Christopher Akehurst’s lament of the Catholic Church’s apparent absence from the recent New South Wales abortion debate, Eavesdropping on Sin, was a conspicuously inaccurate characterisation in an analysis of the rise of state-sanctioned anti-Catholicism in Australia that otherwise rang true.

Not only did the Catholic Church in Sydney and NSW more broadly declare the abhorrence of the abortion bill from the rooftops; it led so many others in the fight as well.