Like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez I used to be raised Catholic. Counting graduate work at Georgetown, I attended Catholic faculties for greater than twenty years. My first school educating job, which I held for 3 years, was at Wheeling Faculty—since renamed Wheeling Jesuit College. Someday round 1980, for a wide range of causes, I ended contemplating myself a Catholic. Its dogmatism and lack of progressivism, particularly for the reason that demise of Pope John XXIII in 1963, was a partial rationalization. Nonetheless, although contemplating myself an agnostic now for about 4 many years, I proceed to admire many Catholics—and different believers—whose religion encourages them to behave in loving methods towards their fellow human beings. Amongst such folks I’ve written about are Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, and Pope Francis. Right here I counsel that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is following in that custom.
Elected in 2018—she grew to become the youngest member of Congress—she has said that her Catholicism conjures up her views on points equivalent to local weather change and well being care. She has pointed to the similarity of the Green New Deal, a 2019 congressional decision she has co-sponsored, to Pope Francis’s earlier view expressed in his encyclical Laudato Si’. Particularly, she famous that each requires addressing local weather change criticized unfettered capitalism and runaway consumption and mirrored a priority for future generations. A Catholic publication quoted her as saying, “We do know that the Earth is sacred. . . . We’ve got a duty to steward it and shield it.”
That very same media supply notes the affect of her faith on her views of well being care. She cites the Gospel parable of the Good Samaritan and different biblical tales coping with therapeutic to assist her place on common well being care. She is “insistent that each human being ought to have entry to a health care provider, each human being ought to be cared for.”
Her faith has additionally influenced her views of our felony justice system. In 2018, earlier than her election victory, she wrote an article on her “Catholic religion and the urgency of felony justice reform.” It appeared in America, {a magazine} printed by the Jesuit order, the identical order to which Pope Francis belongs and which runs varied universities within the USA together with Georgetown. She noted that “the United States incarcerates more of its people than any other nation in the world,” and “that mass incarceration advanced as an outgrowth of Jim Crow legal guidelines, which itself was a system rooted within the subjugation of former slaves.” She cited Michelle Alexander’s level that “there are more African-Americans under correctional control today than have been enslaved in 1850.”
Relating to the imprisonment of Latinos, she suggests there additionally many however that “most states have little to no information on Latinos within the felony justice system.” She insisted that “felony justice reform should consider” varied points equivalent to “punitive Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations and the black-box detainment of immigrants and separated households,” in addition to “the results of incarceration on motherhood and psychological well being.” Reform, she added, calls for “us to ask philosophical and ethical questions. What ought to be the last word aim of sentencing and incarceration? Is it punishment? Rehabilitation? Forgiveness? For Catholics, these questions tie on to the guts of our religion.” Her reply was that we must always “intention to rehabilitate our brothers and sisters wherever potential and wherever mandatory. By nature, a society that forgives and rehabilitates its folks is a society that forgives and transforms itself. That takes a radical sort of love, a secret of which is given within the Lord’s Prayer: Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those that trespass towards us.”
Whether or not she is going to ever develop into as efficient a legislator as Ted Kennedy—or, in truth, whether or not she is going to ever even view that as essential as being a radical, prophetic congressional voice—solely the longer term will reveal.
Many different areas of her political concern additionally replicate her non secular beliefs. Her favorite biblical story is when Jesus throws the cash changers out of the temple. She likes the way it reveals Jesus “as a human being who might lose his mood,” and the way corruption happens. She associated the story to her ongoing criticism of the position of “huge cash” in politics and her perception that such cash is corrupting our system.
Nonetheless solely 31 years of age, Ocasio-Cortez should still have a really lengthy political profession in entrance of her, and her values and views could bear some modifications. From these she has already labored with and from Catholic progressives like Day, Merton, and Pope Francis she might nonetheless study a lot. After serving as an intern beneath Sen. Ted Kennedy, her subsequent main political work was campaigning diligently for Sen. Bernie Sanders in his run for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016. Kennedy was a Catholic, and the ethnically Jewish Sanders appreciated Catholic social thought. Whereas operating for the presidency in 2016, he went to Rome to talk at a convention of The Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences. In his speech, he noted that “there are few locations in trendy thought that rival the depth and perception of the Church’s ethical teachings available on the market economic system.” There may be already ample proof that Ocasio-Cortez’s financial views bear some resemblance to such ethical teachings.
