serious than a felony crime, like sexual offenses and drug and property violations. But battery is a violent offense: deliberately causing physical harm to another person through physical acts.
Peaceful, prayerful Jim Kopp?
Perhaps he was merely sitting there cross-legged, reciting verse, and, when he was carried away, he resisted. Or maybe he felt a current running through him, physical, angry, one that inspired more potent action than peaceful resistance. Most everyone who met Jim was struck by what they considered his soulful, gentle nature: the boyish grin, the soft voice. Jim knew his friends felt he was incapable of violence. He also knew they were mistaken. Those who caught him in moments of candor, who looked square into his eyes, waited long enough for his self- effacing “who me?” routine to pass, could see flashes of the intensity and seriousness of purpose that went well beyond that of a conscientious objector.
Jim continued to read voraciously, and fell in love with a book called Story of a Soul, the autobiography of Saint Therese d’Lisieux, a woman who entered a convent at the age of 15 and died in obscurity at age 24. “At last I have found my calling,” she wrote in her journals. “My calling is love.” The core of her spiritual message was the “little way,” that any act, no matter how trivial, is infinitely valuable if done out of love. He studied the history of birth control, sterilization law. He started drawing connections between the Holocaust and abortion. It was all becoming so clear to him. Everything happens for a reason, and every event influences another.
Through the fall of 1984 he attended protests outside abortion clinics in the Bay Area. In September Jim was arrested for trespassing and battery. A month later, the same thing. Early December, assault with a deadly weapon. He relished the courtroom atmosphere. The strategy, the use of language, nuance. He knew how to play the game. Down the road, he would offer advice to other pro-lifers on how to navigate the judicial system. He was, he frequently reminded others, a lawyer’s son. In the fall of 1984, he formally received his master’s degree from Cal State Fullerton. He founded a group in San Francisco called the Lourdes Foundation, which opened a “Free Pregnancy Center,” and named himself its president. Jim billed it as a birth control referral and information center. The center gave pregnancy tests, educated women on the dangers of abortion and assisted pregnant women. It also showed graphic photos of aborted fetuses to patients, who were then also referred to doctors who opposed abortion.
On Good Friday, 1985, he marched in a pro-life procession that went nine miles from St. Martin Church in San Jose to Our Lady of Peace in Santa Clara. Then he drove to south San Francisco to Juvenile Hall detention center. Officials only knew that this pleasant, bookish man was president of the Lourdes Foundation. They learned later, to their horror, that he was an anti-abortion radical—but not before he had an opportunity to take the stage before a group of female inmates and present his pro-life stump speech. Here was Jim, the missionary bestowing wisdom, saving women from so much pain that they did not understand—they had been brainwashed by the media, the liberal culture, the feminists. The young women were, he said, mostly young prostitutes, and three of them were pregnant. You do not have to get an abortion, he told them. You do not. God bless.
For some time, Jim had considered converting to Catholicism, perhaps even pursuing 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 prison for women.
Jim Kopp and 300 others from far and wide made the trip to Pensacola, stood outside the clinic to protest the outrageous injustice done to Joan Andrews. It was heavenly for Jim to be among so many like-minded souls. He decided that, from that moment on, he would no longer go to jail angry, but with a cheerful heart. Among the group in Pensacola was a 58-year-old professor of philosophy from Fordham University in New York. His name was William Marra.
“We’re not eccentric, or extremist, but we’re here to see Joan Andrews free,” Marra told a reporter.
William Marra had a daughter named Loretta. She had just turned 23, studied philosophy at Fordham, and had, like her father, embraced the pro-life cause. Jim Kopp instantly felt great respect for William Marra, who had, like Jim’s father, served in the military. As for Loretta, Jim would, in time, make a connection with her that would grow stronger and stronger and ultimately, change his life.
Kopp headed back to California, and more protests and charges. September 6, in Richmond, trespassing. October 25, in San Jose, he invaded a clinic with another man and chained themselves to an examination table as 15 others protested outside. November 22 in Alameda, trespassing, causing injury, damaging property. He again headed for Florida. On Friday, November 28, the day after Thanksgiving, he was arrested for disorderly conduct and resisting arrest at the same Pensacola clinic where Joan Andrews had been arrested. Jim and others blocked the clinic doors with a truck. That same weekend a meeting was held at the Western Sizzlin’ steakhouse in town. One of the organizers was a man named Randall Terry. Terry unveiled his vision for a new, national, direct action campaign inspired by the impromptu assaults on clinics that had taken place. Terry called it “Operation Rescue.”
Among pro-lifers there were differences of opinion on tactics, on means and ends. Save the preborn, but how? What was the time frame for political change? What kind of action? Jim Kopp was part of the movement, had found a group to connect with—but how long could it conceivably last? He joined Randall Terry’s staff, but he would
