She's no radical, just an elementary Catholic

National Catholic Reporter, Nov 13, 1998 by Arthur Jones

How does God look when one is 83, mother of 12, grandmother to 32 and great-grandmother to 20?

"Much more real now," said Jane Emerson. "I think I'm much better friends with God and I hope that God feels the same way. My chief sin is I don't pray. I read."

Currently she's on an Octavio Paz kick, plus reading all she can about Mexico. Mexico's poor have been part of the Emerson outreach for more than a half-century.

Jane and William Archibald Emerson had 12 children. One son died of cancer at 34. The children are artists and municipal court clerks, auto mechanics and Federal Reserve officials. They are roamed or divorced or separated or remarried. They live in places as varied as an apartment in Oregon and on a boat in the. Virgin Islands.

The Emerson children, their myriad spouses and partners, the grandchildren and great-grandchildren represent a multiracial -- especially African-American -- multicultural world. Their span of religious interests range from deep involvement in the local parish to fundamentalism to self, realization.

Earlier that day, Emerson had been a lector at the 8:30 a.m. Mass at Christ the King Church in San Diego. "The older I get, the more I think faith is a gift. But I'm not pious," she said, checking off another fault, "I'm impious."

Emerson will bristle it anyone refers to her as the parish radical. To her it is elementary, not radical, that to be Catholic means caring about the poor, elementary that the church has to risk alienating people -- particularly its own.

Catholics who radically touched her life and social thinking include Dorothy Day and Cardinal Joseph Cardijn, founders respectively of the Catholic Worker movement in the United States and the Young Christian Workers (and much else) in Europe. Both groups still keep her on track. She edits the local Catholic Worker newspaper and is president of the remnant of the Cardijn Center with its Mexican American Neighbor Outreach -- MANO -- south of the nearby border.

Emerson, born in St. Paul, Minn., was a 19-year-old sophomore at St. Catherine's College there when Day, who'd just started The Catholic Worker newspaper, visited. "I liked what she said about simple living. Bill and I always, tried to live that way, and raise the children that way. Simply," said Emerson, comfortable in her armchair in a small, flower and shrub-surrounded house.

She met the Belgian Cardijn when he visited San Diego in the 1950s. Early influences persist.

Occasionally, she said, a reader of her newsletter complains, "`For heaven's sake, get away from this political stuff,' they say. `Let's talk about feeding the poor.' They just don't get the connection," Emerson said.

"Catholic Workers on the board sometimes say, `Why don't you make it more newsy.' And I say the point is to educate people, hold a mirror up to them a little bit. We're writing it for the people that send us money and we risk alienating them. But that's what we're supposed to do. We aren't writing this for the people we feed."

Even at college, Emerson's work as editor was probably getting her in trouble. About to enter her senior year -- she had been class president for two years and editor of the newspaper she'd helped start as a freshman she was in line to become student body president.

The dean decided otherwise.

She and Bill had been engaged for three-and-a-half years, so Emerson quit and they wed. Emerson recalled, "We had four daughters when my husband, a teacher who was practically born with cardiac asthma, in the winter of 1943 was so ill his doctor just said, `Bill, you either leave Minnesota or you don't ever work again.' So we moved to San Diego."

The city was crying out for teachers, but it was wartime and there was no hot, sing. Finally they found accommodation in wartime, quarters. 400 isolated units at the end of Point Loma.

"They were the most efficiently engineered houses you can imagine. There wasn't a wasted inch," she said. "And the people -- we had neighbors getting PhDs, and the people across the street were poor white crackers from Texas. I don't think either of them could read or write. But their seven children -- as they got children, we did too -- were just as intelligent and capable as any children, I'd lived in a rather sheltered, protected environment. It was great for me."

The family was constantly expanding. "My youngest son -- he's now 42 -- was born the same year that his oldest sister was off at college."

The Emersons bought a house in Ocean Beach that remained home well beyond Bill's death in 1971.

"Bill had a doctorate in English literature, taught at [San Diego] City College. He could have taught English literature, which he loved, but he was particularly fascinated and good at teaching people to read and write. So he never left. He just stayed there.

"We had it all planned that at 55 he would retire and we would have some children in high school, but our income from retirement would be equivalent because we would have much less expense," she said. "But he never got around to it. His life expectancy was 54 -- and he thought he was very smart -- he lived to be 57. He died with his boots on. He taught the day he died. It was asthma that finally got him." And cigarette.