Making Plans and Getting There
Sunday, January 13: Pat calls with the proposition that we go down and March for Life on the 22nd. It sounds good to me, so we decide to think about it and see if we can swing it.
Friday, January 18: We deal with the logistics. Pat will get on the Amtrak Acela in Boston on Monday around 1:00 p.m. It will pick me up in Stamford around 4:00 p.m. We’ll get into D.C. a little before 8:00 p.m. We’ll have booked a room downtown for the night. The return train leaves Tuesday, after the March, at 4:00 p.m. Logistics: done.
Sunday, January 20: Father Francis Mary, in his homily from the Daily Mass on EWTN is urging people — “all of you out there in TV Land!” — to get down to D.C. if at all possible. He’ll be heading up himself with some of his brothers, all the way from Alabama. “We’re going to stand out there, and we’re going to witness peacefully, and we’re going to pray the Rosary, and that’s all we’re going to do. But it’s important. So try to give some serious thought and prayer as to whether you can make the sacrifice and come and join us.” Father Corapi, in a later program, thunders into the camera about the evils of the abortion clinics and how together we can “SHUT THEM DOWN!” I call back Pat because I’m fired up. Now we’re both fired up!
Monday, January 21, 4:15 p.m. The Acela train picks me up in Stamford. Pat has managed to wrangle us some seats adjacent to the club car. Things are looking positive! We meet some friendly people and the trip goes smoothly.
Monday, January 21, 8:45 p.m. Check in at the hotel. We drop off our stuff at the room and head out into the D.C. night. It’s Pat’s first time there, so we take the short walk over to see the White House. I’m in D.C. on business every once in a while, but I still can’t help it — that part of Pennsylvania Avenue, with the White House and the Treasury Department, is a thrill every time. Then it’s around the corner from there to the Old Ebbitt Grill for a great dinner. (In case you’ve never been there, a trip to D.C. is simply not a trip to D.C. without a visit to the Old Ebbitt.)
Virtually No Media Coverage
Sometime after 8:00 p.m. Arrive home, exhausted. Pat and I shook hands on the platform at my station in Connecticut, thankful for the opportunity we had gotten.
My wife, Ursula, who had a prior commitment and couldn’t make the trip, informs me that there has been effectively zero coverage in the mainstream media during all of the part of the day she was able to watch. All those people (an endless sea of them!), and all those colors, and banners, and placards, and all of the different states and countries, and it all taking place in the heart of our nation’s capital, with the vocal and active support of the President of the United States, and all of the traffic in downtown D.C. essentially shut down cold … and not a word on mainstream TV!
Wednesday, January 23: Back to work and hardly a word in the newspapers. If you weren’t there — and transformed by it, as Pat and I were — you would never know that it even happened. Of course, from the “official” perspective of the mainstream media — it didn’t.
John Allen is an attorney in Stamford, CT. His brother Tom is editor-in-chief of Catholic Exchange. You can email John at [email protected]
Copyright 2002 Catholic Exchange.
The March: Masses of People
Tuesday, January 22, 6:00 a.m. Wake-up call. We get our things together, check out, and cab it over to the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception for the big Mass at 7:30 a.m. It’s our first time to the Basilica.
The Basilica of the National Shrine is the largest Catholic Church in the Western Hemisphere and the eighth largest in the world. It measures a total of 459 feet long and covers an area of 77,500 square feet. The interior of the Great Upper Church is 399 feet long and can accommodate more than 6,000 worshipers.
7:10 a.m. And they seemed all to be there — every one of them — that day! When we arrive it's already standing room only. Mercifully, they’re permitting “stragglers” like us to lodge in the aisles, and so we make our way up close to the altar and try to be unobtrusive. Cardinal McCarrick of D.C. is the principal celebrant and homilist, but there is a veritable host (maybe 20) of Bishops and Cardinals and priests concelebrating and lending their hands at the consecration. The Gospel and the Cardinal’s homily focus (appropriately enough for the day) on the Visitation, when Jesus communicates with John the Baptist in the womb.
