The Catholic Roots of Obama’s Activism
CHICAGO
— In a meeting room under Holy Name Cathedral, a rapt group of black
Roman Catholics listened as Barack Obama, a 25-year-old community
organizer, trained them to lobby their fellow delegates to a national
congress in Washington on issues like empowering lay leaders and
attracting more believers.
“He
so quickly got us,” said Andrew Lyke, a participant in the meeting who
is now the director of the Chicago Archdiocese’s Office for Black
Catholics. The group succeeded in inserting its priorities into the
congress’s plan for churches, Mr. Lyke said, and “Barack Obama was key
in helping us do that.”
By
the time of that session in the spring of 1987, Mr. Obama — himself not
Catholic — was already well known in Chicago’s black Catholic circles.
He had arrived two years earlier to fill an organizing position paid for
by a church grant, and had spent his first months here surrounded by
Catholic pastors and congregations. In this often overlooked period of
the president’s life, he had a desk in a South Side parish and became
steeped in the social justice wing of the church, which played a
powerful role in his political formation.
This
Thursday, Mr. Obama will meet with Pope Francis at the Vatican after a
three-decade divergence with the church. By the late 1980s, the Catholic
hierarchy had taken a conservative turn that de-emphasized social
engagement and elevated the culture wars that would eventually cast Mr.
Obama as an abortion-supporting enemy. Mr. Obama, who went on to find his own faith
with the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr.’s Trinity United Church of Christ,
drifted from his youthful, church-backed activism to become a pragmatic
politician and the president with a terrorist “kill list.” The meeting this week is a potential point of confluence.
A
White House accustomed to archbishop antagonists hopes the president
will find a strategic ally and kindred spirit in a pope who preaches a gospel of social justice and inclusion.
Mr. Obama’s old friends in the priesthood pray that Francis will
discover a president freed from concerns about re-election and willing
to rededicate himself to the vulnerable.
But
the Vatican — aware that Mr. Obama has far more to gain from the
encounter than the pope does, and wary of being used for American
political consumption — warns that this will hardly be like the 1982
meeting at which President Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II agreed to
fight Communism in Eastern Europe.
“We’re
not in the old days of the great alliance,” said a senior Vatican
official who was granted anonymity to speak frankly about the mind-set
inside the Holy See. While Mr. Obama’s early work with the church is
“not on the radar screen,” the official said, his recent arguments with
American bishops over issues of religious freedom are: Catholic leaders
have objected to a provision
in the administration’s health care law that requires employers to
cover contraception costs, and have sharply questioned the morality of
the administration’s use of drones to fight terrorism.
As in many reunions, expectations, and the possibility for disappointment, run high.
A Fast Learner
In
1967, as the modernizing changes of the Second Vatican Council began to
transform the Catholic world, Ann Dunham, Mr. Obama’s mother, took her
chubby 6-year-old son occasionally to Mass and enrolled him in a new
Catholic elementary school in Jakarta, Indonesia, called Santo
Fransiskus Asisi. At school, the future president began and ended his
days with prayer. At home, his mother read him the Bible with an
anthropologist’s eye.
Pious
he was not. “When it came time to pray, I would pretend to close my
eyes, then peek around the room,” Mr. Obama wrote in his memoir “Dreams
From My Father.” “Nothing happened. No angels descended. Just a parched
old nun and 30 brown children, muttering words.”
In
1969, Mr. Obama transferred to a more exclusive, state-run school with a
mosque, but a development in the United States would have a greater
impact on his future career. American Catholic bishops responded to the
call of the Second Vatican Council to focus on the poor by creating what
is now known as the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, an antipoverty and social justice program that became one of the country’s most influential supporters of grass-roots groups.
By
the early 1980s, when Mr. Obama was an undergraduate at Columbia
University, the campaign was financing a project to help neighborhoods
after the collapse of the steel mills near Chicago. The program’s
leaders, eager to expand beyond Catholic parishes to the black
Protestant churches where more of the affected community worshiped,
sought an African-American for the task. In 1985, they found one in Mr.
Obama, a fledgling community organizer in New York who answered a want
ad for a job with the Developing Communities Project. The faith-based
program aimed to unify South Side residents against unsafe streets, poor
living conditions and political neglect. Mr. Obama’s salary was less
than $10,000 a year.
The
future president arrived in Chicago with little knowledge of
Catholicism other than the Graham Greene novels and “Confessions” of St.
Augustine he had read during a period of spiritual exploration at
Columbia. But he fit seamlessly into a 1980s Catholic cityscape forged
by the spirit of Vatican II, the influence of liberation theology and
the progressivism of Cardinal Joseph L. Bernardin, the archbishop of
Chicago, who called for a “consistent ethic of life” that wove life and
social justice into a “seamless garment.”
