PRELATE OF THE PEOPLE
Alinsky, Saul
Prelate of the People By SAUL ALINSKY IT WAS 1939, and the CIO was young, bursting with energy, surging with wild dreams. A whole new world was coming round the corner. General Motors, Chrysler,...
...VI Finally, he ended, turned, and slowly began to walk out down the center aisle...
...Then one of the Democratic Party chiefs sent down the word that a certain businessman in the neighborhood was to be forced out of business for political reasons, Jim Sheil refused to be a party to this action...
...He fought the practice of stealing ballots, so the machine went out to get him...
...He wrote the books, "Reveille for Radicals" and "John L. Lewis," and is a frequent contributor to magazines and lecturer to university audiences...
...I asked Bishop Sheil that question...
...It took the kids a little time to start fading the Bishop, but they did...
...And he won...
...At another platform are the best current entertainers in the stage and screen world doing their best, for free...
...Ecclesiastical circles are still gasping over the Frances Sweeney episode...
...Let us take a look at this Christian maverick in the Catholic Church...
...He was assigned as an assistant to St...
...His gang called him Benny, and Benny it has been ever since...
...Bishops are people, and all work and no play would make them dull, too...
...The union won...
...Patrick's Cathedral...
...I have never hesitated to condemn, with all the power at my command, every form of totalitarian government...
...Some of these, unhappily, are Catholic...
...the CYO Boy's Camp...
...The house was shaken alternately by the horse-drawn coal wagons, with their regular dumping of tons of coal, and the elevated trains roaring by...
...A Bishop...
...Rosella, or "Mother Sheil," as she was known to hundreds, kept open house every day and night...
...It is my house, and I go forth to kick it out...
...The Bishop did not raise his hand to wipe it off...
...General Motors, Chrysler, U. S. Steel—they were all going down like tenpins before the bowling drive of the CIO...
...That is what they called our Lord...
...Here, in a hall full of hate, Bishop Bernard Sheil arose and for 15 tense minutes denounced anti-Semitism, white supremacy, and every vile lie that had been bellowed by a demagogue on the platform...
...But even those who play with the Bishop find the going hard, for on a golf course the 63-year young Bishop whacks the ball around in the low eighties...
...Furthermore, whenever he comes to me, I know it's for just one thing—money...
...She shrieked, "I'm a Catholic, but you, you—You're not a Catholic Bishop...
...III Behind all these projects comes the practical question—where does the scads of money required come from...
...Ever since, he has played against the kind of opposition in which he has had to pitch almost constant no-hit ball...
...This was particularly prevalent among the younger groups, and many Jewish youngsters were seriously injured...
...The Bishop's multitudinous interests are translated into multitudinous projects...
...Close, I defy you to prove that I have at any time made any statement that could possibly be interpreted by honest, objective observers, as favorable to either Communism or socialism...
...Nigger lover...
...When the Bishop tells the story, his emotions are mixed between tears and anger...
...He has never forgotten the incident that took place some years ago in one of his CYO summer schools...
...However, it is not so much what the Bishop says as what he does...
...Many of the Catholic parish priests either tacitly condoned this hysteria or else openly encouraged it...
...Each year I say to myself, 'This time the Bishop doesn't get a red cent.' Just like the last time...
...However, Mr...
...the Sheil School...
...they were all down...
...he says, "That boy will always haunt me, and I will stop at nothing to wipe out conditions like that...
...Ha Ha...
...This was the Benny Sheil who turned down four major league offers...
...Once a year the Knights of Columbus give their annual barbecue with the proceeds going to the good little Bishop...
...His capacity for indignation is as deep as his sense of justice and Christianity...
...Close, only by a nauseating disregard for fact, and a revolting violation of justice...
...In Back-of-the-Yards, Chicago's nationally infamous jungle, 25,000 Poles, Slovaks, Negroes, Germans, Irish, Lithuanians, and Mexican-Americans were banded together under the CIO...
...Chicago's Corned-Beef-and-Cab-bage dinner is famous...
...Now completely hysterical, she deliberately cleared her throat, and with all her strength spat over one side of the Bishop's face...
...Viator College against the University of Illinois, Big Ten baseball champions of the year...
...Once there, 20,000 packinghouse workers, inside the Coliseum, and 10,000 standing outside, took over...
...What an instant before had been a mob of snarling faces, became hundreds of lowered heads...
...A mad roar began and suddenly died...
...One day a curious priest trailed the youngster to a crumbling shack and found the six-year-old carefully dividing the milk into three portions, for his fouryear-old sister, two-year-old brother, and a six-month-old infant...
