Good Catholics: The Battle over Abortion in the Catholic Church. Berkeley CA, USA: University of California Press, 2014978-0-520- 95827-2(e-book)

Introduction: The Virgin, The Saint, and The Nun

Everything you need to know about the Catholic Church and women can be ascertained from the front doors of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City. There, six notable American Catholics are immortalized in statues set in the massive bronze doors of the entryway. St. Joseph and St. Patrick occupy the uppermost niches; the martyred Jesuit Isaac Jogues resides in the middle left panel. The three remaining statues occupying the middle right panel and the lowermost reaches of the door are of women. There is Kateri Tekakwiyha, a Mohawk-Algonquian convert to Catholicism who is best known for taking a vow of chastity and dying a virgin at age twenty- four. There is Elizabeth Ann Seton, the founder of the Sisters of Charity, who is famous for being the first native-born American saint. And there is Mother Cabrini, an Italian nun known for her charity work among poor Italian immigrants. All three are now recognized by the church as saints for their various works and purported miracles, although neither Seton nor Tekakwiyha was a saint when the doors were dedicated in 1949.

Virgin, saint, and nun. This is how the Catholic Church sees the ideal woman: chaste, selfless, dedicated to serving others. And positioned decidedly below men in the hierarchy of the sexes. Pope John Paul II was a huge proponent of this idealized view of women, and it has permeated the official theological discourse of the church since the beginning of his reign in 1978. He was forever extolling the special “genius” of women to serve others. “For in giving themselves to others each day women fulfill their deepest vocation,” he wrote in his Letter to Women. He had to do theological gymnastics to explain why women were just as “human” as men but could not be priests because they weren’t the same as men; they were “different and complementary” and fulfilled their authentic “reign” as wives and mothers.

Although the church lionizes motherhood as woman’s true role and purpose, having babies involves the messy realities of sex, which the Catholic Church has never been very good at grappling with. It has always considered celibacy a holier state than marriage. Sex is associated with the fall of man; with sin; with Eve, the temptress. This central contradiction of Catholicism is embodied in the Virgin Mary: virgin and mother, a state unachievable by actual flesh-and-blood women. For some 2,000years the Catholic Church has tried, largely in vain, to reconcile its horror of sex with the realities and necessity of human reproduction, mostly notably by attempting to proscribe any sexual activity not directly related to reproduction or any interference with the generative process that would sever sex from the sanction of pregnancy – the only thing, so the church fathers believed, which prevented the world from being consumed by unbridled lust, lost in a frenzy of fornication.

It is women who have borne the brunt of these proscriptions, limited in their ability to control their fertility just as the settled lifestyle and relatively stable food supply of the agricultural revolution decreased the interval between pregnancies and dramatically increased the number of children a woman could expect to bear in her lifetime. At the same time, the church denied women the agency to modify these restrictions on fertility management to better fit the realities of bearing and raising children. They were prevented from studying theology or becoming priests, which meant they could not rise through the ranks to become members of the magisterium–the bishops and cardinals, and ultimately the pope–who determine church doctrine. This book is the story of how women asserted their agency by reinterpreting Catholic doctrine to better capture its historical and theological nuance regarding sex and reproduction and their lived reality as members of the church. It is not the story of women alone; men also took part in the process of developing and promoting a progressive theology that recognized birth control and abortion as moral options. But they are of necessity its locus for the simple reason that lack of access to abortion and contraception is felt more keenly by women and by that fact alone the relationship between women and the Catholic Church is uniquely fraught.

The Catholic Church officially has prohibited abortion and birth control throughout most of its history, although, as I show, not for the reasons most people think and with a surprising lack of distinction between the two. Today, the issue of abortion has come to define, and in many ways divide, the Roman Catholic Church. But when I was growing up in a middle-class Catholic community in the northern New Jersey suburbs in the 1970s and 1980s, no one mentioned abortion. Priests did not inveigh against it from the pulpit on Sundays. The teachers in the parochial schools I attended, many of them nuns, managed to discuss religion, politics, and human sexuality without ever saying the word. I never knew a single person in our large and vibrant parish who went to an anti-abortion march nor saw a single piece of anti-abortion literature. And our parish was not an exception. I had cousins and friends in parishes throughout the Irish, Italian, and Polish enclaves of North Jersey; my brother and sister went to different Catholic high schools than I did; my family attended mass at different shore churches over the course of many summers (where the priests not only never mentioned abortion, but gave mercifully short, doctrine-free sermons designed to get the faithful to the beach with all due haste). Abortion was not something most Catholics worried or talked about. How, I wondered, did that change? How did abortion go from being a non-issue in the lives of most Catholics to the issue that defines Catholicism today? And what effect has this elevation of abortion as a central concern had on the church and on the United States at large? This book attempts to answer these questions.

As I sought answers, I was surprised to find how much unrecognized influence the hierarchy of the Catholic Church in America, the bishops and cardinals of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, has had on the anti-abortion movement. This book details how they created the modern anti-abortion movement to camouflage their own lobbying against the expansion of abortion rights and then lost control of the movement at the very moment that Roe v. Wade made it essential. It shows how the U.S. bishops created the use of abortion as a wedge issue in modern presidential campaigns, a tactic that was picked up and used with stunning success by the Christian Right. And it shows how despite the high-profile anti-abortion activism of the Christian Right over the past thirty years, it is the Catholic bishops who in many ways have been the most persistent and successful opponents of legalized abortion.

