Found this from HLI as well as this one where Flynn tells his priests to boycott the HLI Mass - both detailing the event you speak of - something smells bad and it seems like there are quite a few people in Archbishop Flynn's chancery who are suspect - but Archbishop Flynn is a much smarter man than I am and so there is no excuse for his actions, now with the Legionaries and then with HLI.
Looks like the culprit was once again, a nun. This story is amazing, especially since Father Richard John Neuhaus and Father John Hardon literally begged Archbishop Flynn to reconsider his stance:
By James Cline
Special to the HERALDMINNEAPOLIS — Human Life International (HLI) featured a broad array of pro-life leaders and moral philosophers at its 16th annual world conference in Minneapolis last weekend. Over 2,000 delegates from 30 countries converged on the Twin Cities to forge new strategies for instilling in their families, parishes, and schools a greater reverence for all human life.
"A dark night has already begun to descend on our planet," proclaimed Bishop Fabian Bruskewitz of Lincoln, Neb., "and unless there is a moral reinvigoration and rebirth... I’m afraid this dark night will be unlit by even a star of hope."
Echoing the bishop’s call to action were philosopher Alice von Hildebrand, authors Mary Ann Kuharski and Ann Sheridan, and former abortionist Bernard Nathanson. Former Falls Church abortionist Joan Appleton also addressed the delegates, describing how a sidewalk counselor had befriended her during her directorship of the Commonwealth Women’s Clinic on Broad Street in the late 1980s.
Appleton, raised in a "strict Irish-Catholic family," said the counselor’s compassion and persistence eventually led her out of the industry and back to confession for the first time in 25 years.
"I will work for the pro-life movement until the day I die," Appleton emotionally vowed, "so that the 10,000 babies I killed haven’t died in vain."
To heal from her past, Appleton recounted how she draws a picture of a baby every morning, names it, and offers it to God in honor of one of her victims.
"This is peace," she said.
Appleton admonished everyone to pray regularly at an abortion facility and accept that the effects of such a presence may not immediately become apparent.
Jim Sedlak, head of Planned Parenthood opponent STOPP, reported that the nation’s largest abortion provider is returning to its core businesses of sex education, birth control and abortion after an unsuccessful foray into mainstream health care.
Sedlak stated that Planned Parenthood’s latest annual report reveals that its profits and its number of clinics and volunteers hit a downturn in 1996 after an attempt to diversify its services. In response, the organization is gearing up to offer the abortion pill RU-486 and redoubling efforts to promote the book It’s Perfectly Normal as part of a sex education campaign.
"This book is pornography," claimed Sedlak.
The STOPP director stated that Planned Parenthood’s 1997 Plan of Action includes getting abortion to be "recognized as a fundamental moral value" by Americans. One of the best ways to counteract Planned Parenthood’s activities, according to Sedlak, is to organize legal action, such as zoning restrictions, at the local level.
While fighting abortion is the primary work of HLI, most of the conference speakers addressed themes surrounding the moral decline in America as the root cause of the advancing "culture of death."
Alice von Hildebrand, noted author and longtime philosophy professor at Hunter College, identified the gradual rejection of the Christian ideal of suffering as a main culprit in America’s cultural transformation. "To accept to suffer that a child may be born," von Hildebrand passionately exhorted, "is to imitate in a modest way the debt that Christ paid on the cross."
Von Hildebrand added that "This world of ours is dying because we are killing maternity." The secularization of Catholic education was cited by Georgetown Ignatian Society president Ann Sheridan as another ingredient in the cultural malaise. Sheridan recounted how "the corporation known as ‘Georgetown,’" once a leading teacher of moral values, has come to the point of "institutionalizing formal dissent."
Georgetown recently became the first Jesuit school in the world to fund a pro-abortion student group, according to Sheridan, while allowing experimentation on aborted human infants and requiring "safe sex" instruction for its incoming students.
The university had previously banished all crucifixes from classrooms, said Sheridan. To alleviate situations such as these, Sheridan advocated notifying bishops and the Vatican, if necessary, of any canon laws violated by the transgressions.
An ongoing controversy surrounding the conference underscored the many references made there about a culture hostile to the pro-life message. Just weeks after Archbishop Harry Flynn of Minneapolis-St. Paul had agreed to celebrate the conference’s opening Mass, a Sister of Zion nun in his chancery orchestrated a nationwide lobbying of the archbishop to denounce HLI as anti-Semitic.
It was widely reported that Sister Marge Boyle had based her charge on the fact that HLI founder Father Paul Marx had once described the abortion industry as a "holocaust" led by many self-proclaimed Jews.
Former Jew Bernard Nathanson and several pro-life Jewish leaders corroborated Marx’s 1987 statement and personally vouched for his character.
"I can smell anti-Semitism," Nathanson said, describing incidents from his childhood, "and Father Marx is not anti-Semitic."
HLI spokesman Anne DeLong explained to the HERALD how Archbishop Flynn, without consulting Father Marx, retracted his offer to celebrate Mass and planned instead to lead a prayer service at a synagogue with members of the American Jewish Congress — a group reportedly in favor of abortion rights.
Despite last-minute pleading by Catholic leaders such as Father Richard John Neuhaus and Father John Hardon, the archbishop went forward with his decision.
After the prayer service, Archbishop Flynn inflamed the controversy by telling reporters that Father Marx’s rhetoric was reminiscent of "Nazi Germany."
Encouraged by the impasse, a teenage group called "Fight the Right" demonstrated outside HLI’s opening Mass at the St. Paul Cathedral and also at its conference site, shouting obscenities and anti-Catholic epithets.
According to the Wanderer newspaper, Archbishop Flynn was previously knowledgeable of HLI. When the archbishop was rector of Mount St. Mary’s Seminary in Emmitsburg, he reportedly had twice invited Father Marx to address the seminarians.
The archbishop’s spokesman told the HERALD that he did not anticipate any positive developments in the near future in his relationship with Father Marx.
Copyright ©1997 Arlington Catholic Herald, Inc. All rights reserved.