Two weeks ago I wrote a blog post about Joseph Maracchli, aka "Baby Joseph," an infant with a rare neurological disease who is on life support at London Health Services Centre in London, Ontario. Due to the horrors of socialized medicine, a death panel decided that their resources would best be allocated elsewhere and basically ordered Joseph's family to take him off life support.
Joseph's parents failed in their attempt to transfer him to a hospital in Michigan, and soon it was looking as if all hope was lost. But that is when Fr. Frank Pavone, President of Priests for Life, stepped in and saved the day. After round-the-clock negotiations with the Canadian government throughout the past two weeks, Fr. Pavone made the trip to Canada last night to transfer Baby Joseph to SSM Cardinal Glennon Children's Medical Center in St. Louis, Missouri. Baby Joseph and his father, Moe Maracchli, were flown there with Father Pavone on a specially equipped air ambulance provided by Michigan-based Kalitta Charters, and sponsored and paid for by the New York City-based Priests for Life.
Fr. Pavone has a long history of saving children. He has been one of the most widely recognized leaders of the pro-life movement in America for the past two decades. I heard him speak at a lecture on the campus of Seton Hall University in the mid-90's, and I can still recall how dynamic he was. Never before had I heard someone articulate the Catholic Church's position on abortion so clearly. He was able to contrast it with other moral social issues, like capital punishment, and even the members of the audience who were anti-life were incapable of refuting his arguments.
Fr. Pavone has led many a peaceful protest and prayer service outside of abortion clinics, and has convinced countless pregnant women to reconsider their decision to end their child's life. He has helped them get counseling, healthcare, and for those mothers who wish to do so, facilitated the process of placing children up for adoption through Catholic Social Services.
For the many lives he has saved over the course of his storied career, Fr. Pavone deserves the Presidential Medal of Freedom. But given the anti-Catholic bias that is so prevalent in our media and throughout our country, chances are that he won't. Don't believe that there is a Catholic bias? Just take a look at the news stories being reported today.
Only one news network, Fox News, picked up this story and reported it on their website today. All the others, CNN, MSNBC, CBS, ABC...you could search their websites high and low and not find a trace of it anywhere. I know because I tried to do just that. What did I see instead? Stories of how Sarah Palin ignored the advice of one of her superiors at Fox News, how a politician issued a "warning" (the exact word CNN used) that Palin could win the GOP nomination in 2012, and another story that conveyed outrage over a woman being denied an abortion because her uterus was already crushing her child.
Nah. No bias there, right? A Catholic priest performs an act of heroism, rescuing an infant at the eleventh hour right before the big bad "healthcare allocation officials" can take him off life support, and the liberal media blatantly ignores it. Instead they'd rather focus their attention on generating negative publicity for Sarah Palin and helping advance the agenda of Planned Parenthood and the anti-life movement.
Did the media ignore the stories of Catholics being sexually abused by priests when they were minors? I am the first one to admit that the Church has made mistakes in handling the pedophilia crisis, and I don't fault the media for reporting it. But the fact is that the liberal media did everything they could to spin it in a way so as to make the Church look more like an agent of Satan than the House of God. Yet when a priest goes above and beyond to save an infant's life, they pretend as if it never happened.
I salute Fr. Pavone and consider him to be a hero among heroes. I will be following very closely what transpires with Baby Joseph during his hospital stay in St. Louis, and like so many others, I am hoping and praying for a miracle. Thank God for Priests for life, and for a priest like Fr. Pavone. For him, it's another day, another child's life saved.
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