Christians of all ages, many faith traditions, unite in prayer and pro-life witness



Metro Detroit — The crowd was solemn as both children and elderly, and Christians of different faith traditions, stepped forward and put roses on the ground before the tall tombstone.

The stone marked a grave for close to 50 individuals who died in abortions.

That Saturday afternoon of Sept. 14 was, in fact, a National Day of Remembrance for Aborted Children, and the gathering at Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary (Grotto) Cemetery in Detroit was only one of 39 events across the country remembering lost unborn children.

Services at three other Michigan memorials were also held on this day, including at gravesites of aborted babies at Holy Sepulchre Cemetery in Southfield; St. Joseph’s Cemetery in Lansing; and the burial site for five aborted children at White Chapel Cemetery in Troy.

“’The people who protect life are a people of hope,’” said Suzy Stockman, president of Pregnancy Aid in Detroit, which assists pregnant women in need. “These are the words of Pope Francis. We are a people of hope.”

The event was coordinated by Citizens for a Pro-Life Society, Priests for Life and Pro-Life Action League, and was the first time in 40 years of legalized abortion that nationwide memorials were conducted simultaneously.



Richard Hass, a parishioner at St. Joan of Arc in St. Clair Shores, said the service offered a time to “pray, to mourn, to come together and continue to remember.”

“Each of these gravesites and all of those memorials should stand as a monument of hope, that we, a people of life, will not forget those sweet and innocent children who were never allowed the first of our God-given and inalienable rights — life,” said Hass, who co-coordinated the event with Becky Reynolds of St. John Vianney Parish, Shelby Township.

One person who was especially close to this memorial site was Lynn Mills, a local longtime pro-life activist who discovered the bodies of several of the children buried there.

In April 1987, she and a friend looked into the Dumpster outside a local abortion clinic and found a number of babies who had been aborted only a short while before. She called the pastor of Assumption Grotto at the time, Msgr. Clifford Sawher — who had originally placed the abortion remembrance headstone as a mere memorial — and he told her to bring the bodies to the church.



“He knew the gravity of the situation,” Mills said. “Msgr. Sawher walked with a cane, and that day he also walked with a shovel. I’ll never forget the image of him coming to this spot, dropping his cane, and digging the hole himself for the babies, saying, ‘I wish they’d catch me burying these babies.’”

“He was ready to take on the whole society, the whole legal system,” Mills said of Msgr. Sawher, who died in 1998.

Rebecca Kiessling, an attorney, adoptee and mother, said the memorial reminds people that babies “don’t just vanish into thin air.”

Having often presented her testimony of being conceived in rape and targeted for abortion by two back-alley abortionists in Detroit, Kiessling said she was not attending the memorial to share her story, because she is still living, “and we’re here to remember the dead.”

“I’m so thankful for this place, this memorial, where people can come to remember,” she said. “It’s very profound.”

Fr. Darrell Roman, pastor of St. Isaac Jogues Parish in St. Clair Shores, said it’s crucial for pastors to speak about life issues to their parishioners.

“Standing here before you as a priest, as a pastor, as a shepherd, I’ve come to realize one thing,” he said. “That each and every one of us has to re-energize our own families to the reality that life is a gift given to us by Almighty God. It’s something to cherish; it’s not something to abuse and take advantage of.”



Furthermore, he added, U.S. government officials are rightly concerned about “all who died in Syria, especially the young. But what about the children here in our own country who die daily? And who goes out to defend them, but you?”

Al Kresta, president of Ave Maria Radio and host of his radio show “Kresta in the Afternoon,” contrasted the “satanic strategy” to belittle human life, with the “Samaritan strategy” to demonstrate that all life is precious.

He added that in the musical “Les Miserables,” the hero Jean Valjean sings “to love another person is to see the face of God.”

“Well, to demean another person is to show the face of the devil,” Kresta said. “The Samaritan strategy is a strategy in which we treat people — other human beings — with love and dignity and respect. It’s where we embrace those who are different, disabled, deformed, inconvenient, less than lovely; ‘irregular people,’ you might call them.”

Photo gallery For more photos from the National Day of Remembrance for Aborted Children at Assumption Grotto Cemetery, visit The Michigan Catholic's gallery page.

A special conclusion to the memorial service was given by Elder Levon Yuille, director of the National Black Pro-Life Congress and pastor of The Bible Church in Ypsilanti.

“We are comforted in the presence of believers who share like beliefs, but it is also a sad moment when we think of the thing that has brought us to this place,” said Yuille, who received the Right to Life of Michigan’s lifetime achievement award with his wife, Sally.

He added his great sadness that “in my community there is a disproportionate number of abortions and the slaughtering of innocent lives.”

“In the black communities, the statistic says one-third to two-thirds of all babies are destroyed in the womb,” he said, and shared a reading from Ephesians 5:11-12: “And have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather reprove them. For it is a shame even to speak of those things which are done then in secret.”

“We as Christians are not dealing with a suggestion, we are dealing with a mandate from Almighty God that we speak up and speak up in reference to situations contrary to the will and the way of God,” Yuille said. “As we leave this place may you leave with this fire burning in your soul that ‘I have a mandate to cry out and tell America, family and friends that we cannot long exist as long as death reigns in our community.’”