Catholic pro-life leaders had an easy answer to this argument: church leaders of past centuries did not have the scientific knowledge of how conception actually worked and hence held mistaken views of when ensoulment took place and life began. Pro-choice critics scoffed at the hubris they detected in such a position. But whatever history said, CFFC founders believed the US bishops did not represent the views of most American Catholics. Like many others in the pro-choice movement, these pro-choice Catholics were convinced that Catholic pro-life leaders were motivated more by misogyny and fear of women’s freedom than by any consistent adherence to church dogma. To make the point as explicitly as possible, in 1974 McQuillan crowned herself “pope” in a public display at the entrance to New York’s historic St. Patrick’s Cathedral. The seeming ridiculousness of a woman in papal garb highlighted the entrenchment of male authority in Roman Catholic leadership. So long as female leaders were unthinkable, church leaders would inevitably uphold gender inequality and discrimination against women.
The most prominent leader of CFFC was Frances Kissling, who headed the organization for a quarter century, from 1982 to 2007. Kissling’s early life hardly portended such a career. Kissling was born Frances Romanski in New York City in 1943 to Polish American parents. After her parents divorced when she was six, she was adopted by her stepfather, Charles Kissling, and raised in a working-class family in Queens. The stepfather left some years later, refusing to support his wife and four children. Kissling went to an all-girls parochial grammar school and two all-girls Catholic high schools and continued her Catholic education into the early years of college, at which point she entered the Sisters of St. Joseph convent in Brentwood, Long Island.
She had dreamed of becoming a nun since admiring the sisters who taught her in school, and she spent about nine months as a postulant at the Long Island convent. When she initially decided to enter the convent, she discovered that she had been conceived out of wedlock (the convent required her parents’ wedding license along with her own birth certificate; her parents wed in February 1943, and she was born in June). The community initially balked at accepting Kissling for this very reason but eventually agreed to take her. As she later recalled, “They decided to make an exception, although it was very clear that they were forced to make the exception. And when I sort of decided to leave—with a little push—they were very glad I was going.” The mother superior told her, as she exited, “You know, we never wanted you.”59 This was a formative moment in Kissling’s understanding of the church’s rigid views on female sexuality and the corrupt sinfulness of women. Because Kissling could not believe in the Catholic Church’s strict views on marriage, divorce, and remarriage, she left the convent and entertained no further thoughts of becoming a nun.
After leaving, Kissling finished college at the New School in New York, where she became involved in Students for a Democratic Society. There, she would later note, “my politics changed dramatically, or I got politics that were mine.” Then in the fall of 1970, just after the legalization of abortion in New York, Kissling got a job running an abortion clinic, the Pelham Medical Group in Westchester. There she found herself in a world of “feminist women who wanted to see that women got well cared for.” Working in the clinic and seeing the care for the women who entered, she remembered, “that was the moment in which I became an active feminist.” Kissling would remain active in the abortion movement for the remainder of her career, working periodically for other clinics and then organizations such as International Projects Assistance Services (IPAS) that helped to establish clinics in other parts of the world. Like Moody, Kissling’s interest in this issue never had to do with population control; her interest was in the rights of women, and most notably the poor. “I’m on the side of the poor,” she reflected. “That probably historically has to do with A, the fact that I’m a working-class person who has been through a broken family with a mother who could just about put shoes on the feet of her children, so this is who I am.… And also as a Catholic due by the social mission of the Church and the notion that the poor should be our first priority.”60
By 1978, Kissling was invited to serve on the board of CFFC, then headed by Patricia McMahon. McMahon’s invitation to the board, Kissling later noted, was “the defining moment of my life,” the moment where she began at last to think about her Catholicism and her commitment to women and to pro-choice activism together. The deep appeal of CFFC was that it served as “a space where the moral dimensions of the issues could be explored”—moral dimensions that Kissling believed were being avoided by secular women’s rights groups such as NARAL, and were therefore conceded to the religious opponents of abortion. The women who sought abortions were always asking themselves the moral questions, wanting to know if their action was right or wrong, sinful or justified. “So in that context, both in terms of my Catholic background, in terms of my experience in the abortion clinic, it always seemed to me that the inability of the movement to deal with the moral questions was problematic for me first and foremost,” she later remembered. “And I also believed then, but even believe more strongly now, that the inability to deal with the question [of abortion] as a moral question undercuts the long term success of the pro-choice movement.”61
