"This plan is directly based on the successful community organising movement established by Saul Alinsky in the United States and has successfully trained generations of community organisers, including President Obama."
So declares the official Conservative Party introduction to David Cameron's Big Society, launched minutes before midnight lest its call for an annual "Big Society Day" be published on the most obvious date for such a festival. Cue screeching from certain quarters, not necessarily without cause. But the long-dead Alinsky's own chosen successor as Executive Director of the Woodlawn Organization was Squire Lance, who is still alive, still active in Civil Rights and in the Chicago Democratic Party, and still a stalwart of Opus Dei.
That would be the Opus Dei that runs ELIS in Rome, the Midtown Center in Chicago, the Moluka medical clinic in Kinshasa, the Los Pinos educational centre in Montevideo, the Braval programme of professional formation for immigrants in Barcelona, the Laguna care centre in Madrid, the "Harambee 2002" project, Condoray in Cañete, the Institute for Industrial Technology in Lagos, the Guatanfur agricultural and stock raising school in Temza, the Anauco medical dispensary in Caracas, the Centenario medical clinic in Monterrey, the Informal Sector Business Institute in Nairobi, and so many more besides. Google them, people. Google them.
Ruth Kelly was until recently the most prominent Opus Dei politician in the world. The President of the Socialist International, António Guterres, has a long history in Opus Dei. Its ranks also include Antonio Fontán, Paola Binetti, Llúis Foix, Mario Maiolo and Xavi Casajuana (if we count Catalan nationalism as part of the Left; it is certainly a very long way from Franco), as well as Squire Lance, among others.
Most of the Chilean "Chicago Boys" were not members of Opus Dei. Pinochet himself never had any affiliation with it. Of six right-wing Opus Dei politicians listed on Wikipedia, four are dead, one since 1966, whereas the three broad left-wingers listed, including two women, are all still alive. So, insofar as it has a political orientation, Opus Dei’s would seem to be towards the Left, if anything. Much like the Catholic Church Herself, in fact. Which is yet another reason to hope, work and pray for the Catholic Church at large to become much more like Opus Dei.
Squire Lance of the Woodlawn Organization and of Opus Dei was an Obama supporter and donor, lining him up with Bob Casey, Ben Nelson, Jim Webb, Mark Warner, Tim Kaine, Bart Stupak, et al. With General Jim Jones. With the hardly liberal Republicans Dick Lugar and Chuck Hagel, both more or less open supporters. With Christopher Buckley. With the conservative Catholic constitutional scholar Douglas Kmiec. With Donnie McClurkin, the ex-gay gospel singer whose presence on the Obama team infuriated the Clinton camp. And with those who voted for Obama on the same day as they voted in California and Florida to re-affirm traditional marriage, voted in Colorado to end legal discrimination against working-class white men, and voted in Missouri and Ohio not to liberalise gambling. Those who voted for Obama from coast to coast also keep the black and Catholic churches, especially, going.
Obama has signed healthcare into law after having promised not to do so if there were any provision for federally funded abortion, which there is not; would that there were a public option of a single-payer system alongside that ban, so as to make abortion practically impossible, but one thing at a time. Nor is their coverage for illegal immigrants, still less the amnesty being promoted by Senate Republicans. Traditional marriage is Obama's own stated view. He has kicked the Freedom of Choice Act into the long grass, and instead endorsed Casey's Pregnant Women Support Act as well as concentrating on the Employee Free Choice Act supported by pro-life stalwarts such as Stupak and Marcy Kaptur, who declined to endorse either Obama or Clinton because neither was offering enough to the victims of the "free" trade agreements that she and Stupak are now prominent in seeking to repeal, not without White House encouragement.
This is where the Saul Alinsky movement has ended up. Such is grace. What a pity, then, that David Cameron has instead chosen to go right back to its source, ignoring the broader and deeper tradition of truly radical, because fundamentally orthodox, activism for Civil Rights, social justice and peace by, in, through and as which it has been redeemed.
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Hagel is an Episcopalian but sent his children to Opus Dei schools. One of Casey's former speechwriters is now an Opus Dei priest in Rome. And Squire Lance ran about sixty per cent of civil rights activity in the city that made Obama.
ReplyDeleteAlinskyism, like any other expression of frustrated Messianic hope and unfulfiled Messianic expectation, is transformed by the Messiah.
ReplyDeleteWhereas Cameron manifestly prefers the frustration and the unfulfilment. If in this case, then in which others? Monetarism? Marxism in general and Trotskyism in particular? Freudianism? Zionism? The Turkish secular ultranationalism that goes back to the Dönme?
There are many, many more. Not least the neoconservatism that draws on them all if those which are capable of it are not redeemed - as Alinsky himself might have said, transformatively - in the Messiah and His Church.
Interesting and informative post. Unfortunately, so many Americans view community organizing of any kind as something lowly, even if it was directed by people they may otherwise agree with on a number of issues. The scoffs directed at Obama's record as a community organizer were supposed to show that he was somehow not accomplished.
ReplyDeleteInstead, the right-wing ideal is a politician who has succeeded in business and has thus proved himself to be a Randian demigod.
Never mind the many failures of George W. Bush, our first MBA president, and the "Masters of the Universe" in the finance industry, whose incompetence brought the world economy to its knees and required gigantic government bailouts (known as "handouts for welfare bums" if given to anybody else) to prevent total collapse.
Opus Dei is nothing more or less than a way of living the Gospel. It has no political agenda whatsoever. Therefore its members will be either politically conservative or liberal or neither. What you will find is that the faithful of Opus Dei are loyal to the Church and to Her teachings.
ReplyDeleteThis is very sad but I must report that Squire Lance passed away last Wednesday April 7th. His wake is this Thursday April 15th and the funeral mass is Friday morning. Check Chicago papers for more information. Squire was about 78 years old and got very sick in the last few weeks
ReplyDeleteRequiescat In Pace.
ReplyDelete