would join him in Rome as the Vatican’s Secretary of State. Montini clearly viewed the gift of his ring as a way of expressing deep affection for Hesburgh, as well as the fact that he was going to nominate him for a red hat in the hope that he would come to Rome and help out the pope as his assistant at the Vatican secretariat of state. Hesburgh was too smart to fall for something like that but not stupid enough to let an opportunity like this go to waste.

Hesburgh, according to the hagiographic documentary of the same name, viewed Paul VI’s heartfelt gesture in a way that can only be characterized as callous. He did not put the ring on his finger, which seemed to be what Paul VI expected him to do. Instead, he put it, box and all, into his pocket, and upon arriving back at this office at Notre Dame, dumped it unceremoniously into the desk draw which contained his cigars and his cigar cutter, as mentioned by his niece in the film, which then cuts to Hesburgh strutting across the football field in Notre Dame stadium bragging that he had more power as president of Notre Dame than any cardinal of the Church would ever have, which was certainly true if we are referring to the powers of this world.

When it became apparent that no support was forthcoming, Bishop Pursely did nothing. I know this because I spoke with him about the situation at Notre Dame, shortly after founding the magazine which is now Culture Wars.

It’s easy to speak with hindsight as someone who did not have to bear the consequences for the decision, but Pursley should have acted on his own. He should have put the university under interdict, and if Hesburgh failed to rescind the Land O’ Lakes statement and subsequent creation of a lay board of trustees, Pursley could have countered by saying that the services of the Holy Cross Order were no longer needed in the Diocese of Fort Wayne-South Bend, and Hesburgh and his fellow priests would have had to pack their bags and leave. No matter how great his infatuation with Hesburgh, Paul VI would most probably have sided with one of his bishops, but we’ll never know. All we know is that momentous consequences followed from Pursley’s failure to act.

Hesburgh perpetrated his act of theft during the summer of 1967, hot on the heels of the US bishops’ ignominious capitulation on the Charles Curran tenure battle at Catholic University of America in Washington. If the bishops weren’t going to enforce discipline at their own university, then it was a sure bet that they were not going to enforce it at Hesburgh’s university either, because Hesburgh outclassed them in both political clout and daring. Hesburgh, in other words, had the tacit support of the American bishops, because with few exceptions – like Cardinal Macintyre of Los Angeles – they were, like Hesburgh himself, Americanists to a man.

Hesburgh also got away with this act of theft because Pope Paul VI refused to act, in spite of the pleas of then ordinary Bishop Leo Pursely, who wanted to put Notre Dame under interdict. As a sign of his gratitude for rescuing him from the ire of the local bishop, Hesburgh betrayed Paul VI one year later by siding with John D. Rockefeller, 3rd and Catholic academe’s dissenters against Humanae Vitae, Paul VI’s birth control encyclical. This act of perfidy did not go unnoticed by Mr. Rockefeller, who named Hesburgh chairman of the Rockefeller Foundation as an expression of his gratitude.

Scheidler mentions Pursley in passing, but never tells us about this noteworthy conflict between Notre Dame and his bishop uncle and how it affected him, or about how Notre Dame led the attack against the Catholic Church on matters like contraception and sexual morality in the United Sates. The fact that the Scheidler family continued to send their children to Notre Dame, where they were exposed to more and more overt attempts to subvert their faith, is difficult to explain, but if Joe found the conflict too painful or too complicated to resolve, the same was a fortiori true of other less articulate, less pugnacious members of the Scheidler family.

Scheidler notes broadly that Notre Dame, “still looks like a Catholic campus. But its broad embrace of secularism has greatly undermined its Catholic identity. Much of this goes back to the presidency of the late Father Theodore Hesburgh, who became president of Notre Dame in 1952, two years after I graduated. … He served as vice president when I taught there in the early ’60s. I always admired him.”²⁷

Scheidler argues that Hesburgh’s perhaps “noble” but misguided intention to defend academic freedom may have been the root cause of the university’s secularization. With the benefit of 60 some years of hindsight, Scheidler realized that something seriously wrong had taken place at Notre Dame, but he fails to elaborate or mention that it took place when his uncle was bishop of the diocese (1956-1976):

While Hesburgh’s intentions may have been noble, by formally rejecting any authority not its own, the statement opened the door to a wholesale crippling of Catholic character in almost all the prominent Catholic colleges. While still acknowledging the influence of the Church, the statement asserts a principle of total autonomy, making a university’s Catholicism merely coincidental to the religious tradition and the intellectual teaching of the Catholic faith. The document was presented as evidence of Catholic colleges taking the lead in support of academic freedom, but despite this optimistic façade, it was in truth a repudiation of its own birthright and a disregard for tradition in line with the social ferment of the late 1960s. . . . Notre Dame had long enjoyed its reputation as the Catholic college in America. The declaration that emerged from the Land O’ Lakes conference asserted that Catholic universities “should carry on a continual examination of all aspects and activities of the Church and should objectively evaluate them.” But this high-minded appeal for persistent self-reflection, coming as it did on the heels of the Second Vatican Council and the period of confusion that followed, encouraged faculty to abandon Catholic principles or, in some cases, to present their own inventions as authentic Catholic thinking. Perhaps worst of all, the statement invited Catholic universities to join Notre Dame in cutting off their unique and distinctive Catholic character from their parent Church.²⁸

