Megan Kamerick interviews Kate Hennessy, granddaughter of Dorothy Day

MK: Who was Peter Maurin and what impact did he have on her life?

KH: It was a surprise. He was sent to her. She was working as a journalist and a researcher. She was covering the Hunger Marches in 1932. The country at that point was just on the verge of falling apart.

She just said to herself, “Why am I here? What do I do?” That’s when she met Peter Maurin. At this point, my grandmother had had a very traditional, religious instruction and she knew nothing about the Catholic teachings on social justice. Peter Maurin just laid it all out to her and said, “These are the teachings of the Catholic Church on social justice. I have a program for how we can do this.”

Most people thought he was a little bit crazy, but my grandmother started hearing what he was saying. She said, “Let’s start a paper.” They started the paper in May of 1933, which of course was the worst year of the Depression.

People immediately started saying, “Where are these houses of hospitality? Where can we get help? We need help.” My grandmother, being very practical, said, “Okay, that’s our next step” and before she knew it, she was a leader of a movement around the country of people opening up houses of hospitality serving soup, giving clothing, shelter, which is still with us today.

MK: Why was voluntary poverty so important for the people who would live at these houses, at the Catholic Workers and how did that relate to the non-violence the Worker also advocated?

KH: There is a saying that people use to explain my grandmother’s actions. She would “Afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted.” One of the ways that she would do this is by saying, “We cannot be wealthy ourselves.” It’s incredibly disrespectful for one thing and also, people don’t believe you. You’re not really going to change people’s lives if you’re coming from a position of comfort and privilege.

Now in terms of how that connects to non-violence, one of the reasons that war happens is this desire to control more resources to simplify our lives. It makes it less imperative that we be a war economy.

MK: She had a real fascination with people and their stories. How did that become part of the Catholic Worker ethos?

KH: She was a writer, as I mentioned. She was always looking to hear people’s stories and she was very, very good at just listening. Storytelling is probably the most powerful way for us to understand each other, to become more human to each other and her ability to elicit these stories from people and then to write about them grabbed people’s imaginations and really set the framework, the foundation for the Catholic Worker.

One of my favorite writings from her are her obituaries of people. She wrote these wonderful stories of who we each are, and I think that is what really helps change us much more than any other kind of statement of belief.

MK: At the same time people were calling her a saint, some people were calling her a communist. How did all of these labels fail to capture her complexity?

KH: She did not agree with communist policies and communist beliefs. She did not feel that we should rely upon the state for anything. Really, I think the bottom line for her is those human connections. That’s what we are asked to do day in and day out is to have this human connection.

MK: Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker, as you say, were often ahead of later movements. She got involved in Civil Rights in the 1930s. She was a pacifist, even during WWII which was very controversial with a lot of her friends. She took part in anti-nuclear protests by refusing to comply with air raid drills.

She wrote about Vietnam way back in 1954 and she wanted the Bishops to speak out against nuclear weapons. Eventually they did issue a pastoral letter, but it was shortly after she died. Do you think she helped nudge the church and other Catholics on these issues?

KH: Absolutely I think she did. The fact that she was prophetic. She also used to say, “You never know when you throw a pebble into the pond where the ripples will lead.” What she says is not easy. Each generation seems to have to come to it in their own way, in their own manner.

The church actually is not making this easy either. You still have Bishops who are very pro-nuclear, even considering the vast damage that our nuclear arsenal can do today. It’s extraordinary! It’s unthinkable.

MK: Your grandmother worked for voting rights, especially during the Civil Rights Movement and of course with the suffragists earlier on, but she never herself voted. Why?

KH: No, she didn’t vote. This is a very tricky question. I’ve had people say to me, “I’m not listening to your grandmother. She never voted. What does she have to say to us?” I think it’s not really a fair assessment because she spent her entire life trying to change the world.

She never told people not to vote. That wasn’t her way at all. She was perfectly happy that people voted, but she herself was not going to do so because she did not believe that any answers lie within the government. What she was looking for was something that was completely outside of politics and that could not be addressed in the political arena.
That said, she also understood that Civil Rights had to be done legislatively, clearly, but that was not her method. That was not her way. Her way was a much longer term. She believed in the long view. And what she meant by the long view was centuries. How do we work for true change, change that we probably will not see in our lifetime?
I think that we’ve developed a crazy way of living in which we forget that we actually do need to live as if we will not see the fruits of our labors. That’s absolutely essential for us as a community, as a society, as a species.

