Today Archbishop Dolan joined an interfaith, interracial group of New Yorkers and the Chiaroscuro Foundation to decry the recently released NY City Department of Vital Statistics data that show 41% of all pregnancies in New York City in 2009 ended in abortion. For blacks, that number is 60%.
I was fortunate enough to have been invited and to be present at this historic New York event, held at the Penn Club of New York. I sat ten feet away from my Archbishop as he uttered the following scalding words:
“This is the first time in my happy 21 months as a New Yorker that I am embarrassed to be one. This New York community, which prides itself on its gritty sensitivity to those in need, is tragically letting down the tiniest most fragile and vulnerable, the little baby in the womb. We’ve got to do more than shiver over these chilling statistics. I invite all to come together to make abortion rare.”
His claim of embarrassment stunned all who heard it. After less than two years, this midwesterner whom we welcomed with open arms is embarrassed to be one of us.
I know how he feels. I’m a native New Yorker, and I feel deep shame over these numbers.
We New Yorkers pride ourselves on our sophistication and cutting-edge progressiveness, on our cultural diversity and unparalleled density of colleges, universities, museums, and other cultural meccas. We love being the giants that we believe ourselves to be in so many areas.
It’s the pride that goeth before the fall.
These abortion statistics have brought us low, and revealed the dark residue of racism that lurks within. The journalists present were not their smarmy New York selves. They didn’t know how to respond. They were disquieted. Every heart in the room hearing of these data for the first time must have sounded like so many Germans after World War II, when they swore that they had no idea of the mass murder happening right under their noses.
My Archbishop is embarrassed, but I am ashamed.
I am ashamed that I didn’t get involved sooner, that I often lacked the courage to speak out, that I allowed myself to be ridiculed into embarrassed silence when I did.
I am ashamed that I bought into the lie that pro-life candidates only matter at the national level, and that I have in the past voted for several pro-choice candidates locally.
I am ashamed that I didn’t always speak up in defense of my bishops when they were ridiculed for speaking up in defense of life.
I am ashamed that I didn’t take seriously the talk of black genocide years and years ago when I first heard it, thinking it to be inflammatory rabble-rousing. But the Vital Statistics tell the story of 79% of all abortions happening to black and Hispanic babies, with Planned Parenthood running 78% of their “clinics” in inner-city neighborhoods.
Archbishop Dolan has every right to feel embarrassed, but every native New Yorker who has turned a blind eye, and that includes me, ought to feel the white-hot heat of shame at 4.3 million abortions in 40 years, 3.3 million of them among blacks and Hispanics.
What good are all of those Universities, museums, and concert halls when the streets run with the blood of innocents on a scale so vast that it beggars the imagination? If we, the most educated, the professors, will not raise our voices in alarm and disgust at these appalling numbers, then what does our scholarship avail civilization?
Is civilization only to be the province of a racial elite?
I didn’t sign on for that when I began graduate school, which brings me to the deepest shame of all.
My discipline, Molecular Biology, is leading the technological innovations advancing the Culture of Death: In Vitro Fertilization, genetic screening leading to abortion, embryonic stem cell research, and cloning. Most in my field despise the pro-life movement.
If any are inclined to upbraid Archbishop Dolan for his embarrassment at being a New Yorker, they had better rank up there with Mother Theresa of Calcutta, otherwise, they had best button their lips and take a long, hard look in the mirror.
In Genesis 4:10, after Cain slays his brother Abel we read:
“The LORD said, ‘What have you done? Listen! Your brother’s blood cries out to me from the ground.’ “
What of the blood of 4.3 million in our city?
I’m surprised we can hear anything else at all.
Coming Home 
The Word became flesh and dwelt among us. Light and Truth has embraced us. May we learn how to follow the Way. Only then will we be a free people and nation!
Great article, but does anyone see something wrong with the Archbishop’s statement?? Hint: last sentence.
“This is the first time in my happy 21 months as a New Yorker that I am embarrassed to be one. This New York community, which prides itself on its gritty sensitivity to those in need, is tragically letting down the tiniest most fragile and vulnerable, the little baby in the womb. We’ve got to do more than shiver over these chilling statistics. I invite all to come together to make abortion rare.”
RARE??????
You are right Michele. I was shocked by the RARE word also.
“His claim of embarrassment stunned all who heard it. After less than two years, this midwesterner whom we welcomed with open arms is embarrassed to be one of us.”
Dolan’s words are long overdue. Humility is a pre-requisite to true compassion and love and the action that stems from it. Thank you, Gerard, for your dedication to LIFE! Your enthusiasm is contagious!
Better “rare” than common. I think we all know what the odds are on eliminating abortion forever. As much as many of us would like that to happen .. evil will always find a way to get what they want.
The word “rare” jumped out at me, too.
I am not against abortion, and yet I would like nothing more than to see it made “rare.”
