By Carol Zimmermann
WASHINGTON (CNS) – Although the 2021 March for Life was far different from the previous 47 annual marches to protest the Supreme Court’s decision legalizing abortion, organizers and rally speakers stressed that the smaller, and primarily virtual crowd, delivered the very same message.
It was simply “more somber and prayerful,” said Jeanne Mancini, president of the March for Life Defense and Education Fund, in the livestreamed broadcast of a group of pro-life leaders making their way to the Supreme Court after the virtual rally.
“We are symbolically marching,” she said of the group representing those who would have marched in normal circumstances, adding that this was a “unique moment to build a culture of life.”
The usual in-person march that typically draws crowds by the busloads was already going to be scaled back as many groups canceled their plans to come to Washington during the pandemic.

On Jan. 15, organizers officially announced the event would primarily be virtual, saying that increased security pressures for law enforcement officers around the U.S. Capitol – since the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol and threats of subsequent violence by domestic terrorist groups – made it impossible to ensure security for march participants.
The message for participants, not muffled by coats, winter gear and crowds moving up and down to stay warm as in previous years, was a resounding cry to continue the fight for the unborn and to advocate for anti-abortion legislation.
The virtual rally was free of usual placards, but it included advertisements from various sponsor groups.
It also did not have the back and forth heated discussions that sometimes occur on the sidewalks or at the Supreme Court with those on both sides of the issue, but snippets of this discussion came up in the comments section for those watching the event on the YouTube link.
The comments section also revealed where many of the viewers were from with comments such as “marching with you” from Louisiana, California and Poland.
The rally began and ended with song and prayer with songs performed by Matthew West, a Christian recording artist and songwriter. The opening prayer was said by Archbishop Joseph F. Naumann of Kansas City, Kansas, chairman of the U.S. bishops’ Committee on Pro-Life Activities, and the closing prayer was said by Cissie Graham Lynch, granddaughter of the well-known Southern Baptist minister, Rev. Billy Graham.
The archbishop prayed for God’s blessing on the “pro-life movement in this nation,” and noted that even though its members were separated by distance, they were united by their use of their talents in building a culture of life.
He also prayed for pregnant women and for those who have been “wounded by abortion,” stressing the need to “walk with them in their time of need.”
The rally did not have the usual array of dozens of speakers from Congress but did include a handful of them addressing participants in pretaped messages. Two Democrats were among these speakers: Rep. Angie Hatton of Kentucky, who is the House minority whip, and state Sen. Mike Gabbard of Hawaii.
Hatton said there needs to be a bipartisan effort to end abortion, not just by outlawing the practice but eliminating the need for women to seek abortions by providing better health care, child care, adoption and social services. She said she is asking pro-life Republicans to also work for “pro-babies and moms’ legislation.”
Gabbard urged virtual rallygoers to recognize they are “on a mission together” and to do their best to preserve life “with love and compassion.”
Rep. Chris Smith, R-New Jersey, who is a regular on the stage during March for Life rallies, pointed out that over the years there have been “significant pro-life setbacks – but pro-lifers absolutely refused to quit or go away.” He said that same spirit continues today as the movement faces “enormous challenges.”
Smith directed his comments to President Joe Biden and stressed that the unborn need the president of the United States “to be their friend and advocate, not another powerful adversary.”
Referring to Biden’s remarks at his inauguration that “the dream of justice for all will be deferred no longer,” Smith said those words can only have true meaning if the lives of unborn children are “must be included, and their precious lives must be protected.
Each year many people at the March for Life say they are impressed by the overwhelming youth presence at the march and rally. This year, Elizabeth Eller, student body president at Christendom College, a Catholic college in Front Royal, Virginia, directly addressed younger viewers, urging them to do everything they can for the pro-life movement.
“We can be the generation that sees an end to abortion,” she said.
Tim Tebow, a former professional football quarterback, told his story about how his mother, when she was pregnant with him, had been advised to have an abortion to save her life but she chose not to.
He urged virtual marchers to be willing to “suffer for and with the unborn.”
“We’ve got to do a better job of being all pro-life all the time,” he said. With a pep talk of sorts to the crowd, he added: “This is a hard fight and it might get even harder but stay in it.”
The rally and march, even in a different format, were not meant to be the end of any advocacy work.
As Mancini said in her closing remarks, the fight would continue in other marches to state capitols and in the work every day by people in the pro-life movement.

