An Excerpt from In the Court of Three Popes by Mary Ann Glendon
In October 1978, when Karol Wojtyla stood on a balcony overlooking the Piazza San Pietro and introduced himself as “a Pope from a faraway land,” I had no idea how that event would change the world and affect the rest of my life. The following year, when the new pope, John Paul II, visited Boston, the only member of our family who went (in pouring rain) to hear him speak was Elizabeth, [my daughter], then twelve years old.
When I was ready to devote time to pro bono activities, I scarcely recognized the causes to which I had once been devoted. I remained intensely interested in care for our natural environment, in human rights, and in issues affecting women and families and the world of work. But I couldn’t see how to engage with the movements that were then dominant in those areas. My dissatisfaction with these trends eventually led me to look for better approaches in organizations grounded in Catholic social thought. In the Berkshires of my youth, I had been steeped in what we called conservationism. Berkshire natives were already concerned about the dangerous chemicals that Pittsfield’s General Electric plant was dumping into the Housatonic River and vigilant about the need to protect Mount Greylock from commercial exploitation. My grandfather Pomeroy enrolled me in the National Wildlife Federation when I was ten. So I was drawn to the new field of environmental law. But the mood and tone of the environmental movement in the seventies was so focused on population control as to seem almost anti-people. It seemed distant from the concept of stewardship for all of God’s creation.
The political landscape had changed too. As a college student, I had been proud to cast my first vote in a presidential election for Massachusetts’s own John F. Kennedy, and as a law student and young lawyer, I had been active in the great cause of the day—the struggle to end segregation. But both the Democratic Party and the civil rights movement had become unwelcoming to those of us who believed that Martin Luther King’s “Beloved Community” required concern for unborn life and assistance for mothers who needed support. At the same time, the Republican Party was not very welcoming to persons who admired many aspects of FDR’s New Deal. So I became and have remained an Independent.
There was also the particular form of feminism that became dominant in the 1970s. When students ask me whether I am a feminist, I always reply, “Yes, if that means I have an interest in issues that are of concern mainly or mostly to women.” My concept of feminism has been shaped by Susan B. Anthony, who fought for women’s suffrage and believed that abortion chiefly benefited irresponsible men. It is hard for me to relate to the version of feminism that harbors animosity to men, marriage, and motherhood, and that emphasizes abortion rights. And so, as my children grew older, I devoted most of my pro bono activities to Catholic organizations. I became active in Church affairs both in the Boston Archdiocese and at the national level as a consultant to the U.S. Bishops Conference Committee on International Policy (now the Committee on International Justice and Peace).
Happily, my work on these committees meshed well with my academic work. The topics I had chosen for comparative study—the family, the world of work, church-state issues—were central to the Church’s teachings on social and economic questions. Most of my research and writing was focused on how the legal systems of countries at comparable stages of development handled problems with which the United States was currently struggling, especially in the world of work and family life. In my 1981 book The New Family and the New Property, I traced the shift that was occurring in the relative importance of family, labor force participation, and government as determinants of wealth, social standing, sense of worth, and economic security.
It was just after the publication of that book, while I was doing further research on labor and employment law, that I encountered the thought of Pope John Paul II in his 1981 encyclical Laborem Exercens, “On Human Work,” the most personal of his encyclicals, and also his favorite. According to papal biographer George Weigel, it was based in part on Wojtyla’s own experiences as a manual laborer during the German occupation of Poland. The encyclical put on display the pope’s empathy for the everyday struggles of men and women, his deep faith, and his sense of history. I was struck by the fact that he addressed himself to “the sons and daughters of the Church” and “all men and women of good will.” The pope’s linkage of work and family, his emphasis on human rights, and his global approach were so congenial to me that I was moved to read further in Catholic writings on social and political issues.
Around the same time, my husband made an observation that was to have a long-lasting effect on my professional life. One autumn when I returned to Boston College Law School after the summer recess, I noticed that someone had taken down all the crucifixes from the classroom walls. Together with the other Catholic professors, I wondered who had done that and why, but we soon dropped the subject and went on to something else. That evening, when I told Edward about it, he was astonished. “Why do you Catholics put up with that kind of thing?” he asked. “There would be an uproar if anyone did something like that at Brandeis.”
