Brooke Soderbery

  

Volume 9 | Issue III | September 2025

Sacred Heart Schools ’26

California, United States

  

As someone who’s been attending a Catholic school for almost a decade, I’ve always been fascinated by the politics of the Catholic Church. In required religion classes, I’ve often gotten my class sidetracked from discussions about scripture to deeper conversations surrounding the complexities that make up the Church’s ideology. I’m a constantly curious person, so Catholicism is the perfect research subject, as there always seems to be another complication or question in its history that draws me in. My research for The Schola, an exploration of the Church’s impact on abortion policy in America, grew out of a desire to combine this interest in the Catholic Church’s history and policy with another academic interest—women’s history, specifically how the policing of women’s bodies and sexuality has evolved over time. Over the years, I’ve grown passionate about women’s history through my work leading a campaign to create a standalone AP US Women’s History class. While researching Church policy on abortion, I was often challenged by complex documents relying on substantial knowledge of Catholic doctrine and Church structure, and through this have developed crucial skills in close textual analysis, learned to navigate the specialized vocabulary of Catholic theology, and grown adept at situating individual documents within broader doctrinal contexts. Outside of academia, I’m passionate about journalism and am the Editor-in-Chief of my school’s newspaper.