A Matter of Spirit - Summer 2023 - Community Organizing

This past February, theologians, community organizers, and other Catholics gathered in San Francisco for “Prophetic Communities,” a conference exploring the intersections of Catholic social teaching and community organizing. I, along with many of the writers found in this issue, was among the attendees. I have to admit that I attended my first so-called synodal conversation with a little bit of trepidation. We were asked to reflect on the “joys and obstacles of journeying with the church as an organizer,” and I felt a little like an imposter. Here I was, surrounded by people doing the real work of organizing, I felt, not like me. I’m in awe of the work organizers do to build the beloved kingdom, but I’m just a writer and editor. Put me behind a desk, in front of a computer, where I can lift the voices of organizers and highlight their work. That’s where I shine—not in the boots-on-the-ground, one-on-one meetings, building community. How was I supposed to answer this question in a meaningful way?

Synodality,” Austen Ivereigh outlines the connections between organizing and Pope Francis’ plan for the church. “Organizing in a synodal church becomes a way of serving the mission which God’s Spirit has revealed,” he writes. Cecilia Flores, meanwhile, provides an overview of organizing in “Community Organizing 101,” outlining how it relates to other kinds of work for social change and placing it within the context of her previous work as a campus minister. In “A Legacy To Be Proud Of,” Nicholas Hayes-Mota dives into the history of community organizing and it’s Catholic roots. He writes that “community organizing is one of the American church’s

I suspect some of AMOS’ readers might feel similarly. Organizing is something that happens elsewhere—in our state capitols, on agricultural land among farmworkers, and in union halls. It’s work we applaud and support, but it’s not work we do ourselves.

One of the things I realized throughout the course of the conference, however, is that organizing is not something that exists only in some niche of the Catholic Church or by people with a certain job title. It is an integral part of our faith: We’re all engaged in organizing in some way or another. When a community of religious or nonprofit makes decisions in collaboration with one another instead of relying on hierarchical power structures—that’s organizing. When a parish works together to solve an issue at stake in their community— that’s organizing. Pope Francis’ vision for a synodal church, one that asks the body of God about their experiences in the church—organizing.

The articles in this issue of AMOS are a celebration of community organizing and how closely intertwined it is with our faith. In “Catholic Social Teaching, Organizing, and

greatest contributions to American public life and global Catholicism.” And, finally, Bishop John Stowe reflects on his own experience as a community organizer and how it affected his vocation and understanding of Catholic social teaching. Sprinkled throughout these articles are also shorter reflections written by organizers on how their work has affected their faith and understanding of their place in the world.

“Each one of you has to be God’s microphone. Each one of you has to be a messenger, a prophet. The church will always exist as long as there is someone who has been baptized,” St. Óscar Romero said in a homily. “Where is your baptism? You are baptized in your professions, in the fields of workers, in the market. Wherever there is someone who has been baptized, that is where the church is. There is a prophet there.”

Perhaps this is what community organizing is—raising your voice and helping others raise theirs as God’s microphones in service of building the kingdom of God. May the articles in this issue help you figure out the best way to do so in your communities and in your work, whatever that may look like.

Emily Sanna, Editor

“Prophetic Communities” 2023 conference participants

“The articles in this issue of AMOS are a celebration of community organizing and how closely intertwined it is with our faith.”

CATHOLIC SOCIAL TEACHING, ORGANIZING, AND SYNODALITY: A New Confluence for Our Times

Adapted from a keynote address delivered by Austen Ivereigh for the “Prophetic Communities: Organizing as an Expression of Catholic Social Thought” conference, University of San Francisco, February 9-11, 2023.

The magic of three. Writers like this. The pope likes it too. So does God (the Holy Trinity). Threeness is fruitful and generative, it opens new horizons, and it is pregnant with possibility.

Because of Pope Francis, we have a new threeness on the scene, the confluence or coming together of three life-giving streams in a new way: Catholic social teaching (CST), community organizing, and synodality. The pope has brought a “new thing” to each of these three that allows them to come together in a kind of kairós, or providential moment.

THE NEW CONFLUENCE

Catholic social teaching and organizing have long been partners as ways to connect faith to everyday life, to form leaders, and to help the church have an impact on local neighborhoods. To realize CST is to become agents of enabling human dignity, especially among the poor, in issues over which the church has been a major advocate, from just wages to migrant regularization.

In a larger sense, CST and organizing have a shared mission: to build the strength of civil society faced with the power of the state and market. This shared mission occurs amid the context of shrinking civil society in a globalized marketplace—with its cult of individual sovereignty, endless mobility, insecurity, and fragmentation. This is one of the main drivers of religious decline, but also of the decline of associations and institutions more generally.

The idea of the gap between the world as it is and the world as it should be has helped many Catholics avoid the traps of both sentimental idealism and other-worldly cynicism. It helps us to grasp what Jesus means when he urges us to be as innocent as doves but as wise as serpents. The gap between the earthly and the heavenly kingdom is at the heart of all mission.

Afflicting the comfortable—the frozen—people of God has been one of organizing’s major contributions to the life of the church. By bringing Catholic churches into broad-based alliances with other traditions, faiths, and civic traditions, it has helped instill the culture of encounter Pope Francis speaks of. It teaches Catholics to listen and dialogue so that differences are made fruitful rather than divisive.

Another natural affinity between organizing and CST is that the object of actions is not to humiliate the other but to enable a relationship. Polarization and personalization are necessary to gain a relationship, but once a relationship has been achieved and concessions won, there is collaboration. This kind of politics is non-ideological; both CST and organizing are rooted in people’s concrete concerns such as immigration status, living wage, decent housing, etc.

The new element here is the pope’s support for the kind of political action that organizing represents. He has made his encouragement explicit throughout his papacy, including in addresses to the popular movements of the developing world, speeches to online conferences, and recent meetings with organizers in Rome.

In Let Us Dream, Pope Francis speaks of the people’s selforganization as a source of moral energy, a reserve of civic passion capable of revitalizing our democracy and putting the economy at the service of the people to build peace and justice and to defend Mother Earth. In 2014 he told popular movements that it “is impossible to imagine a future for society without the active participation of great majorities as protagonists, and such proactive participation overflows the logical procedures of formal democracy.” He went on to urge “new forms of participation that include popular movements and invigorate local, national, and international governing structures with that torrent of moral energy that springs from including the excluded in the building of a common destiny.” When this happens, he says, “we can say that our peoples have claimed back their soul.”

The current Synod on Synodality is distinct even from Pope Francis’ reformed synod of bishops in that it gives direct agency to the people. The experience has been transformative, as Pope Francis knew it would be, and it is already clear that the main fruit of the synod will be synodality itself.

