In October 1979, the Catholic bishops of the United States released a guide to political issues in the 1980 election titled “Political Responsibility: Choices for the 1980s.” Four years earlier, the bishops had released a guide to the presidential election of 1976 that gave prime consideration to abortion, but this time, the bishops charted a somewhat different course. Although the 1980 political guide began with the issue of abortion (as the 1976 guide had), it then diverged markedly by offering a detailed discussion of several issues that the bishops had not even mentioned in 1976: arms buildup, the dangers of nuclear war, and the evils of the apartheid system in South Africa, among other matters. With the exception of abortion, nearly all of the political opinions the bishops’ document expressed corresponded to the positions of politicians on the left rather than the right, and all of them were supported with an appeal to the concept of “human dignity” or “human rights,” the same principles that the bishops had used as a foundation for their pro-life stance. “Our national economic life must reflect broad values of social justice and human rights,” the bishops said. “Above all, the economy must serve the human needs of our people. It is important to call attention to the fact that millions of Americans are still poor, jobless, hungry and inadequately housed and that vast disparities of income and wealth remain within our nation. These conditions are intolerable and must be persistently challenged so that the economy will reflect a fundamental respect for the human dignity and basic needs of all.”
The bishops were not abandoning their fight against abortion, but they were making a concerted effort to avoid linking the pro-life cause to the political right. The key to avoiding a right-wing co-option of the pro-life cause, they thought, was to link the church’s opposition to abortion with the church’s broader social program, or, in a phrase that became a central part of the church’s political vision in the 1980s, a “consistent life ethic.” If the church showed as much concern for the prisoners on death row as it did for fetuses in the womb, and if the church gave the same priority to the alleviation of poverty as it did to the campaign for the rights of the unborn, it would avoid the wrong sort of political entanglements that had threatened to tarnish the bishops’ political influence during the Ford versus Carter contest in 1976. In 1980, the bishops were so eager to avoid any hint of an alliance with the political right that some of them were even willing to distance themselves from pro-life organizations if that was what it took to keep the church out of the Republican Party’s orbit and protect the values of human dignity that Vatican II had endorsed for both the born and the unborn. “There are many in the prolife movement who do not share the bishops’ broad application of the respect-life principle,” wrote Msgr. George Higgins, who had worked for the National Conference of Catholic Bishops (NCCB) for decades and had established a reputation as a politically progressive priest who strongly supported labor unions, in September 1980. “Instead they apply the principle selectively—to the unborn child, but not to prisoners on death row, nor to the poverty-stricken family in the inner city, nor to the starving child in the Sahel. . . . We cannot wait until a Human Life Amendment is passed to face the problems of massive poverty and starvation, of high unemployment and severely inadequate housing. While some threats to human life are obviously more serious than others, none can be adequately dealt with in isolation. To suggest otherwise is to promote the kind of moral and political naiveté that will ultimately hinder the struggle for human dignity.”
But the NCCB’s vision of a nonpartisan consistent life ethic that gave as much attention to fighting poverty and capital punishment as it did to the campaign against abortion proved to be short-lived. By 1984, some of the nation’s leading bishops were already moving away from it, because they believed it was inadequate to stop what they considered an abortion holocaust. This debate was directly related to the Republican and Democratic realignment on abortion. For much of the 1970s, abortion had not been a partisan issue, but by the 1980s it was. The NCCB’s internal debate about how to frame their campaign against abortion therefore had national partisan ramifications that would reshape the politics of the Catholic Church in the United States.
Catholics’ Hesitancy to Join the Conservative Culture Wars
On most political issues, the Catholic clergy of the late 1970s identified more with the political left than the political right. Most of the young priests who were ordained in the immediate wake of Vatican II (from the late 1960s through the mid-1970s) were political progressives whose views had been shaped by civil rights advocacy, opposition to the Vietnam War, and support for expanded social welfare programs to help the poor. The bishops too, though perhaps not quite as liberal as the younger parish priests, were also supportive of the principles of human rights, alleviation of poverty, and international peace advocacy, principles central to Vatican II and some of the papal encyclicals of the 1960s, such as John XXIII’s Pacem in Terris (1963). They still considered abortion a grave evil and a nonnegotiable issue. But as they saw the parties beginning to diverge on abortion, they decided that rather than denounce the Democrats and risk alienating a party that shared their views on many other issues, they would attempt to persuade Catholics that the pro-life cause was a central component of a broader progressive human rights agenda that had much in common with the principles that many liberal Democrats shared.
Under the leadership of San Francisco archbishop John Raphael Quinn, who served as president of the NCCB from 1977 to 1980, the nation’s bishops moved even further away from Republican-leaning pronouncements than they had under the leadership of Archbishop Joseph Bernardin, who had also been wary about inadvertently signaling approval for the political right. Quinn, whom the New York Times described as “very conservative when it comes to doctrine” but “progressive on social issues,” already had a long record campaigning against the death penalty, and he led the bishops to give greater priority to that issue and to the dangers of arms buildup and nuclear war.
