When you grow up in a working-class Catholic family with most of your models in life being working class and a mother who had two bad marriages, the life of a nun looks pretty good in many ways.
Kissling: Well, first of all, I did go to Catholic schools. Tippett: So how did you then end up becoming a nun at the age of 19? How did that happen? While a very young woman, Frances Kissling spent a short time in a convent. She was raised by her Polish-American mother, who came from a coal-mining town in Pennsylvania. Tippett: I’m Krista Tippett, and this is On Being.įrances Kissling is president of the Center for Health, Ethics and Social Policy, but she’s perhaps best known as the president of Catholics for Choice, a post she held from 1982 to 2007.
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But I think what I have learned is that you have got to approach differences with this notion that there is good in the other and that if we can’t figure out how to do that and there isn’t the crack in the middle where there are some people on both sides who absolutely refuse to see the other as evil, this is going to continue. She’s experienced something more powerful, as she tells it, than defining common ground - and this has lessons for other issues in our common life and all our struggles with people with whom we disagree the most.įrances Kissling: The need to approach others with enthusiasm for difference is absolutely critical to any change. She has sought to come into relationship with her political opposites. She’s controversial on both sides but speaking from a place that many of us would like to map out between the poles. I’ve been looking yet again for wisdom away from the turbulent news cycle, and I keep returning to a conversation I had in 2011 with Frances Kissling, who is a bridge person in the abortion debate.
We collapse this most intimate and complex of human dilemmas to two sides.
Krista Tippett, host: The focus of our national fight over abortion may change, but this hasn’t changed for decades.
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