Linda Plitt Donaldson

In Sollicitudo rei Socialis Pope John Paul II used the example of the “nonviolent demonstrations [of the poor] to present their needs and rights to oftentimes corrupt and inefficient authorities” as a “positive sign …[of a] growing … solidarity.” And now Pope Francis is putting hope in the power of community organizing to restore dignity to the poor and to care for our common home.

In 1970, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops passed a resolution to start the Campaign for Human Development to address the structural causes of poverty by supporting the self-help efforts of communities to fight for and defend their right to live and flourish in a manner consistent with their dignity. For 45 years CCHD has been standing in solidarity with low-income communities in their efforts to demand justice and create economic opportunities that offer living-wage jobs.

The PICO National Network, founded by Jesuit priest Rev. John Bauman in 1972, has organized a #TellthePope campaign to highlight for the Pope the profound economic and racial challenges being experienced by families and communities in the United States. Through their Year of Encounter campaign, PICO is challenging communities to engage in “radical encounters of inclusion and to organize for workers’ rights.” At the World Meeting of Families in Philadelphia, they hope to convey the message to Pope Francis that poverty and racism are critical issues in the United States that ravage families and perpetuate the cycle of poverty.

Social workers have long been involved in organizing. They have organized and fought for the rights of children, women, workers, people of color, and people who are poor. The profession includes social justice giants such as Dorothy Height, Whitney Young, and Ron Dellums and lesser-known organizing heroes such as Diana Ming Chan and Antonia Pantoja.

Social workers continue to be engaged in organizing for social justice on a range of issues. For example, Elizabeth Alex is the lead organizer for Casa de Maryland, fighting for the rights of immigrants. Hannah Kane is organizing for the rights of workers with the DC Employment Justice Center. Adam Schneider is fighting for the rights of people who are homeless with Health Care for the Homeless in Baltimore.

The social work profession is largely known for the clinical and direct services it provides to vulnerable and marginalized populations. Yet, the profession also has a legacy of community organizing and social reform that enables it to address both immediate needs and structural causes of poverty and human suffering. Catholics refer to that as walking with two feet of love in action. This is what Pope Francis is calling all of us to do, and the social work profession walks tall and proud with him in our shared vision of justice, mercy, and compassion in the world.

– Linda Plitt Donaldson is an associate professor at The Catholic University of America National Catholic School of Social Service.

Linda Plitt Donaldson

My 22 years of deep experience with Catholic sisters solidified in me that they are among the most credible and authentic witnesses to the power of God’s love in the world. Pope Francis’s message and way of being in the world reflects many of the same principles that I experienced in Catholic sisters, i.e., the primacy of encounter with people who are poor and marginalized, joyful hope in living the gospel, and fearlessness in speaking truth to power.

At the recent LCWR assembly, Rev. Stephen Bevans, S.V.D., offered a keynote address identifying some thirsts of the world for which there is universal longing.

• In a world with many corrupt and dysfunctional political systems, unethical and exploitive business practices, and widely disseminated mistruths and misconceptions, we long for the water of integrity.
• In a world filled with ceaseless human suffering, poverty, and war, we long for the wine of hope.
• In a world of racism, discrimination, exploitation, and oppression, we long for the nectar of justice.
• In a world that sometimes feels full of despair and hopelessness, we long for the elixir of beauty. Father Bevans quotes Mary Lou Kownacki, O.S.B., who wrote, “beauty uncovers the lie of violence, despair, and lack of hope and helps us imagine a world beyond our present reality.

Father Bevans claims that these thirsts are gifts of the Holy Spirit who stirs them within us so we are moved to act in the world with integrity, hope, justice, and beauty. Catholic sisters have been witnesses to this way of life for centuries; Pope Francis is a witness to this way of life for the world now. Let us join with him and our Catholic sisters to meet the thirsts of the world and thereby start to slake our own thirst.

– Linda Plitt Donaldson is an associate professor at The Catholic University of America National Catholic School of Social Service.

Linda Plitt Donaldson

Pope Francis reminds us that caring for creation is not only about caring for the planet; it also includes caring for humanity, especially the poor. In this encyclical, Pope Francis repeatedly states that “everything is connected,” and throughout he underscores the “intimate relationship between the poor and the fragility of the planet.” He speaks explicitly about the impact of pollution and dangerous waste producing “a broad spectrum of health hazards, especially for the poor, [that] cause millions of premature deaths.” He addresses the warming effects that compromise “their means of subsistence [which] are largely dependent on natural reserves and economic systemic services such as agriculture, fishing, and forestry.” He adds that the suffering of the poor is compounded because they have no financial resources to help them adapt to the effects of climate change.

