The Catholic Church hierarchy doesn't much care for Frances Kissling and her growing abortion rights group, Catholics for a Free Choice. Witness this scene: Kissling is in her Washington, D.C., office this spring when she learns the Vatican doesn't want her group attending the upcoming United Nations conference on women in Beijing. Kissling and an aide hop on a plane and by 4 p.m. are at the United Nations, challenging the moral authority of the Catholic Church on the abortion issue. The Vatican, whose anti-abortion position is unalterable, bristles at Kissling's group using the word Catholic in its title. The Vatican's U.N. representative wants the United Nations to deny Kissling admission to the September conference. It doesn't want her group going to China to represent American Catholics who support abortion rights. To the Vatican, the words pro-choice and Catholic are mutually exclusive. "Once a year, it becomes apparent to us that Catholics for a Free Choice is confusing Catholics," says Helen Alvare, spokesperson on abortion issues for the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, explaining the Vatican challenge. "We then need to clarify that their position is the opposite of Catholic. It's the opposite of humane." Still, the Vatican lost. Kissling's group got credentials. A CNN camera crew recorded the moment, bringing more attention to the nemesis the Vatican wishes would just go away. "For the church," says Kissling, 51, who considers herself a practicing Catholic, "there's never anything more threatening than the dissenter from within. The simple challenging of the position on contraception and abortion, particularly abortion, pushes the fear buttons. So does the fact that we are not afraid of the church." Pushing buttons is what Kissling has done all her life. She's good at making people pay attention to her, even those who think her views are wrong. The attention has brought growth to Catholics for a Free Choice. Her staff has grown from five people working in crowded quarters in 1982 to 19 in a larger, newly renovated office. Her budget has jumped from $250,000 in 1982, when she became president, to $2-million today. Kissling is an energetic, articulate woman who almost single-handedly has shaped Catholics for a Free Choice into a nationally known and oft-criticized group that stands as a David to the Vatican's Goliath. "This group is the most visible representative of a lot of Catholic unrest among lay people," says Kenneth Briggs, a former New York Times religion writer whose book, Holy Siege, examined turmoil among American Catholics in the late 1980s. "There's no other group outside the church that gets that kind of attention." Kissling began pushing buttons as a student at St. John's University in Queens, when a professor instructed her to sit on her hands rather than continue bombarding him with questions. "I was always the kid in school who pushed the envelope, who asked hard questions," says Kissling, who grew up in a working-class Queens neighborhood, attended all-girl Catholic schools and was the first in her family to go to college. Early on, she says she reacted strongly to church policy as she watched her divorced mother denied access to the sacraments. When she was 12, Kissling prodded her mother, who had remarried, to try to reconcile with the church. Quietly her mother struck a deal. She would not have sexual relations with her new husband in exchange for being allowed to receive Holy Communion. The catch: Her mother could only attend a faraway parish. "This horrified me," says Kissling. "I was angered beyond belief." Kissling says she joined a religious order after a year at St. John's. It didn't last. After six months, her disagreement with the church over its rules on divorce and birth control became profound. Kissling not only left the convent, she left the church, which she says she has since informally rejoined. She moved to Greenwich Village, took courses, protested the Vietnam War and eventually moved in with a man. Along the way, the never-married Kissling decided not to have children and chose to be sterilized. She refuses to discuss whether she's ever had an abortion. "If I had one, does that make me worse?" asks Kissling. "If I didn't, does that make me a better woman? It's the wrong question." In 1970, Kissling took a job running an abortion clinic in New York, beginning a career in abortion rights that would become her life's work. Six years later, she founded the National Abortion Federation, an umbrella group for abortion providers _ a group with which, she says, she's no longer associated. In 1979, Kissling joined Catholics for a Free Choice as a board member. "The group is not about praising abortion," says longtime board member Rosemary Radford Ruether, a liberal, Catholic theologian who teaches at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary in Evanston, Ill. "It's about keeping it legal, safe and rare." By 1982, Kissling, a short, stocky woman who lives alone in an airy Washington apartment filled with artifacts from her travels to South America, was made president of the abortion rights group at a salary of $25,000. Today, she earns $100,000. She turned Catholics for a Free Choice from an advocacy group into a mini-think tank that encompasses everything from Vatican teachings on abortion, birth control and celibacy for priests to church policy on divorce, homosexuality and sex outside marriage. Over the years, the Ford Foundation, which supports abortion rights, has given Kissling's group more than $2-million to promote reproductive issues in foreign countries. Another backer is the pro-abortion rights MacArthur Foundation. Neither donor has ties to the Catholic Church. This secular money and Kissling's controversial abortion views have provided fodder for critics. "If they had a lot of Catholic support, that would be reflected in their membership and donor base," says Vernon Kirby, a spokesman for Human Life International, a Gaithersburg, Md.-based anti-abortion group founded by a Catholic priest. "But it's just another radical feminist organization. Frances Kissling calls herself a Catholic in order to subvert the church's teachings." Adds William Donohue, president of the conservative Catholic League in New York City: "Their real agenda is to sucker-punch the Catholic Church at every opportunity. People are free to advocate anything. But to call yourself Catholic and express an anti-Catholic position, we should pull the mask off of them." Only 8,000 people subscribe to Catholics for a Free Choice's monthly publication, Conscience, which Donohue cites as an indication of its tiny support. Kissling, however, says she speaks for the silent Catholic voices registered in opinion polls favoring abortion rights. "We didn't want to be like the Christian Coalition," says Kissling. "But that doesn't mean we don't have Catholic support. We represent ideas. We represent all those people in the National Opinion Research Center who go to church, go to Communion and didn't have abortions but want them to be legal." According to National Opinion Research, a polling group at the University of Chicago, about 80 percent of Catholics surveyed last year _ about the same as Protestants _ support abortion rights if the mother's health is endangered, the baby has a serious defect or a rape has occurred. Kissling's group "has more support among Catholics than the Vatican wants to admit," says Ruether. "But the Vatican doesn't care about numbers. Even if 90 percent supported abortion rights, they'd still say: "We are right. They are wrong."' 1995, Religion News Service