Through her work with CFFC, Kissling came to think much more deeply not only about ethics and morals concerning notions such as “life” and “choice” but also about what it meant to be a Catholic, eventually concluding that there are multiples ways to be Catholic and not simply one. Considering both historic and contemporary Catholic figures, she asked, “Was Joan of Arc a Catholic? I mean, she was a heretic one day and now she’s a saint. Is Hans Küng, who publicly rejects infallibility?… Are they Catholics? Is Pat Buchanan, who rejects the entire social justice teaching of the Church, a Catholic?” Only the “ultra orthodox” believed that the “identifying mark of who you are as a Catholic… is loyalty to the Pope.” Ultra-orthodox Catholics, she noted, had asked the pope repeatedly to excommunicate those they call “pro-abortionists” such as Kissling, but the Vatican authorities never did so. “And so, in the eyes of the Church, I am a Catholic. I may be a bad Catholic, I may be a good Catholic, I may be a misguided Catholic, but I am a Catholic. I choose to be a Catholic.… I don’t want to be anything else.”62
Around the time that Kissling became president of CFFC in 1982, she asked Geraldine Ferraro, a New York Democrat and member of the US House of Representatives, to hold a congressional briefing aimed at Catholic congressional leaders holding pro-choice views or a mixed voting record relating to abortion. A pro-choice Catholic herself, Ferraro did so, issuing a statement noting that “the Catholic position on abortion is not monolithic” and that there could be “a range of personal and political responses to the issue.” Ferraro’s own stance was that while she was personally opposed to abortion, she believed that the constitutional guarantee of religious liberty and the respect for other religious views necessary in a diverse civil society meant that a woman should have access to abortion and the freedom to have one if she so chose. Her public airing of that view would shortly reap trouble from Catholic leaders.63
Two years later, Democratic presidential candidate Walter Mondale named Ferraro his vice presidential running mate in the 1984 election. This move opened up the Democratic ticket to public excoriation, as Ferraro was roundly criticized by high-profile Catholic leaders such as John Cardinal O’Connor, the archbishop of New York, for what he deemed a willful perversion of the church’s position on abortion. O’Connor ignited a firestorm after he stated in a televised news conference that he could not fathom how a Catholic “in good conscience” could “vote for an individual explicitly expressing himself or herself as favoring abortion.”64 O’Connor rebuked Ferraro repeatedly in public for misrepresenting the church’s teaching on abortion, and church leaders in Philadelphia and Scranton, Pennsylvania, condemned her when she made campaign appearances in their regions. The eighteen Catholic bishops who served the church in New England d
eclared abortion “the critical issue of the moment” to make clear their preference for the Republican candidate, who had long identified himself as a staunch opponent of abortion. Bishops in other regions likewise made sure local parishioners knew their preference, even if they were careful not to officially endorse him. Critics protested that the church was “aggressively involved” in American politics to an inordinate degree; as one Democratic columnist complained, the church hierarchy was “acting like an arm of the Reagan re-election committee.”65
CFFC was determined to stand behind Ferraro and return fire. The group’s leaders pulled out a statement they had drafted some months earlier called “A Catholic Statement on Pluralism and Abortion” that stressed the fact that “a diversity of opinions regarding abortion exists among committed Catholics,” and now they decided to make it public. Circulating the statement—whose cowriters included the Catholic ethicist and theologian Daniel Maguire, a professor at the Jesuit-run Marquette University, and the Catholic attorney and theologian Marjorie Maguire, his wife at the time—organizers obtained numerous signatories from liberal Catholics, including nuns, priests, theologians, and Catholic academics of various sorts. With the presidential race heating up in the fall, CFFC advocates made plans to publish a full-page advertisement in the New York Times on Sunday, October 7, just a month before the election that pitted Walter Mondale and Ferraro against the popular incumbent Ronald Reagan and his running mate, George H. W. Bush. By the time the ad appeared, it had ninety-seven signatories, including twenty-six women serving as sisters in fourteen canonical communities, two priests, two lay brothers, and sixty-seven additional Catholic signers.66 CFFC claimed that scores of other priests, theologians, and other Catholic leaders had expressed support but had not publicly signed out of concern for losing their jobs.