Through this synod, the pope reclaims synodality as an ancient tradition that gives concrete expression to the idea that the faith of the church is passed through the sensus fidelium. This amounts to a conversion of authority and power in the church in which there is a mutual listening of people and pastors together to hear what the Spirit has to say to the church.

What now opens before us is a new style of being church, one appropriate for our time that is able to connect with seeking and searching and that welcomes participation, co-responsibility, and discernment into the heart of decision-making.

This transformation is just beginning, and it is particularly challenging for the church in the United States, where it runs

Catholic Social Teaching Organizing

A New Confluence

Synodality

counter to clericalism and a corporate mentality, alliances of money and power, and an ideologically driven focus on one or two bioethical issues at the expense of the gospel. No one said this conversion will be quick or easy, but it will happen.

FRUITFUL OVERLAPS

What implications does synodality have for organizing?

To the extent that dioceses and parishes are not synodally converted, very little. But as they learn this new style, organizers will need to adapt in ways that could be fruitful for organizing and may perhaps help organizing recover some of its own roots.

If organizers are willing to be reformed and accept that organizing is downstream from synodal processes, synodality could be a great gift to organizers. A new thing is being born here. Getting that formation—for parish leaders and community organizers—is one of the most essential tasks now.

In the United Kingdom, organizers have already begun to notice that strongly synodal parishes are among their strongest members. This is a slower and more patient way of proceeding, but by involving the whole parish—or at least inviting the whole parish—to be involved in discernment of the parish mission, the whole parish may see the aims of organizing as part of that mission.

Meanwhile, organizing can help parishes and dioceses focus on the margins and translate the fruits of synodal discernment into concrete actions. Without either of these, synodality remains truncated and risks degenerating into just fine words and self-referentiality.

TENSIONS AND CONVERSIONS

In Let Us Dream, Pope Francis writes, “God acts in the simplicity of open hearts, in the patience of those who pause until they can see clearly.” He goes on to describe

what should be, essentially, organizing in a synodal church: “Discerning what is and what is not of God, we begin to see where and how to act. When we find where God’s mercy is waiting to overflow, we can open the gates, and work with all people of goodwill to bring about the necessary changes.”

There is an obvious difference between the relational oneto-one organizing meeting and synodal meetings, and it’s important to respect that. The first is intended to produce an outcome: to find new leaders or get consensus for a campaign. If that outcome is not achieved, there is disappointment and a sense of failure. A synodal meeting, on the other hand, is open; it’s not a discussion, it’s facilitated rather than directed, and uses the method of spiritual conversation.

In my experience of organizing, parishes often felt that they were constantly being asked to furnish cannon fodder. I had that feeling myself, and while I admired organizing, that feeling was the origin of my disillusionment with it.

It’s a familiar burnout story: Campaigns come to depend more and more on organizers trying to motivate ever-smaller numbers of leaders. I know that community organizers are well aware of this and see it as a need to re-focus. Yet I wonder whether this is a design fault in the organizing process.

In Roots for Radicals, Ed Chambers writes that “people in congregations are available to be mobilized. Part of the Industrial Areas Foundation’s deal is to get them out of their pews and into their communities.” This is clericalist language, the language of authoritarian or movement politics. It is to deny agency to the people themselves.

Such an approach cuts right across synodality, which is an invitation to recognize that people are agents, subjects, and vessels of the Spirit. The assumption of synodality is that the Spirit has been poured out on the baptized, who get together to understand what the Spirit is saying to the church here, in this place.

If organizing and synodality are to work together for the benefit of both, organizing needs to respect this agency. Synodality can “purify” organizing’s understanding of selfinterest, which is usually understood as a member organization’s values or priorities or (in one-to-one meetings) what drives a leader. In a synodal parish, it’s not just the values of CST that form one’s self-interest, but also the consensus flowing from the synodal discernment of the parish itself. This discernment is also one of priorities: Among all the goods we believe in, which ones are the Spirit asking us to prioritize?

This also has implications for the way organizing understands power. Leadership training teaches us to not be afraid of power, to see it as the capacity to act, to bring about change: Power is organized people and organized money..Chambers distinguishes between power over and power with. Relational power includes the interests of others. But even in “power with” the agency is still us, and that means in practice the organizers and the leaders they work with. So it is all too easy for the people to be disempowered—campaign cannon fodder.

But what if our action was powerful because it is in service to what the Spirit is already doing? Theologians talk about prevenient grace, or the idea that the Spirit is already out there long before we get there. In deep listening processes, we see this happening: We see what the Spirit has already lain on people’s hearts, what synodality is bringing to the fore. In this case, we cooperate with divine power; we are partners. It is the difference between sailing into the wind and sailing with the wind behind you.

Pope Francis has taught me that in every crisis there is a grace on offer, so perhaps we need to rethink what we mean by power. Pope Francis contrasts power over (potestas) with the power of service (ministerium), meaning that all true power is participation in divine power, which is a vulnerable power (and therefore relational, collegial, and calling for collective action

in alliances) but not a weak power: It is the life force of the world at the service of life and healing.

In this way, organizing in a synodal church becomes a way of serving the mission which God’s Spirit has revealed in listening, and sticking to that mission and purpose will remain the criterion for the action.

Let Us Dream, written by Pope Francis in collaboration with Austen Ivereigh (Simon & Schuster, 2021)

Left: Austen gives the keynote address at “Prophetic Communities.”

In Let Us Dream, Pope Francis writes, “To promote the Gospel and not welcome the strangers in need, not affirm their humanity as children of God, is to seek to encourage a culture that is Christian in name only, emptied of all that makes it distinctive.” At the same time churchgoing is in decline, people vote for populists who promise to protect our identity by scapegoating and rejecting the foreigner. The loss of relationship with God and a loss of a sense of universal fraternity have created isolation, anxiety, and fear of the future.

The future of our church depends on our willingness and capacity to religare, to re-bind our bonds with one another based on respect that begins in our care for creation and for the outsider. In doing so, we also build our community, our capacity as a church.

This isn’t some corporate, proselytizing idea of “how do we get people into our church?” or “how do we make our church attractive to young people?” Build it and they will come. In our commitment to creation and the strangers, people will come to recognize the gospel in our time, and it is impossible to imagine an evangelization in this generation that does not involve a witness in these two areas.

There is one thing I am sure of: The three rivers of synodality, Catholic social teaching, and organizing will be a confluence for many years to come, long after this pontificate, nourishing a new generation of Catholic social action that will become a vital witness in these times. Time to dive in!

