The Catholic Left

Attached following my comments is a very good piece by Ted Glick involving some relatively recent history about some aspects of the Catholic left in this country.  Some personal comments of my own on Catholic social justice  precede that.

First, a correction.  When I posted yesterday on the heated Chris Cuomo interview with Dennis Rodman on CNN, I referred to Andrew Cuomo as the network's pundit.  Andrew, of course, is the New York governor.  I realized that after I posted the piece.

We've always thought pretty well of Mario Cuomo.  Despite his somewhat jaundiced view of firearms, his stance on social justice has always been quite good.  During my stormy career as director of social justice activities for the very large and pervasively Roman Catholic Rochester Diocese (1976-1978), he was NY Secretary of State in the Carey administration and I met him at various functions at Albany,  He was of significant assistance to us in some of our work within and out of Rochester.  We certainly supported his primary bid in 1992.  (Ironically, Bill Clinton turned out to be much more "anti-gun" than Cuomo.)

The Catholic commitment to social justice is old -- and one quite rightly thinks of the Jesuits as first and foremost in that context.  Our own vital tie with Catholicism goes back several hundred years to the arrival of the intrepid Jesuit missionaries in the Far Northeast -- almost always open to a significant degree of syncretism with respect to the traditonal Native theologies -- and the various epochs that followed.  St. Anne's church on the Penobscot reservation in Maine -- we have relatives on that res -- was established in the 1680s and is probably the oldest continuing RC church in this country.  It features the rich liturgical art of the nearly blind Penobscot artist, Joseph Orson, who worked with pigments drawn from wild berries.  The first Jesuit missionaries in the northern Rockies, including historically well known Fathers Peter de Smet and Nicolas Point (a gifted artist), were guided into this region by our own direct ancestor, John Gray, the fighting leader of the Mohawk (and some Abenaki) fur hunters in the Far West.  My father, a gifted artist in his own right, whose art forms were several, often did liturgical art for Catholic churches, and some Anglican (my mother's faith), charging no fee.

My career in Rochester, discussed in some detail in the Epilogue section of my book, Jackson Mississippi, is summarized here from my Hunterbear website:

"The institutional Church [or church] can indeed be something else.  I parted
company with that in the summer of 1978 at Rochester, New York.  For the
better part of the two previous years, I'd been Director of the Office of
Human Development, the social justice arm of the twelve country Rochester
Catholic Diocese.  For years it had been a mostly talk situation -- and I
was hired because part of the staff genuinely wanted to do some genuinely
tangible things [and the Church bureaucracy was unaware of what bona fide
community organization really meant!]  We moved quickly on a number of
fronts: organized Native mink-skinners [in some of the most repressive,
feudal conditions I'd seen since the Deep South] into successful strike
actions; launched all sorts of effective  grassroots single-issue and
multi-issue projects; developed meaningful and effective liaisons with union
labor [and I was a prime organizer and co-chair of the regional Labor Law
Reform Committee -- seeking  strong pro-union legislation];   pushed
international justice issues [Chile, southern Africa, Panama] and actively
supported the Iroquois land claims cases -- all of these both directly and
through the New York State Catholic Committee; vigorously supported gay
rights;  and we did much else.

And we also pushed hard for the socialization of utilities power -- the
people-gouging [super-gouging] Rochester Gas and Electric -- whose board
chairman, we knew, was the biggest single contributor to the Diocese.

Tension between our bona fide social justice organizing and fighting -- and
the institutional Church -- had been growing steadily as Church politicians
began to realize what we were doing via the Office of Human Development.  I
was given a series of ultimatums which, of course, I ignored -- and, in due
course,  I was fired by the Bishop's hatchet-man for "insubordination"
[later changed to "a breakdown in communication."]

There was a hell of a grassroots protest through the remainder of the Summer
of 1978: Native organizations, grassroots groups, the 89 unions making up
the Rochester Central Labor Council and the Teamsters Union; many inner-city
parish priests and nuns; faculty from St. Bernard's Seminary; the Diocesan
canon lawyer; Episcopal clergy; the Catholic Worker movement.  The widely
read  National Catholic Reporter devoted much of an entire issue to the
Rochester upheaval.  The Bishop took early retirement;  his hatchet-man
[rumored to be his successor] was passed over and relegated in due course to
an obscure rural parish. 

I was never, not surprisingly, reinstated -- my growing family and I went on
to the Navajo Nation -- but we did accomplish some solid victories on the
New York scene and we sowed many seeds of discontent. We hear from time to
time of those emergent fruits."

My ties with Catholicism have continued to this moment.  I kept in touch, and still do to some extent, with Catholic social justice activists.  (I spoke in Rochester in 1991 under essentially Catholic Worker auspices.)  The advent of Francis is an obviously encouraging sign.  

And, among other things, we recently re-subbed to the National Catholic Reporter.   (Hunter Bear)

----- Original Message ----- 
From: Ted Glick 
To: [email protected] 
Sent: Wednesday, January 08, 2014 4:14 PM
Subject: [SNCC-List] The Catholic Left 45 Years Later


http://tedglick.com/future-hope-columns/the-catholic-left-45-years-later/

Future Hope column, January 8, 2014

 

The Catholic Left 45 Years Later

 

By Ted Glick

 

It is entirely fitting that the news about who burgled the Media, Pa. FBI office in 1971 and how and why they did it broke just a day after a moving memorial service in New York City for the late Fr. Paul Mayer. Among other accomplishments, Paul was named in early 1971 as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Harrisburg 8 "kidnap Kissinger" indictment that was all about retribution on the part of J. Edgar Hoover's FBI and Richard Nixon's Justice Department against what Hoover called the East Coast Conspiracy to Save Lives.