These were somewhat new stances for the Catholic Church in the United States. In the 1960s and early 1970s, there had been no consensus among the nation’s bishops on capital punishment; some bishops opposed the death penalty, but others said that it was necessary to protect innocent human life. Pro-life activists, like the nation’s bishops, were also divided on the death penalty, with many saying that although they were categorically opposed to the destruction of “innocent life” in every circumstance (including abortion), they did not have the same moral reservations about taking the lives of those who were not innocent (such as criminals) when doing so was necessary to save the lives of others, as was presumably the case in both just war and the death penalty for murderers. But in 1974, two years after the Supreme Court restricted the death penalty in Furman v. Georgia (1972), the NCCB issued a short statement declaring their categorical opposition to the death penalty, the first time that they had gone on record against capital punishment. The Supreme Court authorized the limited reinstatement of the death penalty in 1976 in Gregg v. Georgia, but the bishops doubled down on their opposition to it, even as conservative politicians argued that it was necessary. In 1980, the bishops issued a lengthy statement that offered rebuttals to each of the common arguments in favor of capital punishment and provided evidence that the death penalty was never necessary. Its use was an affront to Christian values, they argued. To a large extent, the bishops’ new quest to end capital punishment was a logical outgrowth of their campaign against abortion, or, at least, that was the way they saw it. With so much of their political effort focused on protecting life from the moment of conception, it seemed incongruous to them that they would be silent when human life was threatened by the reinstatement of the death penalty. “Abolition of capital punishment is also a manifestation of our belief in the unique worth and dignity of each person from the moment of conception, a creature made in the image and likeness of God,” the bishops said.
Consistent Life Advocacy Among Progressive Evangelicals and Catholics
This message had particular appeal to a number of younger Catholics who believed in the church’s moral authority and the value of unborn human life, but who also identified with the social justice causes of the left. This was the case for Juli Loesch Wiley, who, in 1979, at the age of twenty-eight, founded Prolifers for Survival as an organization dedicated to (in her words) “pushing a moral critique of war and the nuclear arms race within the pro-life community.” Wiley had distanced herself for a short time from the church’s teachings on sexuality when she was a committed feminist in her mid-twenties, but at the end of the 1970s, she began to see that “the whole ‘sexual revolution’ failed to live up to its claims.” It hurt women, she decided. She returned to the church and welcomed its teaching on the “solidarity of woman and embryonic child,” because she thought that it was more consistent with her politically progressive, ecofeminist values than anything she heard from the secular left. It was the United States Catholic Conference that was consistently “lobbying against the death penalty, strip mining, and abortion,” she said; it was the American cardinals who were testifying in Congress against both “funding the MX missile and abortion.” “At their most dogmatic, this Church’s teachings are consistently against murder, the bomb, abortion, or a baseball bat,” Wiley wrote. “The Church gave me a coherent ethical position on life-and-death questions, for which I was grateful; but, much more than that, the Church is a community with the heart of Jesus at heart. . . . Now, I saw, with a flow of wonder, the identification of God Almighty with the embryo. I saw also the outpouring of the Spirit on women, slaves and Gentiles, and children, born and unborn, as a revelation; don’t cut us apart! We are one!”
Wiley was dismayed that this egalitarian vision of God’s concern for every person, born and unborn, caused her—a self-described “progressive”—to be lumped in with political conservatives simply because she wanted to “replace the Sexual Revolution with Sexual Shalom” and “restore the traditional Christian vision of natural sex, sacred sex, at the service of the family, and bonding, and life.” Neither the left nor the right fully identified with her approach; only the Catholic Church did, she thought.
Wiley was not alone in this approach. In the early 1980s, a number of Catholic pacifists championed what they called a “consistent life ethic” that included opposition to war, abortion, and all other threats to human life. Jesuit priest Daniel Berrigan, who went to prison in 1970 for vandalizing a draft office and destroying draft files as part of a protest against the Vietnam War, was arrested again in 1991 for participating in an illegal sit-in to block an abortion clinic. To his allies on the left who were disturbed that a progressive antiwar activist would attempt to keep women from accessing abortion services, Berrigan explained that he had always been an advocate for all human life, from conception to old age.
It was Catholic “consistent life” advocates such as Wiley and Berrigan who convinced evangelicals on the left to enlist in the anti-abortion campaign. Although most white evangelicals were politically conservative, a minority of young antiwar progressives in northern evangelical colleges and seminaries created the organization Evangelicals for McGovern in 1972 and then spent the rest of the decade writing about justice for the poor in new magazines such as Sojourners and The Other Side. Because these progressive evangelicals were critical of alliances between Christianity and the state, they had no interest in the evangelical pro-life cause as long as evangelical opposition to abortion was closely tied to Francis Schaeffer’s vision of restoring a Christian America and moral absolutes in civil law. They had been sharply critical of Billy Graham’s alliance with Richard Nixon in the early 1970s, and they did not want to see the next iteration of this Christian nationalism play out in an alliance between pro-life evangelicals and Ronald Reagan. For most of the 1970s, therefore, they said almost nothing about abortion; some were even pro-choice. But they found the pro-life advocacy of peace activists such as Wiley much more appealing. It was centered on a critique of American materialism and individualism and a celebration of communal values and concern for the poor and marginalized that closely accorded with their own ethic. When they encountered this alternative framing of the pro-life cause, they quickly converted to it. In 1980, Sojourners devoted an entire issue to the need to oppose abortion with a “consistent life” ethic.