So perhaps the word was meant to reach out to people like me, who want to keep it legal, but don’t want women to choose it out of desperation? There’s plenty of room for common ground with even the most ardent advocates of legal abortion.
The “rare” jumped out at me too, but I think Archbishop Dolan realizes that abortion will always be there, upfront and plentiful as it is now, or on the downlow and less frequent, as it had been for thousands of years before it was legalized.
Although, I wonder if anyone in the mainstream media will take the “rare” and use it to say that the archbishop supports abortion in some way, rather than his likely looking at the situation in a matter-of-fact way.
Even if the total elimination of abortion seems impossible, “rare” is exactly the word Pro Choice people use just the same. How come Bishop Dolan?
The whole of my life has been marked — no, more than that: disfigured — by the disquiet of contraception, abortion and euthanasia in the public square. We all have been in the sights of the forces that want to redefine our very existence, and have taken much ground.
I too, failed in so many situations, but Praise God for the people who remained awake and who did not fail. Praise God for every voice that has brought me back. Praise God for the numbers getting out there, and the science to back them up.
I pray to God that there will be no giving up because “we will never be able to…” I pray to God that we will be like the story I’ve heard (sorry – cannot remember the attribution) about the child throwing starfish back into the sea from a beach littered with them after a storm and all doomed to die. Asked, “Why are you bothering to throw them back? You’ll never make a difference. There are too many.” The reply as he threw one back into the sea and saved its life was, “I made a difference to that one.”
Rare.
The death penalty can be rare. Very rare.
But abortion? Sentencing to death a completely innocent human being? Sanctioning its death as a good?
I’m a total newcomer here, as a friend linked this article on FaceBook. And I’m not Catholic, but I am pro-life.
Let me defend “rare.” I suggest that Archbishop Dolan used it precisely because it is that term that “pro-choice” people use, and thus better serves to reproach them for hypocrisy if they sit idly by at watch the black holocaust proceed.
In nearly 30 years as a pro-lifer, beginning the epiphany wrought in me by the traveling road show “Whatever Happened to the Human Race,” I’ve found that folks with impeccable liberal credentials, who find “veiled racism” lurking in every appeal to law and order, Federalism, or any other conservative, resorted constantly to relatively naked racism in defending the necessity of abortion.
I’m not positive they are racist (I suspect they are), but that’s how they argue, maybe assuming that pro-lifers are racist and can be won over that way.
I see the use of the word “rare” as a very ironic, satirical, even sarcastic, use of a word that the pro-abortionists like to use. They want more and more sex education in our schools and more readily available contraceptives to younger teens and even children in order to make abortions rare? Who are they trying to kid? What they call sex education (often it is no better than pornography) is in the grammar school now. Condoms and contraceptives are in the counselors offices in middle schools and high schools. What has all of this gotten us? Rampant sexually transmitted diseases, high rates of teen pregnancy, large numbers of single mother families and a dishonoring of the marriage covenant are social ills not even thought of when Pope Paul VI wrote Humanae Vitae. RARE. His use of the word is DRIPPING with irony and sarcasm.
Welcome ReaderJohn!
The denizens here are a warm and friendly band. I think your insight is dead on.
“Warm and friendly” denizens — but subject to change, suddenly and violently, like the weather. Heh.
More than racism, I often hear people make arguments that smack of classism — e.g., “Women who can’t afford to support a child have no right to bring another one into the world, and should abort.”
(On the other hand, I have heard pro-life people make eerily similar arguments — e.g., “Women who can’t afford to support a child should be required to give birth and then put him/her up for adoption by a family who can.”)
Let’s also keep the enslavement of blacks rare.
And let’s keep the rape of grandmothers rare.
And let’s keep the burning of toddlers with cigarettes rare.
Sorry.
“Rare” is one word I don’t like hearing Catholics use when it comes to murder. “Rare” means permissible in some cases.
The ripping of a child limb from limb from his mother or the burning of his delicate tissues with saline until his death should be BANNED, FORBIDDEN, OUTLAWED, etc.
I *know* they use the word “rare” even though they want nothing of the sort. This has always puzzled me. Why rare? If it’s just a ball of cells, who cares? If it’s not a living child, big deal. Does anyone want to make appendectomy rare?
WE don’t use “rare.”
WE use “never.”
And L, as an adoptive mother, I would chastise ANYONE I heard say that a woman should be forced to relinquish custody of her child just because she is poor, or unmarried.
The pro-life movement is about TRUE choice. Choose to parent the little human being, the newest member of our human family, or choose to place her for adoption.
The choice is never an easy one, and it must be made after much prayer, introspection, honest assessment of her life situation, consultation with those she trusts, etc.
But it is NOT for a total stranger to decide. (Nor is it our business to judge or speculate on the child’s future if she DOES decide to parent.)
Okay…question for the data-cruncher (that’s you, Dr. Nadal):
Why do I see 39% some places, and 41% other places? Yes, 39% is still high, but what accounts for that 2%? Any idea? I assume you have the full report, and know this.