Aborted fetuses

Joe became acutely aware of the abortion issue in 1972 when he saw graphic photos of aborted fetuses, a tactic he endorsed throughout his career as a prolife activist. He was prepared to become more deeply involved in the struggle against abortion when the Supreme Court handed down Roe v. Wade in 1973 striking down all state laws against abortion, but it was Joe’s sense that the Church was mishandling what Justice White called “an exercise of raw judicial power” which propelled him into becoming a full-time activist. “Here I was with a wife and four children, a mortgage and no job, but with a firm sense that I had to accept my calling to challenge this tragic national mistake.”²⁹

In the period immediately following the Roe v. Wade decision, Joe met Fr. Paul Marx, OSB, a Benedictine priest from Minnesota at a dinner in Chicago. After Marx showed Scheidler jars containing aborted fetuses, Scheidler asked, “Why does abortion bother me so much, when it doesn’t seem to matter to most people?” “It’s a calling,” Marx answered. “You are blessed with a special calling to fight this evil.” Joe left that meeting convinced that everything he had done up till that moment had prepared him for the vocation of a Right to Life activist. He had “honed skills in debate and argument and worked as a publicist and organizer. And now I had a cause that would demand all my energy and such talents as I had. I was entering my true vocation: pro-life activist.”³⁰

In addition to his training Joe was propelled into action by his disappointment in the Church’s response. Joe believed that the Church had released “a strong condemnation in a pastoral message three weeks after Roe and Doe, but he also believed that “action speaks louder than words,” and was disappointed at the action, or lack thereof which followed the bishops’ words:

I felt that what was most needed to bolster our nation’s collapsing moral character was strong and persistent leadership. I expected that leadership to come from the Catholic Church. Here was a blatant evil with the federal government’s seal of approval. Surely the bishops had to react, and forcefully. I thought they might even do something as dramatic as calling for a nationwide tax protest. Imagine what could have happened if the American Catholic leadership had called on their flocks to withhold financial support from the government?³¹

Because of the hierarchy’s failure to act, Joe decided to get involved in the Right to Life movement as an “activist.” The endorsements on the back of Joe’s book confirm that Joe became the “Father of Pro-Life Activism.” His strategy for activism was based on two pillars: the Holocaust and the Civil Rights Movement, specifically the marches and sit-ins in Selma, Alabama, whose hidden grammar was civil disobedience. Joe didn’t understand either paradigm, largely because of his experience at Notre Dame.

The Americanism he learned there would have serious consequences for two reasons: first it imparted a faith in the honesty of the American system, and secondly, it gave the impression that civil disobedience was a category of Catholic theology when it was not. When the bishops proposed a campaign “to instill reverence for life at all stages,” “in our churches, schools, and homes, as well as in the larger civic community,”³² they were tacitly admitting that there were two possible responses to Roe, education or insurrection, and that they were choosing the former because there was no middle ground.

Civil disobedience was simply not a Catholic category. As I wrote in Fidelity magazine in 1987: Rev. Richard Roach, S.J., a moral theologian from Marquette University, made this principle clear “there isn’t a perfect way to draw the line between the civil disobedience that can alert a society to the presence of an evil that must be changed – and evil which is institutionalized in the civil and criminal law – and an act that is revolutionary. … I think the real question is ‘Is this a revolutionary act or not?’ … According to Populorum Progressio, revolution has to meet the conditions of just war.”

The bishops had ruled out that option, and Joe, unhappy with that decision, decided to take what he thought was a middle course as an “activist” with a mind crippled by the inadequate categories he had picked up at Notre Dame, where people like Hesburgh had already decided that the Civil Rights Movement and the prolife movement were antithetical. In 1974, Father Hesburgh gave a speech in Denver, in the course of which he called prolifers “mindless and crude zealots,” prompting a phone call from Joe during which Hesburgh assured Joe that he wasn’t referring to him. But Scheidler wasn’t fooled by Hesburgh’s mendacity: “But of course he meant us,” even if he was unwilling to call Joe that to his face and willing to write a fundraising letter when Joe got into a legal jam later on. No amount of personal support could disguise Hesburgh’s acquiescence to abortion.