...He was a registered Certified Public Accountant, and yet never professionally audited one single ledger...
...Driven by a burning passion to help children, Bishop Sheil's search for the causes of juvenile delinquency inevitably brought him face to face with the delinquencies of our social order...
...They would have torn to bits anyone who so much as looked sideways at their "good little Bishop...
...There was always a giant pot of boiling coffee, and a mammoth kettle of stew on the wood-burning stove...
...Chicago's Catholic Bishop Sheil was not only going to open the Packinghouse Workers' last-ditch strike mass meeting, but he would appear on the same platform with CIO chief, John L. Lewis...
...One prominent financier told me, "You know, I'm opposed to practically everything that Bishop Sheil represents...
...For himself, he kept none...
...He did not plead for the peaceful, orderly way of democracy...
...He began, and now operates, the Lewis School of Science and Technology, the Master Eye Dog Foundation, two social centers in Chicago...
...He also was given the additional duties of Catholic chaplain for the Cook County jail...
...But after all, he was a Bishop and was entitled to a warning...
...Suddenly the silence was shattered by a scream of anger...
...In 1924 Cardinal Mundelein of Chicago named Father Sheil Chancellor of the Catholic Archdiocese of Chicago, and on young Father Sheil's shoulders rested the main burden of administration of the affairs of the largest Catholic Archdiocese in the world...
...an FM radio station...
...The take is substantial...
...At a long speakers' table sit the city's dignitaries and every sports editor in town...
...Into this medieval darkness came young, Irish, shining-eyed, devoutly Catholic Frances Sweeney...
...Its religious, athletic, educational, vocational, and social service programs are open to youth of all creeds and colors, and thousands of non-Catholics are in it...
...He loves getting outdoors in sweatshirt, baseball cap, ball, and glove to "throw a few...
...They knew the Bishop's background...
...They were heading for the great showdown with the meat packers...
...Frances Sweeney fought hate and injustice right inside her own church...
...Alternately praising and scolding the workers, he went on to denounce the meat trust mercilessly...
...He showed even though Chicago police had to clear eight blocks between his office and the Coliseum, and a personal bodyguard of 50 police had to be asr-signed for protection...
...Col-umbkilles Parochial School, St...
...The Negro has not received a square deal, an honest deal, or a new deal from white America...
...he got $15,000...
...I realize the futility of attempting to refute, in the few minutes allotted to me, the untruthful statements, the unjust implications, the despicable insinuations, and the intellectual dishonesty of Mr...
...It is not uncommon to see the Bishop's priestly assistants nursing split fingers after "The Boss has tossed a few...
...In two hours the Bishop had won every nickel they had, and that ended the craps and cards...
...Here is the story: In 1942 and 1943 parts of the City of Boston were suffering from a severe outburst of anti-Semitism...
...For his is a Catholicity unobstructed and uncomplicated by human fetishes, prejudices, or ritualistic differences...
...It was ignored...
...He demanded it, he fought for it...
...On discrimination, the Bishop really swings from the floor...
...And by totalitarian government, I mean Fascism and Nazism as well as Communism...
...She defied the priests, shamed them by her Christianity, and embarrassed them because she was fighting on the side of the angels...
...Evidently Mr...
...He waited...
...He told the political big-wig, "You are putting precinct politics above Christian charity...
...In 1926 Father Sheil led in the planning and was treasurer of the 28th International Eucharistic Congress, in Chicago, and for this he was promoted to a Monsignor...
...By this time, most of the people were standing on their chairs...
...He was a graduate of Rush Medical School, yet never practiced medicine...
...I do not think you can truthfully say the same, Mr...
...Then it broke...
...The Bishop does not pull his punches on any issue, including the dynamite-laden subject of labor and capital...
...He returned the money to a chastened group of fighters...
...With the war's end, Father Sheil was assigned to Holy Name Cathedral, which is Ghicago's St...
...Here Bernard Sheil grew up, a laughing, tough west side kid, who never ducked an argument, and, more important, never ducked the fight that invariably followed...
...The way the Bishop can toss 7's and lis has made some folks say, "You know, if he wasn't a Bishop, I'd think— but he is a Bishop...
...He still walks...
...Once a year Bishop Sheil and the Sheil School make an award of a special medal called the Pope Leo XIII Award, to the Catholic lay person who has made the greatest contribution to the cause of justice, truth, and the dignity of the individual...
...The Bishop waited another moment, then spoke softly, "Rabbi...
...He walked in many a death march to the gallows...
