A few months before the 2020 election, NETWORK, the scrappy Catholic social justice lobby founded by nuns, stood up to both the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and scores of conservative Catholics who pump tens of millions into Catholic causes: NETWORK declared that no Catholic in good conscience could vote for President Donald Trump.
“He does not embody any of our values,” said NETWORK Executive Director Sister Simone Campbell.
The move was unprecedented for the group, which was founded by progressive Catholic sisters in 1971. It had never before taken a position on a candidate.
The group also issued a voting guide for Catholics far different from the guide released by Catholic bishops. The bishops’ “Faithful Citizenship” guide terms abortion “intrinsically evil,” implying that it is the most important voting issue. NETWORK’s voting guide looks at Catholic values in a much more holistic way, citing the words of Pope Francis to make the case that “abortion is not the only issue that matters.”
NETWORK considered candidates’ positions on everything including immigration policy, a “just tax code,” maternal mortality, particularly among Black women, and policies to end systemic racism, issues the pope calls priorities that are as “equally sacred” as protecting the unborn.
Perhaps not surprisingly, Trump’s position comported with official church teachings just once on NETWORK’s scorecard—his opposition to legal abortion. But on 25 other issues, it was Biden, a practicing Catholic, who aligned with Catholic values.
It wasn’t the first time that NETWORK has faced off with the men who speak for the institutional church.
In 2010, Catholic bishops opposed the Affordable Care Act, worried that the Obama administration’s plan might cover abortion. Campbell wrote a strongly worded letter assuring members that extending healthcare access to millions of Americans who lacked it was a “pro-life” action. Prominent sisters, representing tens of thousands of religious women, signed on.
It turned the tide. “I know 29 votes that letter got,” Campbell says. “It wouldn’t have gotten out of the House without our letter.” It’s something she doesn’t regret, despite the fallout from the institutional church.
Two years later, the Leadership Conference of Catholic Women Religious, whose members represent 80% of Catholic sisters in the U.S., was chastised by the Vatican for its “radical feminist” leanings, including its stances on social justice, abortion and gay marriage, and its relationship with NETWORK. The sisters’ legislative victory on healthcare, she is convinced, was the real reason the Vatican went after the group. The bishops “were still pissed because we won and they lost.”
But up until now, NETWORK has always chosen its battles carefully. “[The group] has survived by not having a position on abortion,” Campbell notes. “Early on in the post-Roe v. Wade fights, we stayed out.” Nevertheless, this year, Campbell publicly admitted her guilt for staying silent for so long. It enabled abortion to become “weaponized by the right-wing political crowd,” she says.
Campbell now frames the abortion issue in different terms. “Our faith does not require the criminalization of abortion,” she says. Instead, Campbell says, caring for the unborn means making sure that pregnant women have the resources and healthcare access to care for their children.
Campbell knows a lot about those women. She’s met them all over the country, on bus tours that she and dozens of other sisters take to shine a light on people at the margins.
NETWORK’s first bus tour launched in 2012, after the Vatican’s public rebuke. Campbell saw the media attention as the answer to her prayer for more visibility. She didn’t respond to the bishops or Vatican officials. Instead, she strategized about making this “explosion of notoriety” work for her organization and its mission.
Thus, Nuns on the Bus was born. “It was a gift of the spirit,” says Campbell, who’s a poet and still speaks with the lilt of the California girl she once was.
The bus tour was covered by local and national news outlets, as the sisters met in communities in nine states hard-hit by the 2008 downturn, and tried to meet with Republican House members who supported sharp cuts in aid to the poor that were proposed by House Speaker Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI).
NETWORK has launched several “Nuns on the Bus” tours since 2012, including a virtual tour in 2020 to encourage Catholics to be “multi-issue voters.” But it was the first tour that really captured the public’s imagination.
That first bus trip “catapulted us to a whole different level of public exposure and clout on the Hill, Campbell says. NETWORK’s substantive grasp of issues had always been respected, but “the capacity to engage in the public dialogue” about issues increased their effectiveness as lobbyists, she says.
Campbell’s fame and popularity were so great that she was asked to speak at the Democratic National Convention that year. She agreed, but she had her conditions: She wouldn’t endorse the re-election of President Barack Obama, and she would declare herself “pro-life.”
Democratic officials willingly agreed. Campbell told stories of the people she met on her bus tour. She never once spoke Obama’s name. But she got uproarious applause from the crowd.
Less well-known was the fact that she also got an appointment with Ryan, something he wasn’t willing to grant before the bus trip. Why? Campbell smiles. “He’s such a boy scout. He’s such a guy who wants to be good and thought well of. He couldn’t bear it.”