That was a transformational moment for me. I asked myself: Why do we Catholics put up with that sort of thing? Why do we get so careless about the faith for which our ancestors made so many sacrifices? For a long time in the United States, Catholic immigrants were subjected to discrimination and prejudice. When my father graduated from college and looked for a job as a teacher in the public schools, he was told plainly by many employers that they didn’t hire Irish or Catholics. Under such conditions, many Catholics adopted one of two survival strategies, what I call the “way of the turtle” and the “way of the chameleon.” The turtles kept their spiritual lives private, inside their shells, in a separate compartment from the rest of their lives. The chameleons changed their color enough to blend in with their surroundings, and if some part of their Catholic heritage didn’t fit in, they just set it aside.
As a pro-life feminist, I was safe from becoming a turtle or a chameleon, but up until the crucifix incident, I tended to ignore or shrug off manifestations of anti-Catholic bias. With Edward’s question, however, I saw the situation anew. I joined the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, and later on, when my family responsibilities lightened, I devoted a good deal of my time to the cause of religious freedom, national and international.
By the 1980s, my books and articles had begun to gain a certain recognition, and I was receiving offers for visiting professorships and invitations to give lectures in the United States and abroad. I declined most of them due to family obligations. But I accepted a visit at nearby Harvard in 1974, and I could not resist an invitation to be a visiting professor at my alma mater, the University of Chicago. In the fall of 1984, while teaching at Chicago, I gave the Rosenthal Lectures at Northwestern University, a series of three talks on changing legal approaches to abortion and divorce in twenty-three countries.
When the pope issued Mulieris Dignitatem (On the Dignity and Vocation of Women) in August 1988, I was expecting the letter to women to be a dry ecclesiastical document. Instead, what struck me most upon reading the text was the pope’s sympathetic attention to issues that were important to me, both as a scholar and as the mother of three daughters. While tracking developments in family law, I was concerned that even as women acquired more rights than ever before, the role of motherhood was becoming less valued and more difficult, especially for women raising children alone. It was heartening to see that the pope understood that concern. Affirming women’s dignity and equality in the strongest possible terms, he pointed out that the ideology of individualism is misplaced where dependents such as children, the sick, and the frail elderly are concerned, and where those who care for them (mostly women) often become dependent themselves in so doing.
1989 saw the publication of my books Abortion and Divorce in Western Law and The Transformation of Family Law. There I noted how the role of motherhood was becoming risky due to what I called the “four deadly Ds”: increased chance of divorce, disrespect for nonmarket work, disadvantage in the workplace for women who take time out for family responsibilities, and the destitution that afflicts so many female-headed families.
A few years later, I was excited to learn that I had been selected by Pope John Paul II to be one of the initial members of his newly founded Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, a body he formed “to aid the Church in the study and development of her social doctrine.” This was a perfect fit with all of my academic interests, and it sounded like a great opportunity to support the process of keeping Catholic social teachings up to date. Then, in the summer of 1995, I received a more challenging assignment. Cardinal Law called to say, “The Holy Father wants you to lead the Holy See delegation to the UN’s Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing this fall.”
During this time, as the idea of universal human rights began to show its power in the events that led to the demise of Eastern European communism, numerous special interest groups became active in international settings, hoping to have their agenda items recognized as human rights. Among the best funded and most determined were advocates of aggressive population control and abortion rights. At the 1984 Mexico City Conference on Population and Development, both the United States under the Reagan administration and the Holy See were instrumental in rebuffing efforts to have abortion declared a human right. But the United States and the Holy See found themselves at odds ten years later at the Cairo Conference on Population and Development, where the Clinton administration led an unsuccessful campaign to have abortion rights inserted into what became the steering document for the UN’s Population Fund. In the summer of 1995, when I was asked to head the Holy See delegation to the UN’s Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, it seemed inevitable that the battle would be renewed.
As I worked on my opening statement for Beijing, I relied on a remarkable series of essays and talks in which Pope John Paul II meditated on women’s roles, repeatedly emphasizing that the Christian faith gives no room for oppression based on sex. To the surprise of many, he adopted much of the language of modern feminism, calling women’s liberation in his Letter to Women in 1995 a “great journey” that “must go on.” After meeting with the pope that June, the Secretary General of the Beijing Conference, Gertrude Mongella, told reporters, “If everyone thought as he does, perhaps we wouldn’t need a women’s conference.”