During those years, and with the help of his father-in-law, attorney Thomas Crowley, Scheidler set up a non-profit organization and ran it from his back porch: “the Chicago Office for Pro-Life Publicity. I thought at the time that publicizing the humanity of the unborn and the medical and psychological threats abortion posed to the mother would be the most powerful tools in combating the terrible turn the nation was taking.”³³ In those first years Scheidler:

constantly wrote letters to editors. I called radio stations to encourage them to do a show on abortion. I did telephone interviews. I wrote short articles for various publications. I passed out flyers. … By 1974, I’d made something of a name for myself in print and on the radio and TV, and the IRLC had noticed. … I’d often speak to church groups to help pro-lifers organize. … I was organizing marches and pickets, getting the IRLC a lot of media exposure … I was doing so many seminars and interviews … I was constantly on the lookout for activists … There were about thirty pro-life groups in Chicago area, and I got to know them all. If I heard that a clinic was opening up, I’d call the leaders of various groups, and we’d form a sizable picket or rally on short notice.³⁴

As if to prove Father Hesburgh right, Joe, the anti-abortion zealot, got fired from one Right to Life organization after another because of the tactics he used, until he finally had to conclude that his brand of activism demanded his own organization. Tom Roeser, an executive with Quaker Oats who shared Scheidler’s zeal for the prolife cause, came to the same conclusion in an interview with Chicago Tribune reporter Linda Witt, “We fired Joe, but Joe was really right. . . . The only thing that could work was a desperate, uncoordinated, hit-the-streets movement that goes to the very brink of uncivility, embarrasses people, makes them uncomfortable. And Joe’s the very guy to pull that off.”³⁵

Joe called his organization the Prolife Action League because “action speaks louder than words.”

Convinced that he had the solid backing of his own organization, Scheidler came up with a strategy which promised to put an end to abortion by driving abortion clinics out of business. Rather than keep this new-found light under a bushel basket, Joe published a book in 1985 entitled CLOSED: 99 Ways to Shut Down an Abortion Clinic based on techniques he had tried himself during the decade of activism following Roe v. Wade. Joe was serious about ending abortion, but when CLOSED finally came out, Joe got a phone call from his father-in-law who as an attorney advised Joe to place his home in a land trust in case he was sued. Joe’s father-in-law had heard of a new legal “gimmick” which was calling the pro-life movement “an anticompetitive conspiracy to restrain trade.”³⁶

The idea seemed preposterous, but Joe fortunately did what his father-in-law told him to do. He subsequently was sued by the National Organization of Women. That lawsuit, NOW v. Scheidler, was based on an anti-racketeering lawsuit cooked up by a professor in the Notre Dame Law School; it lasted 32 years, and it could have cost him his home.

Political Orphans

By the time CLOSED rolled off the presses in 1985, abortion had been legal throughout the country for 12 years. Millions of children had died as a result, and yet the prolife cause remained a political orphan, causing the outrage that decent people felt at this abomination to build to the point where people were deciding that it was time for action.

In that sense, Scheidler’s book was a timely response to the frustration prolifers were feeling. In another sense, it was not timely at all, and couldn’t have appeared at a worse time because the same anger which fueled Joe’s book could not be contained by the tactics he prescribed. This became apparent during late December of 1984 when two teenagers decided to blow up an abortion clinic in Pensacola as their way of presenting a Christmas present to Baby Jesus. I covered the trial of those two teenagers in the spring of 1985 and can testify that there was a sense in the court room that the defendants were going to be acquitted as a way of sending a message to the Supreme Court. The judge in the case provided a way for the jury to acquit by allowing the “necessity defense,” but the jury convicted anyway, and the momentum was lost, only to be replaced by what the prolifers were calling their version of civil disobedience.

In late 1985, Joe Wall and Joan Andrews occupied an abortion clinic in Pittsburgh in an action they referred to as a rescue, to stop abortions. Scheidler was impressed with Wall’s appeal to America’s tradition of civil disobedience in response to injustice. “The idea that you can separate a particular act in technical violation of a law from the reason for it makes no sense whatsoever,” he wrote in his summary. “For anyone who thinks this way, a major part of American history is no more than a criminal conspiracy.”³⁷ Joe was convinced that Wall and Andrews’ actions were “illegal but morally correct,” and that “returning to the clinic to counsel and pray was a moral imperative.”³⁸

By the beginning of 1986, it seemed that groups all across the country had emerged to implement the direct-action strategy which Scheidler had articulated in CLOSED. The reaction was swift in coming. In June 1986, Morris Dees of the Southern Poverty Law Center, a Jewish organization with a phony title which allowed it to masquerade as a Civil Rights group, filed a suit on behalf of the National Organization for Women and two abortion clinics in Delaware and Florida which “asserted a federal antitrust ‘class action’ claim on behalf of all abortion providers and all women seeking access to abortion in the entire United States.”³⁹

Two years after CLOSED was published, Catholics were asking themselves whether civil disobedience of the kind advocated by the Civil Rights Movement was the best response to abortion, a debate we covered on the pages of Fidelity: according to Mike McMonagle, an ex-lieutenant of the U.S. Navy, “in late ’79 the big thing was we were going to solve this by the political process: jump in and help elect Reagan and make sweeping changes. … There was a hope all through the ’80s that we would change this through the political process. And we’ve always had a very prolife state legislature … But I’d say through ’81 we had a major fight in our state legislature in which we did pass the abortion control act, the strongest antiabortion bill in the history of the nation. It was enjoined, and of course ultimately resulted in the Thornburgh decision by the Supreme Court in June ’86, which upheld the Third Circuit court striking down about half the bill. So through ’82 efforts in Congress pretty much petered out.”

