From sexual and sacramental control to sexual and sacramental abuse.

Life Choices: Toward a Catholic Theology of Reproductive Options Anthony T. Padovano (Catholics for a Free Choice, 2004, 106pp) 0-915365-11-1, $25.00

ANTHONY PADOVANO--NOTED theologian and author, married Catholic priest and the first elected president of CORPUS, the National Association for an Inclusive Priesthood--opens his modest volume Life Choices: Toward a Catholic Theology of Reproductive Options by hailing a plurality of voices as a sign of wholeness in a family, a community and an institution. He's right, yet it is just this plurality of voices that the Catholic hierarchy today has brutally silenced, using firings, threats of excommunication and withholding the Eucharist as its means of control. While euthanasia and gay fights can trigger these punishments, the most consistent lightening rod has been and remains abortion.

In his quest for a theology of choice, Padovano chooses the individual as his starting point. He identities being true to ourselves, creating and realizing a self, as the ultimate human calling. While we must also be responsive to others, he insists that a developed self is "the most significant benefit one brings to the other." Relating this to a pregnant woman and the church, Padovano decries a moral code that compels a woman to carry a pregnancy to term against her will, thereby making her a victim of biological determinism as well as requiring her to sacrifice her self. "Loyalty to an institution that requires treason to the self is not loyalty but a betrayal of our most basic vocation," he writes. To Padovano, the first point of reference in a pregnancy is the woman, not the fetus; the self, not the other. "The choice of the self is not necessarily self indulgent," he writes, "it is often the most sacred choice we make."

It is a short trip from the centrality of the self to the importance of conscience to the woman facing the abortion decision. To that end, Padovano provides a primer on the evolution of Catholic teachings on abortion. He reminds us that there is nothing in the bible specifically about abortion; that Jesus said nothing about abortion; that the church accepts the moral principle of probabalism (one's moral decision can be contrary to church doctrine if it is based on what theologian Daniel Maguire describes as "solid probability" either through prayerful discovery of "'cogent,' nonfrivolous reasons for dissenting from the hierarchically supported view" or by citing the liberal dissenting view of "five or six" reputable theologians); that the second Vatican Council vigorously defended conscience; and that for 19 centuries the church did not consider early abortion to be murder, but a sexual sin because it impeded reproduction.

In a fascinating reference, Padovano clarifies what caused the dramatic change in Catholic teaching on abortion, which went from seeing the fetus as developing life imbued with a soul at some indeterminate time during the pregnancy to seeing the fetus as human life from the moment of conception. That shift had its unlikely roots in the emergence of papal infallibility and Marian doctrine. Under Pope Plus IX (1846-78), the dogma of papal infallibility was declared, and Pins IX went on to define the Immaculate Conception (that Mary was conceived without original sin) as an article of faith. But that teaching would make no sense if there were no soul at the moment of conception. So church teaching changed. Perhaps not surprisingly, that led Plus IX to decree "excommunication in every case of direct abortion at any stage of pregnancy, from conception onward." Plus XII followed suit, declaring the Assumption of Mary an article of faith and asserting that "the baby, still to be born, is human in the same degree and for the same reason as the mother."

PADOVANO MAKES CLEAR THAT despite all of the church proclamations forbidding abortion, however, none of the church's sexual or moral teachings are infallible. Only the Immaculate Conception, the Assumption and infallibility itself are infallible dogmas. The deeply disingenuous trend among the church hierarchy has been to confuse the faithful by declaring teachings on birth control, abortion and women's ordination to be "infallible teachings of the ordinary magisterium" (i.e. the Roman congregations and the bishops). In fact, as Padovano insists and the Catholic Theological Society of America has concluded, that is simply not so. To fill the bill for that level of infallibility would require the "explicit agreement of the whole church," which is clearly not the case on these tremendously controversial issues. Padovano also drives home the point that the church hierarchy has made colossal errors in its teachings--a familiar litany that includes slavery, usury, inquisitions, the Crusades, indulgences, religious liberty, ecumenism and more.

As part of his challenge to the church's absolute prohibition on abortion, Padovano also takes on the church's hypocrisy in terms of its relationship to children. He could have simply contrasted the church's longtime denunciation of child victims of priest sex abuse to its shameless defense of criminal clergy, all in the interest of preserving the myth of an all-celibate priesthood, a bedrock for the hierarchy's absolute power. But he chose instead to focus on church sins in another area. Drawing on the works of John Boswell and David Kertzer, Padovano recalls the church's historical willingness not only to accept the massive abandonment of children (a condition to which the church contributed with its rigid prohibitions on birth control and abortion), but to brazenly benefit from it, taking abandoned children into its monasteries and pretty much enslaving them, compelling them to live as monks and nuns and work for the church for life.

Amidst all of the church's "prolife" language, Padovano makes us think long and hard about how much suffering the hierarchy has been and is willing to tolerate--from Am S, forced pregnancy, illegal abortion, failed marriages, homosexual heartache in the interest of imposing an indefensible and inhumane sexual and moral code. Writes Padovano, "At some point, sexual and sacramental control tunas into sexual and sacramental abuse."

While Life Choices could have benefited from better organization and editing for repetition, Padovano has written a heartfelt work, in measured but uncompromising language. It will be useful for people working with women who have crisis pregnancies, reproductive rights activists or anybody who wants to know the truth about abortion and Catholic teachings. It will especially assist the devout Catholic woman facing the abortion decision. Such a woman could well find comfort here.

ANGELA BONAVOGLIA is the author of Good Catholic Girls: How Women Are Leading the Fight to Change the Church (Harper Collins/ Regan Books, 2005).