The pope read a short message expressing his wish for the success of the conference “in its aim to guarantee all the women of the world ‘equality, development, and peace’ through full respect for their equal dignity and for their inalienable human rights, so that they can make their full contribution to the good of society.” He committed the Holy See to giving special attention to the care and education of girls and young women, especially the most disadvantaged, over the coming years. Then he added some forceful words addressed to “all men in the Church”:
I appeal to all men in the Church to undergo, where necessary, a change of heart and to implement as a demand of their faith, a positive vision of women. I ask them to become more and more aware of the disadvantages to which women, and especially girls, have been exposed and to see where the attitude of men, their lack of sensitivity or lack of responsibility, may be at the root. [emphasis added]
In a few private words with me, the Holy Father said that I was “going over there to be a voice for the voiceless.” He advised me to rely on the Holy Spirit, and he added a practical suggestion: if I ran into difficulties in the conference, I should consider going over their heads to the press.
The Holy See delegation was by far the most diverse delegation at the Beijing conference, a group of fourteen women and eight men from nine countries and five continents. It was obvious that the composition of the delegation, as well as the decision to appoint a woman as its head, arose from the desire to counter the caricature of the Vatican representatives at a UN conference in Cairo the year before as anti-woman, anti-sex, and in favor of unrestrained procreation.
One of the main aims of our group was to avert the situation that had developed at Cairo, where the abortion rights initiative championed by the United States had pushed all other conference issues into the background. There was reason to be optimistic. The idea that abortion was a legitimate tool of population control had been expressly rejected in the Cairo document, and in the months leading up to the Beijing conference, it seemed that most nations had little disposition to reopen the matter. The United States, moreover, was now unlikely to take the lead on any controversial issue. Not only had the Clinton administration been chastened by the preceding year’s elections, in which the Republican Party had captured control of Congress for the first time since 1952, but the Senate had adopted a bipartisan resolution instructing the U.S. delegates to Beijing not to denigrate motherhood and the family.
Our hopes were dimmed, however, by the fact that the preparatory document produced for the conference by the UN Commission on the Status of Women was a poorly written, 149-pages-single-spaced hodgepodge of ideas. Population control lobbyists and old-line, hard-line feminist groups had heavily influenced the drafting process, and a large proportion of the document was left in brackets, signifying that no accord could be reached on a number of items. A host of knotty problems were thus left to be worked out in China.
The draft document, from our delegation’s point of view, was deeply flawed. Many provisions addressed issues of equal opportunity, education, and development in a sensible way. But, remarkably, they showed no recognition that most women in the world marry and most have children. The implicit vision of women’s progress was based on the model, increasingly challenged by men and women alike, in which family responsibilities are avoided or subordinated to personal advancement. When dealing with health, education, and young girls, the drafts emphasized sex and reproduction to the neglect of many other crucial issues.
One of the most impressive speakers at the conference was Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, who zeroed in on some of the defects in the preparatory documents. They were, she said, “disturbingly weak” on the role of the traditional family and on the connection between family disintegration and general moral decay. Similarities between the positions of the Holy See delegation and representatives from majority Muslim countries on certain issues prompted the press to speak of an “unholy alliance,” but we were so far apart from them on women’s equality that our contacts were limited to formal greetings.
When Hillary Clinton, then first lady, took the podium, it was apparent that the American administration’s strategy had undergone a sea change since Cairo. In a cautiously worded speech, Mrs. Clinton condemned direct coercion in population control programs and made several positive references to women’s roles as mothers and family members. She did, however, take the occasion to lift up the misleading slogan “Human rights are women’s rights and women’s rights are human rights.” The statement was half true. Human rights are women’s rights—they belong to everyone, everywhere. But not everything that has been called a woman’s right in one or more countries is recognized as a universal human right.
In my opening statement to the conference, I reaffirmed the positions the Holy See had taken at Cairo, and I called attention to several areas where the Beijing drafts needed to be improved. The documents barely mentioned marriage, motherhood, and the family except negatively as impediments to women’s self-realization (and as associated with violence and oppression). The women’s health section focused disproportionately on sexual and reproductive matters, with scarcely a glance toward primary health care, nutrition, sanitation, tropical diseases, access to basic services, or even maternal morbidity and mortality. Women’s poverty was addressed in narrow terms as chiefly a problem of equality between women and men, slighting the influence of family breakdown and economic structures. I pointed out that, without recognition and support of women’s roles in child raising, effective equality would remain elusive for far too many. I concluded with the observation that there can be no real progress for women, or men, at the expense of children or of the underprivileged. These points seemed so reasonable to us that, in the first few days of the conference, we were confident they would find wide support.