Although Sojourners was an evangelical Protestant publication, several of the articles for this special issue came from the Catholic peace movement; Wiley herself wrote one of the pieces. Conservative Southern Baptists and Christian Right activists took their cues on abortion from advocates of pro-family politics affiliated with the New Right, but progressive evangelicals found their inspiration from Catholics on the left who framed opposition to abortion as part of a consistent life ethic. Both groups of evangelicals were working more closely with Catholics than they had a decade before, and both were becoming more strongly insistent on the need to campaign against abortion, even though their social visions were different. Among evangelicals, the culturally conservative group was by far the larger entity; Sojourners’ progressive evangelical readership was fairly small in comparison. Among Catholics, by contrast, the advocates of a consistent life ethic had greater influence, at least in the church hierarchy.
For the Catholic bishops, the trend toward a consistent life ethic reached its height in 1983, when the NCCB issued a sixty-four-page pastoral letter titled “The Challenge of Peace.” Written largely under Archbishop Bernardin’s leadership, “The Challenge of Peace” was both a condemnation of nuclear arms buildup (a policy that the Reagan administration was then pursuing) and of abortion. The bishops were clear: Being pro-life meant being consistently pro-life, or what Bernardin called a “seamless garment” that covered a defense of human life in every area. Pro-life peace activists such as Wiley were delighted, as were progressive evangelicals. In 1986, “consistent life” advocates among both evangelicals and Catholics formed the JustLife PAC to promote the political campaigns of congressional candidates who favored “consistent life” principles. And in 1987, one of the most prominent progressive evangelicals—Ronald Sider, an Eastern University sociology professor who had written the widely influential Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger a decade earlier—published Completely Pro-Life: Building a Consistent Stance, which argued that Christians needed to couple opposition to abortion with opposition to capital punishment, nuclear arms buildup, and other threats to life. That same year, Sider’s organization, Evangelicals for Social Action, joined the Seamless Garment Network that members of Wiley’s Prolifers for Survival founded to promote Bernardin’s consistent life ethic.
Many of the Catholics and evangelicals who advocated a consistent life ethic believed that on issues other than abortion, they were more likely to receive support from the political left than the political right. It bothered them that their natural allies on most human life issues parted ways with them on what they considered the most important issue of human life: abortion. The bishops were still just as committed as ever to lobbying for an anti-abortion constitutional amendment; indeed, in 1983, they devoted considerable lobbying effort to supporting the Hatch amendment, a constitutional amendment proposal to rescind Roe. In their campaign for this amendment, they had to work mostly with Republicans (including many who supported the Reagan administration’s nuclear arms buildup), but that was not necessarily the bishops’ preference. In “The Challenge of Peace,” they begged pro-choice, antiwar liberals to see the light and join the church’s stand against abortion. “If you wish peace, defend life,” the bishops wrote, quoting the late Pope Paul VI. “We plead with all who would work to end the scourge of war to begin by defending life at its most defenseless, the life of the unborn.”
The Religious Debate Over Abortion in the 1984 Presidential Election
The Democratic Party did not heed the call. Instead, the 1984 Democratic presidential nominee, former vice president Walter Mondale (D-MN), selected as his running mate a pro-choice Catholic, Representative Geraldine Ferraro (D-NY) from Queens. Described by the press as a “devout” Roman Catholic, Ferraro said that she did not “believe in abortion,” but added that she could not “impose” her belief on others. This was be coming an increasingly common stance among Catholic Democrats. By 1984, Senator Ted Kennedy (D-MA) had been pro-choice for nearly a decade, and so had many other prominent Catholics in the party. Governor Mario Cuomo (D-NY) took a nearly identical stance of being pro-choice but personally opposed to abortion.
But to the Catholic bishops of New York, a politician’s profession of personal opposition to abortion meant nothing if it was accompanied with a pro-choice policy stance. In April 1984—three months before Ferraro joined the Democratic ticket—the bishops of New York signaled the direction that the bishops would take in the election: “We fail to see the logic of those who contend, ‘I am personally opposed to abortion, but I will not impose my personal views on others.’” In June, the archbishop of New York, John O’Connor, reiterated that stance: “I don’t see how a Catholic in good conscience can vote for a candidate who explicitly supports abortion.” The statement should not have been a surprise to any one who knew O’Connor, who at that point had been in his post as New York archbishop for only a few months. The previous August, when he was bishop of Scranton, he had sent his diocese a pastoral letter: “I will give no support, by word or action, that could be in any way construed in favor of any politician, of any political party, who professes either a specific pro-abortion position or takes refuge in a so-called pro-choice position. I categorically reject the evasion: ‘I am personally opposed to abortion, but this is a pluralistic society, and I must respect the rights of those who disagree with me.’” But whether expected or not, O’Connor’s statement in New York in June struck some of the Catholic Democratic pro-choice politicians in the state as fighting words. “The church has never been this aggressively involved,” Cuomo said. Instead of using a politician’s position on abortion as a single-issue litmus test, voters should look at the entire party platform and ask themselves which set of policies best represented Christian principles, the governor argued. In his view, the Democratic Party was far more Christian in its policies toward the poor than the Republican Party was, regardless of the abortion issue.
