Catholicism, Workers and the Poor.

When I was 18 years old back in Jersey, I was even more sophomoric, pretentious and hypocritical than my prep school. (Delbarton is situated on 400 acres of Jersey forest, and peppered with Greek statuary and Goose shit.)

I would spend studyhall mornings listening to The Shape of Jazz to Come on my walkman, while reading the Communist Manifesto or Forced Exposure in the half-lotus position.

There were a lotta coffees and bagels
snarfed down in between seminars with the half-Benedictine faculty, and a lot of really hideous things happened inside me and around me while I inhabited this prep space. But I also learned about William Faulkner, James Joyce and Marx from a lot of very smart people, some of whom - shit, they were monks - even kinda managed to retain (kinda) leftist critiques of la societe despite all the wanky, preppy computations of the place.

All of which leads up to yours truly getting tapped for a sort of volunteer trip to Camden, NJ, where unbeknownst to me there was a full-blown Liberation Theology, anti-poverty mission happening that left me duly impressed. We emptied abandoned crackhouses by day and then attended - seriously - seminars at night that were often as much about the Sandinistas as they were about transubstantiation...It's also the place where I first heard of Marx, Keynes and Neoclassical political economics.

This was a big time for Young Me, though I'd always known and/or suspected that there was potentially something radical about the cosmological and moral psychological framework called Catholicism that I'd been raised in. Grade School. At Our Lady of Sorrows in South Orange, they were always talking about poor people - poor people seemed to have a weird kind of cred, even. The overall message was something like, you are an ungrateful wretch, but look how much worse off you would be if you were that guy. "That guy" could take the form of Christ getting scourged, or a homeless man, or whatever, within the whimsical framework of this or that lay minister's moralism.

Of course, those were very American, very white ethnic, very suburban glimpses into catholic social teachings that I just provided. The AFL-CIO reminds us how Catholic Worker programs in urban America have a long, kinda bitchin', weirdly bohemian kind of legacy in American communities that need all the help they can get. I'm trying to be very deadpan about my debt here, and I've had to renounce catholicism (for more on this see the sermon chapter of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man), but rest assured that a lot of my formative exposure to the left came through this stained glass-ed prism. As of today I don't think it's any less sane to expect emancipatory action in the catholic church than it is to expect same from the Democratic Party.

Unless, of course, you're a woman, or gay, which brings me back to skepticism, secularism, and a relevant lingering question unanswered above: is catholicism more "pro-worker" or "pro-poor"? Do we even consider wage workers and the unemployed as part of the same class anymore? And back to my point, does Catholic Worker-ism actually contain some class content, or is catholic social teaching better captured in the essentialism - not to say the defeatism or conservatism - of statements such as "the Poor are Always With You."

So anyway, it's funny, a decade later, still living down the residual effects of 18 years in the eyes of the Church... to live through a media moment in which the larger culture is realizing that Liberation Theology exists, and to see it being used as a smear against Barry Obama. It's funny to watch Father Pfleger with however much lefty sympathy, and think, who finds this man frightening? Who? How? Really?

It seems equally as ridiculous as thinking John Bellamy Foster is a threat to the State Monopoly Capitalism (Stamocap).