It’s no coincidence that Catholic defection to the Republican Party during the Reagan era coincided with the start of John Paul II’s papacy. John Paul’s emphasis on opposition to abortion as a core Catholic value—and his warnings about a pro-choice “culture of death“—perfectly meshed with the Republican Party’s use of abortion as a wedge issue. But even before John Paul, the U.S. bishops’ conference had, in 1976, meddled in electoral politics when they pronounced themselves “encouraged” by Gerald Ford’s abortion views while they were “disappointed” by Carter’s.
The U.S. bishops’ conference nevertheless retained a significant center-left faction throughout the 1980s. These bishops continued to emphasize social justice concerns like the abuses of capitalism and militarism in Central America, structural poverty, and the prevention of nuclear war, while remaining moderate on the question of whether Catholics needed to aggressively assert opposition to abortion in public policy.
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