My prolife protest: being prolife should mean more than just using your car as a billboard. Instead, buckle up and go pitch in with the life that's all around.

We Catholics are supposedly for life, aren't we? "Prolife" as opposed to "pro-death" or "anti-life," one imagines. Some of us are fond of going to rallies and prayer services for life, even taking buses to Washington, D.C. and our state capitals for the purpose of demonstrating for life. The press has found a few of us especially picturesque, kneeling on the sidewalk with hands outstretched, clutching crucifixes, eyes closed. We carry signs and placards, we listen to those with modest name recognition make speeches excoriating the pro-death forces. We wear our little fetus feet pins and our red rose iron-on patches and make fine distinctions about ordinary versus extraordinary means of prolonging life. We talk solemnly about "speaking truth to power."

We can be such hypocrites.

We are prolife as long as it doesn't bother us too much personally. As long as it grows silently in some stranger's uterus, we're for it. As long as it lies more or less quietly for years in a hospital bed somewhere, we're for that, too. But let it squawk through the homily in the pew behind us and we're not so prolife anymore, are we? Oh, sure, if it's in the arms of a nicely dressed couple who are in church with their four other cute kids, that's one thing. But if it mewls in the arms of a single mother in jeans, while her 2-year-old has been running his toy truck over the kneeler for the last 15 minutes, quite a few of our thoughts are definitely not pro-those-particular-lives.

How about when the 15-year-old daughter of our parish religious educator turns up pregnant? How prolife are the remarks about that situation? When the man with mental retardation and his girlfriend who mumble loudly through all the prayers look as though they're going to sit in our pew, do we smile and slide over? Or do we act as though we don't see them? We're not so pro-those-particular-lives, are we?

When Mr. Tortella, who has sat in front of us at the 9:30 Mass for seven years, ends up in the hospital with a stroke, do we visit him? Do we know about it? Do we even know his name? What if he ends up in rehab for two months? Will we make sure someone brings him Communion? Will we offer to drive him to Mass? Will we be pro-Mr. Tortella's-life?

When Mrs. Cadiz develops Alzheimer's, who visits? Who sits with her and prays the rosary long after she no longer recognizes her own husband? How many in our parish sit at home, stunned by loneliness? How many can no longer drive and no longer come to church? How pro-these-particular-lives are we?

Going to prolife demonstrations and prayer services, standing in parking lots with pictures of aborted fetuses and persons in persistent vegetative states, expressing our horror at how many Catholics vote for politicians who have supported abortion, listening to speeches, and boldly stating our views to those who disagree with us is way too easy, and it's not enough. These prolife activities have true meaning only after we have thoroughly and lovingly addressed the needs of the particular lives around us. Before we identify ourselves as "prolife," let's see if we're willing to pay the cost in five particular areas:

SUPPORT PREGNANT TEENAGERS

1. Know the names. It's very difficult to be pro-a-particular-life unless you are already on speaking terms with it and have been for some time. If I don't know the name of the person who sits beside me at Mass, saying, "I hear you've got cancer and I'm here to support you!" probably won't work out all that well at the hospital. It's not much, really, knowing the names, but surprising how difficult. Often we don't remember them from week to week and have to ask again and again. Once we have the name and use it, even if it's all we do, we have at least a rudimentary personal relationship. However brief our conversations, however superficial, we have a connection that counts when times are tough. It's ridiculous to say we're prolife if we can't be bothered to learn the names of those lives with whom we worship.

2. Get real. People are people, not objects waiting for our good deeds to be wreaked upon them. We've all had our smug little do-good moments where we swoop in on some identified person in need and drop off a turkey, sing some Christmas carols in the nursing home, put in a few hours cleaning up a yard or working in the soup kitchen. These are good and even necessary things, but they are a form of tourism in the land of poverty and loneliness. We make a visit, see what the natives look like, and come home feeling fine. The excursion has cost us a little time, and maybe a little money, but no real personal involvement.

3. Be in it for the long haul. If we're going to call ourselves prolife, we have to take the risk of making a commitment. Maybe one pass at the soup kitchen will become a Thursday night routine. Maybe Christmas carols at the nursing home will become visiting with Mrs. Olivier and doing her nails every Sunday afternoon. Maybe the Thanksgiving turkey basket will become teaching a father how to read. Hit-and-run good deeds are a way of insulating ourselves from the uncomfortable truth that we are all persons in need. Being prolife means that we share our lives, not only our means; it means we keep it up week after week, long after the tour is done.