Ominous signs, however, soon appeared. Some delegations from developing countries arrived at sessions involving sexual and reproductive matters with position papers that were identical to one another and whose language resembled the statements of Western abortion rights groups. Our own negotiators were getting rough treatment from chairpersons wielding heavy gavels, especially in sessions dealing with the controversial health sections of the draft.
By the end of the first week, it was clear that a coalition led by the European Union had taken up leadership on the sexual and abortion rights front. Negotiating as a bloc, they were pushing hard on a version of the agenda that had been rejected by the Cairo conference. And their efforts were so aggressive that negotiators were failing to make progress on any other issues.
From the beginning, two aspects of the behavior of the European negotiators struck me as very odd. First, many of their positions contradicted well-established principles in their own national laws and constitutions. Second, they were opposing references to key international human rights principles to which their own governments had subscribed, such as Article 16 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), which provides that “the family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the state.”
The EU group’s indifference to basic principles of international human rights seemed to have no bounds. They contested every effort to include the word motherhood in the conference documents except where it appeared in a negative light, even though the Universal Declaration and many European laws provided that “motherhood and childhood are entitled to special care and assistance” (Art. 25). They objected to a paragraph providing for freedom of conscience and religion in the context of education, in spite of the UDHR’s provision that “everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience, and religion [including] freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship, and observance” (Art. 18). And they sought to eliminate all recognition of parental rights and duties from the draft in defiance of UDHR Article 26, which gives parents the “prior right to choose the education of their children.” The EU negotiators’ behavior was a prime example of a phenomenon I had criticized in my 1992 book Rights Talk —the tendency when arguing for a favorite right to brush aside all other rights and obligations.
By the end of the first week of the conference, the European coalition’s relentless focus on sexual and reproductive rights had brought progress on other issues to a near standstill. So that Friday night, our team composed a press release raising the question of whether the EU negotiators were exceeding their authority. We faxed it to all the major European newspapers and waited.
By Monday, there was a marked change in the negotiating atmosphere. Questions had begun to be posed in European legislatures, including the EU Parliament, concerning what their delegations were up to in Beijing. One of our negotiators reported that an unhappy EU delegate complained to her, “Why did you people have to bring all this out in the open?” Negotiations began moving again, and the final documents that were taking shape, section by section, in different negotiating rooms, began to look like something the Holy See might accept, at least in part.
By the time the conference drew to a close, the conference documents had been improved in many ways, but the picture was mixed.
A number of considerations weighed in favor of the document. The principle that abortion must not be promoted as a method of family planning had been reaffirmed. The provisions in the program of action that were closest to the themes of the conference—equality, development, and peace—were also the most consistent with Catholic teachings on dignity, freedom, and social justice. These included sections dealing with the needs of women in poverty, and with strategies for development, literacy, and education; for ending violence against women; for building a culture of peace; and for providing access for women to employment, land, capital, and technology. We could also support general statements on the connection between the feminization of poverty and family disintegration, the discrimination against women that begins with abortion of unborn females, and the promotion of partnership and mutual respect between men and women. Moreover, many of those ideas—such as the emphasis on women’s education and the insistence that the human person must be at the center of concern in development—had been introduced by (or with the help of) the Holy See over the years. Aided by the Friday night press release, our negotiators even succeeded in securing references to relevant universal rights and obligations in areas where those principles had been deliberately ignored.
But the documents still had serious defects. They were weaker on parental rights and respect for religious and cultural values than the Cairo documents had been, and although EU efforts to include the phrase “sexual rights” were rebuffed, the final documents did contain ambiguous rights language in the areas of sexuality and fertility. There was no consensus on what this vague new language meant, but our delegation was concerned that vague language on sexual and reproductive “health” would be used to promote the agendas of aggressive population control groups who were indifferent to the beliefs, hopes, and capacity for self-determination of those whose reproductive behavior they wished to control.
Much of the foundation money that swirled around the Beijing process was aimed at forging a link between development aid and programs that pressured poor women into abortion, sterilization, and the use of risky contraceptive methods. Disregarding abundant evidence that economic development and women’s education lead to lowered fertility rates, these groups wanted population control on the cheap.
The Holy See’s position was thus a difficult one—one that Catholic laypeople often face when they enter the messy world of politics. When does political compromise become moral compromise?
Earlier that year, Pope John Paul II had given important guidance to Catholic elected officials on whether, in cases where it is not possible to overturn a pro-abortion law, one can legitimately “support proposals aimed at limiting the harm done by such a law and at lessening its negative consequences at the level of general opinion and public morality” (Evangelium Vitae, 73). To vote for such a law, the pope said, “does not in fact represent an illicit cooperation with an unjust law, but rather a legitimate and proper attempt to limit its evil aspects.”