The conflict between the bishops and pro-choice Catholic Democrats heated up after Ferraro became the Democratic Party’s vice presidential nominee. On most social and political issues, Ferraro agreed with the bishops. Of the sixty issues that the NCCB highlighted in its political guide for the faithful in 1984, Ferraro accepted the bishops’ position on forty-four. (By contrast, the Republican platform lined up with the bishops on only sixteen of the sixty issues). But on abortion, Ferraro did not agree with the bishops, and that led her into conflict with her church’s hierarchy. Unlike both pro-life activists and the Catholic bishops, Ferraro described her personal opposition to abortion only as a matter of faith, not as a matter of moral reasoning based on scientific evidence or natural law. “As a Catholic, I accept the premise that a fertilized ovum is a baby,” she said. But she then explained: “I have been blessed with the gift of faith; but others have not. I have no right to impose my beliefs on them.” But, as one pro-life advocate pointed out in a letter to the New York Times, “opposition to abortion is not a religious belief.” It was instead a moral issue that did not depend on revelation or personal faith. Just as the Catholic Church’s opposition to nuclear war was a matter of morality rather than revealed dogma, so its position on abortion was a matter of morality, which meant that, contra Ferraro, it was perfectly appropriate to “impose” this moral stand on others through policy.
At the local level in New York, Catholic clergy had debated this issue with Ferraro ever since she first ran for Congress in 1978. While preparing for her first congressional campaign, she met with Msgr. Anthony Bevilacqua of Brooklyn and explained her position of being pro-choice and personally opposed to abortion, a position she thought at the time she could square with the teaching of the Catholic Church, just as John F. Kennedy had insisted that he could uphold church-state separation as a faithful Catholic. The monsignor disagreed. “Gerry, you’re wrong,” he told her, according to Ferraro’s recollection. “That is not the Church’s teaching.” But Ferraro refused to back down. “I feel my position is right in not imposing my views on anyone else,” she told Bevilacqua. She “felt very, very strongly about the separation of church and state,” and if opposition to abortion was a religious position, as she insisted it was, it was inappropriate to enshrine it in law, regardless of what the bishops said.
In September 1984, Governor Cuomo offered a more detailed defense of a Catholic pro-choice position. Speaking at the University of Notre Dame to a packed room full of Catholic theologians, other faculty, and students, Cuomo acknowledged that the church’s teaching on abortion was based not merely on a religious idea but on a moral principle. Unlike Ferraro, he suggested that Catholics who attempted to enshrine that moral principle in law were not necessarily violating the separation of church and state. But he disagreed with the New York bishops’ view that Catholics had a moral duty to do so. “My church and my conscience require me to believe certain things about divorce, birth control and abortion,” Cuomo said. But “my church does not order me—under pain of sin or expulsion—to pursue my salvific mission according to a precisely defined political plan.” The Catholic Church in the United States was no longer engaged in a political campaign to rescind no-fault divorce laws or restrict contraceptive access, he pointed out. In both of those cases, he said, Catholic bishops rightly calculated that a political campaign on their part might do more harm than good. Divorce and contraception might be sinful, but the people had made clear that they were here to stay. And on abortion, it was equally clear that a sizable percentage of morally conscious people who agreed with the bishops on other political issues disagreed with their view on abortion. “Those who endorse legalized abortions . . . aren’t a ruthless, callous alliance of anti-Christians determined to overthrow our moral standards,” Cuomo said. The advocates of abortion rights included mainline Protestant denominational leaders and Jewish rabbis who agreed with the Catholic bishops on the need to protect the rights of immigrants, stop nuclear arms buildup, and promote peace. “In many cases, the proponents of legal abortion are the very people who have worked with Catholics to realize the goals of social justice set out in papal encyclicals,” he said. And if that was the case, it was better to build bridges with these potential allies in the quest for a just society rather than use one’s political power to force them to live under a restrictive abortion policy that they disagreed with. Social justice meant far more than anti-abortion laws, and if that was the case, the church should not demand that politicians support those laws, especially when doing so would threaten the political alliances needed to secure other important political objectives. “Approval or rejection of legal restrictions on abortion should not be the exclusive litmus test of Catholic loyalty,” Cuomo said. “We should understand that whether abortion is outlawed or not, our work has barely begun: the work of creating a society where the right to life doesn’t end at the moment of birth; where an infant isn’t helped into a world that doesn’t care if it’s fed properly, housed decently, educated adequately; where the blind or retarded child isn’t condemned to exist rather than empowered to live.”
Cuomo’s speech demonstrated the difference between two groups of Catholics. On one side were those who believed in the pluralistic, liberal, social justice-oriented society that Vatican II and the NCCB had envisioned, but who also believed that in a society that disagreed on abortion, it was best to make political alliances with pro-choice people of good will who shared most of the tenets of that vision even if it meant distancing themselves from the pro-life movement. On the other side were those who believed that protecting the right to life for the innocent unborn was such a foundational principle that it was impossible to imagine a just society without it. For those people, abortion was the single most important issue, the sine qua non in every election.
Eventually, most Catholic Democratic politicians chose some variation of the path that Cuomo and Ferraro forged. Either they insisted that abortion was strictly a religious personal issue that would be wrong to impose on others in a society that separated church and state or they argued, as Cuomo did, that in a society with a diverse range of moral views on abortion, it was best to make the pragmatic choice and pursue a Catholic social vision by making alliances with those who shared many of the bishops’ political priorities, even if they did not agree on abortion.
