BY C.S. DRAKE

LILBURN--During a workshop at St. John Neumann Church March 8, Brian Clowes, Ph.D., director of Human Life International (HLI), challenged Catholics to become active pro-lifers. The opposition's literature, as he proceeded to demonstrate, "will singe your eyebrows."

"They just don't see how dangerous the message of illicit freedom is to kids," Clowes told 60 participants from metro Atlanta and as far away as Athens and Lookout Mountain. "You're enslaved if you think you need these illicit freedoms."

Clowes, who substituted for HLI's president, Father Matthew Habiger, OSB, condensed the organization's 12-hour pro-life training course at the workshop sponsored by St. John Neumann pro-life ministry. HLI has 85 branches in 57 countries and ships 20 tons of reference material yearly.

Clowes discussed pro-life tactics, the pro-abortion mentality, and interconnected forces that HLI sees as both anti-life and as opposed to the well-being of families and society.

The key for the pro-life movement is to encourage new members to join pro-life efforts, thus keeping the movement fresh, and to learn how to debate "anti-lifers," Clowes said. Forces opposed to life see their mission as war, he said, while the faithful lack a battle mentality. In order to rouse the troops, HLI provides many examples of the opposition's goals. One illustration shown at the workshop, a cover of American Atheist magazine, caricatured Jesus as a disease being yanked from a patient's brain.

"The anti-lifers are effective because they have easily defined objectives--to mess up society," said Clowes. "Our job is not so easy: how to clean up the mess." He said the anti-life movement works this way: divorce separates spouses, abortion breaks the parent-child link and euthanasia eliminates grandparents. Homosexual activity and pornography do further damage, he said. The seemingly modern war between good and evil is as old as the Garden of Eden.

Those living in the 20th century have lost their sense of sin and fail to see Satan, so often wrapped in beauty, in their midst. To sum up succinctly, HLI, an ecumenical movement, quotes the Anglican clergyman Ronald Knox who found it stupid of modern civilization to give up believing in the existence of the devil "when he is the only explanation of it."

While some Catholics complain that the Church over-emphasizes the abortion issue and see no need to defend life, the forces actively pitted against them are all-pervasive but often subtle. Whatever reason Catholics have for failing to get involved, and there are many, HLI's challenge is clear: Sin is not only doing wrong but failing to do right.

Clowes, the father of seven, issued a wake-up call to those who do not realize how many abortions are performed every year in this country and why. The assumption that most abortions result from rape, incest, or saving a mother's life is simply not true, he pointed out. Only one-half of one percent derive from such hard cases, that is, fewer than 7,000 out of 1.5 million per year.

Making the abnormal accepted and widespread practice is, according to HLI, the tactic of anti-life and anti-family forces in the guise of equal protection under the U.S. Constitution. Clowes said, "They go for the hard case, and then everyone can do it." He said that the "slippery slope effect" operates on a personal and a national level. An if-it-feels-good-do-it attitude, over time, deadens the conscience. Nationally the country has advanced from forced sterilizations in the 1930s, to the 1960s sexual revolution, to the 1990s fetal organ harvesting.

Clowes told his audience that those who remain indifferent to how abortion affects them personally have not grasped the message of the Old and New Testament: If we won't hear the cries of the helpless, can we ourselvesbe heard?

How to turn the tide? Clowes cited a study of families who pray with their children and attend Mass together, compared to parents who do both and who are also active in one church activity, be it a soup kitchen or the pro-life effort. Eighty percent of children who see their parents actively involved will stay with the Church over time, while only 20 percent will do so otherwise. Clowes urges parents to "show your kids your faith has applicability in the real world."

He has additional recommendations for volunteers. To avoid burnout, they should focus on doing one thing well, be it organizational, inspirational, spiritual or technical. It is vital for pro-lifers to have a mission, make a plan containing workable steps, remain flexible, overcome obstacles with creativity (such as surprising the opposition), and keep learning. He cautions that newcomers to pro-life groups be screened carefully about their reasons for joining, because wrong motives, such as vengeance, could lead to violence.

According to HLI calculations, if there was only one pro-life person in the world, and this person recruited another, and each person recruited another, the whole world would be pro-life in less than a year. In addition to recruiting, demographics is a factor Clowes embraces with gusto. If present birth rates continue, pro-lifers will overwhelm anti-lifers by sheer numbers. He also said there are more pro-life teens now than in years past. Although he is confident that eventually pro-lifers will triumph, he said this fight is notabout winning, but rather as St. Paul wrote to the Corinthians, in knowing that one's labor for the Lord is not in vain.