A LEGACY To Be Proud Of
BY NICHOLAS HAYES-MOTAIn the United States, one sometimes hears that Catholic social teaching is the church’s “best-kept secret.” There’s a reason for the saying: Too many American Catholics remain woefully unexposed to this vitally important part of our tradition, with the result that the church’s social and political witness to the gospel suffers.
Yet, the church’s role in the history of community organizing may be an even better kept secret than its social teaching. And though that history remains unfamiliar to most Catholics even today, it represents one of the most remarkable legacies of the American Catholic church—a vibrant testimony to how generations of Catholics have tried to live out the church’s social teaching in real life.
Home to Chicago’s meatpacking workers, it was the setting for Upton Sinclair’s 1909 muckraking classic The Jungle, whose vivid depiction of the neighborhoods’ appalling working and living conditions sparked a widespread outcry for better labor, sanitary, and food regulations. Yet 30 years later, in spite of several failed attempts to organize a labor union, Alinsky found that the situation for Back of the Yards residents had scarcely improved.
The reason, Alinksy observed, was that meatpacking workers were sharply divided along ethnic lines. Although the neighborhood was over 90 percent Catholic, its Polish, Lithuanian, Slovak, Bohemian, German, Irish, and Mexican residents all worshipped in their own parishes and frequently
Catholic involvement in organizing doesn’t properly begin with a Catholic at all but with an agnostic Jew and self-proclaimed “radical” named Saul Alinsky. Often called the “dean of community organizing,” Alinsky was famously hardboiled in temperament, flamboyantly irreverent, and scarcely a religious person in any conventional sense.
However, whether by coincidence or providence, Alinsky’s organizing career began in an overwhelmingly immigrant Catholic neighborhood: Chicago’s Back of the Yards. It was there, in the late 1930s, that Alinsky built his first “people’s organization” and developed a new approach to organizing communities that would remain influential long after him. Alinsky’s early work in Back of the Yards also brought him into contact with several key figures in the Catholic church and laid the groundwork for the generations of Catholic organizing that followed.
When Alinsky arrived in Back of the Yards in 1938, the neighborhood had been nationally infamous for decades.
fought with one another, often to the point of literal violence. Furthermore, their culturally conservative priests, who enjoyed great authority within their parishes, regarded any appeal to inter-group cooperation—especially for the sake of labor organizing—with great suspicion. In their eyes, it smacked of communism and was to be avoided at all costs.
Alinsky first developed his community organizing methods as a response to this situation. Rather than trying to organize workers directly on the shop floor, he hatched the idea of building a “people’s organization” that would bring together all of the neighborhood’s key social institutions: its fraternal organizations, voluntary associations, and, above all, parishes. Instead of trying to organize these institutions around any particular cause, political ideal, or ideology, Alinsky appealed to what he termed their “self-interest.” This meant identifying the neighborhood’s key leaders, meeting with them, and asking them to discuss the community problems that most concerned
them—problems such as high crime, low wages, poor sanitation, and lack of resources for the neighborhood’s children.
Having heard their concerns, Alinsky would then carefully bring leaders from different communities together, allowing them to discover for themselves that they actually held many of the same “self-interests” in common. By joining forces through a people’s organization, they could build the collective power they needed to solve their problems and finally turn the neighborhood around.
Alinsky’s strategy worked. In July 1939, the Back of the Yards Neighborhood Council (BYNC) held its founding assembly, featuring representatives from over 100 of the neighborhood’s major associations, including many of its Catholic parishes. The BYNC’s members democratically agreed upon an inaugural “people’s program” to address the neighborhood’s problems, one plank of which was support for a new unionization drive. It wasn’t long before their efforts bore fruit. Confronted for the first time by the united people of Back of the Yards, the meatpacking companies
themselves. It did so by building new grassroots “organizations of organizations” (i.e., people’s organizations), in accord with Catholic social teaching’s principle of subsidiarity. To a church leader such as Sheil, organizing represented a way for bringing the church’s many immigrant groups together across their differences and helping them find their voice in a democratic society that often marginalized them.
quickly capitulated. Within days of the BYNC’s founding, the neighborhood residents won their first union contract.
While Alinsky’s organization of the BYNC was a remarkable feat, it would not have succeeded without early support from two key Catholic leaders. One was a young Irish Catholic layman, Joe Meegan, who became Alinsky’s primary day-today collaborator. The other was Bernard Sheil, the auxiliary bishop of Chicago. Sheil, who ran the popular Catholic Youth Organization (CYO), was a nationally beloved figure and a champion of organized labor. In addition to helping Alinsky and Meegan connect to the neighborhood’s priests, he publicly threw his weight behind the BYNC.
While Meegan became the organization’s founding director after its launch, Sheil had grander designs for Alinsky. In 1940, he pushed the organizer to establish the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) to build similar “people’s organizations” around the country. He also became its inaugural board chair.
