I just returned from a weekend in Manchester, New Hampshire meeting old friends like Shannon and Doug McGinley and people I picketed with years ago in New Hampshire. I love pro-life gatherings where you’re with the cream of the crop, the best people on earth, the future members of the Church Triumphant.
The Freedom of a Layman
Also, being a layman I have no restrictions on what I can talk about, like who not to vote for. I don’t have to be vague. I told the Manchester crowd, for instance, that it is a grave sin to vote for John Kerry if you know about his support for abortion, and that if I were a priest I could not give Holy Communion to a public pro-abortion supporter.
Though I admire most priest and bishops, I wouldn’t have made a good one, because I couldn’t possibly obey an order to low-key my position on sins like abortion and gay rights. I’d be relegated to a farm parish with six families.
It was a fun evening and my hat is off to Betty and Ed Holdgate and Betty Bruder, who ran the event. I stayed with the McGinleys. Shannon used to work for the League and ran around the state converting the unconverted.
Abortionist Ragsdale Dies
Speaking of the Communion of Saints reminds us of the other group, the abortionists, the communion of evil, who have to answer someday for the slaughtered babies when they face the Just Judge. No one’s home free, but at least we’re right onthis issue. We don’t make a living killing babies.
A current case in point is the sudden death of Richard Ragsdale, abortionists from Rockford, IL who has been killing babies since it became legal in 1973. Ragsdale worked out of the Old Turner School renamed the Northern Illinois Womens’ Center at 1400 Broadway during most of his career, with a henchman guard named Wayne Wagner. Wagner kept a full sewage tank on the lot to spray pro-lifers.
Ragsdale was a Catholic and has nine children. Thousands of prayers were offered over the past thirty-two years for him to stop doing abortions. He must have killed between half and three quarters of a million unborn children. We hope he had a last-minute conversion, but he still has some explaining to do to the Just Judge.
Horrific Killing Career
Ragsdale was sued in 1989 for an incomplete abortion, and won when he agreed to abide by some new health regulations imposed by the state. But then he went to court to get the rules changed.
Neal Hartigan, States Attorney General at the time, compromised and did not defend the new state law. Pro-Lifers asked then Cardinal Joseph Bernardin to deny Hartigan Holy Communion since he settled the case and later ran on a pro-choice ticket.
We have a ton of articles on Ragsdale and his mill and the many protests held there. We’ve given talks outside his mill and picketed his home and the Catholic Hospital where he was on staff. Ragsdale’s malpractice cases alone keep you busy reading. But all that’s now history.
Ragsdale was in the abortion business for thirty-one years, and reports are that some weeks he did sixty abortions, some weeks toward the end he was down to perhaps only 20, but any way you count it, it’s over half and probably closer to three-quarters of a million he has to answer for during his 31-year career.
We have our sources gathering more information. He died of pancreatic cancer and we heard that a priest tried to get in to see him before he died but we do not know if the priest got in. About all any of us can do now is pray and hope that his death will send a message to other baby-killers that there comes a time of reckoning for each of us. All we have at the end of our life is our record of good and bad.
Keyes-Obama Debate Tonight
We’ll be watching the Keyes-Obama debate tonight, praying and working for pro-life victories, and doing what we can to get people to vote for life.
