By comparison, anything but ‘controlled’

A letter writer asserts: the Catholic Church’s opposition to abortion was “never really” about seeking to defend the sanctity of life, but instead a means to control women. My maternal grandmother exemplified a different view.

Grammy Cuff was, like Joe Biden, a lifelong Catholic. The kind of Catholic who prayed the Rosary and went to Mass every morning. Well, that was later in life; I’m not sure as a working widow with eight children, living through the Depression in the slums of Boston, she had time for daily churchgoing.

While I guess it could be argued my grandmother was “controlled” by the Catholic Church, she was one of the most empowered people I’ve ever known. Fearless and principled. Unforgiving, yet recklessly loving. Sacrificial, above all else.

Grammy had no time for the feminists of the sixties — or anything else “progressive.” She even argued that when women got the vote (she was in her twenties at the time), the country went to hell in a handbasket. I think many of today’s young men and women, steeped in gender studies, would appear to her as petulant, fearful, neurotic and selfindulgent.

While it’s true my grandmother submitted to forces more powerful than herself — her God and her church — it can hardly be said she was any more “controlled” than the affluent white liberals and dogmatic pseudo-radicals populating much of the left. In fact, on an existential level, she had a kind of freedom only possible by one means: the ongoing struggle for transcendence of the self.