You may have heard that President Trump recently pardoned several prolifers who were arrested and jailed for peacefully praying/protesting at abortion clinics. Kayleigh McEnany of Fox News interviewed three of them: Paulette Harlow (who was accompanied on set by her husband), Jean Marshall, and Will Goodman. You can watch the interview here: https://www.foxnews.com/video/6368062387112.

What struck me most during the interview was the charity and good cheer the three showed when asked about their prison experience, which was hardly easy. Harlow, in her late 70s, was denied the one thing she asked for: to attend weekly Mass. Marshall, also a senior, mentioned the skin-cutting shackles around her ankles. Goodman recalled going without toilet paper for two weeks while hearing that trans prisoners were getting mascara and fragrance. Yet I detected no animosity. They spoke frankly of the weaponization of law and of having been targeted for both pro-life advocacy and their Catholic faith, but did so without resentment. Criminals they were not.

One moment gave me particular pause. McEnany asked Marshall if she had ever asked “Why, God?” while in prison. “No!” Marshall immediately answered, seemingly puzzled at the question. Obviously, I don’t know Marshall, but her answer suggested she knew exactly why she was in prison—she had done what she believed Christ would do and expected the same treatment he received.

Listening to these self-possessed prolifers, I recalled the words of a dear friend and mentor, a former Episcopal priest who spent time in jail in different cities in the 1990s for doing the same kind of things they had done. On why he put his body between a pregnant woman and the one who would kill her child, he said simply, “nothing else seemed appropriate.”

In her biography of St. Francis of Assisi, My God My All, Elizabeth Gouge wrote the following:

It is never the beginning of the story to say a child is born, nor is it the end to say a man has died, for long preparation leads up to every birth, and death leaves behind a power for good or evil that works on in the world for longer than the span from which it grew. In the case of those we call saints, the power is immeasurable. They are the true makers of men. Other great men may alter the material aspect of life for millions, for generations, but the saints make us for eternity. By emptying themselves, by getting rid of self altogether, they become channels of God’s creative power and by him, through them, we are made. Not alone through them, we know, for every occasion in life makes us, and sometimes the touch of God comes directly upon us, but through them more than we realize. In this life we cannot know how much we owe to saints we have never heard of, or to saints who live with us unrecognized. . . .

Gouge goes on about St. Francis in particular, but in words that could apply to any saint:

His influence upon European music, art, drama, and politics has been a study for many scholars, yet it is as a Christian he matters to us, as a humble poor man who set himself to tread as closely as he could in the footsteps of Christ, perhaps as closely as any man has ever done, and by so doing shames us. Looking at him we see what it means to be a Christian, and what it costs. His story is not only endearing, it is terrifying. Yet without the fear and the shame it would not have so much power over us, for we know in our hearts that what is worth having costs everything. And his power lives on and we cannot measure it because it is nowhere near its end (p. 1-2).

These pro-lifers too show us what it means to be a Christian. Outwardly unremarkable, they humbly display the form of Christ, and in so doing call us to be what God created us and redeemed us to be. They are makers of men.