But Ryan was uncomfortable with Campbell’s style of lobbying. What sets NETWORK apart from other progressive groups, she says, is this notion that everyone deserves respect and care. So Campbell asked Ryan how he and his family were coping with his high-pressure job. “He just couldn’t deal with it,” she says. “He had to change the subject.” But that loving attention earned Campbell respect.
Later, when she was testifying in the House, she was assailed by former Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), one of the fiercest conservatives in the chamber, now a U.S. Senator. But when Blackburn referred to Campbell’s recent reprimand by the Vatican, Ryan intervened, Campbell recalls. “He said, ‘Oh, no, Sister Simone is well within the teachings of our faith. She’s certainly a faithful person.’ I mean, he defended me, which validated all the points I was making, and I was the Democratic witness. It was pretty funny,” Campbell recalls.
NETWORK reached out to the Trump administration, but met with “zero success,” Campbell says. Nevertheless, in the most polarized Congress in history, NETWORK continued to make inroads with some Republicans. “Often, in our secular coalitions, we’re seen as the point people who can get into Republican offices,” Campbell says. Republican staff know that a NETWORK meeting won’t devolve into “unpleasant exchanges,” Campbell says. “They’re going to be respected even if we disagree.”
The group’s “2.5 lobbyists” (Campbell is the half since she’s also the executive director) have been working with Republican senators Marco Rubio (FL) and Thom Tillis (NC), who are leading efforts to include “mixed-status” families in any future pandemic aid. Those are families that include members who do not have Social Security numbers. (That includes not only the undocumented but people here legally without permission to work in the U.S.) “We’ve been working really hard with their offices and helping to build the momentum around that issue,” she says, adding that NETWORK’s role is to help lawmakers understand the needs in their respective states. “It’s really kind of fun.”
She observes that the work also involves lobbying Democrats. “Catholic social teaching is quite aligned with the progressive caucus,” she explains. “[But] the fact is, we’ve got to get something done. Often, you’ve got to lobby the Dems to get them to move off some high-flying principles.”
“We’re not a ‘to-the-barricades’ movement,” she adds. “We’re ‘the shoulder-to-the-load, pushing-it-forward, making-the-most-happen’ people."
NETWORK’s lobbying focus has always been expansive. “We do suffer from the progressive thing that we see the intersectionality of everything, so we want to do it all,” she acknowledges.
For example, over the last four years, NETWORK has pushed to “mend the income and wealth gap in our nation,” which requires economic reforms such as a fairer tax policy, higher wages, “a family-friendly workplace,” access to healthcare and housing, and fixing immigration. But NETWORK’s issue portfolio also includes voting rights, trade, and restorative justice.
That’s a lot of issues, she concedes: “We try to stay focused, but it’s hard.” What does NETWORK leave out? The group does not work on environmental or education issues. “That’s where we have to draw a line,” she says.
Even more difficult may be operating with an annual budget of less than $2 million. “We hardly ever get foundation grants,” she says. Either foundations assume that NETWORK gets money from the Catholic Church—it doesn’t—or “faith makes them nervous.”
Secular foundations shy away from the group, even though its issues are not religious. The way NETWORK does politics by “telling the stories of people, engaging in education and principles” also seems to make them uneasy.
And few foundations that give to religious groups will fund the group because its mission is not “religious enough.” Consequently, NETWORK relies on individual donors, and 60% of its funding comes from small givers, she says.
She appreciates having a “broad base” of supporters but wishes foundations would understand why groups like hers that lobby for systemic change at the federal level are crucial to social justice.
“Many in philanthropy want to do the frontline service providers, where you can count numerical statistics and feel good about yourself,” she says. “But unless we have support for those of us trying to heal our society ... we’ll accomplish nothing in service.“
“The needs are going to be so huge,” she predicts. Anything philanthropy provides in direct assistance will be “a drop in the bucket.” What’s required, she contends, is to fundamentally “change how we are as a nation. We have to change our rugged individualism.”
“It’s an unpatriotic lie borne out of the wealth of some. And we’ve got to recover the fact that we are a people. It’s ‘we the people,’” she concludes. “Philanthropy plays an important role in that.”
Last October, Campbell announced that she was stepping down as NETWORK's head in March 2021. But it is not likely that NETWORK's focus and approach will change. And Campbell herself, who has a relationship with Biden, may become a key adviser to the new deeply Catholic president.
As Campbell noted on November 6: “We congratulate Vice President Joseph Biden and Senator Kamala Harris on their imminent victory, and we look forward to working together to create a more perfect union, caring for those who were too often left out of the Trump administration’s care.”
Photo credit: Richard Thornton / Shutterstock.com
