Word has just reached us that Rosemary Stokes, longtime friend and pro-life activist, has died. Rosie and I go back to 1946 when I met her at a St. Mary’s College Tea Dance where she seemed to be the one in charge and I was a shy freshman at Notre Dame.
Rosie Stokes: A Tireless Pro-Life Activist
Rosie and I became fast friends though we never dated since she was at least a foot shorter than me. We all called her “Small Change” due to her diminutive size, and also “The Match Maker,” as she paired off her St. Mary’s classmates with my Notre Dame friends. Only she knows how many of her matches went on to get married, but it was not a few.
Rosie was from the South Side of Chicago, and when I moved here in 1963 we got in touch and for a while we both worked for the City of Chicago, she in the water department and I in youth welfare.
And when the plague of abortion hit our country Rosie took up the pro-life banner with a vengeance, picketing the abortion mills, counseling young women, confronting pro-abortion politicians.
During John Anderson’s unsuccessful campaign for President in 1980, Rosie followed him around relentlessly, appearing wherever he appeared, always in the front row to challenge his pro-abortion position. After Anderson lost badly in Illinois, his next state to campaign in was Wisconsin.
Arriving at his opening rally in Milwaukee he stepped out on the platform to give his first campaign address and there in the front row to confront him was Rosie Stokes. People said they saw tears in his eyes. He lost Wisconsin and dropped out of the race.
Rosie once asked Senator Ted Kennedy why he had “taken the soup,” referring to the starving Irish revolutionaries who were enticed by the British with a bowl of hot soup, to go over to the British side and become traitors to the Irish cause and even to the Church. To Rosie, any Irish Catholic politicians who supported abortion had “taken the soup.”
Rosie also served as a decoy “bag lady” when we were blotting out abortion signs at the Chicago Transit Stations. Rosie is written up for her work in the pro-life activist movement, in a hopefully “soon to be published” book by Monica Miller. If it isn’t published soon, some publisher needs to have his or her head examined. It will be a best seller. I’ve read it.
Rosie is being waked on Friday night at the Thompson and Kuenster Funeral Home at 5570 West 95th St. in Oak Lawn. Her funeral Mass will be at 10:30 AM Saturday at St. Mary Star of the Sea and she will be buried at St. Mary Cemetery. We will all surely miss Rosie Stokes, but hope to see her again in a happier place where we’ll never again have to picket an abortion mill, or ever again have to try to convert a pro-abortion Catholic politician.
Rest in Peace, Small Change.
Forty Day Prayer Vigil Begins in Aurora
The Forty Days of prayer have commenced in Aurora in front of the big ugly abortion mill at 240 North Oakhurst. Thirty stalwarts were on hand Thursday morning as the Forty Days of Prayer began, with warriors coming throughout the night.
Naturally, some of the local police have been trying to make things difficult for our prayer group by telling them that they have to keep moving, can’t block the vision of cars with their little signs and generally being bothersome.
But the vigil goes on unabated, and will end on Tuesday, September 18, at 8:00 AM, the very day and hour that the new death camp is supposed to start its grisly business of macerating small children, cutting their legs and arms off and generally opening the gates of hell on the east side of Aurora.
Our plan is to keep this death camp from ever opening, and that’s what the Forty Days of Prayer are for. But it will take lots and lots of “ora et labora” to accomplish this goal. For updates and information on the Battle of Aurora, check our new Families Against Planned Parenthood website.
Lutheran General Protest on Saturday
If you call Action News before noon on Saturday, hasten out to Advocate Lutheran General Hospital at 1775 Dempster St. in Park Ridge to protest the slaughter of late term babies in that so-called bastion of healing.
