Remembering Dedicated Pro-lifer Dick Retta

On Christmas Day, RTL board member and longtime pro-life activist Richard Retta passed away.  Because of his tireless efforts as a sidewalk counselor, hundreds of innocent unborn children were spared from abortion.

In recent years, Dick held vigil Monday mornings at LeRoy Carhart’s late term abortion clinic.  The large signs of aborted children awakened locals to the atrocities happening boldly on Bethesda’s main thoroughfare.  He persevered in this effort til his last days.

In Dick’s retirement, he began praying outside local abortion facilities.  He became trained in sidewalk counseling and had great success in persuading abortion-minded women to choose life. 

Dick’s zeal for saving babies is well described by a friend’s tribute to him:  “Many years ago I told him that he was the Pete Rose of the sidewalk counselors.  When Pete Rose was seven hits away from 3,000, he was asked by a reporter how many at bats would it take him to get the seven hits.  Rose replied seven.  The reporter thought Rose was full of himself, but Rose replied that he was a professional and that if he didn’t think he could get a hit when he went to bat, he was in the wrong line of work.  Dick believed from his heart that whenever he spoke to a woman who was planning on an abortion, he could get her to choose life instead and hundreds of times he did….I have lost track of how many women he saved from abortion, but by now it is probably more than 700.  Until just before he died, he was sidewalk counseling at Carhart’s late term abortion mill in Bethesda.”

Well done good and faithful servant!  May you Rest In Peace.