'Jane Roe' converts to Catholicism
Norma McCorvey attends Mass at St. Thomas Aquinas Catholic Church in Dallas recently. After intensive instruction, she received Catholic confirmation Aug. 17th.
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Excerpts: ASSOCIATED PRESS
DALLAS -- For years her life has been a twisted path. Its lastest turn, Norma McCorvey says, received a nudge from heaven.
In 1970, she was "Jane Roe," an anonymous woman who said she'd been raped and needed an abortion.
Three years later, she was the winning plaintiff in Roe vs. Wade, the epochal Supreme Court case that overturned all of the nation's abortion statutes.
During the 1980's, "Roe" revealed herself in interviews and a made-for-TV movie.
She really was Norma McCorvey. She confessed that her tale of rape a decade before had been a lie; she simply was an unwed mother who later gave the child up for adoption.
In 1994 she published an autobiography that migled pro-choice preachments with tell-all detail about dysfunctional parents, reform school, petty crime, drug abuse, alcoholism, an abusive husband, a secound unwed pregnancy, attempted suicide and lesbianism.
She had dabbled in New Age and occult ideas, but in 1995 anew chapter came: She received Jesus and joined the Evangelical Protestants.
She was baptized before network TV cameras by a most improbable mentor: the Rev. Philip 'Flip' Benham, national leader of the fervently pro-life Operation Rescue. "Jane Roe" joined his staff -- and his cause.
Now, three years later, the Christian and the pro-life commitments have stuck.
But at age 51, McCorvey has left Operation Rescue and has changed faiths, this time without hoopla.
After intensive instruction, she received Catholic confirmation Aug. 17.
Her parish, St. Thomas Aquinas, is located near the modest bungalow stuffed with kickknacks where she has lived since 1970.
Joining the Catholic Church is something of a homecoming as well as a quest for calm after years of turbulence.
When she was a young girl in a conflict-ridden Texas family, McCorvey sometimes went to Jehovah's Witness meetings with her father but was far more comforted by the Catholic Masses her mother took her to occasionally.
"It was so beautiful and quiet. They seemed so much closer to God and I like that, being as close as I could possibly be to God," she says.
The warm memories lingered despite later fury at her mother, who she says tricked her into signing away custody of her firstborn and then threw her out of the house.
"My mom screamed, 'What did a lesbian know about raising a child?' I lost my child, and my home."
McCorvey's 1995 turning largely was the services of Benham, a one-time saloonkeeper who had experienced a radical religious conversion much like hers.
He simply befriended her when Operation Rescue moved next door to the abortion clinic where she was working.
The moment of converstion, however, didn't occur at the church Benham attended but at the nondenominational Hillcrest Church.
There, McCorvey walked forward one Saturday night to receive Jesus.
Working a Opation Rescue headquartes, meanwhile, McCorvey befriended many Catholics.
She attended a Houston conference of Human Life Internation, a Catholic pro-life group, last April.
There, she attended a Mass celebrated by Father Frank Pavone, head of Priests of Life, and she sensed "this it it. This is where I should be."
Something more mysterious was also in effect.
McCorvey believes she sometimes experiences communications from God.
"I started getting all these messages from the Lord saying, my child, you will soon be with me." She feared this meant her death was imminent.
However one night last June the message became clear: "My child, I want you to come home to my Church."
Abortion stops a beating heart !
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