For Sen. Kennedy, she labored in his immigration workplace, and he or she credit him with having “among the finest immigration constituent service places of work within the nation.” Being of Puerto Rican descent—her mom was born in Puerto Rico—and representing a New York district with many immigrants, she has a natural interest in the issue of immigration. However what she additionally might have realized from Ted Kennedy was to be certainly one of Congress’s handiest all-time legislators. His good good friend, Republican Senator Orrin Hatch, said this about him: “We didn’t agree on a lot, and most of the time, I used to be making an attempt to derail no matter huge authorities scheme he had simply concocted. . . . Ted was a lion amongst liberals, however he was additionally a constructive and shrewd lawmaker. He by no means overlooked the large image and was keen to compromise on sure provisions as a way to transfer ahead on points he believed essential.”
In an earlier essay on this website, “A Tough Progressive Balancing Act: Passion, Tolerance, and Compromise,” I wrote of how robust it was to get the steadiness proper between ardour and compromise. Just like the poker saying (and song by Kenny Rogers) goes, “You bought to know when to carry’em and when to fold’em.” Ocasio-Cortez has ardour in abundance. Whether or not she is going to ever develop into as efficient a legislator as Ted Kennedy—or, in truth, whether or not she is going to ever even view that as essential as being a radical, prophetic congressional voice—solely the longer term will reveal.
A few yr earlier than she ran for Congress, she joined the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). Though Bernie Sanders considers himself a democratic socialist and the social gathering had endorsed his presidential candidacy in 2021, he was not a member of it. Nor was Ocasio-Cortez the primary socialist social gathering member to serve in Congress. That honor belonged to Wisconsin’s Victor Berger, an immigrant from Austria-Hungary, who served within the 62nd Congress (1911–1913) and returned once more for 3 phrases between 1923 and 1929.
The founding father of the DSA, in 1982, was Michael Harrington. About three many years earlier he had “moved into the Catholic Worker [CW] House of Hospitality on the Lower East Side of New York.” The CW was then being run by Dorothy Day, who together with Peter Maurin had based the group in 1933. The Jesuit-educated Harrington (each in highschool and on the Jesuit school of Holy Cross) thought that the CW was then about “as far left as you could go within the church.” Like Day in her youth (see the 1996 movie Entertaining Angels: The Dorothy Day Story now accessible on Amazon Prime) the younger Harrington preferred to drink and argue at New York taverns, particularly the White Horse Tavern in Greenwich Village.
Many years earlier than founding the DSA, he had written concerning the U. S. poor in his e-book The Different America, which grew to become one of the influential books of the Sixties. It helped encourage Presidents John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, in addition to Robert Kennedy later within the decade, to confront American poverty with extra political vigor than at any time since Franklin Roosevelt addressed it through the Nice Despair. As Dorothy Day wrote in certainly one of her Catholic Employee newspaper columns, “This e-book of Mike’s, which got here because of his two-year stick with us as one of many editors of the Catholic Employee, began the Conflict on Poverty program.”
About Day, I wrote my first op-ed for the LA Progressive a few decade in the past, and readers fascinated by her lively and loving Catholic progressivism (and the way it might encourage Ocasio-Cortez) can learn it. However one part I want to emphasize from it’s the following: She was keen to work with anybody, communists included, to hunt the frequent good and assist the unfortunates of society. In a June 1954 letter she wrote, “We should at all times be searching for concordances, relatively than variations—that’s the foundation of the ecumenical motion, which is a part of the peace motion.” She believed strongly that dialogue contributed to “clarification of thought.” Though her Catholic faith was vitally essential to her and gave that means to her life, she didn’t condemn those that thought in a different way.