The ad frankly and directly conveyed the reality that devout Catholics held many opinions about abortion and that even canonical teachings had not spoken with one voice throughout church history, as illuminated by shifting church doctrines on ensoulment over time. “A large number of Catholic theologians hold that even direct abortion, though tragic, can sometimes be a moral choice,” it stated, most particularly because of principles of moral theology such as religious liberty and conscience. The ad also cited poll data from the National Opinion Research Center showing that a mere 11 percent of Catholics disapproved of abortion regardless of the circumstance. Catholics ought to be able to discuss and publicly debate their views without fear of punishment from church authorities, and youth and families ought to be made fully aware of the “complexity of the issues of responsible sexuality and human reproduction.” Moreover, the ad argued, Catholics should not seek legislation that limited any citizen’s religious freedom and exercise of conscience or laws that discriminated against the poor. Above all, the signatories affirmed the belief “that responsible moral decisions can only be made in an atmosphere of freedom from fear or coercion.”67
The ad reaped tremendous publicity and a sharp reaction from the Roman Catholic hierarchy well beyond the United States. The Vatican weighed in, calling on canonical signatories—priests and other serving in official church roles—to retract their adherence to the document, with an “explicit threat of dismissal from the community” if they refused retraction. The priests acceded almost immediately: all four of the male signatories who were priests or members of canonical communities retracted within weeks. The sisters and their superiors in most canonical communities instead resisted, debating with Vatican officials the principles of freedom of conscience and subsidiarity versus obedience. As Kissling later wrote about the Vatican’s push for retraction, “Rome’s quest was not for doctrinal purity”; rather, church leaders sought “to solidify obedience within a clearly delineated hierarchical chain of command.”68 In the meantime, Ferraro continued to reap ferocious attacks from church leaders for her stance.
In November, Ronald Reagan won the election by a landslide, beating the Mondale-Ferraro ticket in forty-nine of fifty states. A solid majority of Catholic voters—estimates ranging between 54 and 61 percent—went for Reagan, who received a higher percentage of the American Catholic vote in 1984 than any Republican candidate in the nation’s history to that point. It was a demoralizing loss for Democrats and alarming to see so many people from one of their longtime constituencies—Catholics—abandon them. Pundits nicknamed that group the Catholic “Reagan Democrats,” and there was little question what social issues had mattered to them in this decisive election. When the Democratic National Committee commissioned an independent study to understand why their party had fared so poorly in that year’s presidential race, they got word that those who had abandoned the party viewed it as controlled by “liberal extremists and special interest groups with values and an agenda foreign to middle-class America,” a clear reference to issues that included abortion. “Gays and feminists” threatened American families, those polled declared, and their moral decadence represented what the Democratic Party had become. It was a stark report, and Democratic officials, not wanting to upset groups of people who remained their core supporters, did not release but instead destroyed and buried it.69
CFFC leaders wanted their politically pro-choice message to be part of the Catholic mainstream, so they aimed always to spread their moral argumentation to as broad a Catholic audience as possible, especially what Kissling called the “ambivalent… middle ground” of Catholics who held positions on abortion somewhere between the extremes of pro-life and pro-choice—that is, between those who opposed abortion in all circumstances and those who supported virtually no restrictions on it. Kissling herself believed in taking seriously the status of the fetus and the question of when life begins, but she was convinced that Catholics should not stop there, since “the whole spectrum of sexual and reproductive issues” needed to be addressed. But her faith in the possibilities of engaging Catholic lay people did not extend to the hierarchy, whose very authority was at stake in the abortion debate. With church leaders appearing to have entirely given up fighting against contraception in the public policy realm, they were not going to budge on abortion, she thought, because “abortion is the most