Fortnight for Freedom, Day 4

Sisterhood is powerful.

That's what feminists in the women's liberation movement in the days of my young adulthood used to say. Sisterhood: women pulling together to break the shackles of a culture in which, for millennia, women had wielded little power. Powerful: capable of breaking those shackles.

They got broken.

Sort of.

Today, women have individually and collectively claimed power to an historically unprecedented degree. Their new power has created a force, a pressure, that has radically changed our world. Including our Catholic world.

Hillary Rodham Clinton

But full equality with men has remained elusive. Hillary Clinton found when she ran for president that there is still a glass ceiling. Women's compensation as workers in the marketplace lags behind men's. Women rightly worry that a slight rightward shift in the Supreme Court might bring an end to abortion rights.

Nowhere is the tension between full rights for women and the prerogatives of men who are still trying to hold onto power more evident than in the Catholic Church.

Fortnight for Freedom is an expression of that tension, that struggle for power. Archbishop William Lori and the U.S. Council of Catholic Bishops claim that F4F is all about religious freedom, but that's a ruse. It's about the ability of the Church to dodge a contraception-provision mandate issued by the federal government, true, but it's much more about whether the Church can continue to claim in its stodgy old way that an all-male apostolate — the bishops, the pope — can define the "belief" of the Church over the heads of the 98 percent of Catholic women who are sexually active and at risk of pregancy, or have been at some time in the past, and have used artificial methods of contraception.

Pope Paul VI

The bishops oppose such methods as the birth control pill and the employment of condoms, a position set in stone in the late 1960s by an encyclical of Pope Paul VI, written at a time when the modern women's movement was just revving up.

We are probably just days away from the decision of the Supreme Court on Obamacare. The court may strike the law down in its entirety, or it may nullify the individual mandate at its heart. If it takes either of those two approaches, the contraception mandate may automatically become void. Why campaign against it thus prematurely?

Because, I think, the real issue is not Obamacare, but the power of the (male) bishops. Their power in our society as a whole, and their power among Catholics. This is a salvo in an ongoing campaign to bring back the mojo bishops commanded once, in a day not so long ago when women had yet to claim their power.