By Gretchen Keiser and Rita McInerney

As Atlanta went about a normal workday, the city's police, abortion clinic operators and Operation Rescue were locked in an intense confrontation at three abortion clinics Oct. 4.

A total of 343 people were arrested by police, as they adopted passive resistance and sat or knelt on all fours in driveways and doorways to three Atlanta clinics. They had been trained to go limp when arrested and most used that technique, being dragged to waiting police buses or vans. Some people moaned and yelled in pain as they were dragged or lifted by police, who used techniques such as twisting arms or pinching holds on the neck to force people to move forward.

An elderly man with head and neck injuries and a middle-aged woman complaining of chest pains and nausea were admitted to Grady Hospital according to a spokeswoman for the Atlanta police. Those arrested were charged with three misdemeanors, she said, and had to give their names and post $1,300 bond to be released. They were being held at the Atlanta Pretrial Detention Center and the Key Road prison farm.

Four priests, Father Dan Stack, parochial vicar of Holy Family Church, Marietta; Father Bill Hoffman, pastor of St. Jude's Church, Sandy Springs; Father Michael Woods, pastor of St. John the Evangelist, Hapeville; and Monsignor Michael Regan, pastor of Our Lady of Perpetual Help, Carrollton, were among those arrested. Father Paul Fogarty, pastor of Holy Family, was among prayer supporters at the Hillcrest Clinic at Eighth Street. Also arrested was Father Norman Weslin, an Oblate of Wisdom, who has been speaking in local parishes about Operation Rescue, and a number of archdiocesan lay people.

Other priests and lay Catholics were visible among prayer supporters, including Father Tom Kenny, pastor of Corpus Christi in Stone Mountain; Father James Fennessy, pastor of St. Thomas Aquinas in Alpharetta, and Father John Farrelly, parochial vicar at Immaculate Heart of Mary parish in Atlanta.

With local and national media chronicling every move, the first of several days of "rescues" began with a 7 a.m. rally in the parking lot of Motel One on Chamblee Tucker Road, off I-285, as an estimated 400 people received final instructions from and prayed with Operation Rescue leader Randall Terry.

"We're not going down there as the heroes," said Terry, speaking through a bullhorn. "We are going down there in a spirit of repentance ... we are 15 years late. There are no heroes here today."

Asked why he had chosen to risk arrest, Father Stack shrugged and said he had been convinced by the reasoning, "It's the only thing that stops the killing." He'd been told that several years ago, he said, but "it took awhile to sink in. You know, we've all written, we've all preached. Nothing has stopped the killing."

From the motel lot, the group split in three and traveled separately to Atlanta on MARTA, showing up at different times during the morning at the Hillcrest Clinic, at Atlanta SurgiCenter on Spring Street and at the Feminist Women's Health Center on 14^th Street. Police barricades, prison buses, police helicopters overhead, and a row of television cameras were waiting. Those who came sang hymns, prayed aloud, and prayed psalms from a booklet given out by Operation Rescue, some crying as they waited to be arrested. Most were middle-aged or older men and women dressed in sneakers and pants, carrying a few items in a plastic bag or knapsack.

Auxiliary Bishop Austin Vaughan of New York, who has been arrested in previous Operation Rescue protests, sat for several hours on the pavement at a back door to the Hillcrest Clinic with two priests who came with him from Brooklyn, NY, but none was arrested.

Monday night, Oct. 3, St. Jude Church in Sandy Springs was a magnet for more than 1,000 pro-life advocates who packed the church for the first pre-rescue rally of the week.

A succession of clergymen addressed the serious crowd after a welcome by Father Hoffman. "This is the house of God, a sanctuary, and we are gathered here in the name of the Lord. No arrests are to be made here." He was referring to an action which had occurred a short time earlier in the church. Leaders of Operation Rescue were served with papers in the injunction brought by the city to bar them blocking entrances or exits to abortion clinics.

Earlier in the day, while a training session for "rescuers" was being held in the church, Randall Terry was arrested by Atlanta police outside St. Jude's. The charge was conspiracy to commit a crime.

He was held at the Atlanta detention Center in lieu of $75,000 bond, and released early Tuesday morning after a local family posted a property bond.

"I found it very shocking that the police will come into a church to arrest somebody," Father Hoffman told The Georgia Bulletin in a telephone interview Oct. 3 shortly after Terry's arrest.

Farther Woods compared Operation Rescue to the non-violent civil rights struggle of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and his followers in Birmingham in the 1960s. He quoted from a letter written to Dr. King by eight prominent Alabama bishops and clergymen on April 12, 1963. They strongly urged him to wait, to let the law take its course.

King, the priest went on, responded from his jail cell with a letter that said, "Wait always meant never ... Justice too long delayed is justice denied."

"It is easy for this city and this nation to say wait when they don't show on television the aborted fetuses, when they speak of children as tissue," Father Woods said.

He compared today's moderates with those of the 1960s, more devoted to order than to justice. Earlier, he told The Georgia Bulletin that he believed the real enemy to be not the abortionists, "but those of us who for the past 15 years have said, 'we agree with what you say, but...'"

Bishop Vaughan, a late arrival to the rally, said, "I came down here to save the babies ... I came down here to support dedicated people."

He compared the 25 million babies aborted since the Roe v. Wade decision made abortion legal in 1973 with the 11 million people estimated to have died in the Holocaust, and the 1.1 million fatalities resulting from all American wars.

"We believe the soul of every human being is created by God," he said, citing the uniqueness of mind, heart and mission in life of each individual.

One Operation Rescue leader, Michael McMonagle, quoted from Mayor Andrew Young. On black militancy in 1968 in fighting against job discrimination, he quoted the mayor as saying, "even if it means tying up the country, we'll have to do it." He went on to quote his remarks on "tying up" Bethesda Naval Hospital in Maryland "so no one can get in or out."

"Be willing to suffer," Joseph Foreman, Operation Rescue leader for Atlanta, told the crowd.