Being a Catholic isn't easy, admits free choice group's leader

Some would say they are an anachronism. Oxymoronic even. For many people the notion of combining "Catholic" "Free" and "Choice" in one title sounds like a challenge offered in a word game. Particularly if it is insisted no negatives can be used.

But an organisation called Catholics for a Free Choice really does exist. Nor is it a hangover from those heady post-Vatican II days of the 1960s. It was founded in 1973 by three women of Irish blood.

Patricia Fogarty McQuillan, Meta Mulcahy and Joan Harriman were three Irish-Americans who firmly believed the US Catholic bishops did not represent the viewpoint of most Catholic Americans in outlawing abortion absolutely. Not that they favoured abortion absolutely. Just that they recognised it as a complex issue with many grey areas.

In the past 25 years Catholics for a Free Choice has developed beyond its single-issue beginnings into an international organisation which is concerned with the right of the individual Catholic to exercise conscience in good faith and with the primacy of such informed conscience in the making of moral decisions, even above the authority of the church. Catholics for a Free Choice believes in the right to dissent. It is therefore not very popular in Rome or among Rome's representatives elsewhere. Ms Frances Kissling is president of Catholics for a Free Choice. From the Queens borough in New York she is Polish-American and spent a year in a novitiate before realising she didn't have a vocation to be a nun. Thereafter she studied English literature at St John's University in New York and joined Catholics for a Free Choice in 1978, radicalised by the church's blunt handling of the abortion issue.

Her passion is conscience - that which doth make cowards of us all. She defines it as "faith enlightened by reason". Its formation followed very careful examination of what was involved and was not about feelings, she said. This was an honest, rational exercise, "an awesome responsibility" which one had a duty to exercise as rigorously as one could in the circumstances. And you must follow it, allowing always for the possibility that you could turn out to be wrong, being "a fallible human being". "We must act on the basis of our insight. Nothing is excluded," she said.

"All of us are in the process of interpreting, including the orthodox (Catholics). If we look on the church as a pilgrim church as defined by (Saint) John," she said, "the reality is that both orthodox and liberal Catholics have a role to play in reaching an understanding." She rejected the notion that she could not be Catholic holding such views.

"The church is not a corporation. It is a family and in a family you always have people who disagree or are out of favour. But they too are still family. We are stuck with each other." But she felt the orthodox approach of exclusivity didn't help. "We are looking for an inclusive church. And I think the church is enriched by disagreement and dissent. The process of reasoning involves dialogue and dissent."

On US television she has described conscience as "not a whimsical kind of thing. It is an intuitive but educated personal evaluation of what is the morally correct action to take in any given circumstance. And it involves - in a Catholic sense - an attempt to try to understand what would God want of me in this circumstance."

Despite present rigidities, she will not be leaving the church. In "Once A Catholic" mode, she said, "I believe in the Catholic Church. If I wanted an easier life I would have joined some Protestant denomination, particularly where issues concerning women, divorce and reproduction are concerned. I was educated as a Catholic. Being a Catholic isn't easy."