Austen Ivereigh is a UK-based writer, journalist, and commentator. He is a fellow in Contemporary Church History at Campion Hall, University of Oxford, and in 2020 he collaborated with Pope Francis on Let Us Dream: the Path to a Better Future (Simon & Schuster).

Hear more from Austen Ivereigh and several of the other authors in interviews with Cecilia Flores for IPJC’s Justice Rising podcast. Get more information and a link to the podcast at ipjc.org/justice-rising-podcast.

Radical Kinship in Action

Having grown up in the church and gone to multiple Jesuit schools, I have heard the word kinship many times. In college, when I heard this word in a class or at a conference, I thought it was simply a synonym for “solidarity.” I thought of it as standing with marginalized people via service trips or petitions or learning about important justice issues as an ally.

I lived in Belize City with the Jesuit Volunteer Corps for two years after college. It was here that I not only gained a deeper understanding of kinship but got to live and experience kinship in deeper ways. I extended kinship to those around me and was also invited into kinship by our neighbors, originally complete strangers. Proximity became encounter, encounter became relationship, relationship led to community and, ultimately, kinship and family.

At the “Prophetic Communities” conference in May, one of my favorite quotes was: “I am Catholic because I’m an organizer, and I am an organizer because I am Catholic.” It perfectly sums up how I feel about my vocation and what has led me to become a full-time community organizer. Organizing is not just what I

BY ALYSSA PEREZ

do for a living or my job title; it is who I am. It is my way of being in the world. Radical kinship is not just something I talk about, but something I live out in my everyday life. Organizing allows me to put my faith into action, to practice a faith that does justice.

clothe, house, and feed those in need. This is holy work, and I pray that I never lose sight of the sacredness of my vocation.

While community organizing allows me to live out radical kinship in my work life, how am I living out this value in all other aspects of my life—with my family and friends, in my community, and among my coworkers? Am I able to easily build relationships and extend kinship to those I don’t necessarily get along with or agree with? I pray that I continue to take seriously the holy work to which I have been called, and I pray that each person reading this finds how to live out radical kinship in their life.

I currently work in a multi-faith and multi-racial community organizing network, LA Voice. One of the most life-giving experiences I’ve had here has been while working on our Home is Sacred legislative platform. The campaign centers around a legislative package of three housing bills that protect, preserve, and produce affordable housing, and it has truly allowed me to live out the gospel. Home is Sacred— that name is intentional. There are many examples in the gospel that direct us to

Alyssa Perez serves as a community organizer for LA Voice, a multiracial and multifaith organizing network in Los Angeles County. She was a Jesuit Volunteer in Belize City from 2015–2017. She holds degrees in theology and political science from Loyola Marymount University and a masters of nonprofit administration from the University of San Francisco. Having been Jesuit educated for 12 years, she is deeply committed to Ignatian spirituality and building the beloved community.

“Proximity became encounter, encounter became relationship, relationship led to community and, ultimately, kinship and family.”

“Prophetic Communities” participants at Mass, St. Ignatius Church, University of San Francisco

Servant of God, Sister Thea Bowman inspires me greatly. She was a peacemaker; throughout her work she was relational and intentionally reached across barriers to build bridges. I see much of who I am and who I want to be as an organizer in her.

Sister Thea had passion for unity and cross-cultural understanding; it was the backbone of her ministry. She was adamant about the need for different races and cultures to be relational and to listen to one another’s experiences. She lived out the gospel call to love your neighbor with the understanding that we need to know our neighbor deeply: not just those within our parishes but everyone we encounter.

From a young age, I understood that injustices were the causes of despair and unrest around me. Things as they were didn’t match up with things as God wanted them to be. Growing up in one of the most diverse cities in the country exposed me to many different people, but it also further highlighted the inequity in my community. As an immigrant and child of immigrants, I learned pretty quickly that being welcome and being welcomed were two different things. For some, that invitation came with conditions.

My parish, St. Rose of Lima, provided me with many opportunities to live out my justice-minded heart in direct service with communities and service in the church. It led me to believe that I and my family could practice stewardship no matter our income, and it allowed me to give my time and talents to the parish and surrounding community. In this work, I found a love of relationality that has stuck with me for many years.

My parish was one of the founding congregations of Action in Montgomery (AIM), a community power organization in Montgomery County, Maryland. One Sunday, during the announcements,

Bridge Builder

BY OGECHI AKALEGBERE

someone from AIM shared about what would be the Maryland DREAM Act. Throughout his presentation, I learned that my peers, immigrants like me, were disproportionately affected by the cost of college tuition simply because of their immigration status. Once again, the world as it was did not match the world as it should be.

I remember being angry and disappointed in myself that I had done all this service but never understood the plight of people with whom I walked the halls, people who shared my same immigrant identity. That anger and fire eventually pointed me toward organizing in college. Years after college, I went to my first AIM meeting, and the rest is history. The common thread in all of this was my parish, which gave me the ability to put my faith into practice and allowed me to provide a sense of power, hope, and accountability to and for my community.

Now, many years later, I am honored to organize alongside parents, teens, and community leaders. Although we might have different faiths, I believe my encounters with these leaders have been nothing short of sacramental. In deep relational encounters, the Holy Spirit is present.

One encounter I hold dear is a meeting with Judy Walser. Judy and I come from different backgrounds. Her parish is less

diverse and significantly wealthier than mine. She has nothing to gain physically from organizing, but I have seen the light of Christ in her love of solidarity and care for others. Over the years, I have cherished our intergenerational friendship. I consider her a fellow bridge builder and co-conspirator for justice. As any true justice worker does, Judy acknowledges who is missing and loves to use her known privilege to enhance our organizing efforts.

As Sr. Thea Bowman stated, “I think when we love one another, when we become friends, then we can walk hand in hand into the house of the Lord and celebrate. But to me, to pray together when our hearts are not one, when we’re not at least trying to bridge the gaps, is sacrilege.”

As organizers, our work is most effective if we are bridge builders. We build bridges between the inequitable world as it is to a more justice-focused reality where those who are ignored in the margins are leaders and have neighbors who are willing to walk in solidarity with them.

Ogechi Akalegbere is a youth and young adult minister, community organizer, and speaker based in Gaithersburg, Maryland. Outside of ministry, she enjoys personal training and lifting weights.

Left: Akalegbere, her sister Nneka, and Judy Walser at a county election pre-primary action at a local synagogue (Courtesy of Ogechi Akalegbere). Right: Akalegbere as a panelist at “Prophetic Communities.”

