This reflection names the deaths of three children, severe mental illness, and abortion. It is pastoral, not a legal brief. If you are in crisis, call or text 988, or call 911.
I want to say the names first.
Cora was five.
Dawson was three.
Callan was eight months old.
On Friday, a jury in Plymouth finished seven days of deliberation and could not agree whether their mother, Lindsay Clancy, was criminally responsible for strangling them in January 2023. The judge declared a mistrial. The note from the jury began the only way a note like that can begin: with a heavy heart.
That is the right first sentence. The law is still unfinished. The children are not.
A clip of Archbishop Fulton Sheen has been circulating again — words from the mid-1970s, not long after Roe. He told the women in the room to think how many mentally disturbed women America would have in ten or fifteen years, “when the guilt of abortion begins to attack the mind and soul.” People justify it now, he said, because everyone is doing it, and because they have learned to call the child “scar tissue.” Then he told the story of a doctor who asked a girl the question that still will not die:
What did you intend to call the scar tissue?
Sheen was not preaching the Clancy trial. He was naming a specific wound: abortion guilt swallowed, delayed, and later erupting in the mind and soul. Lindsay Clancy’s defense is postpartum psychosis after birth — a rare and severe break, not the same thing. A chaplain who collapses those two stories into one slogan is not being faithful. He is being convenient.
But some things still connect. Not as a proof-text. As a pastoral position.
The Child Is Never Tissue
Sheen’s doctor line still cuts because it refuses the rename.
Cora, Dawson, and Callan had names. They were not symbols in a mental-health debate. They were not evidence in a culture war. They were children.
“Children are a heritage from the Lord, offspring a reward from him.” — Psalm 127:3 (NIV)
Any Christian word about this case that does not start with their deaths is already off the rails. The courtroom can argue responsibility. The Church does not get to argue whether they counted.
“In the same way your Father in heaven is not willing that any of these little ones should perish.” — Matthew 18:14 (NIV)
Motherhood Can Break
Sheen expected a harvest of wounded women because he believed the maternal soul is real. It can be formed. It can be injured. It can collapse.
The Clancy trial put that wound on television: a labor-and-delivery nurse, a mother of three, a suicide attempt, paralysis, years in a hospital, a nation arguing whether she was a murderer or a patient. The hung jury is the culture saying it cannot decide.
A pastor does not have that luxury.
He holds both truths in the same hands: grave illness is real, and three children are still dead. Compassion that erases the children is not compassion. Judgment that pretends the mind cannot break is not righteousness.
“The Lord is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit.” — Psalm 34:18 (NIV)
Closeness to the brokenhearted is not the same thing as rewriting what happened in the basement.
Suppression Has a Cost
Sheen’s larger point was not “women will go crazy.” It was that unconfessed guilt and unhealed interior collapse do not stay quiet. They come out sideways — psychosis for some, rage for others, numbness, addiction, the slow death of the capacity to see a child as a child.
A society that only has two boxes — fully culpable monster or no agency at all — will keep hanging juries. The Church’s older language is sharper. Sin, sickness, responsibility, and mercy can exist in the same soul. We do not have to pick one word and throw the others away.
“If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness.” — 1 John 1:9 (NIV)
Confession is not public relations. It is not a diagnosis. It is truth named in the presence of a God who is both faithful and just. Sheen said suppressed guilt remains “unless it’s forgiven.” That is still the door.
Mercy Is Not Denial
Pastoral care here is not “she’s a victim, end of story.” It is not “lock her up and move on.”
It is this order:
The children first.
Then the husband who came home to that basement.
Then a woman whose mind and body are wrecked.
Then a culture that medicalizes everything except the sacredness of the small.
Sheen’s remedy was not a clip. It was confession — truth named, guilt not managed but forgiven, the child not renamed as tissue.
“He has shown you, O mortal, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.” — Micah 6:8 (NIV)
Justice without mercy becomes cruelty. Mercy without justice becomes a lie. Humility is what keeps a chaplain from using either word as a weapon.
Do Not Use the Dead as a Proof-Text
It would be cheap to say “Sheen called it” and point at Duxbury.
He called a specific spiritual consequence of abortion. This trial is about filicide and postpartum psychosis. The honest pastoral tie is narrower and heavier:
We have built a world that is very good at explaining away the child and very poor at healing the mother. When the explanation fails, we get seven days of deadlock and a note that begins, “It is with a heavy heart.”
“Learn to do right; seek justice. Defend the oppressed. Take up the cause of the fatherless; plead the case of the widow.” — Isaiah 1:17 (NIV)
The fatherless in this story are three children who will not grow up. Justice starts there. Forgiveness does not step over their bodies to get to a more comfortable conversation.
A Nation That Prays for Both
The call is not another argument. The call is a nation that still knows how to pray for forgiveness and justice in the same breath.
Forgiveness — because we have learned to speak about children as problems, tissue, timing, and choice, and we need to be cleaned of that speech.
Justice — because Cora, Dawson, and Callan were not abstractions, and a people who cannot tell the truth about the small will not tell the truth about anything else.
“When justice is done, it brings joy to the righteous but terror to evildoers.” — Proverbs 21:15 (NIV)
Pray for the jury that carried a heavy heart.
Pray for the district attorney who now has to decide what faithfulness looks like in a retrial.
Pray for every mother in the dark who is afraid to say how bad it has gotten.
Pray for every father who does not know how to walk back into a quiet house.
And pray that we would stop renaming children so we can bear what we have done.
I sit with men inside. I sit with families outside. I have learned this much: presence without truth is sentiment. Truth without mercy is a hammer. Jesus refuses both.
A Chaplain’s Prayer
Father of mercies and God of all comfort,
we come with names in our mouths.
Cora. Dawson. Callan.
They were Yours before they were anyone else’s.
We ask You to hold Patrick in the rooms that will never sound the same.
We ask You to deal justly and mercifully with Lindsay — not as a mascot, but as a soul. You see the mind that broke and the children who died. We do not. Teach us not to pretend we do.
Forgive this nation for every place we have called a child tissue, inconvenience, or afterthought.
Give us justice that will not look away from the small.
Give us mercy that will not lie about the wound.
Give us humility to walk with the broken without using them.
Make us a people who can pray for forgiveness and justice in the same sentence, and mean both.
In the name of Jesus, who welcomed the little ones and still does.
Amen.
If this landed heavy, that is appropriate. You do not have to turn it into content. You can pray the names. You can ask the Lord to search your own speech about children. You can refuse the two boxes.
If you need someone to sit with you — not to win an argument, but to pray, open Scripture, and walk at a human pace — that is part of what chaplaincy is for. You can reach me through family support, the statement of faith, or the resources on this site.
Grace to you.
From a chaplain’s heart.