According to McMonagle, the prolife movement reached its nadir in 1983, when the “Hatch Amendment, a very mild type of amendment, failed in Congress in June, and then the Supreme Court reaffirmed the Akron ordinance in June ’83. But I would say in ’83 an awareness began being shaped that the political process was not going to solve this thing…” Figures like Joan Andrews set the example of civil disobedience, and John Cavanaugh-O’Keefe provided “an intellectual basis for direct action.”

Cavanaugh O’Keefe’s book No Cheap Solutions argued that instead of protesting something, prolifers were now going to save lives by stopping abortion. This new rationale provided a shot in the arm to a movement deeply demoralized over the failure of so many promising initiatives at the dawn of the Reagan era and deeply split over legislative tactics. As McMonagle argued, “It was pretty apparent that Reagan was not serious about showing leadership. And then the ’82 elections certainly didn’t help us, particularly locally. There were some clear-cut races in Catholic areas where the proabortion candidate won.”

In the same Fidelity article, I argued that it was apparent that the abortion issue was a battle between elites and “people who worked for a living and were paid an hourly wage.” And I documented the shift in vision following the disillusionment of the Reagan era: “The situation in Philadelphia is indicative of the state of the prolife movement as a whole in this country. The movement has changed from being a national movement headquartered in Washington, focusing on education and legislation, to being a number of autonomous local groups …willing to go beyond the tactics approved by the National Right to Life Committee.”

In that same article in Fidelity July, 1987, Catholics debated the issue and came to the conclusion that the abortion movement could not follow the steps of the Civil Rights Movement and could not fall into the Holocaust paradigm because it did not have the support of the Federal government and its troops or the Supreme Court. For unlike the Blacks who sat-in waiting to be served after the Supreme Court ruled in their favor in Brown, prolifers would be disrupting a service provided by abortionists who had the backing of the Supreme Court: “Membership in the elite can’t just be a matter of money … it has to be associated with a cause, and the cause has to have something to do with emancipation from unenlightened views. So you can’t really be a Catholic member of the elite unless you’re ready to sell out in one way or another.”

The Catholic debate revolved around the issue of civil disobedience. Was it a revolutionary act or not? As I wrote in 1987, if it is a revolutionary act, then one shouldn’t engage in it except according to the conditions for conducting a just war (Populorum Progressio), because revolution has to meet the conditions of just war. If those conditions were met, prolifers would not be constrained to limit themselves to nonviolent tactics, because a bomb would be much more effective in shutting down clinics.

If it is not a revolutionary act, it is an act of persuasion, in which case sidewalk counseling would be much more effective because as Professor Charles Rice of the Notre Dame Law School pointed out in the same Fidelity article, “I think as a tactic that the thing [direct action] is self-defeating. I’ve just seen too many cases … they spend the next six months or two years trying to get out of some stupid legal jam, and the net result of what they do is not profitable. The abortions continue and [the prolifers are] out of action.” In his book Fifty Questions on Abortion, Euthanasia, and Related Issues, Rice makes the same point: “Sit-ins and similar low-intensity disruptive tactics can be effective in the short run. But they are ultimately self-defeating … The protesters are taken out of circulation by jail sentences or injunctions; they are subject to potentially ruinous suits; they are deterred from future activities, even of a legal character, at abortuaries and the resources of the movement are disproportionately diverted to unproductive legal defense.”

Joe Scheidler, then part of the ProLife Action League in Chicago, concurred, “I am advising prolife people not to go into clinics” because his own experience had shown that the clinic personnel could be counted on to lie. As a result, prolifers found themselves facing felony charges instead of simply trespassing. Thirty years later, Scheidler gave an example of such tactics in his memoir, “Early in my activist career, I regularly visited abortion clinics, asking to speak with the physician or the administrator, hoping to learn why they got into the business and to try to talk them out of it. … Strange as it seems, I’ve seen people quit the business after a compassionate encounter with a pro-lifer, some even right on the spot.” In the spring of 1987, when Schiedler, hoping to speak to the new administrator of the Feminist Women’s Health Centers in Redding, CA, found the clinic closed, he left his business card with the note, “Sorry I missed you.” Eleven years later, the same business card was used as evidence against Joe, “The plaintiffs alleged that my card constituted a death threat, part of a pattern of conspiracy and extortion against the nation’s abortion providers and their clients.”⁴⁰

So by July 1987, lay-Catholic intellectuals and moral theologians were in agreement – sit-ins constituted a revolutionary act without much hope of success. But, a year earlier, in November 1986, a Charismatic used-car-salesman by the name of Randy Terry entered the prolife scene. Randall Terry arrived in Pensacola to unveil a new strategy of direct action which he was calling Operation Rescue:

The plan was to stage high-profile acts of civil disobedience in New York, Chicago, and Washington, DC. Activists would storm into a clinic, barricade the door, and unfurl a pro-life banner out the window. There was talk of trashing the clinics, dismantling the machines, hurling furniture out of windows, and perhaps disabling the elevators. But just about everybody there knew these tactics were far too drastic, and they convinced Randy that only a nonviolent movement could effectively manifest solidarity with the unborn victims. Randy took the advice. Operation Rescue would only blockade the exterior clinic doors.⁴¹