COMMUNITY ORGANIZING101

BY CECILIA FLORES

In the fall of 2016, after many years in ministry with Catholic youth and young adults, I started a new role as director of a Newman Center in California and was tasked with growing a budding ministry at a highly diverse public commuter university. As I planned for the upcoming academic year with our staff and student leadership team, our events calendar quickly filled with student Masses, social events, faith formation studies, and the numerous other activities common to this age group.

As the weeks trudged on, however, I became aware of other realities the students were facing that felt important to address, such as food and housing insecurity. As I turned to colleagues in the university campus ministry field, I was disappointed that I couldn’t find others working on addressing these issues. I ultimately decided in the spirit of “cura personalis”—whole person care—that it was part of my mission to serve these students’ physiological needs as well as their spiritual ones. This led to collaboration with a local St. Vincent de Paul Society chapter to fund and create a student food pantry, as well as a collaboration with the university social worker to find ways our center could support unhoused students. That fall, it started to become evident that despite being hired to be an expert and leader in pastoring these students, my years of experience in ministry did not prepare me to accompany them through the urgent issues that kept them up at night.

On September 5, 2017, the Trump administration announced that it would be rescinding Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), a policy that grants certain people who came to the United States as children temporary permission to stay and work in the country.1 After a year of growing in relationship with these students, I knew that this announcement would have a detrimental effect on the lives of many in our community, and I knew that not addressing it and serving them in that need would be a failure in my pastoral care to them. However, once again I found myself without resources to address this urgent issue from within my campus ministry network. It was then that I turned to a friend who was a faith-based community organizer and asked her to work with our students, not knowing completely what that meant.

Accept/uses

Community Organizing: Spectrum

Homeless shelters

Trash clean-up

What Is Community Organizing?

There are several ways an individual can engage in work for social change. Most people are likely familiar with direct service, in which one (person, organization, etc.) fulfills the needs of another. Another familiar method of engagement is advocacy, in which an individual or group speaks and acts on behalf of another.

While advocacy can certainly be an effective mechanism for creating change on behalf of impacted communities, the goal of community organizing is to accompany impacted communities as they become agents of change and to bring solutions to the problems they themselves are living.

Faith-Based Community Organizing Cycle

Celebration & Evaluation

(De-brief, Report back, Next steps)

Action & Mobilization

(Outreach, Personal invitation, Execution)

Listening & Relationship Building

(1:1s, House meetings)

Relationship & Faith

Research (Movement alignment, Research meetings, Social analysis, Theological analysis)

The work of faith-based community organizing is rooted in relationship and faith. This takes place in four main steps:

1) Listening and relationship building

2) Research

3) Action and mobilization

1 “Key Facts on Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA),” KFF, last modified April 26, 2023, https://www.kff.org/racial-equity-andhealth-policy/fact-sheet/key-facts-on-deferred-action-for-childhoodarrivals-daca/

4) Celebration and evaluation

These steps can happen in a cycle, but they can also happen simultaneously. Because congregations and other faith-based

of Demand for Change Challenges existing power relationship

Direct Action

groups are brought together by their commitment to shared beliefs and values, organizing in faith spaces can bring those shared values to life and deepen members’ commitment to the community.

A common way to initiate an organizing cycle within a community is to conduct a listening campaign. A listening campaign is an “intentional effort by a local organizing committee to reach out and listen to a certain number of people in the congregation within a defined period of time.” 2 This listening is done primarily in one-to-one meetings, face-to-face conversations, with the purpose of discovering someone’s selfinterest. Through listening campaigns, an organizer can build and strengthen relationships and identify key problems facing the community.

Once problems are identified, the next phase of the cycle is to engage in research, which in this context is an “intentional process carried out by community leaders, with the goal of defining a specific, resolvable issue within a larger problem.” 3 In this phase, leaders seek to better understand the problem from multiple perspectives, build relationships in order to learn from others working on the problem, explore possible solutions, and identify individuals with authority or power to influence the issue at hand.

After conducting research, those involved then decide what action to undertake and define strategies to mobilize the community to partake in this action. This can take on many forms, such as a press conference, a public action, or gathering signatures for a petition to take to elected officials. Action and mobilization is an important step in the cycle: Well-known community organizer Saul Alinsky said that action is the oxygen of organizing. Taking collective action breathes new life into our movements and efforts, strengthens the bonds of community, and helps move us from private shame to public pain and further collective action for change.

2. “A Day in the Life of a Faith In Action Organizer,” Faith in Action, accessed June 128, 2023, https://organizingcareers.org/day-in-thelife-faith-in-action-organizer/.

3. Ibid.

In the last step of the organizing cycle, celebration and evaluation, we’re given an opportunity to reflect on what has taken place both individually and collectively. This is an important step in the cycle, as it is seen as a safe space for learning and development. Through reflection and evaluation of what we have learned and accomplished up to this point, we can continue to grow in our leadership capacity and refine our strategies.

Organizing as Subsidiarity

In the context of Catholic social teaching, community organizing can be considered a method of embodying subsidiarity. The principle of subsidiarity, as defined in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, is a “teaching according to which a community of a higher order should not interfere in the internal life of a community of a lower order, depriving the latter of its functions, but rather should support it in case of need and help to coordinate its activity with the activities of the rest of society, always with a view to the common good.” 4

In this case, “higher order” and “lower order” can refer to levels of government or authority. For example, a state government could be considered to be higher order, while a local school could be considered lower order. Because the local school is of lower order, subsidiarity would encourage the school and all of those who are part of it to be responsible for decisions that affect its internal life.

Community organizing enables subsidiarity by creating a pathway for people closest to the pain to define their own solutions, instead of solutions being dictated through a topdown approach. It invites community members to be agents of change over their daily lives and to interact with government and authority in a way that empowers them to hold those in authority accountable to their needs and desires. ***

From my experience within a campus ministry context, community organizing helped to enhance my ability to serve the student community. It taught me that, despite being an “expert” in the field of youth and young adult ministry, any person I am called to serve is in fact the only expert of their lived experience. My role is to accompany them as they seek to understand their communities and their role within them. The skills and postures that I learned from organizing have made me a more effective pastoral minister, helping me to embody true accompaniment and solidarity.

Cecilia Flores is the daughter of Filipino immigrants and grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. She holds a master’s degree in global development and social justice from St. John’s University and currently works as a community organizer and narrative strategist with Sacramento ACT. She is the host and producer of IPJC’s Justice Rising podcast.

