“Don’t Let Your Catholicism Be Used for Political Goals”: Catholic Sisters and the Making of a Pro-Choice Catholic Identity

As the U.S. bishops amplified their campaigns against abortion and dissenting Catholics post-Roe, “you can’t be Catholic and pro-choice” emerged as a political platform. Abortion and its intersections with women’s rights initiatives like the Equal Rights Amendment soon became the dividing line for Catholic feminists. A less-examined history is the role religious sisters played in constructing a public pro-choice Catholic identity during the long seventies. My presentation explores how a modest yet vocal faction of American sisters, the National Coalition of American Nuns, negotiated the boundaries of their vows and the all-male hierarchy to define their involvement in the second-wave feminist movement and assert their own moral and political authority independent of the bishops. NCAN leaders organized Catholics and non-Catholics alike, emerging as the Catholic leaders among the religious left. More importantly, the sisters’ organizing reveals how mainstream Catholicism possessed a degree of flexibility and prioritized social and economic justice over a hardline anti-abortion platform—thus resisting the boundaries of the emerging culture wars.

I draw on archival research to reconstruct internal conversations among NCAN members and illustrate how religious sisters constructed a pro-choice Catholic identity through dialogue, coalition-building, and the media. By decentering institutional narratives in favor of grassroots archival materials and oral histories from Catholic sisters, I employ a “bottom-up” methodology to reveal a more nuanced social history of Catholic feminist activism. I seek to complicate binary historical narratives that position the “long seventies” as either a period of liberation or destabilization, particularly for American Catholics, and instead argue that this instability on the margins enabled religious sisters in their activist theologies and strategies. This history not only helps explain religious feminist activism today but continues to interrogate public narratives that center a singular brand of “traditional” pro-life Catholicism.