the priesthood. One day he hopped in his car and drove south down the coast, Highway 1, past windswept beaches, Monterey, Carmel. Four hours later he was negotiating cliffs along the coastline known as Big Sur. He gained elevation, where the water is metallic against the sun, its texture dimpled by the wind. Then off the highway along a dirt road, steeper still, straight up, a harrowing ride, he had never experienced anything like it. Finally, at the top, he found the humble monastery called New Camaldoli Hermitage.
The hermitage was a place where aspiring monks came to study and learn. You could smell the flowers and pine in the air, hear nothing but silence. He met Father Isaiah Teichert, talked for many hours with the priest. Father Isaiah, Jim reflected, came to know him better than anyone in the Bay Area. That included, sadly, he thought, his family, who had never really known him. His fellow pro-lifers never quite figured him out either.
What, exactly, did Father Isaiah advise? Years later, his relationship with Jim Kopp was not something the priest was willing to discuss. Whatever Father Isaiah’s advice, Jim now wondered if his mission might be to embrace the world of the Benedictine monk. He had been called to pray but action was necessary, too. So much violence, so much blood shed by innocent babies. Jim knew what his mission could ultimately mean—that he was destined to die a drawn-out, painful death. So be it.
The notion of the “victim soul” came from Jesus, who redeemed mankind by dying for their sins. It also derived from the Old Testament and the ancient Jewish custom of letting a goat loose in the wilderness on Yom Kippur, after the high priest had symbolically laid upon the goat all the sins of the people. The unborn babies were victim souls. Jim decided he would be one as well.
Later that year he went east, to New York, joining the Missionaries of Charity, founded by Mother Teresa, housed in a convent in the Bronx not far from Yankee Stadium. He was there several months, rising before dawn each day to feed the homeless and drug addicts who came to the order’s soup kitchen. He prayed, meditated and studied. He had few possessions and didn’t talk much to others. He owned three sets of clothes, washed them in a bucket.
Mother Teresa had said that “I feel that the greatest destroyer of peace today is abortion, because it is a war against the child, murder by the mother herself.” Jim would tell friends for years that he had once met Mother Teresa face-to-face, he told her about his calling from God, and she suggested he become a priest. Jim then told her that he was conflicted on the priesthood, because he felt a separate calling from Jesus to devote his life to stopping abortion.
About six months after joining the Bronx mission, he left, returning to California. He never stayed in one place for long. On May 21, 1986, in Redwood City, south of San Francisco, he was arrested at a protest outside a clinic and charged with obstruction and resisting arrest. On July 19 he was arrested in San Francisco for using force. He headed east.
On August 5, 1986 he was in Pensacola, Florida. He was anxious to show his support for the woman whose reputation within the anti-abortion movement was reaching heroic proportions. Her name was Joan Andrews. It was back in March 1986, in Pensacola, that Andrews cemented her status as “patron saint of the rescue movement” at the Pensacola Ladies Center. Along with another protester, Reverend John Burt, and his two daughters, Andrews walked inside the clinic and, with police in pursuit, tried to unplug a suction abortion machine. Police cuffed her, then arrested the others. Andrews grabbed the edge of the machine behind her cuffed hands, yanked and toppled it over, disabling it. There were no abortions that day. The trial made her a star within the movement, she was sentenced to five years at the Broward Correctional Institute, Florida’s toughest maximum-security
The hermitage was a place where aspiring monks came to study and learn. You could smell the flowers and pine in the air, hear nothing but silence. He met Father Isaiah Teichert, talked for many hours with the priest. Father Isaiah, Jim reflected, came to know him better than anyone in the Bay Area. That included, sadly, he thought, his family, who had never really known him. His fellow pro-lifers never quite figured him out either.
What, exactly, did Father Isaiah advise? Years later, his relationship with Jim Kopp was not something the priest was willing to discuss. Whatever Father Isaiah’s advice, Jim now wondered if his mission might be to embrace the world of the Benedictine monk. He had been called to pray but action was necessary, too. So much violence, so much blood shed by innocent babies. Jim knew what his mission could ultimately mean—that he was destined to die a drawn-out, painful death. So be it.
The notion of the “victim soul” came from Jesus, who redeemed mankind by dying for their sins. It also derived from the Old Testament and the ancient Jewish custom of letting a goat loose in the wilderness on Yom Kippur, after the high priest had symbolically laid upon the goat all the sins of the people. The unborn babies were victim souls. Jim decided he would be one as well.
Later that year he went east, to New York, joining the Missionaries of Charity, founded by Mother Teresa, housed in a convent in the Bronx not far from Yankee Stadium. He was there several months, rising before dawn each day to feed the homeless and drug addicts who came to the order’s soup kitchen. He prayed, meditated and studied. He had few possessions and didn’t talk much to others. He owned three sets of clothes, washed them in a bucket.
Mother Teresa had said that “I feel that the greatest destroyer of peace today is abortion, because it is a war against the child, murder by the mother herself.” Jim would tell friends for years that he had once met Mother Teresa face-to-face, he told her about his calling from God, and she suggested he become a priest. Jim then told her that he was conflicted on the priesthood, because he felt a separate calling from Jesus to devote his life to stopping abortion.
About six months after joining the Bronx mission, he left, returning to California. He never stayed in one place for long. On May 21, 1986, in Redwood City, south of San Francisco, he was arrested at a protest outside a clinic and charged with obstruction and resisting arrest. On July 19 he was arrested in San Francisco for using force. He headed east.
On August 5, 1986 he was in Pensacola, Florida. He was anxious to show his support for the woman whose reputation within the anti-abortion movement was reaching heroic proportions. Her name was Joan Andrews. It was back in March 1986, in Pensacola, that Andrews cemented her status as “patron saint of the rescue movement” at the Pensacola Ladies Center. Along with another protester, Reverend John Burt, and his two daughters, Andrews walked inside the clinic and, with police in pursuit, tried to unplug a suction abortion machine. Police cuffed her, then arrested the others. Andrews grabbed the edge of the machine behind her cuffed hands, yanked and toppled it over, disabling it. There were no abortions that day. The trial made her a star within the movement, she was sentenced to five years at the Broward Correctional Institute, Florida’s toughest maximum-security
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