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Kim Mulford
Courier-Post
Catholics who gather outside a clinic every Saturday to protest abortion are unusually dedicated to their cause
At 6:30 every Saturday morning, Catherine Farrell goes to Mass at St. Peter Celestine Church on Kings Highway in Cherry Hill.
After the service, the 71-year-old Audubon woman walks a few blocks to the Cherry Hill Women's Center, where she prays on the sidewalk for one, two or three hours.
When it's cold, she wears two pairs of gloves, long underwear, two pairs of socks, a sweater and a coat. When it's hot, she wears shorts.
When people scream or curse at her or the others who join her, she ignores them and keeps on praying.
"We stay on the sidewalks," Farrell said. "We don't shout. We don't scream. We don't do any of that. It doesn't do any good."
Farrell is a member of the local organization of the Helpers of God's Most Precious Infants, an international group of Catholics who pray regularly outside abortion clinics.
She has been doing this for so many years she can't remember when she started coming. It was sometime after she started volunteering for a non-profit crisis pregnancy center in the early 1970s.
The agency, now called 1st Way in West Collingswood, gives away free baby clothes, formula, diapers, counseling, pregnancy testing and referrals, all to persuade a mother from having an abortion. Farrell, who is director of the agency, started praying at the clinic as a last-ditch effort to sway minds.
"We're really praying for the baby and the mother," said Farrell, a grandmother and a retired hospital secretary.
"Some people, they think it's controversial," she said, whispering the last word. She is not deterred. She believes she is protesting in a peaceful, loving way.
"You can't accuse those women," Farrell said. "They feel bad enough going in there. You have to project love to them. You can't judge them. You can't have any bad feelings toward them. That's Christ-like."
For at least 15, maybe 20 years, Emil A. Ralbusky has also prayed on the sidewalks in front of a Cherry Hill abortion clinic. The 52-year-old and his wife, Marie, rarely miss a Saturday morning. After Mass, they pray for about an hour outside another Cherry Hill clinic on Haddonfield Road.
It's one of those things chiseled in stone, he said.
The couple has two adult daughters. Marie is a teacher and Emil works in the advertising department for the Catholic Star-Herald newspaper.
They have been laughed at, mocked and cursed. There are other things they'd rather do, but they believe God requires them to endure it and pray the rosary.
"It's a nightmare," said Emil. "By the grace of God, we do it. It's nothing on our own."
There is little assurance their prayers are being answered, both Farrell and the Ralbuskys said. Few women turn around. Once, a woman stopped to thank them and pointed to a baby in the back seat. Their prayers had kept her from having a second abortion, she said.
It's a small group of regulars who pray outside the clinics each week. Emil said sometimes he feels "like we're a couple of nuts here." Even Farrell said her family thinks she's crazy.
They will continue this work as long as they can.
"We'll probably be doing this for the rest of our lives," Emil said. "I'd like to never go out there, but we just feel the Lord wants us there."
Elizabeth Barnes, director of the Cherry Hill Women's Center, said she, too, believes in the power of prayer. But she believes there are more effective ways to help the women who are coming to the clinic.
Because there is no way to know who will be peaceful and who will use illegal methods of protest, Barnes and her staff are wary of anyone who protests outside the clinic, even people who just pray.
"As an American, I support their right to peaceful protest," said Barnes, who was raised by Jewish and Christian parents. "But they could be of so much more help by having a bake sale or a fund-raiser and giving to a pregnant woman who has no resources or to a program that supports foster care."
Next Saturday, Bishop Nicholas DiMarzio will celebrate Mass at St. Peter Celestine Church in observance of the Feast of Holy Innocents. The Catholic holy day has been celebrated since the fourth century.
It recalls when, shortly after the birth of Jesus, King Herod ordered the killing of all male infants under the age of 2 in Bethlehem.
After the Mass, DiMarzio will lead a procession to the Cherry Hill Women's Center to pray.
The company will be welcome, said Farrell.
"We always need more people," she said. "The more prayers, the better and the more lives we can save."
Last week, I wrote about Discovery Church, a new congregation that will begin holding weekly Sunday services at Voorhees Middle School starting Jan. 19. The following information was left out of the paper:
Keeping the Faith appears on Saturday. Reach Kim Mulford at (856) 845-6521 or kmulford@courierpostonline.com
