Prior to the President's meeting today with Pope Francis, the New York Times took a look back at the President's relationship with the Church over the years, and the Church's influence on his views of social welfare:
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.
It is interesting that Obama got to meet and work with so many movers and shakers in the Chicago Archdiocese in the fairly short period of time he worked in the CCHD program. The Campaign for Human Development is one of my favorite Church charities to donate to. It is funny to me that conservatives within the church laity have been so bitter and nasty toward the program, a bitterness which predates Obama's election as president, but which grew much stronger after it. After the Great Recession led to me getting laid off from my previous job, I cut back on a number of my donations, but I never cut the amount I gave to CCHD and to the Retirement Fund for Religious. I've been impressed with a number of the programs CCHD funds, but I have to admit, part of the joy of giving to it is to stick it to the conservative haters. Funny how that shit works even among the so-called godly folks (that comment is intended to encompass me, even though I'm not very godly).
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