Catholics for Choice
Some Catholics went further and argued that the pro-choice position was not merely strategic or a temporal necessity in a pluralistic society but was an authentically Catholic, morally right position. On October 7, 1984, an organization called Catholics for a Free Choice published a full-page advertisement in the New York Times that stated, “A diversity of opinions regarding abortion exists among committed Catholics.” The view that recent papal statements against abortion reflected the “only legitimate Catholic position” was “mistaken,” Catholics for a Free Choice said; “a large number of Catholic theologians hold that even direct abortion, though tragic, can sometimes be a moral choice.” Catholic politicians, priests, theologians, and educators needed the freedom to dissent from the church hierarchy’s views on abortion, the ad stated; they should not be penalized for advocating for a pro-choice position or even for saying that in some cases, abortion could be moral. The advertisement was signed by ninety-seven Catholic professors, priests, and nuns.
This may have been the first time that many Americans had heard of Catholics for a Free Choice, which had no more than 5,000 members at the time. The organization had started more than a decade earlier, in 1973, when Patricia McQuillan—a Catholic mother, stockbroker, and member of the National Organization for Women who was dismayed at her church’s teachings on abortion and who wanted to find a way to reconcile second-wave feminism with her faith—joined with several other pro-choice Catholic women to launch an organization to protest the church hierarchy’s opposition to abortion and especially protest the bishops’ use of church resources to fund an anti-abortion campaign. At the time, McQuillan’s opposition to all abortion restrictions was a minority position among Catholics, as was her strong feminist opposition to the church hierarchy. McQuillan believed that the bishops and pope had lost their right to speak for the church because they had long practiced misogyny by, among other things, excluding women from the clergy and from the bishops’ councils. An all-male hierarchy did not constitute the church, she said; only the total number of people of God did, and that certainly included women. On the first anniversary of Roe v. Wade, McQuillan made headlines by walking up the steps of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City with a few female friends, a bishop’s miter and vestments in hand, then donning the miter and proclaiming herself “Her Holiness Pope Patricia the First.” The church’s stance on abortion was “strictly political and has nothing to do with ‘religion’ as taught by Jesus,” she told the assembled crowd. She and other Catholic women would “no longer accept the erroneous dictates of the magisterium or the ‘teaching authority’ of the church regarding women.” It was time for women to follow their own consciences on the matter and for both the church and the law to stay out of women’s private decisions.
For the first few years of its existence, Catholics for a Free Choice was a small and relatively uninfluential organization, but it represented the views of a much larger number of Catholics than those who paid membership dues and formally joined the organization. Part of the reason for that was the increased willingness of many Catholics to dissent from church teaching. Even by the early 1970s, a majority of married Catholics of childbearing age were not following church teaching on contraception, and a near majority of Catholics of all ages were skipping church; 71 percent of Catholics in 1964 reported in a Gallup survey that they had been to church within the last seven days, but that number dropped to 54 percent by 1975 and then to 50 percent by the mid-1980s. Dissent from the church’s teaching on abortion seemed to closely track with declining Mass attendance rates. Only 17 percent of Catholics who frequently attended church in the late 1980s said that elective abortion (that is, abortion for “any reason”) should be legal, compared to 46 percent of those who characterized their church attendance as “not high.”
But to a greater degree even than church attendance, what divided pro-choice Catholics from those who were pro-life was a different locus of authority. Catholics for a Free Choice insisted that the hierarchy was not the church and could not speak unilaterally for the church; the church instead was the whole people of God, as Vatican II had said. But although Vatican II had indeed emphasized this point, it had not suggested that this broad understanding of the definition of the church in any way ended the authority of the magisterium. Catholics for a Free Choice, by contrast, believed that the laity often knew better than the hierarchy, and they viewed their campaign as a needed challenge to an all-male church hierarchy that they considered antidemocratic and misogynistic. On issues of sexuality, especially, they believed that lay Catholics who were in sexual relationships were far better authorities than celibate clergy. On abortion, women who could become pregnant knew better than male bishops. “The laity are again, along with the theologians, leading the church on the moral freedom to practice contraception and to use abortion when necessary as a backup,” said Marquette University ethics professor Daniel Maguire, a leader in Catholics for a Free Choice. “Perhaps if the hierarchy were married with families, they could follow the wisdom of the laity in this at a faster pace. It would be a shame if it took a century or two for them to respect the conscience of the laity, graced and grounded as that conscience is in the lived experience of marriage and children.” When John Paul II insisted that the church’s teaching on abortion was unchangeable and must be enforced by quelling dissent on abortion from Catholic theologians, Maguire and other pro-choice Catholics responded that this was wrong and an abuse of the hierarchy’s power, which had no legitimacy in Christianity. “The Vatican’s effort to claim a monopod authority is heretical to the best in the Jesus movement,” Maguire wrote. Besides, Catholics for a Free Choice argued, the church’s theological tradition on abortion was inconsistent and unpersuasive. Many revered Catholic thinkers of the past, including Thomas Aquinas, believed that ensoulment occurred well after conception, which is why the Catholic Church had not always viewed early abortions as homicides. Because the Catholic Church’s understanding of fetal life and abortion had changed over time, lay theologians and even individual Catholics who were not professional theologians had the right to reinterpret the tradition for themselves and reach their own conclusions.
