ISSUES: CHRISTIANS AND THE WORLD

It took me a week to get around to posting this. Fr. Pacwa is familiar to those who watch EWTN and its remarkable stable of great communicators - priests and laymen alike - who convey the message of Christ beautifully and creatively.

Saul Alinsky may be familiar to those who have followed the activities of American radicals since the 1960s, but he became better known during the campaign as Barack Obama's guru in 'community organizing'.

What Fr. Pacwa does here is tie up two major topics which are nonetheless closely related - another Kennedy's presumptuous pontification on Catholicism which has greatly exercised the Catholic blogosphere lately, and Alinksy'a radical agenda which Barack Obama imbibed almost with his mother's milk.



Fr. Mitch Pacwa on
the latest Kennedy apostasy
and Saul Alinsky's rules
for 'community organizing'


Sunday, August 02, 2009


This most recent newsletter from Fr. Mitch Pacwa, S.J., received this morning, has some interesting historical information, some frank talk, and some strong opinions:

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I recently became upset when Newsweek's "Without A Doubt" feature published an article by Kathleen Kennedy Townsend entitled, "Why Barack Obama represents American Catholics better than the Pope does."

She commends President Obama's "pragmatic approach to divisive policy" and his "social justice agenda." Meanwhile, she claims that the positions of the Pope, the bishops and the pro-life activists do not.

In fact, Townsend asserts that the Chicago community organizer president could teach the Pope a lot about a Catholic approach to politics and the ability to listen to other people's points of view with empathy.

Townsend continues her rant against the Church's teachings on various issues regarding human sexuality - contraception, abortion, homosexual unions and women priests, decrying the Church's unwillingness to listen to other points of view while ignoring the various documents on these issues which were written with an intent compassion for the people to whom they were addressed.

Townsend shows no indication that she has listened to the Church's teachings on these topics, though the documents are easily acquired in print or on the Internet.

I recognize the community organizer approach that Townsend commends in this piece. I learned Sol Alinsky style of community organizing as a novice in Chicago when President Obama was a little boy living in Jakarta, Indonesia.

Mr. Tom Gaudette, an associate of Sol Alinsky, trained a number of us Jesuits. I was the youngest man in the group, and I was certainly not well developed in the practice of organizing, but I tried my best in COUP - the acronym for Community of United People - on Chicago's near West Side.

Most of the folks were African Americans trying to get their public housing projects brought up to city codes; I especially made contact with the Mexican community near Racine and Taylor streets, a line of housing between Italian residents and the public housing projects.

I was particularly drawn to work with a street gang, which saw a lot of gang fights in the year I worked there. In fact, I eventually had to leave the area after having seen a friend of mine killed: they made him kneel down and shot him through the head; they merely beat me up.

Despite the trauma, I never forgot the lessons I learned about Alinsky's community organizing.:

- The key to starting an organization was to find an issue that united the people. The issue should be small enough to win a victory, but large enough to matter to the folks.

- Second, after choosing the issue we had to identify an enemy the community could recognize as the personification of the issue. Usually this was some politician or businessman.

- Third, an action had to be designed by which the people could attack the enemy and force his or her hand on the issue, thereby giving the folks a victory.

That would motivate them to take on bigger and more important issues, while the leaders among the people could emerge. This was a means of bringing power to the people.

Townsend certainly understands these tactics, as does President Obama. Notice how she has focused on issues of human sexuality, since these concern the most intimate areas of any person's life. People feel these issues quite strongly, so it would be popular to take them on.

Second, she identifies the enemies who personify the problem: the Pope, the bishops and the pro-life activists. She develops the strategy of making popular popes - John Paul II, who motivated Paul VI to promulgate Humanae Vitae, which continued the age-old Christian rejection of artificial birth control and abortion, and Benedict XVI, whom she portrays as a man sheltered within the Roman Curia who is more concerned with papal power than with love of the people.

Her approach reminds me of the battle cries after Humanae Vitae: "I don't want the Pope in my bedroom."

My response is: "You flatter yourself; he does not want to be in there, either. But the Pope will insist that God is Lord of the sexual realm, including everyone's bedroom."

Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, President Barack Hussein Obama, and a number of others will arise to make the Pope and bishops into our enemies. This will be especially important as the politicians begin pushing the end of life and the prevention of life as money saving programs in the health care proposals.

