Angela Bonavoglia

Angela Bonavoglia is an award-winning journalist and author who covers social, health, religious and women’s issues. Her feature articles, investigative reports, op-eds, personal essays, and profiles have appeared in Ms. (longtime contributing editor), the Chicago Tribune, The Nation, Salon.com, Redbook, Cosmopolitan, Newsday, The New York Times, the National Catholic Reporter, and the HuffingtonPost.com (where she blogs), among other publications.

Her article, "The Church’s Tug of War," about women as an invisible force for reform in the Roman Catholic Church, was the lead article in The Nation in the wake of the clergy sex abuse scandals. It provided a fresh analysis of the role of women in the progressive Church reform movement at an unprecedented moment in American Church history. It also served as the basis for her most recent book, Good Catholic Girls: How Women Are Leading the Fight to Change the Church (Harper Collins). Since its publication, Bonavoglia has spoken around the country about women and Catholic Church reform and been a guest on nearly 60 television and radio shows.

Bonavoglia also authored The Choices We Made: 25 Women and Men Speak Out About Abortion, an oral history spanning seven decades, from the 1920s through the 1980s. With a foreword by Gloria Steinem, it features Bonavoglia’s interviews with celebrities, authors, activists, clerics and medical providers about their experiences with abortion(Random House, Seal Press).

The Choices We Made was featured on "Oprah" and NPR’s "Lenny Lopate Show." Excerpts appeared in Cosmopolitan, Ms., and Hippocrates (now Health), and the book was discussed in The New York Times (Anna Quindlen's column), Newsday, the New York Daily News, the Los Angeles Times, Entertainment Weekly, Mirabella, and Mother Jones.

Bonavoglia is also a communications and development consultant who has worked for leading foundations, public agencies, and nonprofit institutions.

PRAISE FOR "GOOD CATHOLIC GIRLS"

--Booklist Pick:
“One of top ten women’s history books of 2005”

“These stories remain vivid for the reader long after the book is finished. They provide access to the real world of Catholic women’s lived religion, so far from the abstract, idealized woman of the papal documents...Bonavoglia’s book belongs in our classrooms and our libraries.”
Journal of American Catholic Studies

"[A]compelling account of what dedicated Catholic women are accomplishing for the church they love."
--Publishers Weekly

"These astonishingly diverse women...are representative of the breadth and variety of this progressive revolution...[Their] calls for reform...make good common and spiritual sense."
--Booklist

"Worth Reading...Bonavoglia traces the growth of Catholic feminism and church reform, and profiles nuns, women church leaders, and lay women who have and still are pushing for change."
--Chicago Tribune

"Detailed and well-documented....Takes a fresh look at the post-sexual-scandal church and finds the landscape both familiar and surprising."
Sally Cunneen
--National Catholic Reporter

"[A]thoughtful, coherent and impassioned call for answers to some of the most pressing questions facing the Catholic Church today."
--Dallas Morning News

"These good, Catholic girls embolden the vision of inclusivity and animate the very word 'Christian.' Bonavoglia deftly interprets the law of conscience articulated in the Constitution on the Church in the Modern World: 'For woman has in her heart a law written by God; to obey it is the very dignity of woman; according to it, she will be judged.' Dignity restored is what Good Catholic Girls is all about."
Peggie Thorp
--In the Vineyard, March 2005
Read full review
Voice of the Faithful

"Reading all the stories as Bonavoglia stitched them together reminded me of some of the best parts of being Catholic...Equally important...she tells the hard truths that will be critical for church renewal [and] shows the steadfast and valiant women who have already laid the foundation for those reforms. Every adult Catholic needs to read this book."
Diana Wear
--New Women, New Church

"The book is an example of the high calling of the good journalist...where writers are unafraid to insert personal conviction into sound reporting. Who, now, is to write the account of good Canadian Catholic girls?"
Rosemary Ganley
--Catholic New Times

"With Good Catholic Girls, Bonavoglia vividly demonstrates that you truly can't keep a good girl down."
Ann Farmer
www.voices-unabridged.org