MK: She also brought out how much joy she found in life. How did she live that?

KH: She had an incredible eye for beauty in so many ways and she had to develop this because she lived in the worst neighborhoods in New York City. If I could tell you just how dreadful these Catholic Worker houses were, and she suffered from that. This is not something that she would have chosen, but she had to develop this incredibly fine-tuned sense and wide, varying notion of what beauty is.

Why did she love that quote from Dostoyevsky so much; “The world will be saved by beauty”? What does that mean? What does beauty mean? We need to open ourselves up to whatever we find beautiful, which can just be practically anything. She loved opera. She loved art. She loved literature. She loved people. She loved people’s faces. She loved a beautiful dish or a tree that was growing on the sidewalk in these dreadful slums.

She really could see these things and they opened her up in a way that we need. When we open ourselves up to these moments of profound beauty, we are changed, and in our change, we can then change the world.

MK: She is a candidate for canonization for sainthood. How would she react to that?

KH: Oh, she would have no interest ultimately. She just said, “Do the work. Do the work.” She’s also famously quoted as saying, “Don’t call me a saint. I don’t want to be dismissed so easily.” What she was saying is the fact that people, by calling her a saint, it’s a way of walking away from one’s own responsibility. She would say, “Don’t put me on a pedestal. I’m not doing anything that you can’t do. You find out what you need to do and you do it. You do the work.”

MK: Your book really brings home how difficult her path was. She struggled with depression. She had a loving but difficult relationship with your mother. The Worker houses and the needs of so many people often weighed on her. War never seemed to end. I’d like you to read a brief passage that address those feelings of hopelessness.

KH: “Still,” she said, “we must keep moving. Take as many steps as you can. Bear witness. Stand fast. Huddle together in faith and community and dream. We have,” she said, “a responsibility to hope and to dream of a better world.”

Megan Kamerick interviews Kerry Walters, author of Saint Óscar Romero: Pastor, Prophet, Martyr

KW: In the early years, Romero really wasn’t concerned about social or economic institutions that were oppressive. It was only after he became Archbishop, only after he began to make personal contact with people that he began to reflect upon what it was in the society that was causing such suffering.

MK: What was he like as a pastor?

KW: He was an incredible pastor from everything that I’ve been able to read. Despite those dry years between 1967 and 1974 when he was basically a diocese administrator, which he later called “the worst years” of his life, he seemed to have a great deal of empathy as a pastor.

He would climb on yules and go into the highlands and the jungles to visit tiny little villages to confirm kids. His door was always open to anyone who wanted to see him. The people loved him. Unfortunately, his fellow priests tended not to be as fond of him.

MK: Romero was very suspicious of liberation theology. Could you explain what that was and why he disliked it?

KW: It was an attempt to try to apply the basic social teachings of the church to the concrete facts on the ground in South America. Most of the liberation theologians were pretty impressed by Marxist methodology. They didn’t buy into the materialism of Marx, but they felt that Marx had a pretty good methodological explanation for why structures of oppression arose in the first place.

What Romero objected to initially was what most of the more traditionally minded clerics objected to. He feared that Marxists and Communists were simply using naive churchmen in order to foment a communist revolution.

MK: When he was named Archbishop of San Salvador in 1977, he was considered to be someone who wouldn’t rock the boat. He was malleable. But you write that change was actually already happening in him. Can you talk more about that?

KW: He had a kind of a meek demeanor for most of his life and so it was easy, I think, for power mongers to believe that this was a guy who could be easily controlled. In point of fact though, he had begun to have grave doubts about the oligarchy.

MK: Romero was introverted. He was shy. He didn’t make friends very easily. One unlikely friend was a Jesuit priest Rutilio Grande. He was murdered not long after Romero became Archbishop. How did this become a turning point for him?

KW: Rutilio was a Jesuit. He had psychological difficulties all of his life, but he was absolutely committed to the idea of empowering Capuchinos, both materially and spiritually.