Already Speaker Nancy Pelosi has proposed $300 million for condoms as a part of this Congress's first stimulus bill - a rather odd idea for a bill focused on stimulating the economy. However, her reason was to prevent births as a money saver for the states. That is one of the ways she sees the birth of children.

There will be many more proposals for taxpayer funding of abortions and euthanasia, since early infancy and end of life are the most expensive periods in regard to health care.

The proposed health care bill in the House of Representatives will require the elderly to consult with their doctors every five years about alternatives to long term care. The doctors may be required to inform the elderly about assisted suicide, or at least the need to refrain from long term, expensive procedures.

"Grandma may just need to take a pain pill," President Obama told us in a town meeting recently.

Of course, Kennedy Townsend and Obama want to make the Pope and bishops into our enemies. I, however, ask why?

Do the politicians fear the Magisterium's authority to teach us the holiness of human sexuality, the sacredness of Matrimony, or the sanctity of the right to life which comes from God our Creator and never from the state?

Do they fear the goodness of our popes or the deep joy in Jesus Christ which radiates from their eyes, attracting many people to the Catholic Church?

Do they fear a solid Catholic critique of their proposals to use death of the unborn and elderly or the prevention of new life as a solution to their inability to pay for all of the medical care they have promised but cannot deliver without eliminating the most vulnerable people who might need care?

Let us not fall for the Alinsky tricks of letting community organizers set up our enemies. These organizers try to stay in the background, manipulating the folks to go after an enemy.

We Catholics will do well to stand shoulder to shoulder with our pope and bishops as we move forward in history to promote life and love, all the way to heaven. Those who sow division between us and our leaders will march to their own chosen destinations.

In Christ Jesus,

Fr. Mitch Pacwa, S.J

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Because their arguments were clearly so ideological, I had ignored Kathleen Kennedy Townsend's Newsweek article, as I did her younger sister Kerry's book last year, in which both preach their ultraliberal brand of cafeteria Catholicism - which is their right, of course. What I mind and protest to high heavens is how they can so contemptuously dismiss the Popes as though they were congenital cretins.

(And by the way, have the Kennedy girls ever asked Ethel Kennedy what she and Robert personally thought about contraception and abortion? Would they have been born at all if their parents had practiced contraception and abortion? They had 11 children, Kathleen being the eldest and Kerry #7. Their youngest sister was born after their father's assassination.)

On the other hand, I have been reluctant to post anything about Saul Alinsky (although I have mentioned him in some posts when commenting about Obama) because I am trying hard not tu use these pages as a soapbox against Obama unless it becomes absolutely inescapable. [For this reason, I welcome the daily 'fix' provided me by the bloggers at FIRST THINGS, particularly David Goldman and Elizabeth Scalia (The Anchoress), whose thinking on Obama mirror mine a hundred percent.]

"Alinsky's teachings influenced Barack Obama in his early career as a community organizer on the far South Side of Chicago. Working for Gerald Kellman's Developing Communities Project, Obama learned and taught Alinsky's methods for community organizing", says the Wikipedia entry on Alinksy, a statement citing 3 verifiable sources for what it says.

Now go back and read Alinsky's rules as Fr. Pacwa cited them above - and see if that does not apply to everything Obama has said and done from the day he set his sights on the US Presidency. And if you somehow belied in his 'ope and promise', see if you can ever look at him with the same trusting, unskeptical eyes after this.

Alinsky says in his RULES FOR RADICALS:

"What follows is for those who want to change the world from what it is to what they believe it should be. The Prince was written by Machiavelli for the Haves on how to hold power. Rules for Radicals is written for the Have-Nots on how to take it away....

He argued that the most effective means are whatever will achieve the desired ends, and that an intermediate end for radicals should be democracy because of its relative ease to work within.

"There's another reason for working inside the system. Dostoevski said that taking a new step is what people fear most. Any revolutionary change must be preceded by a passive, affirmative, non-challenging attitude toward change among the mass of our people.

"They must feel so frustrated, so defeated, so lost, so futureless in the prevailing system that they are willing to let go of the past and change the future. This acceptance is the reformation essential to any revolution.

"To bring on this reformation requires that the organizer work inside the system, among not only the middle class but the 40 per cent of American families – more than seventy million people – whose income range from $5,000 to $10,000 a year [in 1971].