(Follow Zimmermann on Twitter: @carolmaczim)

By Karen Pulfer Focht
MEMPHIS, Tenn. (CNS) – As a child, Sheila Stiles Jewell played outside of the public housing where her family lived in Memphis. She felt one with nature weaving clover and catching bumblebees, not realizing that she was really feeding her curiosity for science and the natural world.
During the days of segregation, the Catholic Church recruited her family, living at Lemoyne Owen Gardens at the time, to receive a Catholic education. It was a noble act that she credits with much of her success today.

Working into her 70s, Jewell is a research geneticist at the U.S. NOAA Northeast Fisheries Science Center in Milford, Connecticut. NOAA Fisheries is an office of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
“Science has made my faith stronger,” she said. “The DNA structure is amazing. It is beautiful and is evidence of what God can do and has done. Look around you, it is just wonderful!”
Women from her generation are underrepresented in the field of science.
Jewell would like to see more African American females enter the field of science. She speaks at schools and brings her sea creatures to show the students hoping to spark an interest within them.
“My faith has been an important part of how I persisted and persevered. I can’t imagine how I could have done it without my faith,” she said. Jewell still comes home often to be with family and together they attend Mass at St. Augustine Church in South Memphis.
She remembers the times as a child in the segregated South, when she went to Mass at a white church, she had to stand in the back, sit in the balcony at the movies, and drink out of separate drinking fountains.
“We came from humble beginnings,” she recalled. Her mother, a teacher, was her first role model. She instilled in Jewell that an education was the key to a successful life. “We couldn’t always realize our dreams because of segregation, but that did not keep us from striving to be somebody,” she said.
The people in the public housing where she lived always looked out for the children. “We were sheltered and protected, it was a village.” They were always encouraged to go to church.
Jewell studied science at Father Bertrand High School, where she was valedictorian. It was there that Sister Mary Kilian, a Sister of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, encouraged her to go to college and major in biology.
She attended Xavier University in New Orleans, the only historically Black Catholic university in the U.S., and then accepted an internship in Milford. She was apprehensive about leaving all she knew.
That summer, her advisers convinced her to go on a 30-hour Greyhound bus ride to pursue new opportunities. Because she was Black, she rode in the back of the bus and even though the North was not officially segregated like Memphis at the time, there was nowhere to stay. Housing was not open to Blacks in the 1960s. Her advisers found a family for her to stay with.
She was the first permanent African American female employee in Department of Interior in the Milford marine biological laboratory, where she has had a 56-year career and is still working today.
“I had a passion for genetics. Early in my career, there were no role models in this male-dominated field,” she said. She studies shellfish, such as oysters, clams, scallops and mussels, and working on restoring this population through genetics and breeding for better survival and growth.
Women’s rights and civil rights have helped and brought a lot of improvement, though there are still some barriers today, she said.
She loves working with young people, “reaching out and reaching back,” she said. “If you have a dream, follow it, do what it takes, don’t be discouraged, don’t give up.”
Jewell was a trailblazer. This past fall she was inducted into the Memphis Catholic High School Hall of Fame.
For so many years, she drew on her faith. “If it were not for my faith, I would not have been as successful as I have been. God has been beside me throughout this journey. I could not have made this journey alone. I am so thankful for my faith, my family and my friends.”
When it has been difficult to persevere, “my faith has made a difference,” she added.

By Carol Zimmermann
WASHINGTON (CNS) – Long before she burst into the public spotlight delivering her inauguration poem, Amanda Gorman got a standing ovation from fellow parishioners of St. Brigid Church in Los Angeles for reciting a poem she wrote about the parish.
And on Jan. 20, at the inauguration ceremony of President Joe Biden, parishioners watching this young woman on their TV screens – addressing political leaders and the nation at large about courageously rebuilding the country – applauded her all the more.

