From Gloria Steinem to Israel: Catholic Labor Day Quick Hits

By Peter Wolfgang ( bio - articles - email ) | Sep 04, 2026

I enjoyed giving Catholic Culture’s “Quick Hits” feature a whirl recently. With nothing big happening in Catholicism or the culture as we head into this Labor Day weekend, I thought I would give it another try. Here are a few brief items that are on my mind.

Gloria Steinem, RIP

The “feminist icon” has gone to her reward. Here was Evangelical commentator John Stonestreet’s reaction this morning:

Well, Gloria Steinem is an incredibly consequential figure for a couple of reasons. I think the most important and prominent part of her legacy is that she took a feminist movement that was grounded in ideals about equal value and human dignity, and took it into a direction, particularly in understanding that women’s rights required access to abortion.

I cut my pro-life baby teeth with Feminists for Life and the description Stonestreet gives—of an originally good feminism later warped by the likes of Steinem—was always my understanding as well. But a Wall Street Journal column last year claiming Pope St. John Paul II for feminism set off a fiery debate among Catholic commentators. (Our own Thomas Mirus weighed in here, here and here.) Regardless, most Catholics will agree that Gloria Steinem led a life that left the world a much worse place.

We never met in person but I crossed swords with her twice. In the 2010 Connecticiut Democratic primary for Comptroller she sent a letter targeting my organization, Family Institute of Connecticut, because our PAC had endorsed a pro-life Democrat. And...would you believe I once failed to reel in a big donor in Fairfield County Evangelicalism because the man’s wife had just given away the farm to Steinem? You wouldn’t think Steinem and I would be fishing in the same pond but there it is.

Steinem most recently crossed my mind in 2020, when I watched Rose Byrne’s portrayal of her in “Mrs. America,” Hulu’s hatchet job on Phyllis Schlafly. I literally watched “Free to Be You and Me” when I was four years old in 1974 on primetime TV the same night “Mrs. America” portrays Gloria Steinem and her friends watching it. My parents bought me the album. No, really.

The feminists’ deep loathing of Schlafly as depicted in the miniseries was quite real. Well into the mid-1980s, when I was in junior high school, a classmate penned an essay for our student newspaper attacking Schlafly because, she said, her concerns were so outlandish. “Unisex bathrooms? Oh, how silly! That will never happen.”

“Mrs. America’s” two-dimensional portrayal of a purely heroic Steinem struck me as false. Unlike the traditionalists, the feminists were portrayed as completely in control of their relationships. Yet what I remember most about Steinem was her one intervention in the politics of my adult life: her “men are allowed one grope” New York Times op-ed, defending Bill Clinton during L’Affaire Lewinsky. Feminism’s finest moment!

I’m glad she lived long enough to see Roe v. Wade overturned. RIP.

Israel trip fallout

EWTN News published a story this week about the Israeli government-sponsored trip to Israel for Catholic Influencers. I was on that trip, which I wrote about here and here. The reaction to the EWTN story on the fringe of the Catholic internet has been what one might expect. Paranoid conspiracies about the Jewish organizers, defamatory statements about the Catholics ones, and so forth.

What frosts me most about this genre of Catholic commentary is that it is not made in good faith. The podcasters who say such things are following my work—they actually linked to one of my tweets—but they deliberately ignored my two Catholic Culture columns on the trip because I provided context and disclaimers that contradict their preferred narrative of sinister Jews and their Catholic lackeys. How, for instance, would my recounting of our throwdown with Israel’s Anti-Defamation League fit their storyline?

It doesn’t, so they leave it out altogether. This is how that crowd rolls. Recall the Benedictine College student who couldn’t be bothered to challenge our speakers during the Catholics Against Antisemitism conference Q and A but then blanketed his campus with an antisemitic leaflet. The goofball wing of Catholic podcasters jumped to his defense without ever addressing his cowardice. They’re right about not confusing objections to Israeli government policy with Jew-hatred. It will be easier to believe they are motivated only by the former, and not the latter, when they learn to argue in good faith.

Happy Labor Day

It’s interesting that Gloria Steinem died as we head into this holiday weekend. Labor Day is a reminder of how Catholicism holds it all together.

The Church once stood alongside the Left on issues where the Left was right. Catholic social teaching, beginning with Leo XIII, defended workers against the injustices of the Industrial Revolution. Not because the Church was socialist, but because she stood with the victims.

The parallel today is striking. “Humanae Vitae” and John Paul II’s “Theology of the Body” place the Church on the side of those harmed by the Sexual Revolution. But thanks to the Gloria Steinems of the world, the modern Left largely abandoned its focus on Labor for abortion and sexual ideology.

The Church’s teaching remains consistent: stand with the victims, whatever ideology is fashionable.