In the fall of 1987, Terry joined forces with Joe Wall and Mike McMonagle and more than 300 other volunteers from 20 different states to blockade the entrance to an abortion clinic in Philadelphia. The operation was such a success that Terry, McMonagle, Wall and their 300 followers traveled across the Delaware River to Cherry Hill, New Jersey, where “two hundred were arrested.”⁴²

In the summer of 1988, I published an article by Juli Loesch, on Operation Rescue for Fidelity magazine describing Operation Rescue as the creation of Randall Terry, a lay preacher who had graduated from Elim Bible College and had gone on to become a used car salesman. Terry and his wife of that time had gotten involved in sidewalk counseling outside of abortion clinics but felt frustrated at the lack of results. At that point he came across the writings of John Cavanaugh-O’Keefe, who was able to articulate the frustrations of a segment of the prolife movement and to propose an antidote in direct action to those frustrations.

Juli Loesch, Catholic founder of Prolifers for Survival, found this logic persuasive and was swept up into the rescue movement. The argument was based on a charismatic conflation of the distinction between education and insurrection which the use of the decidedly non-Catholic category of civil disobedience had brought about. Loesch admits “What Terry wants to orchestrate is an uprising,” “What’s missing? Conflict, controversy, and a sense of intolerable urgency; the kind of intense street drama which fired all the great movements – antislavery, women’s suffrage, civil rights … which have shaped America’s destiny.” Loesch also admitted that those accepted into the movement were Evangelicals, Pentecostals, and born-again Catholics. The vision of direct action which Cavanugh-O’Keefe and later Randy Terry conjured allowed Loesch to unload her own frustration by shifting from symbolic to direct action. “Symbolic action,” she wrote in the same issue of Fidelity:

is very limited. When you do this at an abortion clinic, you are not doing this to protest abortion, you’re doing it to stop abortion. … And so our defense in court it not a first amendment defense. It is not saying that we’re expressing our feelings. We say we are trying to save lives. It’s the necessity defense, not a first amendment defense.⁴³

If Loesch had been reading Fidelity, she would have known that the necessity defense failed two years earlier in the Pensacola abortion clinic bombing trial. Veteran prolifers were unimpressed with Loesch’s argument.⁴⁴ “We need to recruit large numbers,” Scheidler said to me in a phone interview the previous year, “By using these [Operation Rescue] tactics, we’re scaring people off.” Scheidler felt that an attitude was creeping into the movement which tacitly claimed that “if you’re not willing to get arrested, you’re not quite 100 percent [prolife],” an attitude he felt was counterproductive.

As I pointed out in the 1987 article, the strategy behind Operation Rescue was fundamentally flawed. It might have made sense if the Supreme Court had declared abortion illegal, as it had done for racial discrimination in Brown v. School Board, but the exact opposite was the case, and the same Jewish-controlled media who had supported Brown were now fully in support of Roe, and so sympathetic accounts of the movement in the press were out of the question.

As I said in 1987, “if the sit-in is what Loesch said it is, if it is not an attempt to publicize the wrong of abortion, then it is a revolutionary act.”⁴⁴

One year later Joe changed his mind. In the article on the first Operation Rescue in New York by Loesch, she mentioned that “Joe Scheidler, who had at first expressed serious reservations about the tactic of mass arrests, was so impressed by the spirit of the group that he joined the ‘arrestable’ side of the line later in the day and went to jail with the rest.”⁴⁵

A disquieting thought began to emerge toward the end of 1986, the year in which NOW had filed their original suit. In terms of paradigms, Scheidler was less like Martin Luther King and more like the Sorcerer’s apprentice⁴⁶ who had found the magic formula which could conjure powerful spirits but could not control them. “Besen Besen seids gewesen”⁴⁷ Joe might have said in the German of his ancestors, if he could peer into the future and see the troubles it would bring. Worse still, because he had written CLOSED, Joe became a convenient target who could be blamed for excesses he did not condone.

In May 1988, Operation Rescue was officially launched, and Scheidler was one of 503 people arrested for blockading an abortion clinic. After his arrest, Scheidler and his 502 fellow rescuers were taken to the New York Police Academy and issued tickets, and then released. The rescuers were charged with disorderly conduct, but “those charges were soon dropped,” making Operation Rescue’s shut down of every abortion clinic in New York City for four days in a row “a resounding success.”⁴⁸

The Right to Life movement quickly became intoxicated by the early successes of Operation Rescue, when “Pat Robertson praised the rescuers on The 700 Club, and Jerry Falwell came to Atlanta to present Randy and Operation Rescue with a ten-thousand-dollar check. ‘Nonviolent civil disobedience,’ he said, ‘is the only way to end the biological holocaust in this country.’”⁴⁹

In spite of its initial success, Scheidler began to feel uneasy not only about Terry’s strategy but also about the motives behind the strategy. Like Scheidler, Terry had based the strategy of Operation Rescue on his understanding of the Civil Rights Movement, which meant that “Randy wanted lots of arrests—to pack the jails like the civil rights demonstrators had done in Birmingham in 1963 and to use the media to orchestrate a national campaign to end abortion.”⁵⁰

But neither Scheidler nor Terry were willing to admit that the media they presumed as allies were controlled by Jews who were universally pro-abortion and, therefore, unrelentingly hostile to their cause.