4. Offer an antidote for loneliness. What happens when someone's spouse dies? We usually send a card. "You're in our prayers," we say. Any widow will tell you that's code for "You're in our prayers but crossed off our phone list."

Widows quickly discover that in mixed company they are like a third leg on a chicken. Do we organize at least part of our lives to casually include singles as well as couples? Is there room at our table for someone who would otherwise be alone on Sunday? And when she asks if she could bring something, do we say, "Oh no, just yourself"? Or do we eagerly ask her to bring her World Famous Chocolate Cake if it isn't too much trouble?

No one wants to be invited as an act of mercy; we want to be part of the action, whether it's bringing a cake or helping watch the toddlers or slicing the cucumbers in a pickle-making enterprise. Having, as one parish bulletin proclaimed, a "Parish Thanksgiving Dinner for the Needy and Lonely" the week before Thanksgiving is short of the mark. Being prolife means that we organize our lives and our parish community to meaningfully include single people, and that we are willing to disrupt our own comfort to do so. It means that we issue invitations not only for ceremonial holiday meals but for casual errands, for parish activities and chores, for last-minute get-togethers, for boring tasks as well as celebrations, and that we intentionally and regularly break the couples-and-families-only mold of social interactions.

5. Overcome class distinctions. Look around after Mass this Sunday. Notice who talks to whom and who walks away alone. We might deny it vociferously, but there's a hierarchy in our parish. We talk to the people we know, of course, but we tend to know the people who are like us. Gravel contractors and lawyers and doctors and teachers are somehow more likely to be engaged in genial conversation with one another after Mass, laughing, lingering in the aisle. People who are well-dressed by the standards of our parish are more likely to be found chatting together. Sometimes the priest seems to have more time for the accountant and his son, interrupting the conversation for a few handshakes and "Thank you, Fathers" from the less apparently successful.

It may be that the elderly guy in the ratty raincoat was once the parish council president and personally laid out the garden by the side of the rectory, but that was 30 years, several priests, and two strokes ago when his wife was still alive. Nobody remembers. The new movers and shakers in the parish don't notice him. The distracted middle-aged woman who leaves quietly may have been caring for her brain-damaged husband at home for the past 10 years, but she's too tired to be outgoing, and nobody offers her a hello. The guy in jeans and a T-shirt did just get out of jail for the third time, and was, indeed, out most of last night drinking, and nobody, but nobody, is going to make eye contact with him.

If we're going to proclaim our prolife credentials, we have to go out of our way to know about lives that don't look like ours, to see to it that certain lives are not marginalized in our parish, to include those who can no longer or could never include themselves. We have to see those lives that are invisible to us until there is no "them" but only "us."

Before we go on any more marches or rallies, before we go to another prayer vigil for life, before we buy another prolife bumper sticker, let's check out our prolife credentials. Are we prolife, or just pro-certain-kinds-of-life?

* Do we greet people who are different from us and then feel smugly proud of our inclusiveness, or do we have genuine conversations with one another?

* Do we sniff at the adolescents with multiple piercings and weird hair, judging their parents to be dismal failures, or do we welcome them with affection and good humor?

* How do we treat the pregnant teenager and her parents? Do we focus as much on the commandment that she's obviously keeping as on the one that she and someone else--and more than a few of us--have broken?

* Do we know who's in the hospital, who's in the nursing home, who needs a ride, who needs a hand with a toddler or a teenager or falling-apart front steps? Do we know this not because of any list but because we know one another?

* Have we made a personal, practical commitment to sharing time every week with someone whose life is fragile or lonely or who is struggling financially or emotionally? As long as we turn our backs and avert our eyes from the already-born, our prolife rallies are just a lot of noise.

As long as members of our parishes lie forgotten in nursing homes, we should keep our mouths shut about end-of-life morality. When each of us, individually, is holding a hand that needs to be held, and when we all reach beyond the comfort of our own living rooms and kitchen tables and familiar pews to reach those hands, we won't need little pins to identify ourselves as prolife.

When anyone looking at our parish can see that we love and care for one another in practical ways, that we cherish our crying babies and our magenta-haired adolescents, that we revere our elders, and that hospitals, nursing homes, prisons, and mental institutions are full of Catholics visiting our brothers and sisters, we won't need prolife bumper stickers. Our lives themselves will declare life, and the whole world will know. Then it will mean something.

ANN LEBLANC, author of How to Go To Confession If You Don't Know How (St. Anthony Messenger Press, 2003).