But ultimately, Catholics for a Free Choice argued, the supreme moral authority in these questions should not be historical investigation or theological inquiry; it should be individual conscience. Conscience was the title of Catholics for a Free Choice’s official magazine; it was also the fundamental basis of its moral claims. Frances Kissling, who served as president of Catholics for a Free Choice from 1982 to 2007, argued that because the Catholic Church had never infallibly defined when fetal personhood began, the Catholic concept of probabilism meant that individual Catholics must decide this matter for themselves, using their own conscience as a guide. “The absolute prohibition on abortion by the church is not infallible,” she said. “Only the woman herself can make the abortion decision.” After Kissling stepped down as president, subsequent presidents of Catholics for a Free Choice (which changed its name to Catholics for Choice in the twenty-first century) continued making this argument. “As Catholics, we are called by our faith to follow our conscience in all matters of moral decision-making and respect the right of others to do the same,” Catholics for Choice president Jamie Manson declared. “This includes the right to make decisions about abortion and reproductive healthcare.” The Vatican disagreed in 2002: “A well-formed Christian conscience does not permit one to vote for a political program or an individual law which contradicts the fundamental contents of faith and morals.” Catholics for a Free Choice did not accurately represent Catholic doctrine, the Vatican said.
The bishops responded to Catholics for a Free Choice’s 1984 New York Times ad with a clear denunciation. The statements in the ad “contradict the clear and constant teaching of the church about abortion, a teaching which they as Catholics are obliged to accept,” the NCCB said in November 1984. Probabilism did not apply in the matter of abortion, because “Catholic theology does not allow the application of the theory of probabilism in cases which contradict Church teaching or where the risk of taking life is present.” In the case of abortion, both caveats applied: Catholics for a Free Choice’s statements contradicted church teaching and they led to the taking of life. A few days after the NCCB issued this statement, the Vatican’s Sacred Congregation for Religious and Secular Institutes sent letters to the nuns, priests, and monks who had signed the advertisement from Catholics for a Free Choice demanding that they recant or be dismissed from their orders or clerical positions. Theologians teaching at institutions who were not under Vatican control faced less direct pressure. In some cases, their diocesan bishops requested a meeting with them. In other cases, Catholic colleges rescinded their lecture invitations. Daniel Maguire, who had several summer speaking engagements canceled because of his support for the ad, called it “a blacklisting like during the McCarthy period in the ’50s.” In Catholics for a Free Choice’s view, the actions of the Vatican and the U.S. bishops were an attack on “free speech” and an abuse of power, but in the view of many pro-life Catholics, these were necessary commonsense measures to draw the line on one of the clearest issues of Catholic moral teaching and enforce the authority of the magisterium against the moral anarchy of individual opinion.
Most Catholics, it turned out, took a position somewhere between the magisterium and Catholics for a Free Choice. One survey from 1989 showed that 63 percent of Catholics (compared to only 57 percent of white Protestants) said that abortion was “murder.” Yet this same survey also showed that only 25 percent of Catholics wanted to ban abortion altogether. Seventy-five percent agreed with the statement, “I personally feel that abortion is morally wrong, but I also feel that whether or not to have an abortion is a decision that has to be made by every woman herself.” It appeared that the pope and the bishops had succeeded in convincing a majority of Catholics that abortion killed innocent unborn babies, but they had not succeeded in convincing all of them that this moral stance should be translated into public law. Instead, many Catholics insisted that their own moral views on such matters were not objective universal dictates that could form the foundation of a Christian society but were rather personal matters of conscience. In other words, the overwhelming majority of Catholics took positions that closely reflected the positions of pro-choice Democrats, such as Mario Cuomo, regardless of how strongly the bishops stated that this was wrong.
Although the bishops were united in opposing Catholics for a Free Choice’s stance and even the more moderate position of pro-choice Democrats, such as Cuomo, they were sharply divided among themselves about whether to frame the abortion issue as part of a consistent-life seamless garment or instead as a unique, stand-alone issue that could serve as a political litmus test. Archbishop O’Connor clearly favored the latter course of action, but in a protest against that move, twenty-three bishops affiliated with the peace organization Pax Christi signed a statement declaring that “one cannot examine abortion as though it were the only moral issue facing our people. . . . As bishops we are gravely concerned that the threat of nuclear war is being neglected in the current examination of moral issues in the public order.” Archbishop Bernardin, now a cardinal, continued to insist that both abortion and opposition to nuclear war were equally important issues, and that the church must be just as outspoken on both parts of the seamless garment. Indeed, he said, the best way to ensure the passage of anti-abortion legislation was to be consistent in defending the entirety of the church’s social justice teaching, since “the credibility of our advocacy of every unborn child’s right to life will be enhanced by a consistent concern for the plight of the homeless, the hungry and helpless in our nation, as well as the poor of the world.”