4. John, Paul II. Catechism of the Catholic Church. 2nd ed. Washington, DC: United States Catholic Conference, 2011. https://www.usccb. org/sites/default/files/flipbooks/catechism/

Advocacy Speaking with people in power on behalf of a community

Speaking with people in power on behalf of self

Adapted from a graphic by Meredith Begin

Voices of the Community

There is a concern for justice in our world today. Giving people the chance to listen to the voices that have never had the opportunity to be heard is an act of justice.

For me and many other women, our voices were like a small light in the corner, covered with judgments and fears, hidden away where nobody could see and hear us. But I and the other women in the Women’s Justice Circles were given the opportunity to raise our voices. It started with eight sessions, where step by step we learned to act for justice and to love others with our words and actions.

Our voices now connect us to the community, organize families, and lead us on a path to a better life through new opportunities that make our families thrive. We have learned to value where we live and all the people who live there. We have learned to look at the needs the community has and to support one another. We have learned that we are women with rights: the right to speak and be heard, the right to point out what affects us, what seems unattainable, and what oppresses our families and ourselves. We have learned to take care of our inner beings and value who we are: beautiful women who are part of the community and this world.

We have made a change. Our streets are now cleaner, and our actions are motivating others to take part in caring

BY NORMA ORTIZ

for our city. With pride we walk and clean our streets, motivating and bringing awareness to each person who sees us, not only to take care of our streets but to take care of our environment.

Even when things are not achieved, we are winners, because by speaking we overcome shyness, isolation, fear of rejection, and the voices telling us, “You can’t.” Our voice has been heard, and we are not only part of the community; we are the community!

We have achieved this thanks to IPJC. The Women’s Justice Circles opened the door to hope, to believing in ourselves and our voices. We advocate, we look, and we listen to what matters in the community. Thanks to the Women’s Justice Circles, we can bring and realize justice in our communities.

Norma Ortiz is a long-time leader in the IPJC community and has facilitated numerous Women’s Justice Circles. Most recently, she facilitated a Circle in Burien, Washington that focused on developing a monthly community clean-up day. Norma also serves on IPJC’s Justice for Women Leadership Advisory Team, helping lead the newly formed Justice for Women Facilitator Network. Norma works for Southwest Youth and Family Services as a site manager for several low-income housing communities coordinating services and attending to the needs of the residents.

Women’s Justice Circles

IPJC’s Women’s Justice Circles provide an essential social network for women who are low-income and on the margins of society. Along with the significant benefits that arise from creating community, participants exchange useful information and resources, share a common purpose, and work together to bring about tangible changes in their communities. The women gather information, design campaigns, recruit others, choose a social justice issue to focus on, and take concrete steps toward systemic change in areas such as housing, health care, education, and violence prevention.

The Circles’ eight-week format is deliberately designed to deepen relationships among participants and provides a forum in which to address specific concerns. The weekly topics include creating community, exploring diversity, providing skills for collaboration and consensus building, leadership building, developing strategies and implementing an action, and reflecting as a group on the process. IPJC provides all the materials, training, and support needed. We work with each site to find a facilitator and a group of participants (approximately 6–10 members).  If you are interested in hearing more about our Circles, contact ipjc@ipjc.org.

Por una Comunidad Limpia ¡Únete! For a Clean Community Join Us! – a monthly cleaning campaign initiated by one of the Women’s Justice Circles.

A LEGACY To Be Proud Of

BY NICHOLAS HAYES-MOTA

In 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

Left: An early Back of the Yards Neighborhood Council action. Source: YouTube/TheBYNC Center: Clergy members support slaughterhouse union workers on the picket line,Chicago, 1946. Herman Brauer, Elizabeth Goss, Saul Alinsky, Joseph Meegan, Ambroise Ondrak. Wikimedia Commons by Adrien Rouxxx. Right: Joseph Meegan, Bishop Bernard Sheil, and Saul Alinsky. Source: YouTube/TheBYNC

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.”

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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

Below right: Dolores Huerta speaks at the induction of the United Farm Worker movement into the Labor Hall of Honor. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Everyone Has Something to Give

This quote from anthropologist Margaret Mead speaks to the power of people mobilizing. The power of true, meaningful change starts with impacted individuals and communities. It is daunting to witness the immense struggles facing the world now and hold the mindset that trajectories can shift. The quote is a reminder that everything must start somewhere. The number of people is not what drives change, but instead it is their motivation. Although this quote may sound overly naïve or optimistic, hope is contagious, and the act of a single passionate person can lead to a snowball effect for those around them..

Resource utilization is made more effective through organizing. If one prioritizes community health or the improvement of one’s community, they are more likely to work to implement changes. I cherish the possibility of living in a more equitable society. I want to live in a society where everyone can get by and enjoy life’s benefits. I believe that each life has intrinsic value and is entitled to a certain level of enjoyment as well as the chance to advance and support their families. I do not believe that people should only be exploited as agents of labor for others.

There is no one cookie-cutter method of bringing this world about; I believe everyone has gifts, and using these gifts to their full advantage in the service of others is the best way to help. If someone has wealth, donating money is more practical and beneficial than someone who may not have as much wealth but

has other talents that can benefit a certain community.

This brings to mind the biblical account of the widow’s mite, found in Mark 12:41–44 and Luke 21:1–14. When wealthier members of the group contribute only from their surplus, which costs them nothing, Jesus points out the woman with very little who gives all she has. This narrative acts as a potent reminder that the depth of sacrifice and sincere intention behind one’s effort are more important than the quantity or tangible worth of the offer.

In the same way, everyone has something special to give when it comes to assisting others, regardless of their financial situation. Each person has unique circumstances, skills, and resources, and it is only through valuing this diversity that we can effectively alter our communities.

My career hopes are driven by a desire to live purposefully and know I made a worthy difference and positively impacted peoples’ lives. I hope to participate in the political arena and have been working to develop foundational knowledge, skills, and activism. Through my acceptance to a Civics Center summer intensive focused on advanced voter drive organizing, I learned about public narratives and strong speechwriting skills. I believe that political justice leads to greater social justice and awareness. I also worked on a youth legislative team to advocate for electoral reforms,

specifically ranked-choice voting. This voting system is proven to be more equitable and promotes diversity among political candidates. After meeting with city council members, I testified at a council meeting to inform my community about the importance of the reform and proposed an implementation plan.

Although I have been part of some other advocacies, these two stand out to me, because they shaped my identity and helped me articulate what I want to stand for. As I became more exposed to the kinds of people who participate in this type of work, I desired to be around them more and develop my character in ways that reflected their traits I admire.

God gifted me with kindness, empathy, and creativity. I have an innate care for others and look to see that they find peace and happiness. I may not always understand or know how to best help in situations, but I will always do my best to remain curious and work to better understand the needs of marginalized individuals and communities.