Floy Hawkins, former director of religious education at the parish for over 20 years, said her phone did not stop ringing after the inauguration, with friends asking if she saw, heard or knew about Gorman’s role.
“You see her? Look at that little girl!” fellow parishioners were saying because as Hawkins put it: “We still see her in a very endearing way.”
And even though they were thrilled for Gorman, parishioners of the historically Black church didn’t see her performance as a “solo act,” because Gorman has always been at the parish with her twin sister, Gabrielle, and her mom. Hawkins felt that sense of family when cameras followed Gorman joining her mother when she finished her delivery.
St. Brigid’s pastor, Josephite Father Kenneth Keke, also didn’t just see Gorman in that moment but felt she represented the entire parish in South Central Los Angeles – which is predominantly African American but now also has a growing number of Latinos, Filipinos and white parishioners too.
“We are a community; everyone here is important,” the priest said. “Whatever belongs to the parish belongs to everyone; in our parish, the success of anyone is the success of all.”
It’s also the pride of all.
“Parishioners are very much proud of her,” the priest, from Nigeria, told Catholic News Service Jan. 22, adding that he personally knew she would go far. “She is a very, very intelligent young lady. The first time I saw her, I knew that one day she was going to be very important.”
This pride is displayed on the parish website with photos of Gorman and the words: “We celebrate and congratulate Amanda Gorman: 2021 inauguration poet. Youngest in history.”
Hawkins told CNS that when she saw Gorman approach the podium and begin speaking, she was “in awe … to see such a young African American female be at such a pinnacle point of the world.” She also said it humbled her “from a spiritual perspective of God’s graces and mercies,” since she knew the national youth poet laureate from Gorman’s middle school days.
As adolescents, Gorman and her sister, went through a two-year training program at the parish and then received the sacraments of baptism, first Communion and confirmation on the same day.
When she graduated from high school to attend Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Gorman received a scholarship donation from the parish. The pastor said she always returned to the church when she visited home.
In recent months, he hasn’t seen Gorman, who graduated last year, but he also hasn’t seen many of his parishioners due to coronavirus Mass restrictions.
Hawkins, in her role at the parish which numbered 750 families prior to the pandemic, was impressed by the Gorman sisters from the start, saying they were brilliant intellectually and socially with quiet but confident personalities.
She also remembered Amanda’s speech impairment that caused difficulty in saying certain letters, which the poet has overcome and spoken about. Hawkins once overhead a student asking Amanda why she talked the way she did, and Amanda replied that it was just her East Coast accent.
“I was so happy when I learned she had acknowledged publicly that she had a speech impediment, what a release for her,” Hawkins said.
Gorman, who had been writing and developing her own style since she was a young girl, was named the Youth Poet Laureate of Los Angeles at 16, and it was around that time she wrote the St. Brigid’s poem that she recited at the end of a Mass commemorating the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. The parish assistant choir director, knowing of Gorman’s work, had asked her to consider doing it.
That Gorman stepped up to the plate, then and now, is something Hawkins admires. When she saw her on the Capitol stage in her yellow coat and red headband, she knew Gorman had taken “ownership of the opportunity.”
“Sometimes people ask you to do something and you say: ‘Oh, I don’t know if I could do it,’” she said.
“I don’t get the sense that was her response when the first lady invited her to speak at the inauguration,” Hawkins added. “I believe she immediately said yes, as we are encouraged to say: ‘Yes Lord.’”
Hawkins prayed for Gorman before the poet introduced herself to the country as the “skinny Black girl, descended from slaves and raised by a single mother” who can “dream of becoming president only to find herself reciting for one.”
But as she listened to the 22-year-old’s strong, clear voice she said to herself: “Glory be to God. … Look what you have done in the world!” And she felt the strong connection too – that the poet’s description of finding light in dark times was something the people of St. Brigid’s knew all too well.
What a time for our Catholic faith and our African American culture, she thought.
She also was pleased that Gorman, named the National Youth Poet Laureate in 2017, “didn’t minimize or dismiss” the insurrection at the Capitol just two weeks before but spoke of not losing hope when terrible things happen.
Her poem, “The Hill We Climb,” speaks in part of a country “bruised but whole, benevolent but bold, fierce and free” and adds: “We will not be turned around or interrupted by intimidation.”
It ends with the promise of rebirth and reconciliation, saying: “Our people diverse and beautiful will emerge, battered and beautiful … For there is always light, if only we’re brave enough to see it. If only we’re brave enough to be it.”
Father Keke said the poem reflected “what we preach here at St. Brigid’s” about liberation and redemption. Her words on unity had a strong spiritual connection, the priest added.
The parish is planning to celebrate Gorman’s achievement in some small way soon and in a bigger way once COVID-19 restrictions are lifted.
“She is definitely a light, an inspiration to us all,” said Hawkins, who said the current buzz around Gorman simply validates who she is and will take her further than she ever imagined. She also has no doubt Gorman will continue to courageously move forward, but not alone.
“She takes God with her,” she said.