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Pro-Lifers' Faith Inspires New Priest

On Divine Mercy Sunday in April, 1992, the 27-year-old director of Defend Life approached Defend Life founder Jack Ames after Mass.

“You’ll have to find yourself a new director,” he told the startled Ames.

“I’m joining the Legionaries of Christ.”

Charles Sikorsky was ordained a Legionary priest in Rome on Christmas Eve, 2002.

Back in Baltimore for a short visit, in his sermon at a Mass he celebrated March 8 for his old pro-life friends, he paid tribute to them.

“Your enthusiasm and your faith helped me grow deeper in my faith and my relationship with Jesus Christ,” he said.

Father Sikorsky urged the pro-lifers “to find time for Christ in prayer and the sacraments; that will be the motor that keeps us going in the fight against the culture of death.”

After the Mass, held in Our Lady’s Chapel at the Cathedral of Mary Our Queen, Father Sikorsky reminisced about the path that led him to become a Legionary priest.

“I came in contact with people who took their faith seriously,” he said.

A Calvert Hall graduate, he had gone on to Johns Hopkins University where, he said, “I wasn’t really that serious about my faith.”

But around 1984-’85 he underwent a “repentance” experience:  “I saw where my life was going too far on the wrong side; I needed to change.”

Some of his friends had gotten into a form of Evangelism and he joined them in Bible studies.

“But I had my Catholic formation, and some of the things they said, I couldn’t square with Catholic teaching,” he recalled.

Still, he hadn’t yet grasped “the deep meaning” of the sacraments, and there were many “nominal” Catholics around to help dull that meaning.

Graduating with a degree in political science in 1986, he entered the University of Maryland Law School, where his pro-life instincts bristled at the unquestioned dominance of the pro-abortion feminists on campus.

“No one would question them or say anything.  I realized we were conceding to immoral principles.”

Charles started Law Students for Life, whose members stirred things up by posting pictures of aborted babies.

“Everyone liked to talk about abortion in the abstract,” he explained.

The Law Students for Life got called into the dean’s office.

“Of course, you have a constitutional right to do that, but most people are turned off by it,” the dean told them.

The furor over the graphic posters generated a heated debate in the school newspaper.

Around this time, Sikorsky saw a Defend Life poster at St. Mark’s Church in Catonsville, and went to a Defend Life-sponsored talk by Fr. Paul Marx at Loyola College.

He contacted Jack Ames, who soon put him to work.  One of his first chores was chauffeuring Notre Dame Law School Professor Charles Rice to various Defend Life talks.

“In his talks, he made the point that we needed to pray the Rosary,” Charles recalled.  “I had thought that was for little old ladies, but here was this ex-Marine doing it.  So I started saying the Rosary.

“The more I got involved in pro-life, the more I realized that this is a spiritual war.”

By 1990, Sikorsky had graduated from law school and was working for a law firm.  He also became director of Defend Life.

As director, he arranged for six prominent pro-life speakers a year at Loyola College.  The speakers also gave talks at schools and did interviews on WCBM and local Christian radio stations.

Other activities flowed from the talks:  picketing, work with Operation Rescue, Rosaries at Planned Parenthood.

When Pro-Life Action League Director Joe Scheidler came to Baltimore for a talk, Sikorsky engineered a startling coup.

He had been amassing a dossier documenting the pro-abortion, anti-life bias of the Baltimore Sun.

In an effort to correct this bias, Sikorsky arranged for a meeting with four Sun editors, including the editorial page editor, and the publisher.

Accompanying the dynamic young, 6-foot-4 attorney and former college basketball star were Ames, Scheidler and local pro-life activist Sheila Wharam.

“It was a very cordial meeting, but nothing was accomplished,” recalled Ames; “they had been telling their lies for so long, they believed them.

“Joe Scheidler was speaking that night, and Charles asked them, as a gesture of good will, to cover the talk:  they had never covered one of our talks.

“They just looked at each other.”

Sikorsky learned from the apparently unsuccessful event, however.  He saw that Scheidler, instead of becoming discouraged, “was more active than ever.”

Scheidler’s example of going to daily Mass made a deep impression on Sikorsky as well, and he began following the older man’s example.

“God was working on my conscience,” he reflected.

The young attorney had a girlfriend and was planning on getting married.  But thoughts that he might have a vocation to the priesthood, dormant since his days at Calvert Hall, began to reassert themselves.

At a pro-life conference in Washington, D.C., Sikorsky stopped at a table set up by the Legionaries of Christ.

Talking to one of the Legionaries, he was amazed to learn that the young priest was the son of Professor Charles Rice.

It seemed providential.

The Legionary invited him to a retreat at the order’s seminary in Cheshire, Conn.

“They had a program called Test Your Call,” said Charles’ mother, Helen.  “He went twice for retreats – that was it!”

Sikorsky underwent a two-year novitiate in Connecticut, which he described as “basically, a ‘detox’ from the world – a trial period to see if you have a vocation.”

Two years in Rome followed, during which he studied philosophy, Italian and Spanish, and discovered the “siesta” – a necessity after an exhausting morning of study.

Then it was off to Chile for a four-year apostolic internship:  “another period of trial to see if what we learned in the seminary, we could live out,” he explained.

Two more years in Rome, studying theology, completed his preparation for his ordination in 2002.

He finished his masters in canon law last summer and is presently doing administrative work for the Legion.

Founded by Fr. Marcial Maciel in Mexico City in 1941, the fast-growing, conservative order has nearly 700 ordained priests, 2,500 minor seminarians, and over 60,000 members of Regnum Christi, a Legionary group for lay people who want to live their faith more deeply and do apostolic work.

The order operates 120 schools and 10 universities worldwide, and has recently constructed four new seminaries, three in Brazil and one in Columbia, said Father Sikorsky.

Pope John Paul II has directed the Legion to start a seminary in Rome for the formation of diocesan priests from America, he said.

He also described some of their many charitable works, which include free or low-tuition schools for the poor in Latin America and projects to help Spanish-speaking immigrants in Florida.

Reflecting on Father Sikorsky’s path to the priesthood, Ames declared, “I think the moral of this story is, when you’re out there evangelizing for life, you never know what can happen!”