What drew devout Catholics such as Meegan and Sheil to Alinsky? Like many Catholics since, both saw his community organizing as a uniquely compelling way to put the church’s social teaching into practice. The whole point of organizing, as Alinsky conceived it, was to create solidarity from division for the sake of the common good. Furthermore, the method by which it did so was specifically designed to promote the dignity and participation of ordinary people. Rather than mobilizing communities around a predetermined goal or agenda, organizing was about enabling poor and working-class people to identify, agree upon, and solve their problems for
If Meegan and Sheil were the first Catholics to gravitate to community organizing for these reasons, they were far from the last. During the 1940s, Alinsky would cultivate close, decadeslong friendships with both Jacques Maritain, the internationally renowned French philosopher, and Monsignor John O’Grady, the legendary director of Catholic Charities. Maritain tirelessly promoted Alinsky’s work within the United States and abroad; in 1958, he even arranged a trip to Italy, where Alinsky met the future Pope Paul VI (alas, nothing came of it). O’Grady, meanwhile, worked with Alinsky to launch new organizing projects across the United States, introduce priests to his approach, and financially support the IAF. Thanks to his efforts, the Catholic Church became Alinsky’s primary institutional base as well as the source for most of his protégés.
Consequently, as Alinsky-style community organizing spread beyond Chicago, an outsize number of its leading practitioners were Catholic. Two of the most significant early IAF organizers were Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta, Mexican American Californians who built the Community Service Organization (CSO) during the 1950s. The CSO, which for a time was a major
“The whole point of organizing, as Alinsky conceived it, was to create solidarity from division for the sake of the common good.”
force in California politics, also trained a rising generation of Latinx civic leaders. Subsequently, in the ’60s, Chavez and Huerta founded the far better-known United Farm Workers (UFW). Combining Alinsky’s methods with tactics from union organizing and the civil rights movements, they took community organizing in a whole new direction.
During the 1970s, Catholics likewise played the leading role in developing what is now commonly called “faithbased organizing.” Upon Alinsky’s death in 1972, his protégé Ed Chambers assumed directorship of the IAF. Chambers, an erstwhile Benedictine seminarian, made parish-based organizing even more central to the IAF’s approach. But still more importantly, perhaps, was the pioneering work of two Texas-based IAF organizers: Ernie Cortés, a Chicano layman,
and Sister of Divine Providence Christine Stephens. Working with a largely Latinx Catholic constituency in San Antonio through an organization called COPS (Communities Organized for Public Service), Cortés and Stephens crafted a new theology of organizing explicitly founded on Catholic social teaching. They also pioneered a new organizing methodology that prioritized values and deep relationship-building. Inspired by their approach, other Catholic organizers soon adopted it for their organizations, including Jesuit Father John Baumann, the founder of PICO (the Pacific Institute for Community Organization—now Faith in Action), and Greg Galluzzo, the ex-Jesuit founder of Gamaliel Network. During the 1980s and ’90s, the IAF, PICO (now Faith in Action), and Gamaliel became the three leading faith-based organizing networks in the United States and, increasingly, beyond it.
No story of community organizing in the United States would be complete without mentioning the Catholic Campaign for Human Development (CCHD). Established in 1969, the CCHD was explicitly created to combat poverty, promote racial justice and solidarity, and expose American Catholics to the church’s social teaching. For decades, CCHD was also the single largest funder of community organizing in the United States, whether faith-based or not. This is no coincidence, for the CCHD was founded primarily by Catholic students of Saul Alinsky. Like so many other Catholics, past and present, they saw community organizing not merely as a highly effective method for social change, but as a faithful way to embody the gospel in social and political life.
Decades later, community organizing is no longer quite so distinctively Catholic as it once was. Today’s leading organizers are people of many creeds, whereas the institutional church’s own support for organizing has sadly dwindled in recent years. Yet community organizing as we know it would simply not exist were it not for the thousands of American Catholics—lay, clergy, and religious, of all backgrounds and levels of leadership—who perseveringly built the field into what it is now. Community organizing is one of the American church’s greatest contributions to American public life and global Catholicism. Now more than ever, it deserves to be remembered, celebrated, and continued.
Nicholas Hayes-Mota is a doctoral candidate in theological ethics at Boston College, where he also serves as assistant director of the Clough Center for the Study of Constitutional Democracy. His research focuses on the Catholic history of community organizing and the contributions organizing can make to a new “politics of the common good.”
PAGE12 Top left: Dolores Huerta and Cesar Chavez at the United Farm Workers founding convention. Photo by Bob Fitch. Source: Stanford University Libraries, Department of Special Collections Below Left: Cesar Chavez speaks with United Farm Workers. Photo by Bob Fitch. Source: Stanford University Libraries, Department of Special Collections PAGE 13 Left: Cesar Chavez at St. Paul’s Cathedral. Photo by Bob Fitch. Source: Stanford University Libraries, Department of Special Collections Top right: Ernes‑‑to Cortéz gives a talk at the University of Birmingham. Source: YouTube/University of Birmingham