Editorial Two families
Steinfels, Margaret O'Brien
Two families Hast month's two-hour "Frontline" (PBS) documentary, "Murder on 'Abortion Row,'" was a powerful presentation of yet another chapter in the nation's anguished struggle over abortion....
...It is hard to imagine how any program on abortion would satisfy all viewers...
...and by the conservative Catholic Campaign for America, which argued that the program portrayed the Catholic church "as inciting the events in Brookline...
...Lowney (a 1991 Boston College graduate) had worked in a Jesuit-sponsored program serving the poor in Ecuador...
...That Mr...
...Does Salvi's misguided decision mean the prolife movement is to blame...
...Of particular interest to Catholics was the documentary's pairing of the lives of Mr...
...Murder on 'Abortion Row'" allows the viewer to see to the heart of their painful circumstance...
...Daly, for she makes her unsupportable statement with utter self-assurance, totally oblivious of her own biases...
...Here the documentary might have quoted the pope directly in condemning such violence, but chose to turn to Boston's Cardinal Bernard Law for a response...
...and Mrs...
...It is a stunning moment of revelation about Ms...
...And the Salvis-their only and well-loved child now on trial for murder-bear an enormous burden of their own...
...Salvi and one of the victims, Shannon Lowney (twenty-five...
...But given the generally less-than-balanced state of reporting on the subject, and in particular coverage of the complexities of the religiously inspired anti-abortion protest movement, "Murder" seemed uncommonly textured...
...Within the grand drama of America's abortion issue, the Salvis' is another fateful story...
...And, as reported in "Murder," even hierarchs can and do disagree on tactical approaches to the political issues involved...
...The Catholic position on abortion is not so monolithic as to exclude debate on, for example, the point in the developmental process when personhood begins...
...Yet Ms...
...Salvi had been an altar boy and his mother the parish choir leader...
...The film has been criticized by some mainline pro-life activists (see box) who feel their views were not adequately represented...
...Without doubt, however, the most telling virtue of the film derives from its portraits of the radiant Ms...
...I think what we have [here] is a person who decided to do something which is wrong," the cardinal says of Salvi, "in a very misguided way because of something that is good-and that is the defense of human life...
...The Lowneys seem to have everything going for them...
...There is something admirable, almost golden about each member of the family...
...But immediately an apparently disinterested intellectual is called on to question the cardinal's conclusion...
...Salvi suffered(s) from mental instability seems to be the inescapable conclusion to be drawn from the program...
...Mary Daly, a one-time Catholic theologian and still a professor at Boston College (Ms...
...The program aired just as the trial of twenty-three-year-old John Salvi III opened in Massachusetts Superior Court...
...Frontline" also contrasts the responses of various Catholics and former Catholics to the tragic events...
...Cardinal Law is presented throughout the program as a principled foe of abortion, but also as a humane, reasonable, and compassionate leader...
...Then a bullet shatters their lives...
...Lowney, the troubled Mr...
...Salvi's grief (not only for their son and for their own failures, but for the victims and their families), we come face-to-face with the consequences of violence and the inviolability of each human life...
...Murder on 'Abortion Row'" makes no such claim...
...Both were raised in observant Catholic families...
...I don't think anyone could rationally say that," the cardinal answers...
...It is this delusional dimension, not his Catholic upbringing, that drove Salvi to act as he did...
...The Catholic Campaign simply got it wrong when its press release declared that the program "overtly attributes the murder of an abortion clinic receptionist to the deranged killer's Catholic beliefs...
...Lowney attended one of her courses in 1989), says that Salvi and Law "are on a continuum...
...Cardinal Law's decision after the murders to call for a moratorium on anti-abortion demonstrations met with resistance not only from some members of the local church and some parts of the Boston pro-life movement, but from Cardinal O'Connor of New York...
...Salvi, their families, and the sorrow that will eternally link them...
...When a defense psychiatrist pointedly asks Salvi whether he supports actions such as Paul Hill's July 1994 murder of a doctor and a security guard at a Florida abortion clinic, Salvi replies, "Does the pope support it...
...Daly's blithe commentary is but another facet of the documentary that makes it so instructive...
...In the picture of their suffering, unforgettably captured here and heightened by Mr...
...Shannon's beloved grandfather, informed of her murder, dies from a broken heart twelve hours later...
...They are an American Catholic success story: well-educated, attractive, accomplished...
...Salvi is on trial for the murder in December 1994 of two women's health-clinic receptionists in Brookline...
Vol. 123 • February 1996 • No. 4