In a move that was really quite unusual for Jesuits in El Salvador for the day, he went out and lived with the Capuchinos. He dressed like the Capuchinos did. Needless to say, this raised a lot of anger on the part of the powers that be because they rightly saw Grande trying to subvert their authority.

In February of 1977, they assassinated him along with a few other people who were in a vehicle with him. When Romero heard that Grande had been assassinated, he immediately took off for the small village in which Grande’s body lay and when he saw the state of the body, (one onlooker said that Grande had been shot so many times that he had practically disintegrated) he had this tipping point that I think had been building for a few years and realized that not only were Capuchinos in danger, but the church was also in danger and people who stood up for the social teachings of the church or even just common decency ran great risk in El Salvador in the day.

MK: What was his vision for non-violence and the church’s role?

KW: He was absolutely convinced that individuals as well as institutions like the church as well as society at large, if they were to thrive spiritually and materially, had to somehow comport themselves to the vision of peace and equity and compassion and kindness and love that was preached and practiced by Jesus.

Any institution or any action of people in charge that violated that Christocentric vision was something that he felt he had to speak out against in his three years as Archbishop of San Salvador and he did. In sermons, in pastoral letters, on the radio and on loudspeakers strapped onto the back of Jeeps.

If you read his sermons that were delivered every Sunday in the cathedral in San Salvador, they take your breath away. Not only are they wonderful, pastoral sermons, but they also almost always challenged not only the ruling junta, but also challenged the United States for supporting the juntas.

A good deal of his Sunday sermons, which were broadcast all over the country to tens of thousands of people, were running chronicles of the week’s news in which he would analyze events that had happened; this many people had been killed, this village had been attacked. Those sermons, the powers that be eventually decided, were probably the single most dangerous weapon that they had had wielded against them.

He never played the zero-sum game that I think a lot of politicians then and now play. He was always willing to listen. He was always willing to try to see where the other person was coming from just so long as they could agree on the ground rules of non-violence.

MK: In the last three years of his life, the violence continued to escalate. Just before he was murdered, there were mutilated dead bodies in public places daily. He was also battling within the church. Why was he running afoul of the church hierarchy?

KW: Yes, it was a frightening time. I can’t even imagine being a priest during that era in El Salvador. One of the most popular slogans that you saw spray painted on walls everywhere was “Be a patriot, kill a priest.” He ran afoul of the bishops because they thought that he was a radical. They thought that he was naive and was being manipulated by the leftists and they did everything that they could to get in his way.

MK: He feared his own violent death, but that didn’t stop him from speaking out. His last homily was particularly provocative, but it’s chilling to hear it knowing that he was killed just a day later as he said mass. Who killed him?

KW: It’s pretty clear that he was assassinated on the orders of one of the death squads that had become so popular in El Salvador at the time and almost certainly on the direct orders of D'Aubuisson who was an army officer, but who also was deeply implicated in the death squads. Romero’s assassination occurred right after this incredible sermon in which he basically said to the armed forces, (and there were lots of them in the cathedral at the time listening to him) “Stop the oppression.”

OR: “I’d like to make an appeal in a special way to the men in the army. Brothers, each one of you is one of us. We are the same people. The farmers and peasants that you kill are your own brothers and sisters. When you hear the words of a man telling you to kill, think instead in the words of God, “Thou shalt not kill!” No soldier is obliged to obey an order contrary to the law of God. In his name and in the name of our tormented people who have suffered so much and whose laments cry out to heaven, I am implore you, I beg you, I order you stop the repression!”

MK: It just reminds me of Martin Luther King’s last sermon.

KW: It’s paradoxical, isn’t it Megan? You can’t really, in some situations at any rate, preach the gospel of peace and non-violence without inviting violence to be thrown at you. I think both of those men had a pretty good idea that that was going to happen.

MK: When you go to El Salvador, (I’ve been a couple of times) his image is everywhere. The country is engulfed in violence. What do you think is Oscar Romero’s legacy?

KW: I think ultimately his legacy is one of hope. Hope is faith projected into the future that influences the way we live in the present. What Romero and a couple of his associates did was to give the people of El Salvador hope.
Once again, he assured them that the oppression under which they suffered wasn’t written in stone by the finger of God, but that it was the consequence of oppressive structures that were made by humans and could, as a consequence, be fixed by humans.