...He still throws a "spitter," saying truculently, "According to baseball rules, all those using the spitball before it was outlawed can still use it, and I am one of those...
...At first he was appalled, then consumed with anger...
...Time without number, he has been denied a job simply because he was black...
...The Bishop is a wizard at some of the so-called indoor recreations...
...How long are we going to continue to give second class privileges to first-class citizens...
...Close seemed to be as reliably informed on the Bishop as on many other subjects...
...For days afterwards, the packinghouse workers kept saying that Sheil had pitched another no-hitter...
...Two years later Pope Pius XI named Monsignor Sheil as Auxiliary Bishop of Chicago...
...In some parts of the country his vote is side-tracked by legal tricks...
...II Bernard James Sheil was born Feb...
...He prospered and became active in politics...
...The time is long since passed when labor will be satisfied with what is left over...
...Just before Pearl Harbor, the Bishop, overriding the protests of associates, went unannounced and uninvited to a mass meeting sponsored by a number of groups, such as the Christian Front and similar organizations...
...Rabbi Sheil...
...a special Puerto Rican program...
...Once a year, in the largest hotel ballroom in Chicago, better than 2.000 dinner guests sit down to a plate of corned beef and cabbage at $10 a plate...
...I'm not even sure that I like his brand of Christianity...
...He attacked Bishop Sheil as an apologist for Communism...
...He knew the passions of the times and what must happen when thousands of men who earned their living using knives, went to war...
...But ask any newsboy or panhandler who the worst sucker or "softest touch" in Chicago is, and they'll tell you, with an affectionate caress to each word, "The Little Bishop...
...God damn you...
...Close...
...Here he saw, not only the criminals, but the crimes of a society largely responsible for all of this...
...Chicago, a really tough town, had shrugged its shoulders and sloughed off the CIO, but they kept coming...
...The Bishop, with the dignity of immortality, had turned the other cheek...
...People were constantly coming in for a meal, and young Benny Sheil never forgot the sight of the numerous hungry visitors...
...It would be the first time that a Catholic prelate had publicly appeared with the bulldog-faced labor leader since the beginning of the CIO...
...I don't like his stands on labor, housing, and lots of other things...
...They thought he was crazy...
...Following the broadcast, the Bishop received 14,000 wires and letters awarding him a win by a knockout...
...He is not accepted on an equal plane in the drawing rooms of the white group...
...The Bishop is determined to walk God's path, no matter whose toes get stepped on...
...The fight was for stakes higher than the man on the street dreams about...
...Well, he didn't get a red cent...
...A bullet shattered the window of a restaurant where he was lunching...
...A campaign of political persecution finally succeeded in breaking his heart...
...He was a graduate of the Illinois College of Pharmacy, yet never pursued pharmacy...
...and extensive city-wide summer supervised recreation programs...
...The Negro is denied entrance to many of our educational institutions...
...The movement now extends through the United States, Canada, and Hawaii...
...Everything went, and if a Catholic Bishop had to go too, it was just too bad...
...Once, disturbed over reports of card playing and dice games among the members of one of his boxing teams, he accompanied them on their next trip...
...He fought with all he had to prevent the strike...
...Jim Sheil went into the coal and ice business, because he was Irish, and that was the business for Irishmen...
...V Needless to say, in these days, no one, not even a Catholic prelate, can maintain these positions without the good old "Red" paint brush being brought into use...
...Ordinarily, I would not dignify such patently absurd remarks by stooping to answer them...
...All the chips were blue, and SAUL ALINSKY, a sociologist and co-founder of the Back of the Yards Neighborhood Council in Chicago, is executive director of the Industrial Areas Foundation...
...Here he saw human misery at its worst...
...Jew lover...
...As for the audience— well, as Herb Graffis, news columnist, who was acting as master of ceremonies one year, said, "Fellow suckers, now that you are here, the Bishop has ordered the doors closed and we will put the gun on you for all you've got...
...And Benny Sheil never forgot...
...The audience listened restlessly, glaring, seething with hostility...
...The Bishop's presence would be taken as a church blessing of the cause of the workers...
...Then World War I broke out and Father Sheil became a Chaplain at Great Lakes Naval Training Station...
...The little Bishop made history that night...
...That quaking, five-room flat was security and home for those in hunger and in need...
...27, 1946...
...His father, James B. Sheil, was possessed of an incredible thirst for knowledge, for knowledge's sake...
...Many of those in attendance were Catholics, and many of them followers of Father Cough-lin, Elizabeth Dilling, and others of that ilk...
