The Nun Who Chose Abortion Over Her Vows

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It wasn’t until 8:45 a.m. on February 23, 1983, that the Sisters of Mercy in Detroit learned that Archbishop Edmund Szoka would soon hold a news conference to deliver an ultimatum: Sister of Mercy Agnes Mary Mansour must withdraw her appointment as director of Michigan’s Department of Social Services – a role that oversaw state Medicaid funding for abortion – or else leave religious life.

The archbishop tasked the Sisters of Mercy with requesting Mansour’s formal dispensation, or release, from her religious vows. As rumors spread, the order’s Detroit Administrative Team acted quickly, declaring the following day: “Sister Agnes Mary remains a sister in good standing.”^[1]

At fifty-one years old, Mansour had spent her entire adult life as a Sister of Mercy. She held a Ph.D. in biochemistry, but since the Vatican had long limited the roles of religious sisters to nursing, social work, and education, Mansour never received her M.D. or worked as a medical doctor as she desired. Despite these institutional constraints, from the mid-1800s, when the Sisters of Mercy opened the world’s first Mercy hospital in Pittsburgh, to the latter half of the twentieth century, women in habits – not men in mitres – were the face and backbone of Catholic healthcare in the United States. Overseeing most Catholic hospitals, religious sisters wielded spiritual authority backed by medical expertise, a role the U.S. bishops increasingly sought to replace with their own ecclesial authority.

During the pre-Roe era, serving on the frontlines gave the Sisters of Mercy direct, if clandestine, encounters with abortion. For example, the Mercy Sisters’ Misericordia Hospital in West Philadelphia reportedly treated twenty-two “incomplete” abortions in its first two years of operation.^[2] By the time of the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, the U.S. bishops’ conference had tightened their code of medical ethics to prevent incidences of abortion at Catholic hospitals. But Roe also arrived in the wake of the Second Vatican Council, when religious sisters began embracing the Council’s call to shed their hierarchical habits and take on greater social activist roles.

As single, educated women, religious sisters were primed to become allies in the secular second-wave feminist movement; however, reproductive health would test the sisters as feminist and healthcare leaders. Just before the Mansour saga unfolded, the U.S. bishops forced the Sisters of Mercy to stop circulating a position paper on tubal ligations, which were being performed at some of their hospitals despite the bishops’ ethical directives. The Mercy sisters maintained that tubal ligations, when performed with consent, could prevent “unjust injury” to women.^[3] By the early 1980s, more than twenty-five states had also restricted Medicaid funding to abortion after the Supreme Court ruled that financial access to abortion is not a constitutional right, allowing states to adopt the provisions of the Hyde Amendment. Restoring universal public funding for abortion became a central plank for the abortion rights movement.

Michigan permitted Medicaid funding for abortion until 1988, so Mansour’s role as social services director would require supervising the distribution of funds. The bishops advocated for limiting Medicaid funding if it meant blocking abortions, yet Mansour viewed abortion as an economic and political reality. “I do not believe it appropriate to have a double standard allowing one economic class to more easily obtain abortions over another,” she explained in a 1982 position paper. Any endorsement of public funding would be “a vote for the poor rather than a vote for abortions.”

Religious sisters didn’t always morally agree with abortion, but a faction of American sisters was growing frustrated with the bishops’ escalating political campaigns. In April 1982, the National Coalition of American Nuns (NCAN), representing 1,800 sisters, publicly opposed the Hatch Amendment, becoming one of the first “institutionally related” Catholic organizations to publicly diverge from the bishops on abortion. NCAN’s board underscored its opposition to abortion, yet also objected to abortion bans and criminalization. Instead, NCAN advocated for promoting “sexual responsibility – especially among men – and expanding social welfare for families.

While NCAN leaders hoped they would provoke discussion among the bishops, the bishops largely ignored NCAN’s pro-choice statement. Instead, the organization received hundreds of letters, including personal abortion stories from Catholic women. NCAN leader and Sister of Loretto Margaret Traxler noticed the widening gulf between the bishops’ “Dow Jones perspective” and the women beneath them. She claimed that religious sisters “work with poor women. We’re still in the church. We can’t be silent.”^[4]

When Mansour accepted the nomination as social services director in December 1982, Archbishop Szoka appeared open to compromise. He only asked that Mansour affirm her personal opposition to abortion, which she did. Yet one week before his eleventh-hour press conference, Szoka met with Mansour and threatened to withdraw his approval if she didn’t publicly oppose Medicaid-funded abortion – something the Mercy sister refused to do. At her confirmation hearing in March 1983, Mansour reiterated that her “pro-life” stance and the social services position aligned with her order’s charism – or spiritual mission – to bring about the works of mercy.^[5]

