Abstract: The book details the crucial role that gender politics played in producing first a crisis in, and later a transformation of, German Catholicism. This transformation, I argue, facilitated the Church’s ability to exercise significant influence on national debates concerning women’s reproductive rights and the defense of life, despite a dramatic decline in traditional indices of faith, such as membership in the Church. This seeming paradox—continued political influence, on the one hand, and declining membership, on the other—has received little scholarly or media attention. Instead, most historians and pundits assume that after a brief Christian cultural and political resurgence in the 1950s, a secularized Germany emerged and the Christian churches lost their political influence. Consequently, recent victories by moral conservatives in a reunified Germany, such as the 2009 revision of Paragraph 218 mandating a three-day waiting period for late-term abortions when a fetal disability has been diagnosed, seemed for many scholars and pundits a surprising development in a nation known for its liberal attitudes on sexuality. By analyzing the evolution of Catholic discourses on celibacy, women’s ordination, contraception, abortion, and new reproductive technologies in dialogue with secular discourses and situated within the broader cultural, social, and political context, my study demonstrates that these recent political victories are inextricably linked to the moral crisis of authority in the 1960s and 1970s. From this crisis, slowly, a new Catholic theological and political identity emerged for a post-secular age. Theologically, this meant a move away from the feminized piety of the nineteenth century aimed at filling the pews with women toward a gendered theology aimed at preserving the Church’s teachings on the male celibate priesthood and marriage. Politically, it meant promoting an interventionist and theologically informed agenda that embraced new arguments and issue-specific alliances with political parties other than the self-identified Christian parties. Thus, in the 2009 abortion debate, Catholic parliamentarians linked traditional pro-life arguments to a new argument that abortion violated the rights of the disabled; as a result, many Social Democrats and Greens voted for the law, because they did not want to be seen as opponents of disability rights.