Florida bishop: Social worker pressured my mother to abort me
May 10, 2010
In a diocesan magazine column, Bishop Victor Galeone of St. Augustine recounts that a social worker threatened to take away the family’s benefit cards during the Great Depression if his mother-- an Italian immigrant with a third-grade education-- did not abort her fourth child. The future bishop’s father responded, “Let them have their cards back! The Lord will provide.”
“For the first time in my life-- on learning how close I had come to not seeing the light of day-- I fully realized what a precious gift life is,” the prelate remarked as he recalled a 1970 conversation with his mother.
Born in 1935 in Philadelphia, Bishop Galeone was ordained a priest of the Archdiocese of Baltimore in 1960. A missionary in Peru from 1970 to 1975, and again from 1978 to 1985, he was appointed Bishop of St. Augustine in 2001.
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