Sydney Leardi interned for the IPJC Youth Action Team this past year while attending Seattle Prep High School. She looks forward to pursuing economics and political science, through the lens of community service and organizing, at Boston College in the fall.

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”

BY SYDNEY LEARDI

Sydney (left) with her IPJC Youth Action Team co-interns Erin Monda and Pavithra Harsha

Youth Action Team Internship

The Youth Action Team Internship (YATI) offers Catholic high-school juniors and seniors the opportunity to learn the principles of community organizing through the lens of Catholic social teaching while also building their own social movement. The academic year-long program begins with an emphasis on developing relational skills and community building.

Join the Collaborative for Catholic Organizing catholicorganizing.org

FOR Catholic Organizing

In February 2023, IPJC, Jesuits West, and the University of San Francisco gathered folks from across the United States for “Prophetic Communities: Organizing as an Expression of Catholic Social Thought.” The conference was attended by academics, community organizers, social ministry directors, and others committed to growing the practice of community organizing in Catholic contexts. One of the gathering’s outgrowths was the Collaborative for Catholic Organizing, which IPJC will co-coordinate in partnership with NETWORK and Jesuits West. We hope that you will consider joining this shared project and community by learning more below.

PURPOSE: The Collaborative for Catholic Organizing exists to foster community, nourish spiritual development, and build power among organizers, theologians, and people of faith committed to community organizing within the Catholic context.

OBJECTIVES:

In the first semester, interns participate in weekly workshops led by local and national community organizers and focused on the following topics: identity, power and privilege, storytelling, listening skills, communication, and outreach. After developing their own leadership styles and honoring their unique organizing gifts, the group participates in a listening campaign with the broader Seattle community aimed at gathering research about community joys and challenges. Then students utilize their research to engage in a communal discernment process about the social injustice they desire to address for the remainder of the year. The second semester focuses upon building a social movement to address the issue.

The 2022–23 interns built the Catholic School Student Coalition for Social Action, which will allow Catholic high schoolers to participate in social action without committing to a yearlong internship.

—“Justice in the World,” World Synod of Catholic Bishops, 1971

1. Align: Deepen the connections among Catholic social teaching, liberation theology, and community organizing through resource development, sharing, and collaboration.

2. Build community: Foster deep relationships that build communities of resiliency and trust among organizers, major stakeholders, and justice builders working in Catholic spaces.

3. Strategize: Intentionally collaborate and build power for social change through shared power analysis, movement alignment, and coordinated efforts to situate organizing within Catholic social teaching.

4. Grow: Nurture people in both their organizing skills and spiritual depth in the work of organizing, especially in helping participants connect their work to the Catholic faith. Increase capacity to work in Catholic contexts and deepen spiritual sustainability.

WAYS

TO PARTICIPATE:

1. Attend quarterly community-wide meetings focused on deepening relationships, professional development, and capacity building.

2. Attend individual events exploring issues related to community organizing in Catholic contexts.

3. Participate in a working group:

a. Ministerial, theological, and academic formation

b. Synodal distillation group (Synodal process from “Prophetic Communities”)

c. Power and network building

4. Contribute to and utilize the growing resource library on the Collaborative’s website: catholicorganizing.org .

5. Click Ask to Join group at the top the Collaborative’s website.

“Action on behalf of justice and participation in the transformation of the world fully appear to us as a constitutive dimension of the preaching of the Gospel”

IPJC Youth Action Team interns

COMMUNITY ORGANIZING and the Reign of God

BY BISHOP JOHN STOWE, O.F.M., CONV.

My inspiration to join the Conventual Franciscans after high school was largely motivated by the sense of family and community I experienced with the friars, whom I had known all my life from my home parish and high school..I took a course on St. Francis in high school that resonated with me; I learned about the freedom Francis discovered in serving outcast lepers and how that experience freed him from the “upward mobility” trajectory his merchant father expected of him.

Francis’ call to conversion was experienced in the church and among the marginalized. His joyous spirit attracted many to join his fraternity, which grew into a large movement that rejected violence as much as it embraced simplicity of life. The election of Pope Francis to the Chair of Peter in 2013 has brought those same values to the center of the church. Pope Francis, the first Jesuit pope, is leading the church with the spirit of his namesake, Francis of Assisi.

My formational experiences in Jesuit educational institutions heavily complemented my attraction to Franciscan fraternity. As a postulant, I began studies in philosophy and history at St. Louis University, where the friars had a house of studies. There I came to appreciate the “faith that does justice” approach to all that I was learning. Opportunities for expressing solidarity with the Central American sanctuary movement and opposition to the U.S. support of repressive regimes and preference for armed violence made my faith and prayer life come alive. That my Franciscan province had a presence in Central America also helped deepen my solidarity with the global south..

During my senior year at St. Louis University, the Jesuits at the Central American University (UCA) were martyred; the witness of the “faith that does justice” became even clearer. I had the opportunity to continue studies in theology at the Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley (now part of Santa Clara University) and continued to pursue interests in the history of Latin American colonization and prophetic voices within the church who denounced exploitation of the natives and alignment with oppression.

During the course of my studies, I was active in my province and order’s Justice, Peace and Integrity of Creation commission. On a visit to El Paso and later to San Antonio, I encountered community organizing through the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF). From COPS (Communities Organized in Public Service) in San Antonio, I learned about the history of giving economically disadvantaged people a voice in the community and the power to bring about constructive changes. In El Paso, I witnessed an accountability session where city politicians and candidates answered questions of their constituents and responded to the agenda of the people rather than giving campaign speeches. I watched in awe as an immigrant told elected officials that they had to abide by the rules of the session and stopped them from attacking opponents. The well-prepared participants insisted that their agenda be heard and responded to.

When I completed my theology studies and was assigned to our Franciscan parish in Ysleta, El Paso, I was eager to connect with the community organizers as part of my pastoral ministry. My first encounter with a lead organizer was mutually disappointing only because she was disappointed that I was not the pastor, whom she insisted the organization had to work with. The parish was already a member of the organization, which by that time had brought water, streets, and sewage to many of the border colonias that lacked these basic aspects of infrastructure. I was persistent and eventually convinced the organizer that I would bring the pastor along.

An early lesson in community organizing was that not everybody is impressed with their accomplishments or methods, and some have a hard time grasping why the church is engaged with these kinds of issues. With all of my formation, I thought this should be obvious, and I was dumbfounded that anyone would object. I learned that despite an impressive ability to create and support an agenda that is beneficial to the local community, politicians have figured out that showing up at events, presenting flags, and taking photos will easily convince people that they are the good guys and that community

Courtesy of Bishop John Stowe

organizers are really troublemakers who don’t understand what the government is doing.