Harrington was equally open-minded. According to Alan Steinberg—who due to Harrington “flirted with socialism” when he was younger (however later grew to become a reasonable Republican)—“the Harrington public outreach was completely humanitarian in type and substance, searching for to heal the nation’s wounds, finish hatred and bigotry, alleviate the poverty of the poor, finish the struggling of the sick, and remove societal inequality with out selling hatred between ethnic teams and financial lessons. The Harrington message was one of reconciliation.” Steinberg added that “Harrington traditionally was a fierce critic” of Marxist authoritarian regimes, together with these in “the previous Soviet Union, Castroite Cuba, and Sandinista Nicaragua.”
In addition to Harrington, one other man who contributed to the Catholic Employee newspaper within the Sixties was the Trappist monk and prolific writer Thomas Merton, who like Day and Harrington was a social critic and opponent of the Vietnam Conflict. (See here for my lengthy essay on Day and Merton.) For well-known politicians and specifically for somebody like Ocasio-Cortez, who’s sometimes described as a “rock star” of the Democratic Occasion, Merton has important words to say about humility: “It’s virtually inconceivable to overestimate the worth of true humility and its energy within the religious life. . . . Humility accommodates in itself the reply to all the nice issues of the lifetime of the soul.” And “Humble people can do great things with uncommon perfection because they are no longer concerned about their own interests and their own reputation, and therefore they no longer need to waste their efforts in defending them.” Something that frees politicians to spend extra time desirous about others—like their constituents—must be welcomed.
Within the first paragraph of this essay I discussed one different Catholic, apart from Day and Merton, who preceded Ocasio-Cortez in being impressed by their Catholicism to behave in “loving methods towards their fellow human beings.” That was Pope Francis, and it was no accident that when he addressed the U. S. Congress in 2015, two of the nice People he signaled out have been Day and Merton—the opposite two have been Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr.
In 2015 Ocasio-Cortez was nonetheless too younger to take a seat in Congress, but when she had been current when Pope Francis spoke, there may be little doubt she would have greeted his phrases with nice enthusiasm. For he suggested Congress to behave on lots of the points expensive to her coronary heart, for instance, on poverty and starvation, on “environmental deterioration attributable to human exercise,” on appearing for the frequent good and never particular pursuits, on viewing migrants and refugees “as individuals, seeing their faces and listening to their tales, making an attempt to reply as finest we are able to to their state of affairs.” (After the presidential election of Joe Biden, one other Catholic, in 2020 he indicated that he looked forward to working with Francis on a few of these identical points: serving to the “marginalized and the poor, addressing the disaster of local weather change, and welcoming and integrating immigrants and refugees into our communities.” The diploma and that implications of Biden’s progressive Catholicism, nonetheless, are matter for one more essay.)
In his 2016 handle and in earlier remarks Francis additionally warned about an issue that Ocasio-Cortez may need to take particular steps to keep away from—ideological rigidity. Though he appeared to be pondering extra of the ideological Proper than of the ideological Left, his phrases are relevant to all ideologues. (See my LAP op-ed “Dogmatists of the Left?”) “When a Christian turns into a disciple of the ideology, he has misplaced the religion. . . . However it’s a critical sickness, this of ideological Christians. . . . His perspective is: be inflexible, moralistic, moral, however with out kindness.” He urged Christians “to stay humble, and so to not develop into closed.” He instructed Congress that “an excellent political chief is one who, with the pursuits of all in thoughts, seizes the second in a spirit of openness and pragmatism.”
Like all people, Day, Merton, Pope Francis, and Ocasio-Cortez have had their faults, however in my opinion their faith has typically made them higher folks. (This isn’t to say that in some particular instances, like Francis on same-sex marriages, they haven’t erred.) All 4 appear to have taken significantly the Christian message—and that of many different religions—that we must always love our fellow people and attempt to be humble and search the frequent good. If Rep. Ocasio-Cortez continues to use such classes and observe the examples of Day, Merton, and Pope Francis, she will probably be serving our nation effectively.
Walter G. Moss
