jmaffei@clear.net /catholiccounterpoint

These are the Operation Rescue videos that I produced of the major rescues in the U.S. .The stories of the brave men and women who dared to put thier bodies in front of the doors of the child killing centers; You will be with them from the planning the nite before to the scary walk to block the doors.

This is history.

Wichita operation rescue, Buffalo operation rescue, Dobb Ferry  operation rescue , Birmingham rescue , Dayton operation rescue ,Rescue , Vermont, Washington D.C. operation rescue, Binghamton N.Y., Operation rescue .  Vermont Operation .Rescue with Fr Weslin of the "Lambs" leading the Rescue.

The Fr. Norman Weslin story

Time magazine in

The Gathering of the Lambs.

 

nd Airborne Division.Stationed in Panama in 1952, henearly killed Mary Lou while driving drunk. The doctor told him

“I just always happened to there when it happened.”

In the fifth grade hemet a pretty little girl named Mary Lou. The

fact that she was Catholic and he wasLutheran didn’t deter him – he fell madly inlove, and stayed thatway until he graduatedfrom high school andjoined the army at age17.

But Mary Lou said shewouldn’t marry himunless he made something of himself and became an officer.

So after getting off to a dismal start,he pulled his act together, graduating

from Officer Candidate School in March of 1951.

Then it was on to artillery andmissile school at Ft. Bliss, Texas.

While there, the smitten youngsecond lieutenant converted toCatholicism.

Norman and Mary Lou were marriedin August, 1951.Airborne school at Ft. Benning,

Georgia, followed, then paratrooper duty at Ft. Bragg, North Carolina,

with the 82

It was there, Weslin relates, that he began a 20-year run as a “hopeless alcoholic.”

she had suffered a massive brain concussion and was going to die.

 

A nurse gave him a green scapular,told him to pin it on Mary Lou’s

pajamas and pray, “Immaculate Heart of Mary, pray for us now and

at the hour of our death.”Weslin did so. His wife sat up in bed

and asked when she could leave the hospital. She left three days later.

During his assignment in Japan, the couple adopted two Japanese-

American children, a 2

½ 

-month-old boy and an 11-month-old girl.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In 1963, drunk after a party athis house, he accidentally sethimself on fire while trying torelight the barbecue grill and nearlyburned himself to death.

 

Weslin retired from the army in 1968with the rank of lieutenant colonel.

That same year he came to gripswith his alcoholism, joined

Alcoholics Anonymous, turned his life and his will over to God, and

never drank again.

In retirement, his religious faith deepened. He delved into the

 

 

Fr. Norman Weslin is tagged during his arrest for

trespassing at Notre Dame University last May.

At age 49, he decided to see if he could abandon everything to Jesus,

But finally accepting his loss as God’s will, he turned his home in Colorado Springs into The Mary

 

 

 

 

 

 

Often, it would take police all day, a full day in which no baby deaths occurred. And as Weslin points out, Center for Disease Control studies show that 20 percent of mothers who are turned away from abortion mills never return to kill their babies.

 

 

courtroom stairs hanging by his wrists in an inverted “V,” with his head and

Weslin, never one to mince words,called reporter Lesley Stahl “the 60-

Minute Jezebel – a barracuda feminazi of the first order.”

The Lambs spent over 100 days in North Dakota jails. Stahl won an

Emmy for the story.

But Weslin’s worst jail experience came in Houston. There, a guard spotted pro-life attorney John Broderick palming a Consecrated

Host to Weslin, which the priest slipped into his mouth.Three guards jumped him, kicked him in his back and handcuffed him,trying unsuccessfully to pry the Host from his mouth.Then they stripped him naked and left him lying on the floor for all to see.After blockading the door of a Planned Parenthood clinic with an old car in Rochester, New York,

Weslin served 4 months in McKean Federal Prison near Erie,

Pennsylvania, in 1997, for violating the FACE (Freedom of Access to

Clinic Entrances) Act.The food and treatment at federal prisons weren’t so bad, he found.While at McKean, he completed a 39-day water only spiritual fast and wrote almost 300 pages of his book.

Over the years, the Lambs of Christ’s ranks were thinning. Police brutality

– breaking arms, beatings and torture holds took their toll. Long prison

sentences did too.Federal officials went after the property of pro-lifers using the RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations) Act. And the FACE Act, passed in 1994, was a major factor in stopping the clinic blockades.

But Father Weslin soldiered on.In 2002 he was back in McKean

Prison again, serving a 5-monthsentence – this time for criminal

contempt – for praying inside a court-ordered 60-foot buffer zone at

an abortion mill in Buffalo, NewYork.

In 2007 a federal jury in Omaha,Nebraska, found him not guilty of

violating the FACE Act. He hadentered an abortion clinic, knelt and

prayed, and offered help to pregnant women and clinic workers.

More recently, he has traveled to Illinois, Washington, D.C., Colorado

and Missouri.

I am one of the Lambs

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

Mr. Policeman, tell me why Unborn babies got to die.

Keep your eyes on the prize– hold on!One of Weslin’s roughest

experiences occurred in 1989 at an abortion mill blockade in West

Hartford, Connecticut.Under the direct supervision of the

local police chief, police handcuffed Weslin behind his back.Then two officers yanked him off the ground by holding a nightstick between his handcuffed wrists

 

– a torture technique called thestrapado hold. They carried him to the paddy wagon and then up the

feet banging and dragging on the floor.The hold caused excruciating pain,

stopping the blood circulation in his wrists and pulling his arms out of their

sockets. He never completely recovered the full use of his arms.

The other Lambs endured the same treatment.

 

CBS’s “60 Minutes” covered the Lambs’ arrests in Fargo, North Dakota, in 1992 in a report highlybiased against the group.

The Lambs employed various methods for pumping up their esprit

de corps, including humor.They had their own lingo: their leaders were “shepherds” and “shepherdesses.” They traveled in a “Bedlamb” bus or a “Lambousine.” Locked together in the clinic entry way, they would sing:

Paul and Silas went to jail,Had no money for the bail.Keep your eyes on the prize –hold on! Or:

Weslin Home for Pregnant, Unwed Mothers. The home would eventuallyhouse over 250 mothers.

In 1982, at age 52, Weslin entered Sacred Heart Seminary in Hales

Corners, Wisconsin, to study for the priesthood.He estimates that at Sacred Heart,

located in Bishop Rembert Weakland’s diocese, about 40percent of the seminarians were practicing homosexuals. After two years at the seminary, the academic dean kicked him out for refusing to go to a class withheretical teachings.Weslin continued his studies at Mater Dei Seminary in Spokane,Washington.Following his priestly ordination at age 56, he joined a small, orthodox order called the  oblates of Wisdom.

Weslin had “rescued” – blockadedthe doors at abortion clinics –several times, beginning in 1976,once with Bishop Austin Vaughan,

his spiritualdirector.

On retired status from his order in 1988, he took part in a rescue in Atlanta and went to Key Roads prison with 260

others.Jail officials clapped him in solitaryconfinement for nine days for offering Mass while in prison.

The Lambs of Christ concept came to him while he was in solitary.Shaping his philosophy and method

for fighting abortion was the theology he had found in St. Louis de Montfort’s “total abandonment

to Jesus through Mary,” combined with the mystical theology of the victim soul exemplified by Blessed Josefa Menendez.

He decided that the “scrawny Lambs of Christ” would confront satanic worldly authority as proxies for the helpless babies killed by abortion.

They would perform acts of civil disobedience; Weslin reasoned that this was permissible because the laws they would break were unjustand therefore, according to Catholic teaching, no laws at all. When arrested, they would assume the helplessness of an unborn child, refusing to speak or assist in their arrest. They would go limp when arrested,refuse to give their names or respond in court, and refuse to pay bail or any fines.They would offer up their suffering as “victim souls” to satisfy God’s justice so that He would intercede and stop the killing.

Gathering together Catholic followers of like mind, Weslin and his Lambs of Christ crisscrossed the country, staging blitzkrieg abortion mill blockades in one city after another.

Whenever possible, they actually entered the clinics. But inside or out, using heavy kryptonite locks,they would chainthemselves to concrete blocks or inside old automobiles,making it as hard as possible forpolice and firemen to remove them.

through Mary, as Louis de Montfortadvised – literally.

He hitchhiked to Denver and hired himself out as a sheepherder, ending

up in the Black Mountains on the Colorado-Wyoming border with “one

thousand sheep faces all looking at me,” and having no idea what to do.

A Basque sheepherder from Spain appeared from nowhere and taught

him the ropes, probably rescuing himfrom death by starvation or other

mishap.

He was hooked: abandonment to Jesus through Mary worked.

After the sheepherding episode hereceived his Master’s degree in

Theology at the Roman Catholic School of Applied Theology, part of

the Graduate Theological Union at Berkeley, California – but not without

being utterly appalled by the oftenheretical and blasphemous teaching

going on at the school.His participation in the pro-life

movement began in 1969 when he led a fight to defeat a bill in Colorado to

legalize abortion. Weslin and Mary Lou had been planning to teach the Indians about Christ on the reservations in Wyoming.All their plans came to a screeching halt on July 2, 1980, when a car rearendedthe Weslin’s car – their daughter was driving – and Mary Lou waskilled.

After 28 years of marriage to his beloved Mary Lou, Weslin was like a

lost soul, wandering from the home of one relative after another.

writings of Teresa of Avila, St.John of the Cross, and especialSt.Louis de Montfort’sTrue Devotion to Mary.

Then it was back to Ft. Bliss for the officers’ advanced course in their

nuclear missile school. Weslin graduated second from the top of his

class.He became a missile operations officer, responsible for the army

nuclear missile air defense of NewYork City and New Jersey against

Soviet Russian air attack.More high-level positions followed.

All the while he continued to drink heavily.

An unlikely priest displays

unbridled valor

 

Of all the well-publicized scenes at the Notre Dame University

commencement protests last May,probably none was more poignant than

the arrest by police of the feeble, 78-year-old priest struggling under the

weight of a wooden cross.But getting arrested at abortion

protests was nothing new for Fr.Norman Weslin.

As the founder of Lambs forChrist, described by

1992 as perhaps “the most zealous and aggressive of the pro-life organizations

that seek to shut down ‘killing centers,’” Weslin has been arrested

and jailed over 70 times.A more devout, dedicated, anddownright feisty pro-life priest wouldbe hard to find.

It would also be hard to find a man seemingly less likely to become a

priest in the first place.Norman Weslin was the son of

Oscar and Hilma Weslin, bothimmigrants from Finland who met and

married in Michigan, settling down inIron City to raise 18 children.

The first ten died in infancy.Norman, baby number 16, grew up to

be a little rascal in school, and came in for his share of whippings from the

school principal.“I was never a sarcastic kid or one always looking for trouble,” Weslin wrote in his book,