On
one of his first days on the job, Mr. Obama heard Cardinal Bernardin
speak at an economic development meeting. He felt like a Catholic novice
there, he wrote in his memoir, and later decided “not to ask what a
catechism was.” But he was a quick study.
“He
had to do a power analysis of each Catholic church,” said one of his
mentors at the time, Gregory Galluzzo, a former Jesuit priest and
disciple of the organizer Saul Alinsky. Mr. Obama, Mr. Galluzzo said,
soon understood the chain of command and who had influence in individual
parishes.
Mr.
Obama had a small office with two cloudy glass-block windows on the
ground floor of Holy Rosary, a handsome red brick parish on the South
Side, where he would pop down the hall to the office of the Rev. William
Stenzel, raise a phantom cigarette to his lips and ask, “Want to go out
for lunch?” Besides sneaking smoke breaks with the priest on the roof,
Mr. Obama listened to him during Mass. “He was on an exposure curve to
organized religion,” Father Stenzel said.
The
future president’s education included evangelizing. Mr. Obama often
plotted strategy with the recent Catholic convert who had hired him,
Gerald Kellman, about how to bring people into the program and closer to
the church. The effort to fill the pews “was what Bernardin really
bought into,” Mr. Kellman said.
To
expand congregations as well as the reach of his organizing program,
Mr. Obama went to Holy Ghost Catholic Church in South Holland, Ill., to
ask Wilton D. Gregory, an African-American bishop and a rising star in
the hierarchy, for a grant for operating costs. Archbishop Gregory, who
now leads the Archdiocese of Atlanta, recalled Mr. Obama as a persuasive
man who “wanted to engage the people of the neighborhood.” He
recommended that Cardinal Bernardin release the funds.
As
the months went on, Mr. Obama became a familiar face in South Side
black parishes. At Holy Angels Church, considered a center of black
Catholic life, he talked to the pastor and the pastor’s adopted son
about finding families willing to adopt troubled children. At Our Lady
of the Gardens, he attended peace and black history Masses and conferred
with the Rev. Dominic Carmon on programs to battle unemployment and
violence. At the neo-Gothic St. Sabina, he struck up a friendship with
the Rev. Michael L. Pfleger, the firebrand white pastor of one of the
city’s largest black parishes. The two would huddle in a back room and
commiserate about the liquor stores and payday loan businesses in the
neighborhood.
But
even as Mr. Obama effectively proselytized for the church and its role
in improving the community, and even as he opened meetings in the backs
of churches with the Lord’s Prayer and showed a comfort with faith that
put the people he hoped to organize at ease, Catholic doctrine did not
tempt him. He was not baptized Catholic, priests said. But it was amid
the trappings of Catholicism, according to his fellow organizers, that
the future president began to express a spiritual thirst.
As
Mr. Obama helped expand the program from Catholic parishes to
megachurches and Protestant congregations, he felt that need slaked by
the prevailing black liberation theology, inspired by the civil rights
movement and preached by African-American ministers like Mr. Wright of
Trinity. The notion that Jesus delivered salvation to communities that
expressed faith through good deeds suited Mr. Obama’s instincts — and
perhaps his interests.
For an ambitious black politician, Mr. Galluzzo said, “it was not politically advantageous to be in a Catholic church.”
Mr.
Obama nevertheless maintained his Catholic connections, so much so that
when he turned up in the basement of the Holy Name complex in 1987,
“there was a need to clarify” that he was not a member of the flock,
said the Rev. David Jones, who was at the meeting. And some members
still tried to draw him in, in more ways than one.
“He
was a man of integrity, very much to my disappointment,” joked Cynthia
Norris, then the director of the Chicago Archdiocese’s black Catholics
office, who found the young Mr. Obama appealing. The future president,
who was dating another woman, did turn to Ms. Norris for a Harvard Law
School recommendation, and kept in touch during a trip to Europe in
1988.
“I
wander around Paris, the most beautiful, alluring, maddening city I’ve
ever seen; one is tempted to chuck the whole organizing/political
business and be a painter” on the banks of the Seine, Mr. Obama
scribbled to Ms. Norris, along with “Love, Barack,” on one side of a
postcard. On the other was a picture of the Cathedral of Notre-Dame.
A Partnership Falters
Mr.
Obama entered Harvard in 1988, the same year he was baptized at
Trinity, the power church of Chicago’s black professional class. Trinity
served Mr. Obama well through his dizzying political ascent, which
coincided with a period in which black Catholic churches in Chicago
closed and the hierarchy shifted away from the progressive social
engagement that had characterized Mr. Obama’s early years here.
