FRANCES Kissling sends a cheque to the Pope every month for "public relations services faithfully rendered" to the American organisation Catholics for a Free Choice (CFFC), of which she is president.

She doesn't really it's just a joke she tells during interviews and public meetings. The gag is always sure to get a laugh because it comes from a Catholic woman whose job it is to spearhead Catholic opposition to the institutional church's anti feminist agenda.

The punch line lies in the fact that many attempts by the church to face down criticism from CFFC have been own goals, resulting in CFFC substantially raising both its public profile and its support.

A voluntary educational and advocacy organisation set up in 1973, CFFC challenges the Catholic Church's stance on a wide range of issues, including contraception, abortion, sterilisation and assisted reproduction. It maintains that the church's opposition to these issues is founded not on respect for family values or human life life but on a primitive and unconscious fear of women and their power, and a desire to control it.

Through its media exposure, lobbying activities, workshops and publications, CFFC asserts the "free choice" of all Catholics to dissent from the Catholic hierarchy's teachings by showing what it argues is a lack of firm theological authority behind many of the Vatican's statements on sexual and reproductive issues.

In an article in the current edition of its quarterly news journal, Conscience, Kissling poses two questions she often asks when she speaks in public "How many people know that the Roman Catholic Church has no position on when the foetus becomes a person ...? How many people know that the church is willing to give latitude to generals, to soldiers, as they decide whether and when to take life, and no latitude to women to decide when and whether an abortion would be appropriate?" By educating people largely women, about these grey areas, Kissling hopes to empower them to make sound and responsible decisions about their own lives instead of blindly following church dogma.

"In some ways you could say that we are a human rights movement within the Roman Catholic Church," says 52 year old Kissling, the red stone brooch pinned to her left shoulder shimmering in the light like a flaming heart. "We're there to say to people that the picture you get of the church from Rome, or perhaps from your parish priest, of a monolithic institution in which all members are required to follow the opinion and teaching of one man is not a true picture of what it means to be a Catholic.

"The history of the church is one of diversity. If you go back to the Bible, you read that Peter and Paul are fighting with each other all the time. If the church or any institution is going to be alive it has to have dissension, diversity and change. Institutions that do not change, die. And not only do you have a right as a Catholic, but a responsibility if you are seriously engaged in the church, to express your views and to participate in the internal debates within the church."

CFFC last clashed with the Vatican on such debates at the United Nation's Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, China, last year. The group challenged the Vatican's submission to the conference by widely circulating its critique of it.

"We raised very obvious questions that the Vatican is not used to having raised ... what happens is that sometimes the obvious is missed and, sometimes because of the deference given to religion, somebody has to say it first, that the emperor has no clothes and then other people start to say the same thing," she explains.

Kissling considers herself well qualified to expose these naked injustices of the institutional church. The eldest of four children born to a working class, Catholic family in Queen's, New York, her parents divorced when she was five and as a result her mother was forbidden to receive the sacrament of Holy Communion. Seven years later, at the eager behest of her daughter, Kissling's mother visited the local priest for a chat about what could be done to reconcile her to the church. She was told that she could receive Holy Communion again but in private, not in the church and only if she agreed never to have sex again with her second husband.

Kissling's outrage at this "degrading" treatment of her mother was, she says, a "pivotal" moment in her life and what she does.

Despite it, she joined a convent four years later, but left the nuns after six months as she felt unable to remain a representative of an organisation whose views on marriage and sexuality were at odds with her own.

After graduating with a BA in English literature, Kissling went on to run one of the country's first abortion clinics in New York and helped to set up safe, clandestine clinics in Italy and Mexico where abortion was illegal. She was invited to join the board of directors of CFFC in 1978 and has been its president since 1982. She is single and lives alone.

Although CFFC has no formal membership, it has between 8,000 and 10,000 members worldwide who contribute $100,000 each year to its annual budget of about $2 million according to Kissling. It has 15 staff at its Washington DC headquarters as well as volunteer spokes people in 35 other states. CFFC is also affiliated to three similar organisations in Brazil, Uruguay and Mexico.

In addition to the journal Conscience, it publishes booklets on topics such as the history of abortion and the Catholic Church and the growth of right wing Catholic groups.

Although she calls herself a "Catholic in resistance", Kissling defies her critics by remaining one because she still values a good deal of the work the church does. She believes that if the church was more open to engaging with its followers "in a non hierarchical, non absolutist way, it could make an enormous contribution to the way in which people approach the question of how to live a good life that has value". She welcomes the crack in the moral authority of the Catholic Church in Ireland caused by recent sex scandals and public rows.

But while she constantly criticises the institutional church for its intolerance of diversity Kissling has faith that it is capable of reform.

She predicts confidently that after the death of the current Pope, ("I'm not prognosticating when he dies") the next Pope will allow married priests as a pragmatic step to secure the church's survival. She believes that within IS years of this step, the church will be forced by pressure from the clergy to allow contraception.

Tonight Kissling will address an all party parliamentary committee at Westminster on ways for policy makers to respond to the church's agenda. On Monday last, she was in Belfast where she addressed a meeting on the pro choice Catholic philosophy. The meeting was organised by the Alliance for Choice, Northern Ireland (ACNI), an umbrella body of pro choice groups and individuals seeking clarification of the ambiguities of the abortion law in Northern Ireland.

If any of the Catholic Church's statements on abortion, contraception or divorce were actually binding on the individual's conscience, "then we would have seen many Catholics formally ex communicated by now," she told the Belfast meeting.

Several women, some of whom worked as pre and post abortion counsellors, expressed their delight at Kissling's belief that the church's "bedrock" principle of the primacy of the individual's conscience afforded women the moral capacity to choose abortion.

Their relief echoed that of a Catholic woman earlier in the day, who phoned BBC Radio Ulster after listening to Kissling being interviewed to say that since her abortion 10 years ago, she had felt terrible about herself. Kissling's words had made her feel good about herself for the first time, she said.

It's a weird thing," remarks Kissling after recounting this incident, because the institutional church thinks that we are the devil personified or that the mission of CFFC is to degrade and destroy it. Yet in reality what I experience is that for many people the only way that they can be a Catholic is to be a Catholic for a Free Choice. This organisation provides them with the ability to remain Catholics as opposed to becoming Episcoplians or Lutherans or athiests or whatever."

Then, switching into joke telling mode again, she adds "I actually get the church more people. I'd like the church to give me $100 for everyone I bring back. I would be a rich woman." And maybe she and the Pope would then be quits.