Every network this week is calling Gloria Steinem a hero.
None of them mention what she did outside a Manhattan cathedral in 1995.
Steinem led a mob against the pope, and this week's tributes left it out.
The Protest Steinem Led Outside St. Patrick's Cathedral in 1995
Pope John Paul II said Mass at St. Patrick's Cathedral in October 1995.
Catholic League president Bill Donohue was inside.
Outside, he says, more than 1,000 protesters gathered, carrying signs attacking the pope and hurling obscenities.
Steinem led that demonstration alongside actress Olympia Dukakis, according to Donohue's own account.
She told reporters at a press conference that day that "we will live to see the day that St. Patrick's Cathedral is a child-care center and the pope is no longer a disgrace to the skirt that he has on."
The networks calling Steinem a "fierce feminist trailblazer" this week left that press conference out of every tribute.
Hollywood sent its tributes too, and so did Capitol Hill, and even Miss Piggy got a mention in the celebrity remembrances.
Nobody in that lineup mentioned the cathedral.
The Abortion Steinem Called a Gift and Never Regretted
Steinem had an illegal abortion in London in 1957, when she was 22 years old.
She talked about it for the rest of her life, and never once called it a tragedy.
"It gave me my life," Steinem said. "I wouldn't have been able to live my life otherwise."
She endorsed a book by atheist activist Anne Nicol Gaylor with a title that says everything: Abortion Is A Blessing.
Steinem once called "National Abortion Providers Appreciation Day" an occasion that recognizes "acts of kindness."
A woman ending a pregnancy, Steinem said, was making "a profoundly moral decision."
Millions of American women have heard that message from Steinem for six decades, and the pro-abortion movement built an entire ideology on it.
She co-founded Ms. magazine in 1972 to spread it nationwide.
Barack Obama gave her the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2013 for exactly that.
Why Steinem Wanted Marriage Abolished Too
Steinem's targets were never limited to the Catholic Church.
She made it her stated ambition to "abolish and reform the institution of marriage."
A culture raising children outside marriage was not a warning to Steinem.
It was the goal.
Decades of research linking fatherless homes to poverty and childhood instability apparently never made it onto her reading list.
The Establishment Media Pattern Political Scientists Documented Decades Ago
None of this is new, and the coverage this week is not an accident.
Political scientist Stanley Rothman spent the 1980s studying who runs America's newsrooms, and found them overwhelmingly pro-abortion.
That imbalance is exactly why the same networks eulogizing Steinem as a hero skip the cathedral, skip the blessing quote, and skip the marriage crusade entirely.
Steinem is not the first pro-abortion icon to get the hagiography treatment.
She will not be the last.
The Half of Gloria Steinem's Legacy the Obituaries Buried
Gloria Steinem spent 92 years building a legacy, and half of it just got erased in a single news cycle.
The half that survives is the one Hollywood, Capitol Hill, and the nightly news wanted people to remember.
The half that got buried includes a mob screaming outside a cathedral, a blessing pronounced over a life ended in London, and a plan to tear down marriage itself.
Catholics and pro-life Americans do not get to rewrite history when one of their own dies.
Gloria Steinem does not get that treatment either.
A woman can build magazines, win medals, and fill obituary pages for a week straight.
None of that erases a cathedral full of worshippers who had obscenities screamed at them while she led the crowd outside.
The full record did not disappear with her this time.
Catholic and pro-life writers wrote it down decades ago, and now, this week, you have it too.
Sources:
- Bill Donohue, "The Other Side of Gloria Steinem," Catholic League, September 2026.
- "Radical Abortion Activist Gloria Steinem Dies at 92," LifeNews.com, September 3, 2026.
- "Gloria Steinem, Fierce Feminist Trailblazer, Dies at 92," NBC News, September 3, 2026.
- "Tributes to Gloria Steinem Are Flooding In, From Hollywood to Capitol Hill," NPR, September 3, 2026.
