Farewell to Pre-eminent Catholic Social Activist By: Msgr. George Higgins

   During the University of Notre Dame's annual baccalaureate Mass it is customary for the university's president to read the names of the Notre Dame students, faculty members and staff who died during the year just ending. Attending this year's Mass as an outsider, I wasn't paying close attention as the names were read, but I was shaken abruptly when the president said my fellow diocesan and lifetime friend Msgr. John Egan of Chicago had died that morning. His name was included because he once served at Notre Dame for 13 years as a special assistant to its then-president, Holy Cross Father Theodore Hesburgh.

   Having talked on the phone to Msgr. Egan a few days earlier, I knew his days were numbered, but he passed away sooner than I expected. Msgr. Egan's funeral Mass in Chicago four days later was one of the most racially, ethnically and religiously diverse and most impressive ceremonies of its kind I ever attended. For more than 50 years he had been a pre-eminent Catholic social activist locally and nationally.

   As the pastor of Holy Name Cathedral in Chicago put it, “He was the social conscience of Chicago.” Msgr. Egan was that indeed in several key areas: housing, race relations, urban renewal, labor relations, community organizing and ecumenism. He was, in short, a uniquely influential figure in 20th-century American Catholicism.

   The day after Msgr. Egan died, I presented remarks at Notre Dame's commencement exercises in the presence of President Bush and other dignitaries. I'd had Msgr. Egan much in mind as I drafted my brief address. I took as my opening a brief quotation from the late Cardinal Gibbons' historic 1887 memorandum to the Vatican in defense of the Knights of Labor, which the historian Msgr. John Tracy Ellis characterized as the single most important document in the history of the Catholic Church in the United States.

   Cardinal Gibbons said it is “evidently of supreme importance that the church should always be found on the side of humanity, of justice to the multitudes who comprise the body of the human family.” He wrote at a time when the overwhelming majority of U.S. Catholics were impoverished immigrants.

   One fears, I said, that today, when many but by no means all American Catholics are more prosperous than their immigrant forebears, we may fail to realize that poverty is still endemic in our society, especially, but not exclusively, among minorities. We may also fail to realize that we are still a nation of immigrants -- perhaps more so than at the end of the 19th century.

   I noted that some among us argue -- in effect, if not always in so many words -- that evangelization of the poor and the new immigrants must be exclusively spiritual, not concerning itself with structural, socio-economic reforms. That's a seductive half-truth finding no support in the entire corpus of Catholic social teaching, least of all in Pope John Paul II's social teaching.

   The pope, writing about the role of the church's social teaching in evangelization, comes down strongly in favor of a preferential option for the poor. In the spirit of the pope's social teaching, I concluded with an excerpt from a prayer in a book of meditations on the Psalms by a Spanish Jesuit in India:

   “Thank you for the new light and the new courage that have surged through your church today to denounce poverty and to right oppression. Thank you for the church of the poor.”

   Now that Msgr. Egan has been laid to rest, I should like to dedicate this prayer to his memory. It will be a long time before we see his like again.

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Farewell to a Pre-eminent Catholic Social Activist

By Msgr. George G. Higgins

The Yardstick

June 18, 2001