They should have listened to Juli Loesch who in 1988 was calling up her “amiable Jewish friend from the Bronx” Mike Bobrow to “scan the list of New York editors” and tell her “who’s a sweetheart and who’s a schmuck.” While Bobrow was on the phone to the Jewish press, Loesch was praying silently “God of Israel, make sure they get in front of the cameras.”

There were legal issues as well. The success of the New York rescue was predicated on the fact that all of the demonstrators got handed misdemeanor citations and were effectively released once the demonstration was over. If the prolifers persisted in their attempt to shut down abortion clinics, the legal response to it could change, and that is in fact what happened. To make matters worse, Scheidler felt that Terry was dishonest and leading his naïve supporters into a legal nightmare to fuel his narcissistic fantasies of himself as the man who was going to end abortion.

The issue came up early on during a break from preliminary meetings at the Times Square hotel in preparation for the New York rescue when Joe was having lunch with longtime friends Bill and Mary Tracey, who told him: “‘They don’t know what they’re getting into,’ Mary said dismissively. ‘What are the police going to do with all those people? They’re going to wind up on Rikers Island.’”

Operation Rescue, in other words, could very well be used to destroy the prolife movement by tying up all of its most zealous members in never ending legal battles because of Terry’s insistence that they get arrested. Chastened by what he was hearing from fellow prolifers, Scheidler began to have even stronger misgivings of his own about Terry’s tactics as well as his motives.

At a certain point Scheidler and Terry began competing for the leadership of the direct action movement. Scheidler had become convinced that Terry was unnecessarily putting the most zealous prolifers in a legal jeopardy which would effectively render them hors de combat. Scheidler was convinced that sidewalk counseling could “save just as many lives,” but when he brought it up in Operation Rescue meetings, he discovered that “Randy wasn’t interested.”⁵¹

“Joe,” he said, “I don’t want you throwing a wet blanket on this. As of right now, I personally disinvite you from Operation Rescue.” Afraid that he was losing out on his struggle with Scheidler, Terry excommunicated him from Operation Rescue. Afraid that the Operation Rescue train was going to leave the station without him, Joe ignored Terry’s disinvitation, and replied, “No, I’ll be there.”⁵² Joe continued to support Terry’s operation, “even though I thought that holding seminars to train the green activists in sidewalk counseling before sending them forth would be a more effective program.”⁵³

In 1991, the court dismissed the SPLC complaint, at which point NOW filed a new suit arguing that Scheidler had engaged in racketeering under the RICO Act. “[NOW] added charges under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act, alleging that I was masterminding the movement of civil disobedience against abortion clinics that was sweeping the nation.”54 Which made Scheidler wonder, “How did a guy from Hartford City, Indiana … end up a defendant in a federal racketeering trial? Chicago has a long history of mob bosses. But me? I didn’t know the first thing about running a national crime syndicate.” Joe continued:

Tom Brejcha and staff attorneys at the AUL recruited the author of the RICO statue, Notre Dame law professor Robert Blakey, to affirm that the district court had rightly dismissed the RICO charges. But we were asking Blakey to argue against his own law. If he made too forceful a case, there was a chance that RICO itself could be found unconstitutional. He failed to convince the court, which ruled unanimously to let the case proceed.⁵⁵

The RICO statute, as Blakey himself would testify, was intended to prevent organized crime figures from investing “ill-gotten gains” in legitimate business ventures and the predicate offenses which constituted “racketeering” were murder, kidnapping, gambling, arson, robbery, bribery, extortion, or dealing with narcotic or other dangerous drugs. But Blakey’s claim that their use of his law was an abuse of its intent did not deter NOW.

To make matters much worse, in 1993, Tom Brejcha’s boss, Jim Fox informed Scheidler that Abramson & Fox was not interesting in offering its services pro bono. Fox told Joe he owed his firm $240,738, and by August he needed the first installment of $40,000. “So we had five weeks to raise forty thousand dollars or NOW would succeed in driving us into bankruptcy.”⁵⁶

NOW had added Randall Terry and Operation Rescue to the list of defendants, and “Just weeks before” the federal court trial, which took place on March 2, 1998, NOW offered Randy a deal “identical to the national injunction they sought,” and Randy accepted the deal because “he was planning to mount a political campaign and couln’t spare the time and publicity of a trial.” According to Scheidler, this was “a serious blow,” because it would now appear as if Operation Rescue was Scheidler’s front. Randy promised Scheidler that he would testify that Operation Rescue was his own group, but then, taking his lawyers’ advice, failed to support Joe when Joe needed his help.⁵⁷

NOW’s strategy was based on guilt by association. Scheidler had to be associated with the spate of violence that began around the same time that his book appeared, but as Tom Brechja, Scheidler’s lawyer in the NOW case and the founder of the Thomas More society pointed out, “there was no valid or credible evidence of actual physical violence on the part of pro-life defendants.” Paul Hill, an activist who actually murdered an abortion doctor in Pensacola, was never mentioned, much less sued in the NOW case. There was no extortion.

