What is the scandal here?
On Facebook, Fr. William Kuchinsky posted an article from the Washington Post* about his, Fr. Kuchinsky's, actions in obtaining, offering a requiem Mass for, and personally burying more than 100 "human fetuses" i.e. babies.
Kuchinsky, a West Virginia priest well known for his antiabortion activism, had been called to the apartment on March 28 by other antiabortion activists who said they had gotten the remains from the driver of a medical waste disposal truck in D.C. — an account the waste company denied. Lauren Handy, who rented the apartment, and Terrisa Bukovinac, another activist, had asked Kuchinsky to come, and he celebrated a funeral Mass.
Kuchinsky said he also agreed to take nearly all the fetuses, which the priest knew some would see as stolen and deeply disrespected, while others would call them rescued and honored.
***
Police last week would say only that the case remained “under active investigation.” Earlier this month, they said they were investigating the actions of activists as well as whether proper procedures were followed in disposal of the remains.
Everyone knows that if the remains of these little human beings had been incinerated in what our society considers, without much examination, to be the approved manner, not a murmur would be raised -- certainly no Washington Post articles are ever written about that subject.
This Post article isn't quite sure what to make of Fr. Kuchinsky and the activists who took the dead babies for burial (and as evidence of law breaking). Other pro-lifers have criticized Father for showing pictures of what he discovered in the containers. Recently I saw images of animals in nets on the sidewalk, presumably in Shanghai -- and the comments were full of anguish at the very thought of the inhumanity of it all, even though the same story also told of (but did not picture) infants torn from their mothers.
The Post article's authors seem not to know what to make of the priest taking the remains to his kitchen so that he could prepare a service for them, nor are they sure what that service consists of. It seems clear to me that these reporters have come to a place -- the apartment where the activists took care of the remains, in fact -- where their preconceptions about "women's access to reproductive rights" don't stretch to cover or even cast a shadow over the facts; and the facts, which include 100 dead babies prayed over and buried, won't arrange themselves in a way that allows them to dismiss the priest as a wrong-doer, though they are evidently disposed to do so.
At first I thought this article expressed scandal over the activists' actions; on re-reading it, I find that there is something else there. I think of it as a sense of being completely surprised that anyone would take any of the steps the activists have taken, much less all of them. That surprise doesn't translate into a serious journalistic commitment to uncover the crimes of the abortion industry, but it is something different from what we usually see. Fr. Kuchinsky, Lauren Handy, and Terrisa Bukovinac have achieved something in bringing them to that point.
And they have done the right thing in burying these poor dead.