 

Actually, that was the name of just one of the many groups which took nonviolent direct action to destroy Selective Service draft files between 1967 and 1972. Sometimes there were other targets, like the offices or production sites of war corporations like GE, Dow Chemical and AMF, or the FBI (it wasn't just at Media, Pa.).

 

Fr. Dan Berrigan, looking and sounding very frail in body, was one of the speakers at Paul Mayer's memorial, and it was fitting that he received a much-deserved standing ovation from the 250 people who gathered at Judson Church on a very cold and icy day. Dan, with his late brother Phil, was a leader of the Catholic Left, more an inspirational leader than a practical, nuts and bolts leader, which was Phil's department.

 

I joined the Catholic Left in late 1969 and participated in four "actions," as we called them, before I was arrested over Labor Day weekend, 1970, with seven others at 5:15 am following five hours inside the Rochester, N.Y. federal building. We had spent those five hours cutting up Selective Service files of young men who were classified 1-A, meaning they would soon be sent to Vietnam. We had also gone into the FBI and US Attorney's offices. We had suitcases full of incriminating (for them) FBI files as we waited for our pickup vehicles by the front door, but we never got them out of the building. The Rochester police, who had been tipped off to our plans by a government informer, happened to check on the doors as we sat there waiting underneath them. Three and a half months later, after an incredible two-week trial where seven of the eight of us defended ourselves, opening up the courtroom to testimony we would never have gotten in otherwise, we were on our way to prison, but for much shorter sentences than we had expected.

 

All of these memories and more have come flooding back to me as I've heard, over Democracy Now, and read in the NY Times and elsewhere about the identities of some of the people who pulled off the successful Media, Pa. FBI action in March of 1971. Without question, their success played a major role in putting the government on the defensive, leading to some reforms of FBI practices and drastically curtailing the use of Cointelpro type programs, at least for many years.

 

I've been very touched to learn that John and Bonnie Raines played the active role that they did in the Media action. During the time that I lived in Philadelphia in 1970 when I was most active with the Catholic Left, Bonnie and John were close friends and very supportive. But to learn that they were willing to take this risk even with their responsibilities as parents of three young children is very moving, very inspiring. They were clearly about a much higher responsibility to their children, the responsibility of providing an example of someone who is willing to take reasonable risks for justice, peace and the common good.

 

I wasn't surprised in the slightest to learn that Bill Davidon was the leader of this action, having worked with him on some of the actions which took place in the Philadelphia area during this time. Bill was fearless. He seemed most happy when he was actively preparing for one of them.

 

There were hundreds of such people in the Catholic Left, Johns and Bonnies and Bills and Dans and Phils. A fair number were Catholic priests and nuns and religious people, but over time, as the actions became less symbolic and more focused on practically disrupting the operations of the Selective Service System, or exposing corporate collusion with war-making and illegal FBI repression and intimidation, younger people like myself-20 at the time-who were not Catholic and who were not very overtly religious got involved.

 

For me, the Catholic Left was a way to take action that was appropriate to the urgency of what was happening in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos and among draft-age young men in the USA facing months risking life, limb and their mental stability, especially those from low-income and working-class communities. The actions we took were carried out without the use of violence. The Catholic Left was much more of a threat to the war-making government than the Weather Underground, which got it on the urgency but missed it on what tactics made the most sense in the USA if you were trying to actually stop the war. 

 

Many FBI agents back then, and perhaps still today, were Catholics, and that may be part of the reason why J. Edgar Hoover took the Catholic Left so seriously. The main reason, however, was because we were effective. We were practically effective in throwing some sand into the gears of the Selective Service system, and with the Media action we were effective in making it much more difficult for the FBI to do what it was doing. An action at an AMF plant in York, Pa. in March of 1972, on the eve of the beginning of the Harrisburg 7 trial, rendered unuseable hundreds of "smart bomb" casings about to be shipped to a GE plant in Philadelphia where the seeing-eye electronic "eye" would have been installed.

 

We were also politically effective. To have a growing number of Catholic priests and nuns publicly taking action in this way was a hard thing to isolate and label as fringe. Without question, the Catholic Left, building upon the mass anti-war movement and the mass draft resistance movement that birthed it, played a key role at a critical time in our nation's history.

 

(For more information on the Catholic Left I would recommend the movie, Hit and Stay, by Joe Tropea and Skizz Cyzyk, http://hitandstay.tumblr.com/).

 

Ted Glick has been a progressive activist and organizer since 1968. Past writings and other information can be found at http://tedglick.com, and he can be followed on Twitter at http://twitter.com/jtglick.



HUNTER GRAY [HUNTER BEAR/JOHN R SALTER JR] Mi'kmaq / 
St. Francis Abenaki / St. Regis Mohawk 
Member, National Writers Union AFL-CIO

Check out our massive social justice website
www.hunterbear.org  The site is dedicated to our
one-half Bobcat, Cloudy Gray, and to Sky Gray:
http://hunterbear.org/cloudy_gray.htm

SHOOTING LUPUS --  Driving this oft-lethal deadly 
disease of mine back into its genetic cave and into
impotency in an eight year war:
http://hunterbear.org/shooting_lupus.htm

See our very full COMMUNITY ORGANIZING
page -- with a great deal of practical material:
http://hunterbear.org/my_combined_community_organizing.htm

See my  new expanded/updated "Organizer's Book," 
JACKSON MISSISSIPPI -- with a new 10,000 word
introduction by me. This page lists many reviews.
And this book is also an activist's how-to manual: 
 http://hunterbear.org/jackson.htm   

The Stormy Adoption of an Indian Child [My Father]:
http://hunterbear.org/James%20and%20Salter%20and%20Dad.htm: