Iulia Elena Cazan
(ZENIT News – Center for Family and Human Rights / New York, 03.26.2025).- Catholics for Choice openly attacked the Vatican at a UN Women’s Conference, calling the Holy See a “threat to religious freedom and women’s rights” and asking for its removal from the UN. Such a hostile act against a UN observer state could cost Catholics for Choice its UN consultative status.
Catholics for Choice (CFC) delivered the remarks during the General Discussion at the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW), a meeting attended by UN diplomats, parliamentarians, and civil society representatives.
CFC argued that achieving women’s “reproductive rights” and eliminating “coercive laws” is “impossible with the Holy See as a permanent observer at the United Nations.”
“The UN should not be granting this high-level diplomatic status to a religious body that is interfering in the progress of already-established goals, and it certainly should not be granted solely to the Vatican,” the CFC representative said.
CFC’s public attack against a UN Mission may have violated UN rules and could lead to the group losing their UN consultative status. The UN Resolution guiding the relationship between member states and civil society groups says that NGOs can have their ECOSOC consultative status “suspended for three years or withdrawn” if they engage in “unsubstantiated or politically motivated acts against States Members of the United Nations incompatible with those purposes and principles [of the Charter of the United Nations].”
At a CSW parallel event, “The Long Shadow of the Church at Beijing: Feminists Reflect”, Frances Kissling, a former CFC president, said that the Vatican “has about as much right in the UN as Disneyland.”
Kissling went on to say that “[w]hen dealing with the Institutional Church, many Catholics and certainly non-Catholics believe they have to be nice […] you don’t take them on in the same way you take on…you know…the same right-wing group” and that “if you are fighting something that is bigger than you, you have to be prepared to be willing to not be so respectful.”
Founded soon after Roe v. Wade in 1973, CFC is a feminist dissident NGO that rejects Catholic teaching on core issues, including abortion, contraception, the Church hierarchy, and human sexuality.
Historically, CFC has been primarily funded by “secular and anti-religious sources,” including major foundations, like the Sunnen Foundation, “a pioneer in the contraceptive industry”, and the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation, whose founding Billionaire self-identified as agnostic.
At a CSW parallel event, Steph Hanson-Quintana, Vice President of Organizing and Engagement at CFC, said that the goal of CFC is to “mobilize, gather people of faith who support reproductive freedom”. At the same event, another CFC representative said that “the Bible does not prohibit abortion” and that the Holy Scripture seems to indicate that “the fetus is not a person.”
The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops condemned CFC multiple times across the years. In 1993 it argued that “[b]ecause of its opposition to the human rights of some of the most defenseless members of the human race, and because its purposes and activities deliberately contradict essential teachings of the Catholic faith…Catholics for Choice merits no recognition or support as a Catholic organization.” Similarly, in a 2016 statement, The Conference declared that “the use of the name ‘Catholic’ as a platform to promote the taking of innocent human life is offensive not only to Catholics, but to all who expect honesty and forthrightness in public discourse.”
When CFC moved to have the Holy See kicked out of the General Assembly more than 20 years ago, several thousand groups from around the world, signed a statement in support of the Holy See at the UN. These included the largest Protestant and Muslim groups in the world. A resolution was passed in the US Congress endorsing the Holy See at the UN.
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