Shortly after Mansour’s confirmation, the Vatican notified Sister of Mercy President Theresa Kane that Rome requested Mansour’s resignation from the Department of Social Services director position. Mansour soon asked for a temporary leave from her vows while her order engaged in dialogue with the Vatican. But in early May 1983, a Vatican delegate traveled to Michigan solely to deliver Mansour a mandate from Pope John Paul II: “by virtue of your vow of obedience to the Holy Father you immediately resign from your position,” or else face dismissal from the sisterhood.^[6] Not wanting to defy the pope – but also wanting to honor her “continued commitment to the poor” – Mansour chose to renounce her vows.

This wasn’t the first time Mansour had ruffled some cassocks. The previous spring, Mansour bypassed Archbishop Szoka and launched a short-lived campaign for a vacant Congressional seat without first obtaining his permission. John Paul II didn’t specifically forbid religious sisters from holding public office, though a Vatican prelate ultimately conceded that religious sisters should stick to their work as “spiritual leaders.”^[7]

Mansour’s political campaign first publicized her support for Medicaid-funded abortion – perhaps inspiring the Vatican to ensure that religious sisters stay in their “spiritual” lane. But the Vatican’s subsequent handling of Mansour’s appointment to director of social services had the opposite effect. Arguing that Mansour’s forced dispensation stripped her – and all religious sisters – of spiritual leadership, Sister of Mercy President Kane told her fellow Sisters of Mercy: “We find ourselves a community of believers—acting in sincerity but also in conflict—a community ever in search of truth.”^[8]

What followed was what Ms. magazine deemed “the nuns’ revolt.”^[9] NCAN, the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, and numerous orders and women’s groups rallied nationwide support for Mansour. Several thousand sisters and laywomen demonstrated across Detroit, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C. In Chicago, NCAN and the National Assembly of Religious Women hosted the “Pentecostal Call to Witness Pray & Protest” outside the Holy Name Cathedral.^[10] The groups tailored their messaging around the violation of Mansour’s right to due process in a male-dominated church, not her support for Medicaid-funded abortion. Still, anti-abortion counter-protesters camped outside the cathedral with a garbage can of small dolls representing aborted fetuses, with one young man waving a placard: “These nuns are evil.”^[11]

Not all religious sisters were united, either. For example, a School Sister of Notre Dame in New Orleans claimed she was one of the “Good Religious” protesting the “arrogance” of Mansour’s case, which she viewed as a “clear cut defiance of the laws of God.”^[12] The sister urged NCAN, “We cannot be with the Church and against it at the same time.”^[13]

For Mansour and her allies, to be with the Church meant serving women on the margins. Mansour was simply living out her charism of mercy, said Dominican Sister Carol Coston, co-founder of the social justice lobby NETWORK. “Why, then, was it not permissible for Sister Agnes Mary, Catholic nun, to administer Medicaid funds,” Coston questioned, “but permissible for Agnes Mary Mansour, Catholic laywoman?”^[14]

The Sisters of Mercy would continue to wrestle with this contradiction. Later in 1983, the order formally banned tubal ligations at its U.S. hospitals following the Vatican’s ongoing pressure. Outside the Sisters of Mercy, Mansour’s allies continued organizing. NCAN leader Sister Sallie Watkins delivered a pro-choice Catholic talk for the New Mexico Religious Coalition for Abortion Rights, whose hotlines regularly received calls from Catholic women “struggling with the guilt from a problem pregnancy.”^[15] Dominican Sister Marjorie Tuite joined an assembly of more than 200 groups for the 1984 National Consultation on Economic Justice for Women Who Are Poor, which declared the state of the nation to be “code blue” – the medical term for a life-threatening emergency.^[16]

Yet in its efforts to consolidate ecclesial and political power through abortion, the Vatican continued making examples of dissenting sisters. Following the October 1984 publication of “A Catholic Statement on Pluralism and Abortion” in the New York Times, the Vatican pressured numerous religious orders to dismiss the twenty-four sisters who endorsed the statement. Many of the “sister-signers” claimed that their orders retracted their endorsements – and submitted statements obeying the Vatican – without their consent. Meanwhile, Notre Dame de Namur Sisters Barbara Ferraro and Patricia Hussey refused to affirm the Church’s teaching on abortion, which they believed ignored the experiences of working-class women. “[W]e must remain faithful to the call of the gospel as we hear it from the poor women with whom we work,” Ferraro and Hussey told their order. “Their lives need room for choices in matters of reproduction.”^[17]