visible sign that a person or a couple, a woman or a couple, does not accept the teachings of the Church relative to sexuality.” Abortion, in short, represented a woman who did not accept that every sexual act must be open to conception and who thus bucked the church hierarchy’s fundamental teaching on sexuality. She who chose to abort was dirty, just as an unmarried pregnant woman was dirty. And for Catholics such as those in CFFC, the fundamental moral point here concerned “the historic prejudice against women and against sex” that was, ultimately, about power. Hence, these Catholics were disdainful of what some nicknamed “Catholic pelvic theology.” Dissenters believed that since the Catholic Church upholds a celibate hierarchy—that is, one in which “people who do not have sex are better qualified to hold power”—the effect is that “the prohibition on sexuality enables the maintenance of an elite core of leaders.” Any move to liberalize that prohibition, and the rules against sex more generally, would erode the notion “that not having sex makes you a better person qualified to have power.”70
Needless to say, the Catholic leadership did not hold CFFC and its pro-choice activism in high esteem. More broadly, the authority structure of the church led to a very different reaction among clerical leaders than the Clergy Consultation Service had received from considerable numbers of Protestant leaders. Many of the signers of the New York Times ad who stood by their position suffered repercussions for it, both personally and professionally. Daniel Maguire had speaking invitations rescinded from several Catholic universities. Other “disinvitations” greeted several more signers, and some were refused jobs, promotions, and academic tenure in ways that they and CFFC supporters believed were related to their unwillingness to retract their support for the ad. According to Kissling, an executive director of Planned Parenthood was excommunicated because of her work related to abortion, whi
le a twelve-year-old girl was expelled from her Catholic elementary school because she held pro-choice views: “Such are examples of Vatican overkill.”71
The Conference of Catholic Bishops consistently maintained that CFFC did not represent authentic Catholicism, and eventually, the bishops would condemn CFFC’s criticisms of church policy as another in the line of “episodes of anti-Catholic bigotry that the Catholic Church has endured in the past.”72 Catholic feminists and other allies continued to praise CFFC for what they saw as the organization’s courageous work both in and far beyond the United States, in partnerships in such places as Bolivia, Brazil, Mexico, Columbia, Chile, and Argentina. But the organization and its leadership repeatedly took fire from church leaders and members passionately committed to upholding the church’s strict ban on abortion as the law of the land. That opposition was mostly civil, even if pointed, but not always. As one outraged critic said of Kissling, suggesting both the fury and the misogyny brewing underground, “This woman is a smug, curt, character-assassinating cunt.”73 Not everyone would put it so offensively, to say the least, but those most loyal to the male church hierarchy and its equation of a day-old embryo with a fully formed human being were not about to budge a hair on abortion.
THE CHIEF IMPETUS FOR MOODY, Kissling, and so many others on the religious pro-choice side was the idea that sex was good, in and of itself, and that it ought to be separated from mere procreation. God intended sex to be a source of joy, not a source of fear and shame, they believed. Sexuality was a dynamic, multiplicitous, uncontainable mystery, they repeatedly argued, and the moralizers attempting to restrict it for heterosexual, monogamous, eternal marriage were inflicting misery and terror on far too many people. If most Christian leaders—Protestant but especially Catholic—continued to resist the decoupling of sexuality from reproduction and to refuse to entertain any notion that sex outside of marriage, under appropriate circumstances, could be good, then members of their flocks would simply ignore them, just as Catholics had long ignored the church’s ban on birth control. What Daniel Maguire later cheekily called “the long shadow of Augustine’s penis”—the church’s history of making sex dirty that owed so much to the early Christian bishop’s efforts to restrain and eradicate his own sexual desires—may not have been the only factor influencing people’s views on abortion, but it was unquestionably an important one. Still, many if not most pro-life Christians were surely sincere in seeing this as an issue of life versus death.74
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