This book tells the story of how American Catholics became vocal champions of conscience rights and subjective freedoms in the 1960s and 1970s. Catholics, particularly priests, defended the rights of doctors and nurses to follow conscience and opt out of abortion procedures throughout the 1970s. Before that, however, Catholic antiwar activists came to the aid of men drafted into the military who wanted to follow conscience rather than fight in the Vietnam War. At the same time as Catholics protested the Selective Service, priests began defending the freedom of the laity to follow conscience on ... More

This book tells the story of how American Catholics became vocal champions of conscience rights and subjective freedoms in the 1960s and 1970s. Catholics, particularly priests, defended the rights of doctors and nurses to follow conscience and opt out of abortion procedures throughout the 1970s. Before that, however, Catholic antiwar activists came to the aid of men drafted into the military who wanted to follow conscience rather than fight in the Vietnam War. At the same time as Catholics protested the Selective Service, priests began defending the freedom of the laity to follow conscience on the question of contraception. American historians often depict Protestant dissidents and secular rebels as the nation’s champions of individualism. But in the late twentieth-century, as this book contends, Catholics joined America’s long-running discourse on individualism, shaping its basic terms. The Catholic campaign for conscience rights deepened and transformed the nation’s concept of autonomy and, with it, the broader culture of modern American democracy. The Catholic campaign for conscience rights shaped broader American concepts of ecumenism, individualism, freedom, democracy, autonomy, and pluralism. However, Follow Your Conscience does not tell a story of progress, but one of antagonism and intellectual gridlock. A significant legacy of the Catholic conscience rights movement in the 1960s and 1970s is a constantly churning cycle of theological and political argumentation, in the United States and in the Vatican, with no end in sight.