The above is a picture of my friend, Fr. Fidelis CFR, being arrested for his pro-life work. For peaceful pro-life work, I have been arrested in Wash DC and New Jersey with Fr. Fidelis under a group called Red Rose Rescue (RRR.) I thought I was pro-life before I met those associated with RRR. But the way that RRR changed my thinking was this: Whereas most pro-life organizations know in their brains that the unborn are really children, the members of RRR know in their hearts that children are really being killed.
Here’s what I mean: Imagine if you found out in the nearest big city that somewhere downtown there was a conveyer-belt with three-year old toddlers on it, and these kids were were systematically rolled-out under a machine which crushed them with a sledgehammer. Imagine you find this was “legal” just because someone found a loophole in the law to sledgehammer over the head maybe one hundred 3-year-olds a day. Can you imagine any man who would not look past the silly loophole to “illegally” enter in order to stop the slaughter of innocent children?
Why then don’t we do that for the unborn? It’s because we (including myself) are all convinced that somehow (perhaps because of “the law”?) that they have less rights than a toddler. When I met RRR members, I encountered for the first time in my life pro-lifers who spoke of the urgency of physically remaining between the slaughtered and the killer. In RRR, we do counseling inside the abortion center until every woman and child there is safe. Because this has been deemed “illegal” by our genocidal government, we always end up getting the cops called on us.
Getting arrested is not the goal, but it seems to be the subsequent outcome. We do not want to cause trouble, but we also can’t leave the killing-center until every child is safe. But because the government does not allow us to stop child-killing, it is we the pro-lifers (not the homicidal physicians) who are removed by the police. Do you see how insane our country is? Not even pagan countries killed their own children with such instrumentation.
In 1994, Bill Clinton signed into effect the FACE laws. FACE stands for Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act. This made blocking entrance to a killing-center a felony, meaning one gets five years in prison. Overnight, this practically did away with much of the Operation Rescue movement. However, RRR found a way to only endure a misdemeanor offense: By praying inside the clinic, we would technically not be “blocking entrance to a clinic.”
But Fr. Fidelis goes beyond this. Last summer (2022) I spoke to him on the phone right after he locked a gate at an abortion center. This action he did on his own, not with RRR. For this, he was recently locked away in a Brooklyn jail for six-months. If this sounds extreme to put a bike-lock on an abortion center, ask yourself again if you would do that to a sledgehammer-charged conveyer-belt with toddlers rolling through it. Of course, every man (and most women) reading this blog post would go and do that. Why then do we consider it extreme what Fr. Fidelis does?
Fr. Fidelis told me once at his friary outside NYC that has been reading Lord of the Rings on repeat for the past twenty years. You have to wonder if, after carrying the “One Ring” alone for so long (or semi-alone, as in clearly walking it with other heroes and heroines who play the role of Sam in RRR) Fr. Fidelis will ever be able to return to a Friary-Shire in a normal way again. Jail tends to change you, and it’s a hard place to be. I’ve only done three-hour stints a couple times, but Fr. Fidelis will be in there six-months.
In fact, the inspiration of RRR is a heroine named Mary Wagner who has done six years in a Canadian prison for her refusal to see children slaughtered. (She is so famous in Poland that they put her on stamps.)
If you want to write Fr. Fidelis in prison, you can find the information here.
Recently, I saw a little purse in a traditional chapel that said Estote Fidelis. That is the imperative sentence meaning Be Faithful. I also understood it to be: Be Fr. Fidelis.
