American Churches Stand and Watch Occupy Wall Street

Even the Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, head of the Anglican Communion, paid attention to the protest movement in London against the power of financial institutions. The voice of religion, on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, in a “nation with the soul of a church,” such as the United States is yet much more powerful, since the evacuated protesters from Zuccotti Park in New York could only find refuge in Trinity Church.

At the beginning of the 20th century, the social gospel of churches struggling with the issue of immigration set the moral foundations (and in certain cases the legal foundations as well) for what then became Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal.

Nowadays, the position of American churches shows the role of the Occupy Wall Street protest. In fact, every social and political movement in the U.S. has a religious implication.

During the recession and the growth of social injustice between classes in America, the participation of churches and religions in the protest movement is less visible and institutional than a century ago. In New York, among the protesters not only can you see priests, believers, Christians, Jewish people, Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs, but also spaces for prayers and meditation, and inter-religious as well as ecumenical celebrations held so as to make Occupy Wall Street a movement which is not solely characterized by any one religious message.

For the moment, however, church leaders steer clear of a headless and what may be a politically risky movement given the presence of various and uncontrollable elements.

Another significant fact is that there are as many people missing as people present. In the entire assembly of Catholic bishops held in Baltimore this week, there was no mention in their work and in the documents published, of the economic crisis and its social and pastoral implications. The attitude towards Occupy Wall Street from intellectuals and theologians is very different.

Liberal public figures such as Peter Berger and Thomas Reese have talked about the Catholic Church, which is necessarily, in the light of its social doctrine, on the side of protesters. Even publications, which are the expression of a strong intellectual tradition, have clearly taken a position.

An editorial in the Jesuit weekly American Magazine entitled “For the 99 Percent” draws a parallel between the ongoing protests in America and the document published only a couple of days ago from the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace favoring a reform of the governance of the global financial system. An editorial in Commonweal, entitled “Justice and Economics” sees much more between the two events than a temporal coincidence and recalls how three years ago Dennis C. Blair, director of President Obama’s national security, had identified the global financial crisis as one of the biggest risks to the security, including internal security, of the United States.

American intellectuals, priests and religious people are much more present and concerned with what happens in the various areas of the occupation protest than the bishops. The paradox lies in the fact that the Catholic Church is careful not to be “assimilated” with American culture, which adapted a liberal economic culture and has more in common with the founding fathers’ Calvinism than with the traditional social doctrine of the Catholic Church.

This way it is easier to understand how the neo-conservative Catholicism pushed for the repudiation of Cardinal Appiah Turkson and the elaboration of the document “Justice and Peace” signed by him.

By all appearances, the “prosperity gospel” is the privilege of only non-Catholic churches; in reality the Catholic Church has focused on the issues of bioethics, abortion and traditional marriage, leaving aside social issues in the most critical period since World War II. Long gone are the 80s, during which the documents of American bishops on social and economic justice were a moral beacon not only for bishops from all over the world but also for non-Catholic Americans.

Believers and other religious people of different faiths, men and women, ordained or not, who carry the voice of God to those who nowadays call for a fairer and more equal world, remind us of the bishops in one of the most powerful scenes from the film “On the Waterfront” by Elia Kazan (1954). There is a scene in which the priest, wonderfully played by Karl Malden shouts, “Boys this is my church!” in response to those who demand that he return to the sacristy and stop dealing with the port workers’ rights. He then adds, “And if you don’t think Christ is down here on the waterfront you’ve got another guess coming!”