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.

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The Truth About Obama’s ‘Catholic Roots’
In advance of his Thursday meeting with Pope Francis at the Vatican, the New York Times is portraying President Obama’s community organizing as a kind of Catholicism in practice. In a front page, above-the-fold piece titled “The Catholic Roots of Obama’s Activism,” Jason Horowitz highlights the close alliance between Obama, his organizing mentors Greg Galluzzo and Gerald Kellman, and the Catholic Church. Obama’s frequent invocation of Chicago’s Cardinal Bernardin is referenced, along with Obama’s ties to the Catholic Campaign for Human Development. Horowitz notes that the alliance reached the point where young Obama was effectively proselytizing for the Catholic Church. A fuller and more accurate account of Obama’s organizing paints a very different picture, however.
Before we get to the reality of Obama’s organizing connection with the Catholic Church, let’s have a quick look back at the founder of community organizing, Saul Alinsky. Obama’s Chicago organizing mentors, after all, were consciously trying to replicate Alinsky’s church strategy. In fact, they were working in some of the same Catholic churches originally organized by Alinsky.
As I show in Spreading the Wealth, Alinksy created his first community organization, the Back of the Yards Neighborhood Council, in an attempt to convince local Catholic churches to support the Packinghouse Workers Organizing Committee, a union most local priests were reluctant to endorse because it was effectively controlled by Chicago’s Communist Party. Alinksy’s line with these reluctant priests was that cooperating with the union would allow the church to “beat the Communists at their own game.” While there was certainly a small group of young, sharply left-leaning Catholic priests working directly and knowingly with Alinsky, it’s clear that he saw himself as hoodwinking the larger and more influential group of anti-Communist priests with whom he worked. In a famous interview with Playboy, Alinsky summarized his feat of conning neighborhood priests into dropping their opposition to a Communist-dominated union, “To f**k your enemies, you’ve first got to seduce your allies.”