Bernard Nathanson, Requiescat in Pace

By Susan Yoshihara, Ph.D. | March 1, 2011

American pro-life icon Bernard Nathanson received full honors yesterday at his Mass of Christian burial at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York.

New York archbishop Timothy Dolan presided, surrounded at the altar by more than a dozen priests, and joined by a hundred religious from the Sisters of Life and Friars and Sisters of the Renewal, as well as members of the American and international pro-life community. Dolan’s phone call to Nathanson from Rome in his last week of life had given him comfort and encouragement, according to homilist, Rev. Gerald Murray.

A man does not spend his life witnessing against something, Murray said. Quoting Whitaker Chambers, Murray said a man’s life is a witness for something, “for his faith.”

Nathanson journeyed from avid abortionist and architect of Roe v. Wade to ardent pro-lifer, from “Jewish atheist” to full initiation into the Catholic Church by the late Cardinal John O’Connor at St. Patrick’s in 1996.

“Social engineering is always preceded by engineering of language,” Murray said. In his later life Nathanson worked to reverse the many lies he and his pro-choice colleagues used to win over the public for legalized abortion.

Dr. Nathanson had performed or presided over some 75,000 abortions before watching a sonogram of the procedure in 1984 that convinced him abortion was a “crime,” Murray said, and which led him to make his famous film, Silent Scream.

In a passionate and sometimes emotional eulogy, Nathanson’s friend Thomas Moore said he longed, as Tennyson did, for the “Touch of a vanished hand,” and the “sound of a voice that is still.” The final testimony was the recorded voice of Nathanson’s wife, Christine, singing a love song from a recent album which she often sang to him in his last difficult week’s of life.

Share on Facebook
Share on Twitter