There are definitely no shortcuts in organizing. There is a constant need to start over with face-to-face meetings and small group house meetings to hear the challenges that people are facing and discover common interests and needs that they can address more forcefully together.

Inspired by the comunidades de base in Latin America, it is not difficult to see the needs of the people addressed in scripture and discover there the tools for empowerment. From the formation of leaders, such as the judges who assisted Moses to the awakening of the power of priests, prophets, and kings given to each of us in baptism, community organizing became ever more clearly a way to connect faith to everyday life.

The analysis of power and structures undertaken by the organizing community also had its application in parish life. The formation of leaders is of obvious advantage to a parish. Forming a real sense of common interest among families helps build a stronger community. Watching the organization help potential leaders find their natural abilities and study complex issues and then teach them to others is tremendously rewarding. Seeing my parishioners speak directly to mayors, city and state representatives, senators, and judges has been deeply satisfying. It also helps people understand how their church, functioning as a real community as well as an institution, has an impact on their neighborhood, city, school district, and, of course, their lives.

Catholic social teaching begins with an emphasis on the dignity of the human person. Community organizing helps people develop self-understanding and an understanding of their role in society. It helps people transform from passive objects of indifference to real actors advocating for their needs. Catholic social teaching emphasizes that human beings are meant to be part of a community, a community of equals who must be respected, seen, and heard. Organizing makes clear what can be accomplished together infinitely surpasses what one can do alone.

The themes of Catholic social teaching come alive in community organizing as just wages, safe working conditions, care for the environment, and other issues are addressed as part of the justice necessary for peace (especially on the local level). Organizing is an exercise in solidarity and is based on the balance of rights and responsibilities assigned proportionately in society; it calls for the preferential option for the poor to be realized in budgets, laws, infrastructure, and more.

Recently, some U.S. community organizing leaders had an opportunity to sit down for a lengthy conversation with

Pope Francis in his home. The pope was impressed with their connection to real people and real communities. He congratulated them for not speaking as theorists or academics, but communicating real transformation in the lives of real people. While Pope Francis has been an organizer himself of the World Meeting of Popular Movements, he is more familiar with people in the global south organizing from the streets, the slums, and even the garbage heaps where they are forced to live. He knows about the struggle against dictators, military governments, and oligarchies that are unresponsive to their populations, especially the poor. He was interested to learn about how this works in the United States, in a democracy that used to be held as an example throughout the world. He was also impressed with the expression of faith put into action that motivates the leaders he met. He experienced a synodal moment with them.

Community organizing has been using a synodal model in communities for a long time, and it is a sign of hope to see this kind of organizing going on in the church. Organizing begins with a faceto-face encounter and then expands those encounters to people who share some aspect of life. It involves listening to the hopes and concerns of people and expressing them together. It really is no wonder that where organizing has been strong, the concept of synodality is easily understood, even if the name and terminology is not.

Pope Francis wants a synodal church that is walking together, and community organizing teaches people how to walk together in effective ways. Missionary disciples can easily be community organizers capable of listening and bringing forth common issues; community organizers can easily be missionary disciples when their organizing is based on the values of faith and a desire for the reign of God.

Bishop John Stowe, O.F.M., Conv. joined the formation program for the Conventual Franciscan Province of Our Lady of Consolation at St. Bonaventure Friary in St. Louis, Missouri in 1985, made his solemn vows as a Conventual Franciscan in 1992, and was ordained to the priesthood in 1995. Stowe served in El Paso, Texas as a pastor, vicar general, and moderator of the curia and chancellor for the Diocese of El Paso from 2002 until 2010, when he was elected vicar provincial of the Province of Our Lady of Consolation and became pastor and rector of the Basilica and National Shrine of Our Lady of Consolation in Carey, Ohio. On March 12, 2015, Pope Francis named him the third bishop of Lexington, Kentucky. He serves on the USCCB subcommittee of the Catholic Campaign for Human Development and is the bishop president of Pax Christi USA.

“It really is no wonder that where organizing has been strong, the concept of synodality is easily understood, even if the name and terminology is not.”

Reflection Process

On the margins I have discovered so many social movements with roots in parishes or schools that bring people together to make them become protagonists of their own histories, to set in motion dynamics that smacked of dignity. Taking life as it comes, they do not sit around resigned or complaining but come together to convert injustice into new possibilities. I call them “social poets.” In mobilizing for change, in their search for dignity, I see a source of moral energy, a reserve of civic passion, capable of revitalizing our democracy and reorientating the economy.

It was precisely here that the Church was born, in the margins of the Cross where so many of the crucified are found. If the Church disowns the poor, she ceases to be the Church of Jesus; she falls back on the old temptation to become a moral or intellectual elite. There is only one word for the Church that becomes a stranger to the poor: “scandal.” The road to the geographic and existential margins is the route of the Incarnation: God chose the peripheries as the place to reveal, in Jesus, His saving action in history. . .

To be clear: this is not the Church “organizing” the people. These are organizations that already exist—some Christian, some not. I would like the Church to open its doors more widely to these movements; I hope every diocese in the world has an ongoing collaboration with them, as some already do. But my role and that of the Church is to accompany, not paternalize them. That means offering teaching and guidance, but never imposing doctrine or trying to control them. The Church illuminates with the light of the Gospel, awakening the peoples to their own dignity, but it is the people who have the instinct to organize themselves.

—POPE FRANCIS, “LET US DREAM” (SIMON & SCHUSTER, 2020)

Reflection Questions:

n How do Catholic social teaching and the principles of organizing, as described in this issue, show up in the work you do both individually and in the communities of which you are a part?

n What’s at stake when it comes to preserving the connections between Catholic social teaching and organizing in the American context? For people of faith? For American public life?

n What changes are needed in order to build the vision Pope Francis describes here—one where every diocese supports and collaborates with community organizers?

n How might we build our collective power to achieve these changes?

Note: Participants were asked to reflect on similar questions throughout the course of the “Prophetic Communities” conference.

SPRING EVENTS

NW Ignatian Advocacy Summit

From April 13–15, we cohosted an ecological justice advocacy summit with Jesuits West and Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington. The three-day event provided opportunities for college- and high-school students, teachers, justice practitioners, and parishioners to learn community organizing and advocacy skills. In a powerful act of solidarity, the highschool students and their teachers traveled to the Spokane City Legislative building when representatives failed to show up to their scheduled Zoom legislative meetings. The summit concluded with a liturgy that invited participants to spend time in deep reflection and gratitude with nature.

