1984 Lives On in Democratic Party Abortion Policy

National Catholic Register, 23 April 2021

Walter Mondale’s death refocuses attention on the repeated clashes, during his 1984 presidential campaign, between his Catholic running mate, Geraldine Ferraro, and Archbishop John O’Connor of New York.

The death of former U.S. Vice President Walter Mondale this week, and the 10th anniversary of the death last month of Geraldine Ferraro, vice-presidential candidate in his presidential bid against incumbent Ronald Reagan, brings to mind how the 1984 election was a signal moment for Catholics in national politics. 

Facing an uphill climb against the popular Reagan, Mondale sought fresh élan for his campaign by nominating the first woman national candidate for a major party. Congresswoman Ferraro was from Queens, an Italian-American, and was also intended to win over some of the ethnic, blue-collar “Reagan Democrats” who had voted for the president in 1980.

Ferraro’s Catholicism — the first Catholic on a national ticket since Sargent Shriver in 1972 — also attracted significant attention. The first Catholic nominated for national office since the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision created a constitutional right to abortion, Ferraro clashed repeatedly during the campaign with Catholic pro-life voices led by the newly appointed archbishop of New York, John O’Connor. 

Before the 1984 campaign, Ferraro had written that “the Catholic position on abortion is not monolithic and there can be a range of personal and political responses to the issue.”

When she repeated that position in the campaign, Archbishop O’Connor took public issue with it, as did his successor in the Diocese of Scranton, Bishop James Timlin. In September 1984, Archbishop O’Connor and Ferraro clashed more prominently, with the archbishop stating flatly that Ferraro was misrepresenting Catholic teaching. The conflict between the two gained national prominence.

Ferraro eventually conceded that there was a not range of views on the morality of abortion in Catholic teaching, but added that “there are a lot of Catholics who do not share the view of the Catholic Church.”

One of those was the prominent governor of New York, Mario Cuomo. He had delivered a rousing keynote address at the Democratic National Convention that summer, and his star was on the rise.

As the O’Connor-Ferraro controversy raged, certain sectors of Catholic opinion were embarrassed by the pro-life witness of Archbishop O’Connor. Thus, Father Theodore Hesburgh, president of the University of Notre Dame, and Father Richard McBrien, head of Notre Dame’s theology department, decided to engage the controversy on the side of the “pro-choice” Catholics in the Democratic Party

Continue reading at the National Catholic Register.