A LEGACY To Be Proud Of BY NICHOLAS HAYES-MOTA
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n 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
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
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 A M AT T E R O F S P I R IT
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