Good Catholics by Patricia Miller

Author:Patricia Miller
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780520276000
Publisher: University of California Press

8

Matters of Conscience

The landmark UN conferences on population and development and women’s rights in the 1990s made important strides in the international recognition of civil and reproductive rights for women. But they also served to deepen the antagonism between the Vatican and the Catholic reproductive rights movement, which was now providing a counterbalance to the Vatican at the international level as well as in the United States. The Cairo conference in particular was a stinging defeat for the pope. “No issue has affected John Paul II in a more profound way in his 15-year papacy than the Cairo conference,” observed former U.S. Vatican ambassador Ray Flynn.1

Cairo also created new alliances among fundamentalist forces that opposed the recognition of reproductive rights for women, alternative definitions of family, such as those headed by same-sex couples, and sexuality education for adolescents. The Beijing women’s conference witnessed the debut of Christian Right groups that had formerly eschewed international forums, including Concerned Women for America and Focus on the Family, as they sought to tie the conference, and by implication the Clinton administration, to a radical feminist agenda. They joined with an organization called the Catholic Campaign for America, which was founded by high-profile conservative Catholics who wanted to bring “a distinctly Catholic voice to the U.S. public policy debate.”2

Under the banner of the International Coalition for Authentic Womanhood, these organizations picked up and amplified Vatican charges that the conference denigrated women and was an attack on the family. James Dobson told Focus on the Family’s 2 million members that the conference was “the most radical, atheistic and anti-family crusade in the history of the world.” Mary Ellen Bork of the Catholic Campaign charged that the conference document “undermines women’s role as mothers and men’s role as fathers, rejects accepted definitions of the family and the moral responsibility that goes with it, and promotes sexual license.”3

It’s not surprising that conservative Catholics and the Christian Right began to eye one another as potential allies in the war against supposedly godless liberal feminists and their ilk, a cross-pollination that previously had been kept in check by conservative Protestants’ historic distrust of the Vatican and their antipathy toward some aspects of Catholic theology. That distaste was formally set aside in March 1994, when a who’s who of conservative Catholics and evangelicals, including Cardinals John O’Connor and Avery Dulles, Pat Robertson, Mary Ann Glendon, Father John Neuhaus, Michael Novak, George Weigel, Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention, and evangelical leader Charles Colson, signed the “Evangelicals and Catholics Together” declaration. Declaring that Christians “have a responsibility for the right ordering of civil society,” the signers announced that they had put aside their traditional theological differences to create a unified political front against abortion and the secularization of America, foreshadowing what would become a major political trend.4

The following year, the Christian Coalition announced plans to create an affiliate called the Catholic Alliance to add Catholics to its 1.7 million-member electoral powerhouse. “A strong alliance between evangelical Christians and pro-family Roman

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