Patricia Miller, a freelance journalist, describes her book, Good Catholics, as “a narrative history of the Catholic reproductive rights movement” (7). Drawing from Catholics for Choices archives, interviews with leading Catholic reproductive rights advocates, contemporaneous news accounts, and a range of secondary sources, she examines the influence of a small group of Catholic women, who, with a few male allies, “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” (2). These women and their allies emerge as the narrative's heroes who battle intransigent opponents, the U.S. bishops and the Vatican, especially John Paul II.
The story unfolds chronologically in two parts: “The History of an Idea” and “The Bishops' Lobby.” The “Idea” is “that good Catholics can support abortion rights” (7), and the “history” begins with “Four Wise Women” (11). In the 1950s and 1960s, Jane Furlong Cahill, Rosemary Radford Ruether, Mary Daly, and Elizabeth Farians earned advanced degrees in Catholic theology, a discipline previously reserved primarily for clergy. Gaining access to this specialized knowledge emboldened these women to challenge the church's prohibitions on contraception and abortion on theological grounds. After recounting these four activists' stories, Miller surveys histories of abortion practices and Catholic moral teaching concerning abortion and traces the “Idea” through Catholic pro-choice organizing culminating in the 1973 founding of Catholics for Free Choice (CFFC)—in 2007, Catholics for Choice.
Two women emerge as key in Miller's account of CFFC's long-term effectiveness. Patricia Fogarty McQuillan, the founding director, appears in chapter three: “Pope Patricia.” The title refers to McQuillan's appearance in papal attire, emblazoned with feminist symbols, on St. Patrick Cathedral's front steps to celebrate the one-year anniversary of Roe v. Wade as a self-proclaimed member of “the female church hierarchy” (69). Images of the carefully orchestrated protest appeared in national news outlets, thus garnering public attention for “a Catholic abortion rights movement” (69). McQuillan died from breast cancer five months later, and the CFFC's small staff struggled to counter the U.S. bishops' powerful opposition to Roe v. Wade. The second person of far greater influence, Frances Kissling, became CFFC director in 1982 and served until 2007. Her strategic leadership secured CFFC's central role in sustaining a Catholic reproductive rights movement. Chapter 5, “The Cardinal of Choice,” details Kissling's successful strategies to combat the U.S. bishops' political efforts to overturn Roe v. Wade in the 1980s as well as church sanctions against women religious who signed the “Catholic Statement on Pluralism and Abortion,” a CFFC-coordinated ad that appeared in the New York Times on October 7, 1984.
Miller's history also details the activities of CFFC's principal opponent, the Catholic hierarchy. The U.S. bishops' and Vatican officials' efforts to prohibit access to birth control and abortion appear in every chapter. Miller identifies John Paul II's 1980 U.S. visit as “the initiation of his efforts to conflate abortion and birth control and associate both with moral decline” (89). The second part, “The Bishops' Lobby,” traces the historical arc of the CFFC's efforts to counter that position's influence in the U.S. and around the globe. In chapter 7, “Showdown at Cairo,” for example, Miller describes Frances Kissling as “a rock star” (165) at the UN sponsored “International Conference on Population and Development” (1994). She, along with Marquette University moral theologian, Daniel Maguire, effectively presented an alternative Catholic position to the Vatican's on reproductive rights.
The remaining three chapters follow the ebb and flow of CFFC's and the Catholic hierarchy's oppositional efforts including condom use in response to Africa's AIDS epidemic and CFFC's “See Change” campaign to end the Holy See's UN observer status. Miller traces these efforts through the presidencies of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barak Obama and the pontificates of John Paul II, Benedict XVI, and Francis I. In the final chapter, Miller comments that those surprised about the Affordable Care Act controversy over access to birth control should not be. “That's because the forty-year fight over reproductive rights had never been about abortion; it had always been about women and sex—specifically the ability of women to have sex without the consequence of pregnancy” (257–258). After reflecting on clerical sexual abuse crisis and the Leadership Conference of Women Religious investigation, Miller offers a glimmer of hope in Pope Francis's comments concerning women's potential participation in the church's institutions of authority. The “Epilogue,” however, recounts the Philippines bishops' successful efforts to prevent access to birth control because “the law violated the country's constitutional protection of ‘the life of the unborn from conception’” (272). Miller's closing example thus reiterates the long-term impact of John Paul II's conflation of birth control and abortion.
Good Catholics effectively complicates a one-sided history of U.S. Catholic engagement in the pro-life/pro-choice debate. Miller's book provides a well-organized, chronological account of the Catholic hierarchy's strategies to circumvent access to birth control and abortion and how those strategies' transformed U.S. and international politics. Yet, Miller's sympathies lie clearly with those Catholics who championed women's reproductive rights, and she gives them their due recognition through her judicious use of sources and engaging narrative. The extent of CFFC's grassroots influence among Catholics, however, remains unclear. Miller offers little evidence of widespread public affirmations of CFFC's specific moral defense of abortion even among progressive Catholic moral theologians, other than Dan Maguire. She also remains curiously silent on CFFC's leaders' accounts of their own identity as “good Catholics.” Finally, the complexities surrounding Catholic teaching authority require greater consideration in discussing CFFC's pronouncements. Good Catholics makes clear why a Catholic's reaction to Miller's treatment of this divisive issue will vary as much as any other reader's. Yet Miller's history also brings to light Catholics' unique roles in shaping the moral and political landscape on both sides of the abortion divide. Miller's ability to create a coherent narrative from disparate and previously ignored primary sources makes this book useful in a variety of courses in women and gender studies and U.S. religious and political histories.
