Feature Article February 2008

A Catholic on the Front Lines of Politics

For the U.S. bishops' pro-life strategist, the fight against the culture of death is highly personal

By William Bole

(from the October 6, 1996, edition of OSV Newsweekly)

Richard Doerflinger was barely a teenager when a car carrying his brother Eugene and two college buddies skidded on an icy road in Poughkeepsie, N.Y.

It was a freak accident, as Doerflinger recalls. The two in the front were unharmed, but Eugene slid across the back seat and slammed his head into a metal coat hook.

The accident 30 years ago left Eugene in a vegetative state.

"The doctor's advice -- and I quote from my mother's very vivid memory -- was: 'Put him in an institution and forget you had a son. Just forget he was ever born, because there will never be any human contact with him ever again,' " Doerflinger told Our Sunday Visitor.

Doerflinger's parents ignored the doctors and took Eugene home, where they talked to him as though he could hear them -- and one day he did.

"He woke up," Doerflinger said. "He's very alert now. He does have some brain damage from the accident. [But] I play chess with him. Sometimes I win, occasionally he wins. Neither of us is very good."

Thoughts of Eugene are never far from Doerflinger's mind, whether at home in Silver Spring, Md., with his wife and four children, or in his untidy office at the U.S. bishops' Secretariat for Pro-Life Activities in Washington, where he is associate director of policy development.

"I think that at a fairly young age, I learned something about the uncertainties of medical science, but also about taking care of people even when you don't think they'll be able to thank you for it, something about giving life the benefit of the doubt," said Doerflinger.

…At the other end of the continuum of life, Doerflinger took a lead part in the lobbying drive to ban federal funding of embryo research, which nonetheless became law…

He also had a key role in legislation signed by President Clinton in April guaranteeing that no teaching hospital would lose its accreditation for refusing to teach abortion techniques, a matter of obvious concern to Catholic hospitals.
Always, Doerflinger's outlook on these matters of life, death and human dignity is more than academic -- it is deeply personal.

As an adult, he has seen both of his wife's parents die of cancer. His in-laws lived on the other side of the country, but the couple and their children were with them through much of the dying, at different times in a hospice in Washington state.

Doerflinger knows the agony of watching loved ones as their bodies deteriorate, "but I think the physical suffering is almost nothing compared to the love and solidarity in the family that could be brought forth by a crisis like that," he said. "The most agonized suffering is the suffering of loneliness and alienation, and the feelings of worthlessness that so many people are in danger of in our society."

On his side of the family, his older brother Eugene must contend with permanent physical disabilities, aside from the brain damage.

As Doerflinger sees it, this is mostly because after the accident, doctors did not reset his brother's dislocated shoulder or give active physical therapy for his legs, since Eugene wasn't supposed to regain consciousness.
"So a lot of the problems he does have is that doctors gave up on him and really didn't know what was going to happen," Doerflinger pointed out.

Now, though mentally impaired and confined to a wheelchair, Eugene holds down a part-time job in Long Island and goes to museums with his brother during visits to Washington.

"When I hear about families who say they are burdened and stressed out and stretched to their limits by the need to take care of sick or disabled relatives, I know very well what they're talking about. But I think it's also a test of us as human beings. It's a test of our society, how we respond to things like that," Doerflinger asserted.

"And it's a test of our Christianity, for those of us who are Christians. It goes back to what Jesus said about those who only do good to people who can do good to them in return. If you take people to dinner who can take you to dinner -- well, any pagan can do that. The real test is caring for and doing good for the people who can't thank you, who can't respond likewise."

Bole is a senior correspondent for Our Sunday Visitor

Update: Richard Doerflinger still works for the Pro-Life Department of the USCCB. Prayer for him and for all who give their lives for such causes in our political system.