But if there were bishops who supported Bernardin’s view, there were also many others who supported O’Connor’s. Seventeen New England bishops signed a letter in the fall of 1984 declaring that abortion was “the critical issue in this campaign.” Because of their belief that they should avoid direct political endorsements, they did not tell Catholics to vote Republican. And because of their belief that it was better to influence the faithful through teaching rather than coercion, they did not deny Communion to Ferraro or Cuomo, as some bishops in the twenty-first century would do to other pro-choice Catholic politicians, such as Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry (D-MA) in 2004. But the 1984 presidential campaign was still a watershed moment for abortion politics in the Catholic Church. From that moment on, the number of bishops who pushed for a progressive seamless garment life ethic gradually diminished, while those who shared O’Connor’s position that abortion must take first priority in the church’s list of social concerns continued to increase. Ever since the mid-1970s, the pro-life movement had wanted the bishops to make the abortion issue a single-issue litmus test of the highest priority rather than merely a piece of a seamless garment, and now they were finally getting their wish. Whereas Bernardin had worked hard to get the church to communicate its pro-life stance as the foundation of a larger consistent life ethic, O’Connor used his position as the country’s most powerful Catholic prelate (as the archbishop of New York was) to move the church toward making it a political litmus test. “I simply don’t see the rationale for saying that a politician is for better housing, a lower rate of unemployment, a more rational foreign policy—and the only thing wrong is he supports abortion, so it’s okay to vote for him,” O’Connor said. “You have to go back to the basic question: What is abortion? Do you think it’s the taking of innocent human life or don’t you?” Of course, Bernardin and the other bishops who had endorsed the consistent-life ethic shared O’Connor’s belief that abortion was the “taking of innocent human life”; they just said that because other issues (such as nuclear arms buildup) also had the potential to take innocent human lives, those issues also had to matter in voters’ choices. What mattered most was the holistic vision of a just society, and that society was not likely to be created if voters narrowly focused only on abortion and ignored all the other social principles that Vatican II had endorsed. But in the view of O’Connor and other pro-life advocates, abortion involved such massive destruction of so many innocent lives that it made all other assaults on human life pale in comparison. It had to be stopped. This had been O’Connor’s conviction from the beginning of his episcopal career. When he was named bishop of Scranton in 1983, he vowed to discuss the value of unborn human life in every public address he ever gave, a promise he continued to cite the next year as archbishop of New York. In this, he had the strong support of John Paul II, who was dedicated to a similar project on a global scale.
Whether because of the pope or because of O’Connor, opposition to abortion became central to the ideological identity of faithful conservative Catholics by the late 1980s, and a dividing line between nominal Catholics and devout churchgoers. According to a 1987 New York Times/CBS News poll, 61 percent of all American Catholics believed that abortion was “the equivalent of murdering a child.” This view was even more widely held among the most devout. A 1989 New York Times/CBS News poll showed that the majority of nominal Catholics who said that religion was not very important in their own lives favored keeping abortion legally available, but only 28 percent of Catholics who said that religion was “very” or “extremely” important to them wanted abortion to remain legal. Even as Catholics dissented from the church’s teachings on contraception and divorce, opposition to abortion unified most of the faithful, at least those who attended Mass regularly and considered their faith an important part of their lives.
Conservative Catholics and the Politics of the Family
Some of the devout Catholics who strongly opposed abortion welcomed the move by conservative bishops such as John O’Connor to downplay the consistent life ethic, because they wanted to make the fight against abortion not part of a larger campaign for an expanded social safety net but rather the central component of a campaign to protect the family, which they saw as the foundation of society. Politically liberal Catholic bishops saw Reagan’s social policies as threats to a humane society, but conservative Catholics who identified with the New Right viewed Reagan as a champion of their vision of a family-centered society that protected parental rights while limiting the power of the state. When it came to politics, the majority of U.S. bishops were “truly ignorant,” Paul Weyrich, founder of the Heritage Foundation and a leading figure in the New Right, told a Washington Post reporter in 1981. His colleague Richard Viguerie agreed: “The Catholic hierarchy in America is becoming synonymous with liberal politics.”
Both Weyrich and Viguerie were Catholics, but instead of deferring to the bishops’ guidance on political questions, they launched their own “pro-family” campaign that in their view was more authentically Catholic in its values than the bishops’ political program. One of Weyrich’s associates at the Heritage Foundation, Onalee McGraw, published a book about secular humanism in the same year (1976) that Francis Schaeffer addressed the subject in his best-selling book How Should We Then Live? But McGraw’s book, Secular Humanism and the Schools: The Issue Whose Time Has Come, focused more specifically on parental rights in education, an issue that was a central concern for Catholics in the New Right and that would soon become a major issue for conservative evangelicals. Another Heritage Foundation associate, Connie Marshner, who worked closely with Weyrich, got her political start by supporting a campaign for parental rights in education in Kanawha County, West Virginia, in 1974, and then wrote Blackboard Tyranny to argue against the public school system and encourage the growth of private Christian schools. In 1979, she helped write the Family Protection Act, an attempt to protect parental rights in education that did not pass in a Democratic-controlled U.S. House but served as a precursor to social conservatives’ legislative priorities in the Reagan administration and beyond. Marshner’s husband, William Marshner, was a charter faculty member at Christendom College, a New Right-oriented traditional Catholic institution formed around the dream of Catholic-based cultural renewal and a revival of “Christendom” in Western society. A network of conservative Catholic institutions, such as Triumph magazine (edited by William F. Buckley Jr.’s brother-in-law L. Brent Bozell), the Wanderer, the University of Dallas, Christendom College, and some of Weyrich’s organizations, promoted a vision of society that was skeptical of both liberal government programs and libertarian rejections of moral regulation. Instead of the expanded government programs that the bishops wanted, Catholic New Right activists pushed for a pro-family approach that envisioned an expansion of parental rights and traditional Catholic teaching about the home as central to a recovery of Christian values.
