“…LAW can override consensus and reshape it…history isn’t made by majorities, but by minorities with the stamina and smarts to persevere against the establishment while co-opting its institutions.”
Stephen Settle
Veteran contributor
National Catholic Register
February 21, 1993

In Chapter 6, I wrote that the Vatican recognized that if the new threat to papal security-survival posed by the population movement in the U.S. were to be neutralized, American political will would have to be undermined. The purpose of the Pastoral Plan was to accomplish this goal.
Jesuit priest Virgil Blum, founder and first President of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, proposed this strategy in a 1971 America magazine article titled, “Public Policy Making: Why the Churches Strike Out.”[54] “If a group is to be politically effective, issues rather than institutions must be at stake,” Blum acknowledged. Abortion was simply the issue chosen to galvanize the movement created to achieve this effectiveness.