This hope of a better world once again was centered squarely and always in what Romero took to be Christ, the center of all existence and that only tended to deepen the hope that he felt and that he conveyed to people.
It’s amazing, a man who was bookish and shy and reticent and, for a long time, was a real company man when it came to the church just blossomed towards the end of his life into a saint, a bonafide saint.

Megan Kamerick interviews Sister Simone Campbell of “Nuns on the Bus”

MK: What does following the gospel mean to you?

SSC: For me, following the gospel is doing what Jesus did, which was always walking towards trouble. He walked towards the lepers, the ones who were most outcast by their society and he then created friendship with the apostles, with those around him. Living the gospel for me is being willing to walk towards trouble and make friends in the process. It’s kind of simple.

MK: You have chosen to engage in the political process and push back. Why did you decide that that was a path you wanted to follow?

SSC: Oh glory! I like to blame it on the Holy Spirit again, but our foundress was the first woman in Parliament in Hungary in the ‘20s when she was the head of our community. We’ve always had political roots and that stirred my imagination. But then, we’re all social workers and I discovered that I’m not such a good social worker. I’m not very patient.
I was doing community organizing and discovered that I wanted to go to law school because I hate power imbalance, so I wanted to be able to argue with legislators and go toe to toe. I went to law school and then I discovered that I liked practicing law. I started a low-cost legal service center in Oakland California to serve the needs of the working poor. I did that for 18 years.

It had always been my vision, my goal for myself to do public policy eventually and I think it’s because you can have a bigger impact on the lives of people all across the nation, people you’ll never know.

Let me give you an example. We lobbied on the Affordable Care Act. I had the honor of writing what’s called “The Nun’s Letter” which was signed by 58 Catholic sisters. It became the tipping point for getting healthcare passed.

If you worked one on one in charity like in a hospital providing service, that’s one at a time, but do you know that because we helped get this law passed, 23 million Americans have access to healthcare who did not have access beforehand? I think that’s a pretty good return on investment.

MK: You write in your memoir, “People want to turn away from pain and poverty and difficulty, but that’s where life is.”

SSC: Oh, absolutely. I am really concerned that we’ve got all these ads on television to take away every conceivable pain that exists because what it does is it numbs us to the reality of life.
It also makes us self-contained individuals. We’re not meant to be that. We’re communal creatures. We’re meant to be in relationships with each other. I think one of the big challenges of our time is hyper individualism; that we can do it alone.

MK: Do you think that fosters violence and conflict?

SSC: Oh absolutely. Absolutely because “I need to protect me and mine because nobody is going to protect me. Nobody has my back.” That’s fear. That’s heightened vigilance. That we know then creates trigger reactions, the fear factor. It’s nuts!
Our security is in being with each other and knowing each other and talking to each other and being in relationships.What I’ve learned is having a broken heart then allows me to have room for everyone.

Let me tell you a story about some nuns on a bus. We were in Savannah doing a townhall and we got talking about the problems they were facing. A woman about 35 or 40 stood up and said that she just wanted to ask us to remember her neighbor who had three young kids who had died the day before because she hadn’t been able to afford her asthma inhaler.

She was in South Carolina and had no access to healthcare. That just broke my heart. A woman in our nation died, a mother in our nation died because she couldn’t afford access to healthcare? It was because of the willful refusal of South Carolina to expand Medicaid and provide care to everybody. That’s just wrong!

Having a broken heart then creates compassion and connection. She will always be part of my story, a part of who I am and I don’t even know her name! She lives inside of me. When someone else lives inside of you, isn’t that what this live is about, to be community together?

MK: There are people who have similar social justice goals to you and to network, but they might be uncomfortable having religion play a role in our political system because it’s supposed to have a separation of church and state.

SSC: People get the separation of church and state wrong all the time. It means that the state shouldn’t be promoting any religion, shouldn’t establish a religion and shouldn’t suppress any church in the United States. Thomas Jefferson, who was not a religious man said that people with religious values needed to be involved in the government and act on those values for democracy to survive. Otherwise we would have a valueless society and that would never work. I’m just doing what Thomas Jefferson said.