Now, fast forward a few years to Pavone’s YouTube video in November of 2016, stumping for president Trump. In this video, he places a baby on an altar and claims he borrowed it from a “Protestant Minister” who got it from a “pathologist” who removed it from an “abortion facility.” That video has been deleted, but you can still see still photos of the infant all over the internet with a simple google search. The baby on the altar is of an identical size to one of the babies in the coffin, and he or she is burned all black except for a bare patch on the buttocks and under the arm. To me it looks identical to one of the babies from 1978, identical to the smaller baby in the video in 2008 that was supposedly “subsequently buried,” identical as far as I can see to the small baby in the white coffin in 2012 which was going to be buried after the demonstrations. Pavone claims this baby was from a prostaglandin abortion, and that he was loaned to him from a “Protestant minister” who obtained him from a “pathologist” who took him from an “abortion facility.”
He then gave two conflicting statements about the baby’s burial. As I wrote before, on November 8th, 2016, Pavone posted an apology for his stunt on Youtube. In the video, he claims that “I’ve already celebrated that baby’s funeral, that baby is, is already, uh, laid to rest.” The video has since been deleted, but plenty of people watched and remarked upon it; here’s my colleague Keith Michael Estrada’s reaction.
Then, later, he told the National Catholic Register that he “he did not know when the baby would be buried. He said the body was out of his hands and back with the Protestant minister.”
I waited for three years for Pavone to answer any of my questions about where he’d gotten this infant, how old she or he was, and whether the baby had been buried. He only responded by blocking me on Facebook.
Finally, last month, Pavone emailed my editor a single jpeg of a certificate of burial, which I’m posting in its entirety here:
He claimed that this one document was proof that the baby from his 2016 stunt had been buried in a timely fashion. He also grouchily told me on Twitter that the baby was and had always been said to be the victim of a prostaglandin abortion, not saline. This is a certificate for someone named “baby Ryan,” whom I presume to be the baby with a black head and bare buttocks and underarms since the other baby was certainly a girl and “Ryan” isn’t usually a girl’s name. However, the baby with a black head and bare buttocks and underarms was referred to as a girl when he or she lay in the coffin in 2012– presuming that these identical-looking infants with identical burns are all the same. At any rate, Baby Ryan was stated to be born on 11-1-2016 and died the same day, and then buried on December 6th, 2016 at 10 AM with no outer burial container and no witnesses to the lowering. The certificate is not signed by Pavone but by Jerry Horn, a former Pentacostal minister who works for Priests for Life; his relation to the deceased is stated to be “friend.” The grave is in Albuquerque, New Mexico, but the document is notarized in Tennessee. Priests for Life is now located in Florida, though I believe it was still in New York in 2016.
I presume now that Jerry Horn is the unnamed “Protestant minister” who obtained the baby from a pathologist and loaned him to Pavone, at some point. His name is on the document and he’s a former Protestant minister, the only named Protestant minister in this story. If Horn was the one who was keeping the baby, we need to ask him what safety precautions he took when working with an old cadaver, and we also need to ask about the pathologist who as far as I can tell committed a crime in stealing the baby in the first place. I don’t see how it can be legal to take either medical waste or dead bodies out of a pathology lab and hand them off to a cleric like this. And it certainly isn’t ethical. It would be meritorious, in many cases, to break the law in order to give a person who was dehumanized and condemned to a violent death a proper burial. Breaking the law in order to keep the corpse of such a person as a trophy is the opposite.
Now here’s one last mystery.
Father Stephen Imbarrato, who used to work with Priests for Life, claims he was given the body of an unborn child named Ryan, by Priests for Life, in July of 2018, and that he held an official funeral on September 5th of that year. He shared photos on his own Twitter page of a gravestone with no date, and “In memory of Ryan and Eve, taken before birth, messengers for Life!” etched on it.
Is this the same Ryan that was supposed to be buried in 2016? If not, why does he have the same name? If intact aborted bodies are so very rare, why did they recycle the exact same name after only two years?
Is Ryan, if Ryan is the name of the baby on Pavone’s desecrated altar, really over forty years old? This seems to me to be the only possible explanation. I don’t find it credible that Priests for Life just happened to have multiple identical infants just the same size, with the exact same pattern of burns or bruises, kept in embalming fluid and displayed naked in identical coffins when convenient at this many times in the past.
Where is the other baby, the girl with the bare head, the one who had her genitals thrust at the camera by a doctor? Is she still in Pavone’s possession right now?
Who is the unknown pathologist who stole the bodies in the first place? Is Jerry Horn the minister who obtained them? And when?
Are we even sure how these babies died? Was it a prostaglandin abortion, saline, or something else?
How has Priests for Life operated for so long without being stopped by the Church, or by secular legal authorities for that matter? Is it legal to keep a preserved corpse in fluid, not in a morgue but in your own office, let alone two and for this long? It’s certainly against Catholic teaching to desecrate a corpse in this way. Bodies are temples of the spirit and required to be treated with respect. Burying the dead is a work of mercy– what we do to a corpse, is what we do to Christ.
Whatever’s going on, I think we all deserve an answer.
(first image via Pixabay, other images are my own screenshots)
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