The legacy of Sister Agnes Mansour and the ensuing “nuns’ revolt” reverberates in the twenty-first century as the One Big Beautiful Act – along with the dismantling of the Title X Family Planning Program – threatens to strip Medicaid funding from millions of Americans and reproductive health clinics nationwide. Although the U.S. bishops opposed these immense Medicaid cuts, they advocated for additional funding cuts to reproductive health services, especially Planned Parenthood. Many orders of women religious – the Sisters of Mercy included – again diverged from the bishops, refusing to make reproductive health a concession in political battles over healthcare. Nearly 200 sisters gathered at the Capitol last June for a Sister Speak Out, with some also lobbying alongside Rep. Nancy Pelosi.

As Sister of Mercy Mary Haddad, President of the Catholic Health Association, told the crowd at the Capitol: “The moral voices of women religious must ring out. … Our work is not over.”

Notes

1. Provincial Administration Team, “Chronology of Events Surrounding Sister Agnes Mary Mansour’s Appointment as Director of the Department of Social Services,” Sisters of Mercy-Province of Detroit, May 12, 1983. Box 10, File 3. Marjorie Tuite, O.P. Collection, Loyola University Chicago Women and Leadership Archives. ↑
2. First Report of the Misericordia Hospital: July 2, 1918-May 31, 1920, 34, Catholic Historical Research Center of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, Philadelphia, PA. ↑
3. Margaret Farley, “Power and Powerlessness: A Case in Point,” Proceedings of the Catholic Theological Society of America, 1982, vol. 37. ↑
4. Lavinia Edmunds, “Activist Nuns: Beyond the Cloister,” Chicago Tribune, July 2, 1982, Sec. 1, 19. ↑
5. Provincial Administration Team, “Chronology of Events Surrounding Sister Agnes Mary Mansour’s Appointment as Director of the Department of Social Services,” Sisters of Mercy-Province of Detroit. ↑
6. Ibid. ↑
7. Harry Cook, “Priests and nuns don’t belong in politics, papal rep declares,” Detroit Free Press, July 1, 1982, 3a, 10 a. ↑
8. Sister Theresa Kane, R.S.M. Letter to the Sisters of Mercy of the Union, May 20, 1983. Box 7, Folder 5. NCAN Records, Department of Special Collections and University Archives, Raynor Memorial Libraries, Marquette University. ↑
9. Mary Kay Blakely, “The Nuns’ Revolt: Sister Agnes Mary Mansour’s Vow to the People,” Ms. magazine, September 1983. Box 7, Folder 5. NCAN Records, Marquette University. ↑
10. Protest flyer, “Pentecostal Call to Witness Pray & Protest,” May 1983. Box 10, Folder 3. Tuite Collection, LUC-WLA. ↑
11. Mark R. Day, “Mansour Case Sparks Protests Across Nation,” National Catholic Reporter, June 3, 1983, and Jane Boyer, “Pentecost 1983,” NCAN Newsletter. Box 7, Folder 5, NCAN Records, Marquette University. ↑
12. Personal correspondence re: the Mansour case, May 18, 1983. Box 7, Folder 5. NCAN Records, Marquette University. ↑
13. Ibid. ↑
14. Sister Carol Coston, O.P., “On Sister Agnes Mary Mansour, RSM,” 1983. Box 10, Folder 3. Tuite Collection, LUC-WLA. ↑
15. Newsletter, New Mexico Religious Coalition for Abortion Rights, June 1983. Box 1, Folder 3. NCAN Records, Marquette University. ↑
16. ^] “Statement of Women Gathered at the National Consultation on Economic Justice for Women Who Are Poor,” January 24-26, 1984. Box 10, Folder 3. Tuite Collection, LUC-WLA. ↑
17. Barbara Ferraro and Patricia Hussey, Letter to the General Government Group, February 7, 1988. Box 23. Barbara Ferraro Records, Catholics for Choice Records, Sophia Smith Collection of Women’s History Repository, Smith College. ↑

 

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Feature image: In November 1983, Catholic sisters and laywomen convened for the conference, “From Generation to Generation: Woman Church Speak.” The conference brochure features a message of solidarity for Sister Agnes Mary Mansour alongside a call to sign the “Catholic Statement on Pluralism and Abortion.” Catholics for a Free Choice will publish the statement, endorsed by many religious sisters, in the New York Times in October 1984. (Courtesy of the Women and Leadership Archives, Loyola University Chicago.)