What Gloria Steinem's Last Debate Still Reveals

Plenty of public figures die and get polished into marble within about six minutes. That seems to be happening with Gloria Steinem. The obituaries line up the familiar pieces, feminist icon, founder, organizer, public voice, abortion advocate, cultural force. All true enough from the reporting here. Still, I keep getting snagged on one thing that doesn't fit neatly into a memorial plaque.

Not whether she was influential. Of course she was. It's whether a person can spend decades teaching the world to talk about power and oppression, then somehow miss the damage done by her own side's favorite sacrament of autonomy. Yes, I used that word on purpose.

The source piece lingers over Steinem's public life and its contradictions. She repeated slogans that made men disposable or abortion untouchable. She built institutions that promoted abortion activism. She also had moments when the revolution she helped popularize turned around and bit her on the ankle. Her comments about Bill Clinton drew criticism later. Her remarks during the Sanders-Clinton fight brought swift condemnation and apology. Even her late-in-life marriage had to be explained in ideological terms so nobody thought she'd betrayed the cause.

That part feels almost too on the nose. Movements that promise liberation often end up issuing little internal passports. You may proceed, citizen, after clarifying your approved motives. I've seen smaller Catholic versions of this too, by the way. Put church people near a controversy long enough and some of us start acting like doctrinal TSA agents at Gate 4.

Freedom gets thin when regret is forbidden

What struck me most was not just Steinem's advocacy, but the way regret itself becomes almost unspeakable in certain moral systems.

The story notes that accounts of her life mention an abortion when she was young and also mention that she had no biological children. Those facts are often placed near each other without anyone daring to notice they might belong in the same human sentence. That silence says a lot. We are allowed to celebrate choice. We are allowed to defend it with slogans sharp enough to fit on protest signs. What we're not allowed to do is ask whether some choices wound us in ways ideology cannot heal.

And yes, before somebody rolls their eyes and mutters about Catholic guilt, let me say it plainly. Guilt can become warped, manipulative, even cruel when it's severed from grace. I've heard confessions from people carrying old shame like wet concrete on their backs. God doesn't enjoy that.

Still, a conscience that never stings is not freedom either. That's numbness wearing lipstick.

The Christian claim is not that regret is fun or tidy or spiritually glamorous. It isn't. It's awful sometimes. It can hit at odd hours too... while folding laundry, driving past a school playground, staring at an empty kitchen table after dinner. But regret can also be honest, which means it can become holy ground if we stop running from it long enough for mercy to find us.

Dorothy Day knew something Steinem didn't want

The source article brings in Dorothy Day near the end, and I'm glad it does because Day ruins everybody's easy categories.

She too had an abortion before her conversion. She too knew political passion and social upheaval and all the restless energy of modern causes. But unlike our polished age of self-justification, Day spoke from regret without being destroyed by it. That's a very Catholic thing, actually. We don't pretend evil is good so people can sleep at night. We also don't tell sinners they're sealed shut forever.

I think that's what bugs me about so much secular praise language around figures like Steinem. It leaves no room for tragedy unless tragedy can be converted into empowerment copy. If an act must always remain proof of liberation, then any later sorrow becomes treason against the script.

That is a brutal way to live.

A few years back I sat with a woman after Mass who wasn't asking for theology class or culture-war talking points. She just said she was tired of being told what she was supposed to feel about an abortion decades earlier. Tired of activists telling her relief was mandatory. Tired of religious people speaking as if she'd become nothing more than a cautionary tale. What she wanted was stranger and simpler: truth without exile.

Most of us do.

Also, tiny tangent here, every time I hear one of those old slogan lines about fish and bicycles or men becoming pregnant I think about how badly political slogans age once they leave the poster board and enter actual kitchens and nurseries and hospital rooms where human beings have to live with them. Slogans are loud. Consequences are quiet.

The Church has to sound different from the crowd

If Catholics are going to say anything worth hearing in moments like this, it can't just be victory-lap moralizing over someone else's contradictions. Lord save us from that performance.

We should be able to say two things at once without flinching: Gloria Steinem helped shape public life in enormous ways, and some of what she championed harmed women while calling itself liberation. Both belong on the table.

The Church's witness only matters if we refuse both lies, the lie that sin doesn't wound us and the lie that wounds cannot be redeemed.

I'm not sure Steinem ever found space for that second truth. Maybe she did privately and we simply don't know it. I won't invent an ending for another person's soul. God sees farther than obituary writers do, farther than activists do, farther than priests with opinions over tea late at night.

Still, whenever our culture praises freedom while banning sorrow, I think of Christ after the Resurrection still bearing wounds you could touch with your hand.

Not erased. Not glorified because they were good wounds in themselves. Transfigured.

That's harder than a slogan would you agree?