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HERALD Staff Writer |
This is the first time 22-year old Ben DeYoung has walked 3,000 miles with Crossroads, a student pro-life, educational organization directed and operated by students at the Franciscan University of Steubenville, Ohio.
Thirty participants, in two groups, arrived in Washington Aug. 14 after a three-month walk from Los Angeles and San Francisco. This is the fifth year Crossroads has organized the trek.
DeYoung hopes to be a student at Franciscan University this fall. On Saturday, however, he was not in Ohio getting ready for school but in Washington. He badly wanted, he said, to witness to the right to life. Crossroads inspired him to do just that at the right time in his life.
"I couldn't stand to be in silence anymore and when you have the power of prayer, all the more powerful," he said in an interview.
Along the 3,000-mile Crossroads itinerary, DeYound and many more stopped in major cities, slept in tents, prayed, talked to many people and held vigils in front of abortion clinics all the way to the nation's capitol.
Being in front of an abortion clinic, DeYoung said, is terrible.
"It is like walking to the gates of hell," he said. "And the more I prayed, the more I knew I had to act."
Elizabeth Daub of American Life League, Crossroads' umbrella organization, said, "walking is a form of sacrifice offered to the victims of abortion."
Daub herself walked with Crossroads in 1996 and 1997. The experience has greatly impacted her pro-life commitment. "You come to realize how pro-life America is," she said. "It is our generation that has been murdered. We survived abortion."
At the end of the walkathon, the group gathered on the steps of the Supreme Court in Washington to pray the rosary with Father Frank Pavone, international director of Priests for Life, a New York-based association of Catholic clergy who give special emphasis to the pro-life teachings of the Church.
Among those attending the gathering were Gary Chreone, lead singer of the legendary rock band Van Halen who, according to American Life League, is "the first contemporary rock star to publicly proclaim his support for efforts to protect human life."
For more information about Crossroads and American Life League, call Steve Sanborn at 540/659-4171 or visit American Life League on the web at www.all.org.
Copyright ©1999 Arlington Catholic Herald, Inc. All rights reserved.
This article was published in the Arlington
Catholic Herald,
200 N. Glebe Rd., Suite 607, Arlington, VA 22203; Vol 24, No 33,
page 2, dated August 19, 1999.
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E-mail:
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A note from the Web Master:
It is noteworthy and honorable that some folks are willing to stand up for a ban on Partial-Birth Abortion. Let us not forget that ordinary everyday run of the mill abortion is also murder. We must understand that aborting the life of a baby is murder no matter the method. Because one method of abortion seems to be horrible does not make the other methods less so. We should be horrified and sickened by any abortion regardless of the method. The Fifth Commandment spells it out clearly:
"Thou shalt not kill."
A fetus is a person, a human being with a God given soul.
Imagine the pain the Lord must feel when any abortion occurs. Please
contact both of your Senators and Representative, via letter or phone,
to let them know how horrified you are that abortions are legal and to
stop, once and for all, Partial-Birth abortions and all other abortions
as soon as possible.
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