The New Freedom Rides

In 1961, civil rights activists decided to test the recent Supreme Court ruling that segregation was illegal and in their effort to fight forced segregation on public transportation in the South, they organized the Freedom Rides. Buses with both African Americans and Whites left Washington, D.C. and traveled through the South headed to New Orleans. Some of the riders were simply arrested in North and South Carolina, but in Alabama, angry mobs provoked by law enforcement set one bus on fire. Freedom riders of both races were beaten by angry mobs or arrested. Although there was a threat of more violence to come, the Freedom Riders wanted to continue their journey, but the bus drivers refused to go on. The riders decided that they did not want more violence to hamper their cause and not wanting to miss the rally in New Orleans, they flew the rest of the way. 

Freedom Rides in 1961

Paying tribute to the freedom riders of five decades ago, a new series of freedom rides are planned by the Pro-Life Movement as a peaceful way to say that justice and equal rights belong to "every human being, regardless of size or age or any other condition." Fr. Frank Pavone of Priests for Life says that it is a call to end our country's self-enslavement to legalized abortion. It is noteworthy that the abortion industry sets up clinics in low income areas, targeting Hispanic and African American women.

Alveda King, niece of civil rights leader Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., is the director of African American outreach at Priests for Life. She says that ever since she was a child, she dreamed of a better life and freedom for all. At a Birmingham news conference, King said, "We join our lives and hearts together with those who have gone before us. . . . We take to the bus, to the streets of America, riding for justice and freedom for all, from conception till natural death. . . How can the dream survive if we murder our children.""

The Freedom Rides, which will take place this summer, will have participants from various political and religious backgrounds. The goal is for this diverse representation of people to speak a spirit of nonviolence on behalf of those without a voice or whose voice has not been heard. The first Pro-Life Freedom Ride begins with a concert and rally in Birmingham on July 23. Fr. Pavone says that dozens of such rides will be scheduled across the country over the next year.

 Pro-Life Freedom Buses

The rides will be preceded by a period of intense prayer to end abortion from May 23 (Pentecost Sunday) through July 4. At the news conference in Birmingham, Fr. Pavone announced the Freedom Rides. With him were Pro-Life ministers of various denominations as well as Janet Morana, the executive director and co-founder of the Silent No More awareness campaign. Also attending were the founders of the post-abortive healing ministry known as Rachel's Vineyard - Fr. William Scott Daniels and Theresa and Kevin Burke.

Alveda King on the Freedom Rides for Life

Spreading the Message of Kibeho

This weekend, I was blessed to be able to meet a woman named Immaculee Ilibagiza. Saturday night she spoke at the Paramount Theater in Austin. Immaculee is a survivor of the 1994 Rwanda genocide - when radicals from the Hutu Tribe attempted to purge the country of the Tutsi. Over 800,000 people were hunted down and slaughtered in the span of 100 days. That is more than six men, women and children murdered every minute of every hour of every day for more than three months. Immaculee is only one of 300,000-400,000 survivors of the genocide. She lost her parents, two of her three brothers and many other relatives in the racial cleansing.

So how did Immaculee survive? Her father, a devout Catholic man known for his kindness, gave her his rosary and sent her to another village to hide at the house of a friend. Although he was a minister, He was Hutu. But her father assured Immaculee that this man would never kill anyone and that he would provide a safe haven for her. Immaculee obeyed her father and for the next 91 days, she would live in a tiny bathroom with 6 other women and a 7-year-old girl sharing what scraps of food the minister was able to sneak for them. They had to wear the same clothes, could not bathe, and could only flush the toilet when they heard the toilet flush in the adjoining bathroom. At the end of her ordeal, Immaculee was physically very weak and she weighed 65 lb. But spiritually, this woman became a giant.

Instead of complaining and asking God why the slaughter of her people was taking place, Immaculee asked God to assure her of His love as she prayed her rosary over and over again. She also asked the pastor who was hiding them for a Bible. She had a heartfelt desire for a renewed faith in God.

"I was reading the Bible for guidance, to know the truth. Now I want to know step-by-step what do You want me to do. I want to read line-by-line. If You say, ‘trust’, I want to try it. If You want to tell me ‘love them’, let me try it.”

Immaculee was certainly fed by the word of God. For some time, she concentrated on Matthew 17:20 - "... truly, I say to you, if you have faith as a grain of mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, 'Move from here to there,' and it will move; and nothing will be impossible to you." It was through prayer and meditating on scripture that Immaculee was able to let go of the anger and hatred toward those who were involved in the Rwandan holocaust and forgive them. 

After moving to the United States, Immaculee felt called to write about her experiences during the genocide. She met Wayne Dyer at a book signing and he asked to publish her story. Her first book, Left to Tell: Discovering God Amidst the Rwandan Holocaust, was a New York Times best seller in March 2006. In December of that same year, 60 Minutes broadcast her story to the world.

