Kitchen Table Politics. Stacie Taranto
to be anything more than secretaries, nurses, and teachers in the lay workforce at the time, male leaders in the Catholic Church leaned on nuns to run the day-today operations of their extensive hospital, retirement, and parochial school networks. With many of these facilities open to the general public and tending to the church’s social justice mission on the front lines, Catholic nuns wielded more power than nearly any other subset of women before an active feminism emerged in the sixties and seventies—power that, even if relegated to historically female pursuits such as caring for children and the infirm, nuns would not appreciate losing after Vatican II. Nuns also were in charge of devotional ceremonies that parishioners took part in. In the case of sects like the Maryknolls, which Phyllis Graham joined for a short time before marrying, some even worked abroad with little or no male oversight.18
Vatican II only granted women token benefits while taking away much of this de facto female power, which caused many nuns to leave the church. Two thousand Catholic men from across the globe—priests, bishops, and others in leadership roles—initially met in Rome at Vatican II. At first, not a single woman was included. The men even refused to allow the wives of the press corps covering Vatican II to attend daily morning mass with them. In response to protest, twenty-three women were invited into the councils as listeners without voting rights; the twenty-three were a mix of lay Catholic women and nuns who made up a mere fraction of the two thousand men in attendance. The men voted to give women some minor concessions in the spirit of modernizing the church. Lay women and nuns could now do readings at mass, other than the important Gospel, which was considered to be (the male) God’s word. In addition, women were allowed to administer bread and wine at mass that, though considered symbolic embodiments of Jesus Christ, comfortably placed them on familiar terrain serving food and drink. But they still could not become priests or hold real positions of power. The reforms also curbed the de facto authority nuns held by, for instance, eliminating many of the devotional ceremonies they ran. These changes overlapped with the transfer of many American nuns to predominantly white, homogeneous, middle-class suburbs, where some were unhappy to no longer be able to administer the church’s social justice mission as they had in poorer and more racially heterogeneous urban parishes. Fortunately for some dissatisfied nuns, Vatican II unfolded amid burgeoning women’s liberation movements across the globe that opened up social and economic possibilities for them outside the church. Modern feminism further prompted some to view the reforms as an attempt to strip them of what little power they possessed. These factors contributed to the largest exodus of Catholic nuns across the globe after Vatican II. In America, the sisterhood decreased by an unprecedented 28 percent from 1966 to 1976.19
Parochial schools were hit hard by the loss of nuns, as many women in New York discovered firsthand in their new suburban communities. Both Phyllis Graham and Jane Gilroy, for example, spoke very highly of the education they received from the nuns at Bishop McDonnell Memorial High School in Brooklyn. The women enrolled their children in parochial schools once they moved to Long Island, but after Vatican II, they felt that Catholic education had become less rigorous. As the mass moved away from rote memorization and became more participatory, the women detected a similar trend in the classroom, where attention to the classics and learning religious doctrine appeared to go by the wayside. The women were very upset that their attempt to give their children a better lifestyle did not include a Catholic education that was as good as or better than theirs had been in the city before Vatican II—this, on top of the overcrowding in suburban parochial schools. The situation worsened as more nuns left the church. Jane Gilroy’s Curé of Ars Parish in Merrick, Long Island, for instance, had built its primary school in 1950 to address the area’s population surge. Two nuns who planned to teach there symbolically broke ground for the project on Easter Sunday that year. But in 1971, the mother general of the Amityville Dominican nuns, whose order ran the school, announced that because of a perceived lack of support from the (male) parish leadership, they would be leaving before the next academic year. Their departure devastated Gilroy and others who felt that nuns, dating back to their own school days, were responsible for instilling an appreciation for hard work, educational rigor, and religious devotion in Catholic youth. Women in charge of their children’s schooling took these developments to heart, as if they had failed as mothers.20
Along with bolstering patriarchy in these ways, church leaders reaffirmed traditional ideas about women’s sexuality and reproduction. As they attempted to modernize the church, the men at Vatican II elected not to alter the Catholic belief that life begins at conception or lessen restrictions on birth control. Some had argued for reform, but the more conservative viewpoint of those like Pope Paul VI (who was in power by the end of Vatican II after Pope John XXIII died of stomach cancer in the summer of 1963) prevailed. In the midst of worldwide, youth-led sexual revolutions—buoyed by movements for women’s rights and liberation, as well as by the advent of the birth control pill earlier in the decade—Pope Paul VI dug his heels in deeper by issuing a related encyclical, Humanae Vitae (Of Human Life), in 1968. Humanae Vitae reaffirmed the church’s ban on all forms of artificial contraception, underscoring that the only appropriate outlet for sex was the heterosexual marital relation, with procreation a welcome and natural outcome. The women considered here agreed, as their large families attest. This makes their (and the church’s) subsequent opposition to legal abortion understandable. For devout parishioners who viewed marriage and motherhood as their highest calling, a message that the church reinforced in discussions about everything from women’s paid work to contraception, legal abortion was a dangerous enabler that allowed women to avoid these sacrosanct duties by murdering babies no different from their own.21
Reflecting on the reforms decades later, Phyllis Graham declared, “Vatican II was earth-shattering for me and my family…. I felt that Vatican II disrupted tradition and was just wrong for Catholics.”22 The Catholic Church had been a bedrock institution for the women, one that offered social networks, educational opportunities, and rituals that they later tried to replicate when raising their own families. But after they moved to the suburbs, uncertainty abounded, from living apart from close family to needing to learn to drive a car. Many Catholics looked to the church for stability, only to find overburdened suburban parishes that barely resembled the tight-knit urban ones they had left. Even worse, the women faced foreign customs and weaker schools that thwarted their desire to give their children a better life in every regard. Luckily, they were surrounded by many other (often first-generation) suburban homemakers who felt the same way, which would fuel their antifeminist activism.
Phyllis Graham even tried to bypass the Vatican II reforms for a while. After the new mass went into effect, she traveled almost an hour every Sunday to Nassau County to attend a traditional Latin mass held in a Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) hall in Hicksville, near where she had first lived on Long Island. This mass was sanctioned by a rogue archbishop in France, Marcel Lefebvre, who, because of a history of such actions, was later excommunicated from the church by Pope John Paul II in 1991. Partially for convenience, Graham returned less than a year later to her parish in Port Jefferson. After all, despite updating the mass, her pastor, the Reverend Matthew LePage, was unenthusiastic about Vatican II and implemented its recommendations as slowly as possible. LePage’s foot-dragging later cost him his job at Infant Jesus in 1972.23
According to Graham, attending these unsanctioned Latin masses occurred at a time before she was political, but behavior like this actually formed the basis of the women’s future activism. Like others, Graham did not start paying attention to electoral politics until the early seventies after New York State legalized abortion. She learned about the Equal Rights Amendment on an anti-abortion lobbying trip that her parish arranged, and her opposition expanded as she became the host of an antifeminist talk radio show on Long Island. Once in politics, Graham and her allies assumed a populist mantle as mere housewives and mothers battling elite, feminist-backed forces that sought to disrupt family life. The women had to leave their homes to fight these perceived evils, something that seemed more necessary as the political and domestic spheres began to intersect after feminists had pushed to make “the personal political.” Attending Latin masses in the sixties was an early act of defiance aimed at preserving family life and traditions. Graham may have been new to electoral politics in the seventies, but for almost a decade, she and others had been primed to defend their families from harm—from watered-down parochial schools and other changes inspired by Vatican