The Faces of Hate
By Joanne Byfield

I encountered evil last week. Up close, in my face and frightening.

It sounds dramatic, I know. But there it was and it shook me more than I could have imagined. It also served as a wake-up call that the cultural battle we face in the pro-life movement really is about good and evil and we need the spiritual resources to cope.

Last week I was in Montreal for the national pro-life conference. Conference sponsors, LifeCanada and Campaign Life Coalition, had chosen Montreal in the hopes of sparking a renewal of faith in that once-Christian province. The host group, Campagne Quebec Vie (CQV), booked St. Joseph’s Oratory for the event.

The Oratory is a Catholic shrine, dedicated to St. Joseph, who is a patron saint of Canada. The shrine sits atop Mount Royal and is a beacon for Catholics and others, thousands of whom visit the site each year to pray.

Here’s what happened. On Wednesday about noon we heard from one of the organizers that officials at St. Joseph’s Oratory, where the conference was to begin the next day, were reconsidering their decision. They had been told that several groups planned to picket and protest and that some of them could be violent. They had consulted with police who, they said, told them that it would be impossible to protect the site from violent protesters, if they showed up.

The Holy Cross Fathers, the Catholic order which runs the Oratory, decided they could not host this event. Almost immediately, an evangelical church, La Bible Parle, jumped in to offer their services and they quickly and efficiently set up their facility to accommodate the several hundred participants.
 
The conference got underway with some delays and confusion about the new location but it was, by and large, successful. I assumed, and I’m certain I was not the only one, that the protesters had won a victory and made their point.

However, on Friday evening the conference agenda included dinner at a restaurant in historic Old Montreal. We chose this over a banquet so that conference participants could get a taste of this quaint area of the city. Forty or fifty of us took a school bus to the restaurant and were the first of about 150 people to arrive at the restaurant. We were surprised and unsettled when we pulled up to see about 20 or 30 protesters with signs clustered around the entrance to the restaurant.

The signs were obscene and I won’t repeat the slogans. I think there were some that said in French, “Too bad Mary (yes that Mary) didn’t know about abortion.” Many of them were in costumes and masked. Some, perhaps all, were holding condoms shaped like hosts used in the Catholic Mass. There was a person, I think it was a guy dressed as a woman, standing right at the door, holding out one of these condoms stamped with the words, “Body of Christ.” He was trying to give them to us as we passed by and he was saying as he did that, “Body of Christ.” These are the words used by Catholic priests when they distribute the Holy Eucharist during the Mass.

At some point, the protesters left but about half an hour or so later, another (or perhaps the same) group appeared across the street from the restaurant, yelling and chanting. We were sitting upstairs on the second floor of the massive restaurant. I was seated right by a beautiful, old, leaded-glass window. After more than half an hour of protest, the group outside was joined by several others who passed around cartons of eggs. Within a couple of minutes, the group began tossing eggs at the upstairs windows, hitting the window right beside me. Then they ran away.

That night someone wrote slogans on the sidewalk in front of the church and threw vegetables at the back door. Someone also wrote slogans on the gates of the Oratory.

The next day, twenty or thirty protesters showed up at La Bible Parle. They were met by many police in cars and paddy wagons. The police locked down the church so we were not allowed in or out of the building. After an hour or so, police scuffled with at least one protester who was later arrested and released.

At no point was I afraid that anyone would actually physically hurt me. Some others were. I was, however, shaken to my core. I have never been directly involved in this kind of incident and I was horrified by the hate and by the sense of evil which encompassed the situation.

I still struggle to comprehend what happens to twist someone’s mind like that. The Catholic Church, once so dominant in the province of Quebec, has been stunted and mostly silent there for over 30 years. Why do these people, most of whom appeared to be young, harbour such hate for the church with whom, I assume, they have had almost no contact in their lives? And why, when their bullying and intimidation succeeded in pushing us out of the Oratory, did they continue their fight against the pro-life movement? We have been largely unsuccessful in our fight against the culture of death in Canada so what possible threat do we pose to these people?

Successful or not, we do represent the truth and the light. Evil cannot conquer as long as there is truth being proclaimed and someone to shed light in dark places. I know now in a very concrete and personal way that however ineffective or unsuccessful we may appear to be, the work we do is a threat to those who advance the culture of death. They will not stop as long as someone is proclaiming the truth. We had better be prepared, physically and especially spiritually, for this battle.

God be with us.

Joanne Byfield is the President of LifeCanada. This article first appeared November 25, 2005 in 'Around the Coffee Table with Joanne Byfield' on the Alberta Pro-Life website: www.albertaprolife.com.