“The only real ‘force’ involved in Operation Rescue was what Gandhi called ‘truth force’ or ‘soul force’—a self-sacrificial surrender of one’s body intended to melt hearts, not break heads.” Since Gandhi was the father of modern-day civil disobedience, it was to be expected that Brechja would bring up his most famous disciple, as once again the prolifers tried to redeem their own movement by what they could have called “redemption by association” as the most reliable antidote to the guilt by associations which was being imposed on them by the Jews. “Like the sit-ins of the 1960s civil rights activists, whose tactics Dr. King celebrated in his classic April 1963 Letter from a Birmingham Jail, as ‘peaceable, nonviolent direct action,’” Brechja continued, “the pro-life rescues were peaceful and no ‘obtaining’ of ‘property’ was ever attempted, much less achieved.”⁵⁸

Eventually, direct action took on a life of its own and its more extreme advocates began gunning down abortionists. In March 1993, Michael F. Griffin gunned down David Gunn, an abortion doctor from Pensacola, and in 1994 the Clinton Administration used his death to pass the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) into law. By threatening prolifers with jail terms of up to six months and fines of up to $10,000 for a first offence, and increasingly draconian punishments for subsequent offences, FACE, as Scheidler put it, “effectively ended the rescue movement.”⁵⁹

Now, in the wake of his death, I’m left here still wondering what Joe found funny. Was it my naivete? Was it naïve to think that Catholics would ever take intellectual issues seriously? As I wrote in CW June 2009, “Piety, no matter how sincere, is … no substitute for scholarship.”

Was it naïve to think that there were any unresolved issues when it came to abortion? When it came to strategy, there were many unresolved issues, such as convincing the media that the Jewish revolutionary spirit which had animated the Civil Rights Movement should be invoked to override the Jewish commitment to abortion.

For example, in Scheidler’s 1993 updated edition of CLOSED he wrote that by “the summer of 1993” over 70,000⁶⁰ rescue arrests had taken place.” We can compare this number to the 3,000 arrested for sit-ins by 1961, which “successfully led to desegregation.”⁶¹ Or convincing Catholics that, as Bishop John D’Arcy warned, converts like Randall Terry, who abandoned his wife and children for the nanny, should not lead cultural warfare.

The 2009 peaceful demonstration at Notre Dame and the consequent arrests of prolifers exposed the hypocrisy of the “folks who make the civil rights movement their religion.”⁶² Joe was a courageous prolife soldier whose actions undoubtedly saved thousands of lives, but by the 1980s he was one of the prolife movement’s generals, and as such he failed to provide the strategic overview a general must have in order to be successful in battle.

As a result, the unborn continued to die, the abortion market grew internationally, and lives were ruined. When it came to the turning point in the movement, when a charismatic car salesman showed up and started handing out spears to the most zealous prolifers with detailed instructions on how they should charge the machine gun nest of federal power, Joe vacillated. He abandoned the objections to direct action which he expressed in 1987 and joined the OR movement in 1988, leading many to follow because of the position of prominence which he enjoyed.

Many of those people had their lives ruined because of subsequent legal battles, extended jail time and prison records, which is bad enough, but the main tragedy was that the Right to Life movement lost its most committed supporters to the legal jams Charlie Rice had predicted. Randy Terry comes across as a sinister figure in this tale, but Joe comes across as someone who should have known better but was unwilling to take what he knew to be an unpopular position out of fear of losing control of the movement. When it came to a choice between lonely reason and emotive crowds, Scheidler did not choose “truth in action.”⁶³

Which brings us back to his laugh. Was it a comment on my naivete? Or was it a comment on the contempt for the intellectual life which he had unconsciously absorbed during his days at Notre Dame, the university which over the next half century would go on to teach its students to hold Logos in contempt in ever more flagrant ways?

The Scheidler family continued to send its children to Notre Dame so that they could be sacrificed on the altar of sexual revolution, long after Hesburgh had ignominiously defeated Joe’s uncle, Bishop Leo A. Pursley, in one of the most crucial battles in the Catholic culture wars in American history. The Scheidlers could not prevail over the meanings which the oligarchs and their lackeys at Notre Dame had succeeded in imposing on their minds. Unable to apply the principles he learned in his philosophy and theology courses to the main event of his life, Scheidler would have to learn the inadequacy of the template approach to cultural warfare in the expensive school of experience.

We may see an end to abortion in states like Missouri and Texas some day because of the actions of their legislators and a Supreme Court open to a new understanding of the once dirty word “state’s rights,” but FACE “effectively ended” the Right to Life movement by offering up its most zealous representatives on the altar of a bad idea.