In
1997, the year Mr. Obama was sworn in as an Illinois state senator,
Cardinal Francis George succeeded Cardinal Bernardin as archbishop of
Chicago. One of the church’s leading conservative intellectuals, called
“Francis the Corrector” by local liberal priests, Cardinal George was
emblematic of the bishops installed by John Paul II and his successor,
Benedict XVI. Some of them looked with skepticism at the social justice
wing that had financed Mr. Obama’s organizing efforts, and later sought
to block his election as president by suggesting that Catholics could
not in good conscience vote for a candidate who supported abortion
rights.
Mr.
Obama still won the Catholic vote in 2008. In his campaign, he had held
out the goal of finding common ground between supporters and opponents
of abortion rights, chiefly by reducing unintended pregnancies and
increasing adoptions. Cardinal George quickly dashed those hopes. “The
common good can never be adequately incarnated in any society when those
waiting to be born can be legally killed at choice,” he said in
November 2008 in his opening address as president of the United States
Conference of Catholic Bishops.
Mr.
Obama, seeking to avoid confrontation with the church, invited Cardinal
George to the White House in March 2009; said at a news conference that
April that abortion rights were “not my highest legislative priority”;
and told graduates at the University of Notre Dame in May, after some
initial boos from the crowd, that Cardinal Bernardin had touched “my
heart and mind.” He recalled his years in Chicago’s Catholic parishes
and said that after branching out to work with other Christian
denominations, “I found myself drawn not just to the work with the
church; I was drawn to be in the church.”
Two
months later, speaking to reporters from Catholic publications, he said
again that the Campaign for Human Development and Cardinal Bernardin
had inspired him. “I think that there have been times over the last
decade or two where that more holistic tradition feels like it’s gotten
buried under the abortion debate,” he said.
Church
leaders were unimpressed. A week after his session with Catholic
reporters, Mr. Obama met with Benedict, who pointedly offered him a
Vatican document on bioethics that condemned abortion and stem cell
research. The relationship deteriorated further during Mr. Obama’s push
for health care reform, specifically the provision on contraception,
which will be argued before the Supreme Court on Tuesday.
Still,
Mr. Obama had not lost all his friends in the church. As the
president’s relations with Catholic leaders reached their nadir, Father
Stenzel, Mr. Obama’s old smoke-break friend, visited the White House. As
they walked into the Oval Office, Mr. Obama joked to his staff that the
priest had given him his first office in Chicago. Father Stenzel
reminded him that his old surroundings were far humbler: “The office I
gave you had two rows of glass-block windows!”
Pope Francis’ Impression
Mr.
Obama’s parish days seemed far behind him when he won re-election in
2012 with a slimmer margin of Catholic votes. Not only did Catholic
conservatives view him as a secularist forcing them to pay for
contraceptives, but some of his old allies in the church’s left wing
criticized his use of drones and lack of emphasis on the poor.
But the election of Pope Francis
last March seemed to breathe new life into the Catholic Church and,
potentially, into the relationship between Mr. Obama and the institution
that gave him his start. While far from an ideological progressive,
Francis does sometimes appear cloaked in Cardinal Bernardin’s “seamless
garment.” His de-emphasis of issues like abortion and same-sex marriage and his championing of the poor and vulnerable — articulated in his mission statement, “The Joy of the Gospel” — have impressed a second-term president who argues that income inequality undermines human dignity.
“Whether
you call that the ‘seamless garment’ or ‘the joy of the Gospel’ or
what, I’ve said to the president I consider that a pretty Catholic way
of looking at the world,” said Denis McDonough, the White House chief of
staff, who is Roman Catholic. Mr. McDonough added that the
community-organizer-turned-president had expressed admiration to him
about “how important it is for the Holy Father to be so in the
community.”
Last
month, Catholic activists made their case for social justice on Capitol
Hill. Afterward, relaxing over beers and a buffet in the Russell Senate
Office Building, they discussed whether Cardinal George, who is
retiring as archbishop of Chicago, would be replaced by Archbishop
Gregory, who helped secure Mr. Obama’s church grant application in the
1980s. Among them was Mr. Lyke, the man who had received coaching from
Mr. Obama years earlier in the basement of Holy Name Cathedral. He
characterized Francis and Mr. Obama as a match made in heaven.
Mr.
Lyke’s view is not universal. Vatican officials have made clear Mr.
Obama will not get special treatment, and leaders of the Catholic
Campaign for Human Development, also gathered in the Russell Building,
saw the coming papal audience as a chance for Mr. Obama to return to the
church’s social justice values, not the other way around.
Dylan
Corbett, one of the Campaign for Human Development leaders, said the
president was “welcome to the conversation” that the pope was driving
about income inequality and poverty. He added with a grin, “We’re happy
to have him back, actually.”
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