I first met Joe Scheidler at a Judie Brown American Life League, conference in what must have been 1982 or 1983. I don’t remember his speech although I’m sure he gave one. I do remember getting into a cab with him after the conference was over and both of us were on our way to the airport. He was well-known at the time, having made a name for himself as a leader of the prolife movement; I was unknown, and so it was natural that he would ask what I did for a living. “I edit a magazine called Fidelity,” I said, referring to the same magazine which would quote him five years later.

“And what kind of magazine is that?” he asked.

“It’s a Catholic magazine, but,” I added in way that may have sounded defensive at the time, “one that’s serious about intellectual issues.”

Joe responded with a laugh. He never told me what he found funny, and I never mentioned his response in subsequent conversations with him. Now he’s gone to his eternal reward. Joe Scheidler died on January 18, 2021 surrounded by his family at his home after refusing to be intubated at the hospital where he had been taken in Chicago. He was 92 years old. The date of his passing was significant as the national holiday which commemorated the life of Martin Luther King and the role he played in what has come to be known as the Civil Rights Movement, which has gone on to become the civic religion of the United States of America. Joe Scheidler attained whatever modicum of fame he enjoyed in this world as a stalwart of the prolife movement which came into existence in 1973 in the aftermath of Roe v. Wade.

As Scheidler’s autobiography, Racketeer for Life: Fighting the Culture of Death from the Sidewalk to the Supreme Court, made clear, the Right to Life movement which he did so much to shape was modeled on King’s nonviolent campaign to end segregation in the South. Scheidler was one year older than King. Their paths crossed in 1965 when Joe took a group of students from Mundelein College, where he was teaching journalism, to march with King from Selma, Alabama, to the state capital in Montgomery in protest against “the glacial pace of civil rights reform and the harassment and violence meted out to demonstrators.”1 Scheidler and the Mundelein students stayed at a local Catholic high school, which also served as the location for a rally attended by the elite organizers of the march and entertainers like Harry Belafonte and Peter, Paul, and Mary. Scheidler remembers the stark contrast between the enthusiasm at the rally and the hostility he encountered when he showed up at a local bar. When it became apparent that Scheidler was not only an outsider but also a Yankee “outside agitator,” a potentially violent mob began forming around him, and he might well have ended up like Violet Liuzzo, a Detroit native who got murdered that same night. Scheidler talked to the crowd, which defused the danger, and learned something from the exchange when someone said, “You don’t know anything about our problems. We’ve got to keep Blacks in their place. If they ever take over . ...”2 For Scheidler, “the point was clear. Even the slightest acknowledgement of a black person’s basic human dignity could destroy the whole system.”3 Equally clear in Scheidler’s mind was the connection between segregation and abortion: “Years later, this same attitude surfaced in the abortion debate. If the unborn have any rights at all, pregnant women—all women—would be relegated to second-class status.”4

Scheidler’s perception of the similarities was not shared by the people who determined national narratives on issues like this. To them, groups like the National Organization for Women or NOW were the successors of King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference, not its antithesis, as Scheidler claimed when he wrote that NOW:

will do everything they can to make sure that the murdered unborn are not recognized as human beings. When Roe and Doe were handed down, I saw a parallel between a pro-abortion society and the Jim Crow South. The nation was deciding to limit its definition of who counted as a person and who was entitled to equal protection under the law. Just as we’d done in the civil rights movement, activists were going to have to agitate for the people who were discarded by their government. But unlike the civil rights movement, these victims could not stand up for themselves.5

In 1989, Fidelity magazine came up with similar conclusions, “Does NOW really oppose violence against women? Or are they willing to condone it as a way of preserving abortion?” The article by Suzanne M. Rini documented allegations of police brutality in Pittsburgh against female prolifers, including gross accusations of molestation and grave physical abuse. These injustices were overseen by such figures as police commander Gwen Elliott who had been a board member of an abortion clinic in Pittsburgh, and covered up by District Attorney Bob Colville, who refused to prosecute the jail warden involved in the abuses. “NOW and their unsubtle allies in the courts, police departments, and official offices use RICO suits to choke up more protection money. This they do, in both cases, to ruin lives.”

In 1966, one year after Scheidler and other Catholics helped Martin Luther King out in Selma, King repaid the favor by showing up in Marquette Park as part of a campaign to break up Catholic ethnic neighborhoods in Chicago. Sensing that he was in trouble with Chicago’s Catholics, Martin Luther King called Father Theodore Hesburgh, president of Notre Dame university and asked him to come to Chicago to show his support. The result was what would become the iconic photo of King and Hesburgh with arms locked together singing “We Shall Overcome,” which became the de facto mission statement for Notre Dame and liberal American Catholicism. The photo had two levels of meaning. For Notre Dame alumni like Joe Scheidler, it meant that Notre Dame, which had always been afflicted with the heresy Pope Leo XIII called Americanism, was now fully supportive of the Civil Rights Movement which had become America’s de facto civic religion. But for those in the know, for the oligarchs whose favor Hesburgh was so eager to court, the photo showed that Notre Dame was fully supportive of the race-based social engineering which would go on to destroy Catholic parishes and therefore Catholic political power in big cities like Chicago.

In a Wall Street Journal article, Notre Dame alumnus Bill McGurn commented on the Hesburgh-King photo as the essential expression of Notre Dame’s post Land O’ Lakes raison d’etre:

In the National Portrait Gallery of the Smithsonian, there is a wonderful photograph of Father Ted Hesburgh – then Notre Dame president-linking hands with Martin Luther King Jr. at a 1964 [sic, 1966] civil-rights rally at Chicago’s Soldier Field. Today, nearly four decades and 50 million abortions after Roe v. Wade, there is no photograph of similar prominence of any Notre Dame president taking a lead at any of the annual marches for life. Father Jenkins is right: That’s not ambiguity. That’s a statement.

[…] This is just an excerpt from the May 2021 Issue of Culture Wars magazine. To read the full article, please purchase a digital download of the magazine, or become a subscriber!