1962, a year after writing Christianity and Social Progress, Pope John XXIII opened Vatican II in much the same spirit. As Phyllis Graham’s new pastor, the Reverend Matthew LePage, wrote to his parishioners at Infant Jesus on Long Island, the church hoped to compete better with the distractions of modern life by transforming the mass into a “community prayer in which everyone, priest and people, must take part actively.” Reflecting the social justice and participatory democratic zeitgeists of that time, LePage argued that Vatican II had “but one purpose: to get people to lead better and more Christian lives.”15 In the United States in the sixties, these ideals led Catholic leaders and parishioners to oppose legal and economic discrimination against African Americans and other racial minorities. Catholic leaders also criticized what they saw as an unjust war in Vietnam. They did not advocate for communism in that country, but they were against spending vast sums of money to wreak death and destruction upon a poor nation that had been exploited economically. Church leaders likewise rejected sending mostly working-class and poorer American men to do so since they lacked the resources to avoid being drafted into war.16
But while (male) Catholic leaders promoted justice along race and class lines, they held very traditional positions on women and gender, as their embrace of a “living wage” underscores. During the economic crisis of the thirties, Catholic leaders—from the pope, in encyclicals such as Quadragesimo Anno (1931), to parish priests in New York and elsewhere—began arguing for a living wage, which would enable a man to earn enough money for his whole family while his wife stayed home with the children. Church leaders recognized, however, that many women such as Phyllis Graham’s mother were in the paid workforce during the Depression (they avoided whether these women worked out of choice or necessity, framing it as the latter). As a result, the church promoted measures to help working women, beginning with protective labor legislation in the thirties and including equal economic opportunity by 1971 in a papal letter. Yet, ample language about women’s maternal obligations accompanied such pronouncements on work into the late twentieth century. The church hierarchy, much like the lay Catholic housewives who would lead New York’s antifeminist response, had a limited view of women’s economic rights. They felt that women, specifically mothers, belonged at home. When that was not possible for financial reasons, policies were needed to help them serve their families with crucial outside income. Clearly, the church’s concept of a worker was gendered male. Women were back-up earners who should only step in when a living wage was not tenable.17
The church’s concept of a leader was similarly gendered: men unequivocally ran the Catholic Church, although nuns wielded a considerable amount of de facto power before Vatican II. Prior to the reforms, becoming a nun was considered an acceptable (even praiseworthy) substitute for Catholic women who did not become wives and mothers, or for those who wanted greater agency in the workplace. While college-educated women struggled 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