...A six-year-old, ragged youngster regularly attended each daily session, rain or shine, and just as regularly disappeared immediately after being given his free half-pint bottle of milk...
...Then the Bishop acted...
...Viator's College and its Seminary...
...It went back to 1906 when Bishop Sheil, then Benny Sheil, pitched for small, unknown St...
...But Frances fought on until her heart gave out...
...He uncovered the foul sores of a society filled with the pus of prejudice, racial discrimination, anti-Semitism, economic injustice, poor housing, disease, and inadequate medical care...
...These same fingers are pretty expert on the piano, and he is completely at home with the masters...
...IV On anti-Semitism, the Bishop has curtly commented, "The only Jew the Gentile need fear is the imaginary one he has created in his own mind...
...He walked out in a silence of Judgment Day...
...Upton Close desperately wired the Bishop a frantic peace plea...
...18, 1888, in a small, poor flat over a coal yard on Chicago's shabby west side...
...He knew his legal rights and used them...
...He walks proudly with his people, all the people, for he is a prelate of the people...
...On issue after issue, Sheil has calmly and courageously enunciated and acted in accordance with the most radical doctrine known in the history of mankind—Christianity...
...Young Benny went to St...
...Once he turned to young Benny and said, "Power without Christian charity is truly the devil at work...
...No, Mr...
...In 1945, to the shock and horror of many a Boston Catholic priest, the Award was made posthumously to Frances Sweeney...
...Even after her death, the snide whispers continued...
...the Mercy Mission...
...Then, as though a sudden chill had gripped her, she began to shake violently...
...And once again, Father Sheil did not forget...
...The democratic process prevailed, and the democratic cause went forward...
...In 1930, with the blessing of Cardinal Mundelein, Bishop Sheil founded the now famous Catholic Youth Organization of America, more familiarly known as the CYO...
...Even where separate educational facilities are provided, the Negro receives second rate equipment and teaching...
...On Sept...
...the West Side Community Center and on the south side, the Sheil House...
...He was warned not to show...
...On May 21, 1910, Benny Sheil became Father Sheil...
...Mel Church, and Father Sheil again was back on the west side...
...Bishop Sheil promptly demanded equal radio time on the next week's broadcast, and got it...
...God provides, as he does everything," he replied...
...It came from a fanatical old woman who stepped out and blocked the Bishop's way just as he was passing her row...
...He loves good music, and his record collection is one of the best...
...When some of his advisers urged that he not fight back in that manner, Sheil, in a low, sweet voice, replied, "When a skunk cometh into your house, someone must kick it out...
...The Bishop appreciates that the way to a man's heart is through his stomach...
...It came blaring through the radio loudspeakers in the thousands of American homes tuned in to the Mutual Broadcasting program when Upton Close had the microphone...
...The old woman froze, as did hundreds about her...
...He is pushed into undesirable living quarters, frequently indescribably filthy and unfit for human habitation...
...He is for the guaranteed annual wage, for adequate—and he means really adequate—unemployment compensation, and even more...
...It would torpedo the entire publicity campaign of the meatpackers that the CIO was a Communist conspiracy...
...On the night of July 16, 1939, the Bishop "showed...
...News editors shook their heads unbelievingly and asked for a recheck on the story, but check or recheck, it was true...
...No one really knew, except that Jim Sheil wanted to know about things, and when he knew he went on to other fields...
...There was no strike...
...Jew-baiting and democracy-baiting Father Curran was given an ovation every time he visited Boston...
...They crawled into their holes and struck back with poisonous whispers, which were the basest lies about Frances Sweeney...
...He worshipped his mother, Ro-sella Sheil, and he took it for granted that everyone else did, too...
...Close assumed that a Catholic Bishop would not reply to such a scurrilous attack...
...Sheil got his Aug...
...Both sides asked no quarter and gave none...
...The labor union, as a recognized social and economic force, must have a voice, along with capital, in the management of industry...
...However, there are a goodly number of affluent Americans who report, "Well, maybe the Bishop's answer is right, but our checking accounts take a hell of a beating when he shows up...
...He walks where he belongs, in the vanguard of millions of Americans, Christians and Jews, black and white, all Americans...
...You can make such a statement, Mr...
...Or, if he is bowling, something is wrong when Sheil bowls under 195...
...His life was threatened...
...3, His Excellency stepped before the microphone and here is a small sample of the wallops absorbed by Close...
...Sheil pitched a no-hit victory against a team from which seven members went on to the major league...
...He's good for a buck to a sawbuck anytime, anywhere, any place...
...Close's entire statement...
Vol. 15 • June 1951 • No. 6