Watch CBS News Videos Online
60 Minutes Interview - 2006

But there is so much more to her experience than could be written in one book. Immaculee now has four books and a number of CDs. Led By Faith: Rising from the Ashes of the Rwandan Genocide continues her story after Left to Tell. Our Lady of Kibeho: Mary Speaks to the World from the Heart of Africa is about Mary's apparitions in Kibeho in Rwanda from 1981-1983 in which she warned the people of Rwanda that the genocide would happen unless they changed their hearts. She wrote a fourth book called  If Only We Had Listened that contains Our Lady's messages.

Diary of Immaculee

Immaculee now travels about the world speaking of her experiences. God is also using her to spread the messages of Our Lady of Kibeho. The apparitions to the original three seers were approved by the Vatican in 2001 and there currently are plans to build a huge basilica there where pilgrims can gather to pray.

I must say that I was deeply moved by Immaculee's sharing of her story at the Paramount Theater on Saturday. Although I had read  Left to Tell, I was not prepared to see the model of the tiny bathroom where she hid. I could scarcely imagine 8 people living in that 3'x4' space for 91 days. It brought me to tears.

Immacculee signing her books at St. John Neumann

Last night's event was at St. John Neumann Catholic Church in Southwest Austin. Immaculee primarily concentrated on the apparitions of Our Lady of Kibeho and how they impacted her faith before the genocide ever took place. It was a joy to hear this beautiful, Spirit filled woman share more of her story and her love for God and Our Lady. It is for this that she survived the genocide - to spread the message of faith, hope and forgiveness through love. It is a story that certainly illustrates that God writes straight with crooked lines. Truly, "Nothing is impossible for God." I have faith that one day, I will make a pilgrimage to Kibeho with Immaculee.

2010 - The House of Immaculee's father is rebuilt
and turned into a house of healing

2007 - Al Jazeera interview with Immaculee

2009 - CBS interview with Immaculee

May Day and the Patron Saint of Workers

O Glorious St. Joseph, model of all those who are devoted to labor, obtain for me the grace to work conscientiously, putting the call of duty above my natural inclinations, to work with gratitude and joy, in a spirit of penance for the remission of my sins, considering it an honor to employ and develop by means of labor the gifts received from God, to work with order, peace, moderation and patience, without ever shrinking from weariness and difficulties, to work above all with purity of intention and detachment from self, having always death before my eyes and the account that I must render of time lost, of talents wasted, of good omitted, of vain complacency in success, so fatal to the work of God. All for Jesus, all through Mary, all after thine example, O Patriarch, St. Joseph. Such shall be my watch-word in life and in death.

-- Composed by St. Pius X

As you probably remember, Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi ironically invoked the aid of St. Joseph the Worker on March 19 to help pass Obama's Health Care Bill. While March 19 is in fact the feast of St. Joseph, husband of Mary, May 1 is the actual feast of St. Joseph the Worker. Why two feasts for St. Joseph?

St. Joseph was an amazing man. Scripture calls him a just man. Because he was the husband of Mary and the foster father of Jesus, we honor his various roles. Though the Church could have given this saint a number of feasts, the liturgical year is given us two main ones that define the life of this humble man. 

The feast of St. Joseph, husband of Mary, on March 19 should cause us to look at Joseph's role as husband and head of the Holy Family. He is an example of how to have holy relationships and a model of how to be a good spouse and father figure. He had a respect for Mary and God's plan for all of us through her. Joseph could have left Mary, yet he followed the will of God and stayed by her side to give her love and support.

On May 1, we find the feast of St. Joseph, the Worker. In addition to being a father and spouse, St. Joseph was a laborer. This feast was instituted in 1955 by Pope Pius XII as a response to May Day celebrations by Communists, who promoted labor as a means to strengthen the regime. The intent of the Church was to emphasize the dignity of the laborer to Communist states that controlled the economic and social activities of their people.

And yet the history of devotion to this saint by workers has a much longer history. The Church has always emphasized the livelihood of Jesus as a carpenter which probably included working with stone as well as wood. Joseph would have taught Jesus about ordinary human life and how we are made in God's image. Whether making a table or a building a synagogue, Joseph would have taught Jesus that God blesses the fruits of well done and that whether made for the family or for the synagogue, the work of His hands would build up God's people.  

The feast of St. Joseph the Worker should call us to look at the dignity of work and to St. Joseph as a model laborer. In his encyclical letter, Redemptoris Custos (Guardian of the Redeemer), Pope John Paul II says, 

..."submission" or obedience of Jesus in the house of Nazareth should be understood as a sharing in the work of Joseph. Having learned the work of his presumed father, he was known as "the carpenter's son." If the Family of Nazareth is an example and model for human families, in the order of salvation and holiness, so too, by analogy, is Jesus' work at the side of Joseph the carpenter. In our own day, the Church has emphasized this by instituting the liturgical memorial of St. Joseph the Worker on May 1. Human work, and especially manual labor, receive special prominence in the Gospel. Along with the humanity of the Son of God, work too has been taken up in the mystery of the Incarnation, and has also been redeemed in a special way. At the workbench where he plied his trade together with Jesus, Joseph brought human work closer to the mystery of the Redemption.