“Receive Her in the Lord”

On May 6, we cosponsored “Receive Her in the Lord: Reimagining Women’s Participation in a Synodal Church” (shown below), an event hosted by Discerning Deacons at St. James Cathedral Hall. Nearly 200 participants from western Washington representing 40 different Catholic communities participated. As a result of this gathering, 10 institutions committed to hosting St. Phoebe Day celebrations in their parish and local communities to honor the many gifts and powerful voices of women while also praying for the universal church’s discernment about women’s participation and leadership. Interested in planning your own St. Phoebe Day celebration? Learn more and register for a planning call at discerningdeacons.org/celebrate2023

Annual Spring Benefit

On May 18, we hosted our annual Spring Benefit and—because of your extraordinary courage, confidence in our work, and generosity—raised $132,000! This year’s theme, “extraordinary courage,” describes our community’s main quality over the last year and perfectly describes our 2023 Thea Bowman Award recipient, Judy Byron, OP (shown right). As a staff we were delighted to award Sister Judy with the award for her commitment to empowering youth, education, and justice work. This year also marked the inaugural St. Thérèse of Lisieux Young Activist Award: Recipients uphold St. Thérèse’s love, authenticity, emotional intelligence, tenderness, strength, and selflessness as demonstrated through commitment to their communities. This year’s award was given to Erin Monda, a senior intern in the Youth Action Team Internship program and graduate of Holy Names Academy.

Racial Justice Week Memorial How Much Longer: Ending the Sin of Racism

On May 23 the South Seattle Deanery Racial Solidarity Committee gathered at St. Edward Catholic Church to commemorate the third anniversary of George Floyd’s murder. The prayer service featured a gospel choir, reflections from community members, liturgical dance, and communal prayer. Two of IPJC’s Youth Action Team interns, Saskia Visser and Cleia Yuniardi, presented their work on the “Break the Norm Campaign,” sharing their experiences of racism and ableism in Catholic education and inviting the assembly to join them in action.

Youth Action Team Internship End of Year Celebration

Season 4 of Justice Rising Comes to an End

Throughout Season 4, host Cecilia Flores interviewed national faith-based community organizers who highlighted the importance of the intersection between faith and community organizing for creating a more just world. A common theme throughout each episode was the importance of developing and investing in authentic relationships. We invite you to embrace the invitations at the end of each episode to engage in different forms of action in your own local community. To listen to Justice Rising please visit ipjc.org/justice-rising-podcast

UPCOMING EVENTS Lobby Days for the Philippine Human Rights Act

The International Coalition for Human Rights in the Philippines (ICHRP) asks for your support to pass the Philippine Human Rights Act (PHRA). From July 13–14, ICHRP is hosting lobbying days in Washington, D.C. They will also facilitate opportunities for lobbying local representatives. To learn more about the PHRA and register for in-person or local lobbying visit humanrightsph.org/2023-lobby-days.

Sacred Salmon: Removing the Lower Snake River Dams

The 2022–23 Youth Action Team Internship cohort (above) held their last meeting on May 24. After a year spent building community, developing themselves as leaders, and striving for justice in the education system, the interns spent an evening sharing about the joys and challenges of community organizing. It was a privilege to spend the year in fellowship and power with eight incredible young women. As this internship year ends, we have already begun interviewing high school students for the 2023–24 cohort, and we cannot wait to share more about them in the fall.

In partnership with Se’Si’Le’ and a broad coalition of partners, IPJC will be hosting and planning several events and actions focused on salmon preservation and dam removal. This work will culminate in the Totem Pole Journey from September 22nd through October 1st. Please look for further communication on ways to get involved.

DONATIONS

IN HONOR OF Mary Alexander, Alice Crawley, Judy Byron, OP, Giselle Cárcamo, Lucille Dean, SP, Rita Elsberry, Sr. Eleanor Gilmore, CSJP, Patricia Harvey

Intercommunity Peace & Justice Center

1216 NE 65th St Seattle, WA 98115-6724

SPONSORING COMMUNITIES

Adrian Dominican Sisters

Congregation of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Peace

Jesuits West

Sisters of the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary, U.S.-Ontario Province

Sisters of Providence, Mother Joseph Province

Sisters of St. Francis of Philadelphia

Tacoma Dominicans

AFFILIATE COMMUNITIES

Benedictine Sisters of Cottonwood, Idaho

Benedictine Sisters of Lacey

Benedictine Sisters of Mt. Angel

Dominican Sisters of Mission San Jose

Dominican Sisters of Racine

Dominican Sisters of San Rafael

Sinsinawa Dominicans

Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary

Sisters of St. Francis of Redwood City

Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet

Sisters of St. Mary of Oregon

Society of the Holy Child Jesus

Sisters of the Holy Family

Sisters of the Presentation, San Francisco

Society of Helpers

Society of the Sacred Heart

Ursuline Sisters of the Roman Union

EDITORIAL BOARD

Gretchen Gundrum

Vince Herberholt

Kelly Hickman

Tricia Hoyt

Nick Mele

Catherine Punsalan-Manlimos

Will Rutt

Editor: Emily Sanna

Copy Editor: Elizabeth Bayardi, Carl Elsik

Design: Sheila Edwards

A Matter of Spirit is a quarterly publication of the Intercommunity Peace & Justice Center, a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization, Federal Tax ID# 94-3083964. All donations are tax-deductible within the guidelines of U.S. law. To make a matching corporate gift, a gift of stocks, bonds, or other securities please call (206) 223-1138. Printed on FSC® certified paper made from 30% post consumer waste.

Cover: Dolores Huerta and Cesar Chavez at the United Farm Workers founding convention. Photo by Bob Fitch.

Source: Stanford University Libraries, Department of Special Collections

ipjc@ipjc.org • ipjc.org

Be the Answer

Get up off your knees Come out of your churches, your mosques, your temples.

God can hear your prayers for peace, justice, and hope in this broken world just fine while you’re out creating peace, working for justice, and giving hope to this broken world.

When are we finally going to realize that humanity is the solution to inhumanity? When will we finally understand that we are all drops of the same ocean, hurting together, healing together, hoping together?

So don’t just pray for hands to heal the hurting. Pray with hands that are healing the hurting. Don’t just pray for arms to help the helpless. Pray with arms that are helping the helpless. Don’t just pray for feet to respond to the need. Pray on feet that are responding to the need. Don’t just pray for someone to do something. Be someone who does something. Don’t just pray for answers. Be the answer.

“Receive Her in the Lord” participants