It’s at that early hour that we first notice all the young people in attendance. (“Young,” in this sense, meaning anyone reasonably younger than Pat and I, which is mid-to-late thirties.) The presence of the young people turns out, strangely, to be one of the things that strike us most about the whole day.
9:00 a.m. Cardinal McCarrick, crozier in hand, leads the procession down the center aisle of the Basilica at the end of the Mass. Pat and I realize that we never arranged for a cab to get us back downtown. We get lucky, however, and are on our way.
We wind up (as luck would have it) back at the Old Ebbitt for some breakfast. The waiter ushers us to a table right next to one occupied by left-leaning television talking head Mark Shields, and some other person neither of us can recognize. (The Old Ebbitt ends up picking up their breakfast bill, but decidedly not ours. That’s business in Washington!)
9:45 a.m. It’s down to the Washington Monument by foot to see if anything is happening yet. The rally starts at noon. We’ve got some time so we head across the park to the Lincoln and Vietnam Memorials. We speak to Pat’s wife, Elevena, on Pat’s cell phone from beneath the feet of the colossal statue of Lincoln. Mr. Lincoln would be amazed.
11:15 a.m. We arrive back at the Washington Monument and start to worry about the turnout. I had heard it was expected at about 100,000 people. It appears to be no more than 30,000 on the field at this time.
After 12:00 p.m. The crowd seems to be increasing exponentially at 15-minute intervals. Pat and I are carrying our Rosaries and holding up our “Respect Life” signs, which were handed out free along the road back from the Vietnam Memorial. President Bush calls in from West Virginia with a strong message of support and encouragement and the crowd goes wild!
People are there from all of the different states of the union, with colorful banners and placards identifying where they came from and, in many cases, their local parishes. The featured speakers include not only politicians, but people representing many different groups and religions. As they mention their various points of origin — Maine, Kentucky, Alabama, Indiana, France, Germany — shouts go up from those regions of the crowd, many of the members of which have traveled 24 hours and more just to add their witness. Pat himself has seven-to-eight hours travel time under his belt! And so we lend our voices and support, all that much the louder as the announced distances get greater.
There are other banners and placards, too, that tell the uncomfortable and gruesome truth. Pictures of aborted and dismembered fetuses. Tiny remains of human feet gripped between a grown person’s thumb and forefinger. Not for the squeamish, but then again let’s really talk about what we’re talking about. That was one of the themes of the day.
Nearly 2:00 p.m. Now there has to be more than 100,000 people, ready to start the walk down to the Capitol and the Supreme Court building. There’s a palpable buzz of excitement in the air. The crowd is huge — maybe 200,000 — I don’t know. I actually almost feel a little claustrophobic. There are people everywhere, hundreds of feet deep on every side — singing, speaking heart-to-heart and praying. Are we proud to be a small part of that Army of God? You bet we are!
After 3:00 p.m. We’ve basically reached the Capitol, but have to turn off the road in order to attempt to catch a cab back to Union Station. (Remember, our train pulls out at 4:00 p.m.) But it’s impossible to get a cab. There are too many people around, and the traffic everywhere is stopped! We’re forced to double back along the route of the March for a while and are astonished at the sea of humanity still coming toward us. We miraculously find a cab (blocks from the route) and hop in. But now we’re stuck in gridlock. The cabby angrily complains that it has been that way all afternoon. Downtown D.C. is basically stopped dead, traffic-wise.
Going on 4:00 p.m. We make it back to Union Station somehow, which is packed close-to-solid with marchers heading home. Pat and I are parched, so we duck into the station pub for a beer. We meet two wonderful, older men who were also at the March, having come in from East Stroudsberg, Pennsylvania. We clink mugs and find out that this has been the first March — but not the last — for all of us! They attempt to “prove” to us, by the vagaries of bar math, that there must have been … “a half-million people!” They are good men. They don’t know where their bus is taking off from and don’t seem to care, either. One of them says he feels like he did a good thing in coming down. We couldn’t agree more.