Joe failed as a general because his mind had been captured by the categories he internalized as a student at Notre Dame. If prudence is the ability to see the truth and then act on it, Joe had the prudence of a foot soldier in an army which looked to him as its general. Joe made the wrong decision when he stepped over the “arrestable” line and joined Operation Rescue.

When it looked as if the charismatic car salesman had commandeered the Right to Life train, and that it was now going to leave the station without him, Joe put reason aside and joined the crowd as it marched howling and brandishing spears into the line of fire.

Endnotes
1 Scheidler, Racketeer for Life, (Charlotte, NC: Tan Books, 2016), p. 91.
2 Scheidler, Racketeer for Life, p. 94.
3 Scheidler, Racketeer for Life, p. 94.
4 Scheidler, Racketeer for Life, p. 94.
5 Scheidler, Racketeer for Life, p. 94.
6 Scheidler, Racketeer for Life, p. 17.
7 Scheidler, Racketeer for Life, p. 12.
8 Fr. Hesburgh’s memoirs according to Rev. Thomas Blantz, CSC, in personal correspondence with Alyssa Rangel 2020.
9 Scheidler, Racketeer for Life, p. 12.
10 Scheidler, Racketeer for Life, p. 13.
11 Scheidler, Racketeer for Life, p. 11.
12 For the details of this plan, read the chapter on “Werner Heisenberg and Jewish Science” in Logos Rising: A History of Ultimate Reality.
13 Scheidler, Racketeer for Life, p. 13.
14 Scheidler, Racketeer for Life, p. 13.
15 Scheidler, Racketeer for Life, p. 13.
16 Scheidler, Racketeer for Life, p. 324.
17 E. Michael Jones, “Abortion Mill Rescue: Are Sit-Ins the Answer,” Fidelity, July-August 1987, pp. 28-36.
18 The previous five paragraphs appeared originally in E. Michael Jones, The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit and its Impact on World History (South Bend, IN: Fidelity Press, 2009), pp. 920-1.
19 Scheidler, Racketeer for Life, p. 4.
19a Joseph M. Scheidler, CLOSED: 99 Ways to Stop Abortion (Rockford, Illinois: TAN Books and Publishers, 1993) revised 1985 edition.
20 Scheidler, Racketeer for Life, p. 29.
21 Scheidler, Racketeer for Life, p. 15.
22 Scheidler, Racketeer for Life, p. 16.
23 Scheidler, Racketeer for Life, p. 16.
24 Scheidler, Racketeer for Life, p. 20.
25 Scheidler, Racketeer for Life, pp. 25-26.
26 Scheidler, Racketeer for Life, p. 65.
27 Scheidler, Racketeer for Life, p. 64.
28 Scheidler, Racketeer for Life, p. 65-6.
29 Scheidler, Racketeer for Life, p. 32.
30 Scheidler, Racketeer for Life, pp. 32-33.
31 Scheidler, Racketeer for Life, pp. 30-31.
32 Scheidler, Racketeer for Life, p. 32.
33 Scheidler, Racketeer for Life, p. 33.
34 Scheidler, Racketeer for Life, pp. 34-35.
35 Scheidler, Racketeer for Life, p. 49.
36 Scheidler, Racketeer for Life, p. 3.
37 Scheidler, Racketeer for Life, p. 277.
38 Scheidler, Racketeer for Life, p. 278.
39 https://www.thomasmoresociety.org/about/scheidler/
40 Scheidler, Racketeer for Life, p. 1.
41 Scheidler, Racketeer for Life, p. 279.
42 Scheidler, Racketeer for Life, p. 281.
43 Jones, “Abortion Mill Rescue: Are Sit-Ins the Answer,” Fidelity (July-August 1987), p. 34.
44 Jones, “Abortion Mill Rescue” Fidelity, July-August 1987, p. 33.
45 Juli Loesch, “Operation Rescue,” Fidelity, July/August 1988, p. 22.
46 “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” is a poem by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe written in 1797.
47 “Broom, Broom return to your room.” My translation.
48 Scheidler, Racketeer for Life, p. 284.
49 Scheidler, Racketeer for Life, p. 285.
50 Scheidler, Racketeer for Life, p. 281.
51 Scheidler, Racketeer for Life, p. 283.
52 Scheidler, Racketeer for Life, p. 283.
53 Scheidler, Racketeer for Life, p. 282.
54 Scheidler, Racketeer for Life, p. 4.
55 Scheidler, Racketeer for Life, pp. 5-6.
56 Scheidler, Racketeer for Life, p. 6.
57 Scheidler, Racketeer for Life, p. 361.
58 https://www.thomasmoresociety.org/about/scheidler/
59 Scheidler, Racketeer for Life, p. 287.
60 Scheidler, ClOSED, 143.
61 Equal Justice Initiative, “On this day Oct 19, 1960,” https://calendar.eji.org/racial-injustice/oct/19
62 E. Michael Jones, Culture Wars, June 2009.
63 Scheidler, Racketeer for Life, p. 60.