Good Catholics tells the story of the nearly fifty-year struggle in the Catholic Church over abortion, as progressives and conservatives battled it out over the moral acceptability of the procedure and whether Catholics have the right to disagree with the leadership of the church on the issue. It is the interwoven story of two forces. On one side is the all-male leadership of the church–the pope and the bishops who compose the magisterium, which is popularly known as the “hierarchy” (and which progressive Catholics are quick to note is not the “church,” which is made up of the hierarchy and the lay Catholics who receive their teaching). On the other side are Catholics – lay, consecrated religious, and clerical – who believe that there is room in Catholic teaching and tradition for Catholics to support abortion rights and even to chose abortion as a moral option. They have not only provided a crucial backstop to the political power of the hierarchy both nationally and internationally but have helped modern Catholics deal realistically with difficult issues like comporting church doctrine with democratic participation. I show that the way these two forces have interacted over the past five decades on the issue of abortion has affected not only the Catholic Church but also the very woof and warp of U.S. politics in ways that are not widely recognized.

The book is divided into two halves. The first half traces the development of a distinctly Catholic pro-choice movement. It tells the story of the first Catholic women to publicly challenge the hierarchy on the practice of birth control and abortion in an era when it was widely assumed that all Catholics believed what the magisterium told them to believe. It simultaneously traces the development of the secular abortion rights movement through the 1960s and 1970s to show how it interacted with nascent Catholic feminism to create a Catholic movement in support of abortion rights. It then details the struggle of this movement, and its flagship organization, Catholics for a Free Choice ([CFFC], which is now known as Catholics for Choice [CFC]) to establish itself in the 1970s and 1980s and the concurrent maturation and professionalization of the abortion rights movement. The first half concludes by recounting the historic battle over abortion and dissent occasioned when conservative bishops called out vice presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro during the 1984 presidential election for her support of CFFC’s contention that good Catholics, including Catholic politicians, can support abortion rights. The result was a landmark statement on abortion and pluralism that changed forever the perception of abortion and Catholics.

The second half of the book details how the U.S. bishops’ conference evolved into a freestanding political lobby that aggressively represents its own interests in the political process, a transformation that most Americans were unaware of until the bishops almost derailed President Barack Obama’s health reform effort with their insistence that it contain new limits on abortion funding. It shows how the 1984 confrontation over pro-choice Catholics triggered an unprecedented Vatican crackdown on dissent in the church that raged from the mid-1980s onward. I illustrate how this war against progressive dissent changed the church and moved the hierarchy away from balanced, reasonable participation in the political process toward a tacit alliance with the Republican Party. This alliance eventually evolved into a far-right coalition comprising the Catholic bishops, conservative elements of the GOP, and the Catholic and Christian Rights that seeks to further limit access to abortion, undercut support for family planning, and create new rights for religiously affiliated organizations in civil society. In particular, I argue, Pope John Paul II’s deliberate conflation of abortion and contraception eventually “infected” the Christian Right and led to the current anti-birth control environment that threatens funding for Planned Parenthood and other efforts to ensure access to contraception.

The remainder of the book shows how the hierarchy’s political absolutism has played out in a number of areas, from highly charged UN conferences on development and women’s issues, to health care in the United States, where hospitals affiliated with the church provide health care to one out of six Americans in any given year and church-affiliated health maintenance organizations (HMOs) participate in government-financed public health plans yet are expected to follow the limitations that the hierarchy puts on the provision of reproductive health services. The book details how the Catholic Church got involved in health care and how the bishops control what services can be provided. It also shows how the bishops have fought for exemptions to allow Catholic health and social service agencies to refuse to provide reproductive health services or serve populations they find morally objectionable, a quest that came to a head in a dramatically public manner when the U.S. bishops challenged the Obama administration’s mandate that all health insurers make contraceptives available to women free of charge.

Good Catholics addresses many of today’s hot-button questions about the separation of church and state and the role of religion in the public square. Are Catholic public officials obligated by their religion to try and insert Catholic doctrine into law? Are the Catholic bishops participating inappropriately in the political process when they consistently and harshly criticize one political party for disagreeing with select aspects of Catholic teaching on reproductive health while giving the other party a pass on social justice issues? What concessions does the civil system need to make for matters of religious doctrine like the Catholic ban on contraception, especially when most Catholics don’t follow the doctrine and the bishops wish to impose it on non-Catholics?

Good Catholics recounts a history of protest and persecution that has never been pulled together in one narrative and demonstrates the profound and surprising influence that the battle over abortion in the Catholic Church has had on the U.S. political system. The role of the hierarchy in creating the highly politicized political climate over abortion has not been well recognized, nor has the successful effort to create a space for pro-choice Catholicism, which has provided an important underpinning for Catholic politicians who favor abortion rights and had a profound cultural affect on the practice of Catholicism. I demonstrate how a relatively small number of committed individuals were able to effect change in society through the careful leveraging of a powerful, but controversial, idea in a number of areas: the media, state and national policymaking bodies, and international forums.

The sources I draw on to tell this story reflect my own background as journalist, specialist in women’s health policy, and independent scholar with a special interest in using primary sources to reconstruct historical events involving women, whose grassroots stories are often neglected by mainstream history. This book draws on the previously unexamined archival resources of Catholics for Choice, a repository of primary documentation of the abortion rights movement going back to the early 1970s and the only archive with extensive holdings related to the Catholic abortion rights movement; interviews with key participants in many of the events detailed; contemporaneous news coverage; and secondary sources, particularly early Catholic feminist texts and accounts of the early women’s and reproductive rights movements; and scholarly texts to create a narrative history of the Catholic reproductive rights movement.

In the end, this book is the history of an idea, an incredibly controversial, groundbreaking idea – that good Catholics can support abortion rights – and the people who have fought a nearly fifty-year battle to assert its legitimacy. Their success in doing so has important implications not just for Catholics and not just for women, but for anyone interested in religious pluralism in our democracy.