Abstract
This chapter will explore how U.S. Catholic women are implementing the Platform for Action (PFA)1 adopted at the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women (1995) in Beijing, China. The first section, entitled Roman Catholicism: Church and State, describes the institutional organization of the Catholic Church and its status as a political state. As a branch of Christianity, Roman Catholicism is a church; as a political entity, the Catholic Church is the Vatican state. Various official agencies of the Catholic Church and Catholic groups are legally and politically autonomous from the institutional church but are embedded in the structure of the church for historical reasons. The distinction between official Catholic agencies and non-official autonomous Catholic organizations is critical to understanding the daily struggles Catholic women face finding practical opportunities to implement the PFA.
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