Though relevant to our decision at Beijing, that advice left it up to decision makers to make prudential judgments about how to mitigate negative consequences under each circumstance. Should the Holy See as a moral witness on the world stage entirely repudiate the flawed conference declaration and program of action? Or would it be more effective to join in consensus on the good parts, and to witness to the truth at the same time by explaining our reasons for rejecting the parts that were injurious to women and to human dignity?
After hours of nervous waiting, I heard from Archbishop Tauran. The pope had said: “Accept what you can, and vigorously reject what cannot be accepted.”
I was immensely relieved.
The Holy See associated itself in part with the conference documents, making several reservations. I began my announcement of our position by quoting the eloquent words of John Paul II on women’s quest for equality in his June 1995 Letter to Women:
When one looks at the great process of women’s liberation, the journey has been a difficult and complicated one and, at times, not without its share of mistakes. But it has been substantially a positive one, even if it is still unfinished, due to the many obstacles which, in various parts of the world, still prevent women from being acknowledged, respected, and appreciated in their own special dignity. This journey must go on!
In keeping with the Holy Father’s instructions, I praised the parts of the documents that were conducive to women’s flourishing, and I was sharply critical of the deficiencies that our delegation had tried from the beginning to publicize and remedy. In addition to our reservations, we attached a “statement of interpretation” on the word gender. During the conference, a controversy over the word had been largely defused with a consensus that it was to be understood according to ordinary usage in the United Nations context. But the final Beijing documents were still permeated with that ambiguous word. So, out of prudence, the Holy See explicitly dissociated itself from the notion that sexual identity is merely a malleable social construct. But we also made it clear that the Holy See rejected any crude form of biological determinism. In this we were mindful of the pope’s writings to and about women where he acknowledged that we do not know everything there is to know about what is natural and what is cultural in men and women.
In the end, the Beijing conference did not reach a solid consensus. The Holy See was among an unusually large number of UN members, 43 of 181 present, that dissented from parts of the conference documents. One lesson I took away from that rowdy conference was that huge international gatherings are not suitable settings for addressing complex questions of social and economic justice or grave issues of human rights.
I returned to Harvard thinking that at least the Holy See could feel proud that it had amplified the voices of women whose concerns would otherwise have been sidelined. The Holy See was the only entity at the Beijing conference whose sphere of concern, like that of the UN, was worldwide. With over three hundred thousand educational, health care, and relief agencies serving mainly the poor in every region on the planet, it had a wealth of firsthand experience in ministering to the most basic needs of women and girls. We had called attention to the plight of women who lacked adequate primary health care, nutrition, and sanitation (all of which were given short shrift due to the conference’s fixation on reproductive health). And we had responded to what we believed was the desire of most women everywhere for a feminism that is not hostile to men, marriage, and motherhood—a feminism that treats men and women as equal partners on their journey through life.
I was invited to have dinner with the pope the next time I was in Rome. The Holy Father opened the conversation by asking me what I thought the “new feminism” that he had called for should look like. I began by telling him about Women Affirming Life, a group that I and other Catholic women had founded in Boston with the motto “Pro-life, Pro-woman, Pro- child, Pro-poor.”
My experiences in Beijing prompted me to reflect on how challenging it is to try to live up to the role of the laity as envisioned by Vatican II, not only to bring Christian principles into the secular sphere where we live and work, but also to enter the messy and morally risky realm of politics when circumstances permit. I like to think that the work of our mostly lay delegation helped to encourage other lay Catholics to take the plunge.
The Beijing experience also deepened my already profound appreciation for the remarkable pontificate of Pope John Paul II. The philosopher-pope’s decision on how to deal with the flawed Beijing conference document was illustrative of another characteristic of his pontificate. It was a practical application of his general approach to the promise and perils of our time: discerning and building on the positive elements of the prevailing culture, while naming and countering what is false and harmful. As he put it later that fall during his visit to the United States, “Sometimes, witnessing to Christ will mean drawing out of a culture the full meaning of its noblest intentions, a fullness that is revealed in Christ. At other times, witnessing to Christ means challenging that culture, especially when the truth about the human person is under assault.”
From the book IN THE COURTS OF THREE POPES: An American Lawyer and Diplomat in the Last Absolute Monarchy of the West by Mary Ann Glendon. Copyright © 2024 by Mary Ann Glendon. Published by Image, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