He draws on the ample scientific evidence that climate change risk is severely acute in developing countries and has caused destruction, displacement, and forced migration of people in many poor communities. The report by the 2015 UCL-Lancet Commission on Health and Climate Change warns that “the effects of climate change threaten to undermine the last half-century of gains in development and global health.” Pope Francis notes the differences between the global north and the global south, and takes to task multinational corporations who “do [in developing countries] what they would never do in . . . the so-called first world . . . leav[ing] behind great human and environmental liabilities such as unemployment, abandoned towns, the depletion of natural reserves, deforestation, the impoverishment of agriculture and local stock breeding, open pits, riven hills, polluted rivers and a handful of social [services] which are no longer sustainable.”

Climate change is also impacting communities in the United States, and there are businesses that engage in practices that exploit low-income communities for their own profits. Readers may remember the film Erin Brockovich as one Hollywood depiction of the environmental impact of corporate practices that undermined the health of low-income residents. The Catholic Campaign for Human Development (CCHD) has funded several community organizing projects to address environmental justice. The Delmarva Poultry Justice Alliance is one example of a CCHD-funded effort and is highlighted in John Hogan’s wonderful book Credible Signs of Christ Alive.

In paraphrasing Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, Pope Francis asks us to “replace consumption with sacrifice, greed with generosity, [and] wastefulness with a spirit of sharing.” Pope Francis also realizes that such changes of behavior and attitude will take a conversion of hearts, so he has declared Sept. 1 as the World Day of Prayer for the Care of Creation. In addition to a conversion of hearts, Pope Francis recognizes that we need community organizing, particularly grassroots movements, to address the structural factors that feed the “mentality of profit at any price, with no concern for the social exclusion or the destruction of nature.”  At the World Meeting of Popular Movements in July, Pope Francis encouraged people who are poor to organize for social change. In offering gratitude and hope, he stated: “You, the lowly, the exploited, the poor and underprivileged, can do, are doing, a lot. . . . the future of humanity is in great measure in your own hands, through your ability to organize… You are the sowers of change.” Social workers have a long history of community organizing. Let’s join with our brothers and sisters in organizing to care for God’s creation — our planet and all of humanity — particularly our neighbors near and far who are poor, vulnerable, and excluded.

—    Linda Plitt Donaldson is an associate professor in The Catholic University of America National Catholic School of Social Service.

Linda Plitt Donaldson

This explains much of the resonance of Pope Francis with social workers. People who are called to social work often have eyes, ears, and hearts that are already open, to some degree, to people who are poor, marginalized, and suffering. And, if social workers allow themselves to be vulnerable in these encounters (and not to hide behind a particular expertise or position of privilege), their hearts can be further broadened, and they can be transformed by these experiences.

Pope Francis speaks about the mutuality in our relationship with people who are poor. “In a very real way, the poor are our teachers. They show us that people’s value is not measured by their possession or how much money they have in the bank.”

“In their difficulties, [the poor] know the suffering Christ. We need to let ourselves be evangelized by them. . . . We are called to find Christ in them, to lend our voices to their causes. . . .” (Evangelii Gaudium, 198).  Social work students will attest that the best teachers in their programs were the people they served in their field placements.

If we open ourselves to be transformed by these encounters, we can move to a place of true solidarity, where we feel in our hearts that our brokenness is bound with the brokenness of those we encounter. And we may gain the courage to take the challenge that Pope Francis and the gospel so plainly set before us — that is, “working to eliminate the structural causes of poverty and to promote the integral development of the poor” (EG, 188). Then we can honestly examine, for ourselves and for our country, the richest country in the world:

·         What are we doing to address the structural causes of poverty for the 45 million people and 20% of children who live in poverty, and the additional 14.7 million people who live in near poverty or between 100 and 125% of the federal poverty level.

·         What are we doing about the growing income inequality and stagnant wages that keep families mired in poverty? Today, 1.7 million more children live in low-income working families than during the Great Recession.

·         What are we doing about the racism in society where families of color disproportionately live in poverty; where black children are four times more likely than white children to live in poverty; where people of color are over-represented in our prison system; and where communities of color experience years of neglect, disinvestment, oppression, and cycles of hopelessness that can create conditions for violence (and peace), as exemplified by the social unrest in Baltimore only two months ago?

·         What are we doing about the cost of housing that is causing a larger share of American families to pay more than half of their paycheck on rent and utilities, and that is making it more difficult for low-income families and people who are homeless to find a place to live?

These are just some of the structural causes of human suffering (poverty, inequality, stagnant wages, racism, housing costs) that make manifest some of the daily struggles social workers encounter here in the United States, such as homelessness, addiction, depression, child abuse and neglect, and violence. Pope Francis invites us to touch these wounds so that we may be transformed by them and strengthened to stand with our brothers and sisters who are poor, to seek structural change, and to cultivate “habits of solidarity” that ultimately “restore to the poor what belongs to them” (EG, 189).

—    Linda Plitt Donaldson is an associate professor in The Catholic University of America National Catholic School of Social Service.