Because their twin enemies were secularism and the sexual revolution—the same movements against which conservative evangelical Protestants were mobilizing—many of these traditional Catholics made common cause with evangelicals, just as Weyrich had when he helped recruit Jerry Falwell to found the Moral Majority. Indeed, their political and social commentary was at times almost indistinguishable from that of conservative evangelical Protestants. All these conservative Catholics strongly opposed abortion, which they viewed as the greatest challenge to human life and Christian values that the country faced. Bozell was a veteran of pro-life organizations. The Wanderer had been publishing articles against abortion for decades. Weyrich provided the office space for Judie Brown’s American Life Lobby. In campaigning against abortion, they believed that they were not only campaigning for human life but were also battling secular humanism, assaults on parental rights, and challenges to the traditional Christian sexual ethic.
The conservative Catholics who campaigned for parental rights and who viewed the liberal state as a threat to their Christian values also included plenty of opponents of second-wave feminism who connected pro-choice feminists’ advocacy of abortion rights to what they believed was their larger disrespect for the family and their willingness to use the power of the state to protect individual autonomy at the expense of children’s well-being, or, in the case of abortion, their lives. From the beginning of the 1970s, the pro-life movement had some members who called themselves feminists. It even had a handful of members who had once been members of the National Organization for Women (NOW), as were Feminists for Life cofounders Pat Goltz and Catherine Callaghan before they were expelled from a Columbus, Ohio, chapter of NOW because of their opposition to abortion. But by the end of the 1970s, far more pro-life activists were persuaded by conservative Catholic Phyllis Schlafly’s STOP-ERA campaign that the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) (and likely the larger second-wave feminist movement itself) threatened the family and would be used to expand abortion rights. In 1980, only 9 percent of National Right to Life Committee (NRLC) members said they supported the ERA.
If pro-life activists were conservative on matters of gender, they were equally so on matters of sex. Ninety-six percent of NRLC members in 1980 believed that homosexuality was “always or almost always wrong,” and 87 percent said the same about premarital heterosexual sex. Since 70 percent of NRLC members were Catholic at the time, these survey results indicated that the Catholics who were most likely to participate in an organized pro-life campaign were likely to hold conservative values on sex, gender, and the family that were very similar to those of many conservative evangelical Protestants. It was thus not too surprising that some of them followed Weyrich’s and Viguerie’s lead in ignoring the liberal-leaning political pronouncements of the Catholic bishops and voted for candidates who wanted to expand parental rights to exempt their children from sex education classes or who promised to reduce government regulation of private Christian or parochial schools. The church could best pursue its mission to help the poor not by supporting federal poverty relief programs, as the bishops thought, but instead by reducing the tax burden on families and empowering faith-based private charitable organizations. The New Right, along with the leaders of most of the nation’s pro-life organizations, supported Ronald Reagan’s presidential candidacy in 1980, even as the bishops went out of their way to avoid any hint of approval for the GOP platform.
Conservative Catholics who grounded their political vision in a defense of the family and conservative views on sex found inspiration in the social teaching of John Paul II, who became pope in 1978. During John Paul II’s first visit to the United States in October 1979, he repeatedly spoke about threats to the family that emerged from ignoring the church’s teaching on abortion and marriage. He devoted the homily in his Mass on the Washington Mall—a rock-star-like celebration that drew nearly 200,000 attendees—to a discussion of the evils of abortion and cultural liberalism’s attack on the church’s teachings on sexuality: “If a person’s right to life is violated at the moment in which he is first conceived in his mother’s womb, an indirect blow is struck also at the whole of the moral order, which serves to ensure the inviolable goods of man. Among those goods, life occupies the first place.” In itself, this was hardly a surprising statement; Catholics had been issuing similar warnings for decades. But many of those earlier warnings had suggested that an acceptance of abortion would lead to a general disregard for human life at other stages. Though by no means denying this connection, the pope largely ignored it in his homily and instead focused on the more urgent matter of marriage, sexuality, and the family. The Catholic teaching on abortion was inseparable from a larger concern for marriage and the family, he suggested. In Philadelphia, where as many as 500,000 people greeted him, the pope said, “There can be no true freedom without respect for the truth regarding the nature of human sexuality and marriage. In today’s society, we see so many disturbing tendencies and so much laxity regarding the Christian view on sexuality that have all one thing in common: recourse to the concept of freedom to justify any behavior that is no longer consonant with the true moral order and the teaching for the church.”
At the beginning of John Paul II’s papacy, many bishops and priests gave greater emphasis to promoting a liberal social vision than to defending conservative values in the area of sexuality. But by the mid-1980s, that was beginning to change, as conservative bishops that John Paul II had appointed (such as John O’Connor) gained greater influence.
EDITORIAL NOTE: This article is excerpted from Abortion and America's Churches: A Religious History of "Roe v. Wade" (University of Notre Dame Press, 2025). It is part of an ongoing collaboration with the University of Notre Dame Press. You can read other excerpts from this collaboration here. All rights reserved.
