In the past few days I have received at least a dozen emails decrying the arrest of Randall Terry and a few of his supporters at the Cathedral of St. Thomas More on October 5th. (Arrests also took place at the Cathedral in Baltimore in September.) All of the emails contained Terry's press release which starts, "It is with great grief that I report to you that I, Randall Terry, along with Brian Sherwood and Joseph Landry, were arrested on Respect Life Sunday, October 5, at St. Thomas More Cathedral in Arlington, VA...." While I'm not opposed to leafletting church lots I think Terry's tactics in these cases are disturbing and, frankly, I question his motives.
A friend of mine who was at the Cathedral both in the morning and in the afternoon when the arrests took place said that Fr. Lundberg, the associate pastor, did not want to have the leafletters arrested. The diocesan policy was explained to them and they were asked to move to the public sidewalk off the property where they could have continued giving out their fliers. (Incidentally, the pastor, Fr. Robert Rippy, was away and the associate is very pro-life.) But moving to the public sidewalk would have meant no publicity and without it Terry can't raise the big bucks to keep himself going. The press release was on the internet immediately after the arrests. Clearly, it was written and ready to go. So the leafletters wanted the arrests.
I was involved in some of the earliest sit-ins at abortion mills back in the 1970s. I also participated in Operation Rescue in the 80s. I admired Randall Terry at the time. But his actions since then have cast a serious shadow on his credibility: his abandonment of his wife of 18 years, his Las Vegas divorce and remarriage to a staffer who worked on his Senate campaign, his claiming to have no money for child support while he was fundraising from the pro-life movement to build a $400,000+ house in a gated Florida community, his lawsuit over the name Operation Rescue, his use of confrontational tactics to gain publicity and use it for fundraising. All these things are seriously problematical.
I also find Terry dishonest. He pulled out of the NOW vs. Scheidler case in 1998, but tried to capitalize on the publicity when it was finally resolved in 2006 as though he had remained a defendant. His defection actually hurt the remaining defendants. Randall Terry was also paid $10,000 from the Terri Schindler-Schiavo Foundation for his few months of work trying to prevent Terri's murder. As someone who also fought for Terri, that makes me somewhat nauseated.
I urge readers to look into Randall Terry's background and ask themselves what's really motivating these actions at churches. Is Randall Terry's first concern the defense of the unborn? Or is he looking for a new cash cow and media attention to rebuild his empire as a leader in the pro-life movement? The bishops certainly deserve plenty of criticism, but not for this I think.
Mary Ann Kreitzer is a founder of the The Catholic Media Coalition and blogs at http://www.lesfemmes-thetruth.blogspot.com/
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For the record, I was there and the intent was to distribute literature. It is true that during the day the police were called and the priest did not have us arrested. We continued to leaflet. The men returned for the evening Mass and were met by the police. This was unexpected considering the events earlier in the day. The men left the church property when asked but continued to be harrassed by the police on public property. It was after that when they decided to go back and continue to leaflet and were arrested. I was there when the press release was written, which was after they were arrested and while they were in jail. There were no pre-written press releases ready to be sent out as the author would like you to believe.
Knowing the errors in the article that I do know, I must question the validitiy of other information contained within and the motives of this author. Sometimes, things appear one way on the surface, but once the truth is sought will be known to be very different.
Someone once told me that you never see in-fighting in the "pro-choice" movement. Why would there be? Evil is on their side so why would it attack them from within? We need to stop the in-fighting and protect the babies.