In the summertime of 1869, a 27-year-old Buffalo businessman and veteran of the Battle of Gettysburg boarded a steamship and set out on a weeks-long tour of the shoreline of Lake Erie. Like many others his age before and since, Nelson Henry Baker was in the hunt for that somebody or something that will give meaning and direction to his life. By summer’s end he knew what it was: He desired to be a priest.
So the next autumn Nelson Baker entered the seminary in Buffalo. During a pilgrimage to Europe together with his fellow seminarians, he had a profound spiritual experience on the shrine of Our Lady of Victories in Paris and directly resolved to return to his hometown and spend his life in her service. What followed was a wide ranging, trailblazing six-decades-long apostolic profession that rivals the earthly accomplishments of our biggest saints. In Lackawanna, N.Y., just south of Buffalo, Father Baker built what amounted to a small “city of charity”—a network of hospitals, schools, orphanages and other social services that in his time would serve tens of hundreds of individuals and serves hundreds more even today.
Father Baker didn’t act just to avoid wasting the infants’ lives; he worked to avoid wasting the lives and reputations of the moms as well.
I visited this Baker-ville and its one-of-a-kind French Rococo minor basilica the week after we learned that the U.S. Supreme Court is prone to overturn Roe v. Wade, the case that established a constitutional right to abortion. One might think that this news, in addition to the fiercely contested debate that it has sparked, are light years away from Father Baker’s America, that his time has little to say to ours. And yet a vital a part of his story suggests otherwise.
Within the spring of 1906, Father Baker began to read newspaper accounts of babies who had been abandoned, including “the stays of over 200 little ones…found in numerous stages of decay” within the Buffalo area. His biographer describes his response: “Mortified at such a wanton destruction of life, Baker, at all times a person of motion, knew something needed to be done.” He quickly established a house where moms could leave their babies anonymously, no questions asked. But Father Baker didn’t act just to avoid wasting the infants’ lives; he worked to avoid wasting the lives and reputations of the moms as well. “Our motive has been, no matter experience,” he wrote, “to guard the unlucky young mother and her family, and to avoid wasting the lifetime of the kid.”
Nelson Baker then was quick to acknowledge two realities, one among which will likely be disregarded in conversations about abortion, then and now. Father Baker was rightly horrified by the intentional killing of those vulnerable human beings. And he was also rightly horrified by the indisputable fact that he lived in a world wherein women may very well be driven to such extremes. In his revulsion, Father Baker could have hardened his heart and turned in self-righteous rage against these moms. As a substitute, he prolonged the identical compassion to them that had caused his heart to interrupt when reading reports about their babies, reasoning that any woman who could summon the desire to override her primordial maternal instinct and take her child’s life needed to be someone in desperate straits, someone as worthy of our mercy as her children were.
We’d like fewer polemics and far more compassion, especially of the sort Venerable Father Baker put into motion.
Debates about abortion today are too often polemical, impersonal, unfeeling. Too many on either side resort to name-calling, to uncharitable hyperbole, or cruel caricatures. People who find themselves pro-choice are called “baby killers.” People who find themselves pro-life are said to be “waging a war against women.” Neither charge is fair or helpful, or human. “What’s most needed in the general public debate on abortion,” the editors write on this issue, “is an honest moral reckoning with the 2 goods which might be in tension when a lady faces a pregnancy she feels she cannot proceed: her bodily integrity and private autonomy, and the dignity of the unborn life that’s entirely depending on her.”
One other way of putting that? We’d like fewer polemics and far more compassion, especially of the sort Venerable Father Baker put into motion. What he began as a house for infants who had been abandoned by their moms rapidly grew to develop into a maternity hospital as well, where unwed or troubled pregnant women may very well be cared for in safety and anonymity. In time, that became Our Lady of Victory Hospital, which served the people of Lackawanna—men, women and kids—for greater than 80 years.
All that happened because Father Baker opened his heart and mind to the people around him, a alternative that also set him on his path to sainthood. In writing to the benefactors of his home for infants and moms, Father Baker would often include this sentence: “The spirit of charity will certainly save innumerable souls.”
He might need added: “Starting along with your own.”