Road least traveled

National Catholic Reporter, Nov 10, 2000 by Arthur Jones

Andersen, in his own words, stepped "off the face of the earth." He lived in the collective's furnace room, let his driving license expire. "I was radically estranged from society," he said. Yet he was fighting to make some sort of peace between how he saw U.S. society -- his revulsion at the sight of the poor, whether in El Salvador of the District of Columbia -- and his sense of his own privileged possibility and revolutionary tendencies.

His conscience's goad was that "punk rock was challenging people to live by their ethics."

Punk was also anti-Christian in the era when the Moral Majority and the Christian Coalition tried to define Christianity for Americans.

By the late 1980s, Andersen was shifting from the Washington Peace Center to a part-time job at Emmaus, sponsored by five churches, housed in the offices of the imposing National City Christian Church on Thomas Circle. He was delving into new challenges as outreach coordinator for the elderly there when Catholicism reared its strange spirit in several ways.

Ironically, Boston College professor Mary Daly was one of those who kicked the door partway open. "During that woolly radical anti-Christian period, I was aware of her," Andersen said, "and read The Church and the Second Sex. That was nothing compared to Daly's Beyond God the Father, demolishing the patriarchal, repressive apparatus, demolishing Christianity," he said.

"One thing she mentioned though, just in passing," said Andersen, "was, `There are some who argue that Jesus was a feminist.' To which I say, basically, yes. I checked her footnote to Leonard Swidler's article, `Jesus was a Feminist,' sought that out, and it began the revolution. I began to see Jesus as distinct from the doctrines of church, that Jesus' life and teachings were still a prophetic critique and challenge and a revolutionary one. It began to open my heart. The second part was reading the late Penny Lernoux's The Cry of the People," a journalist's 1980 account of U.S. involvement in oppression of the poor in Latin America. "I had seen in some philosophical sense that Jesus might not be the enemy," he said. "Lernoux made it clear that there were people in Latin America living out, at the risk of their lives, the notion that Jesus might have revolutionary possibilities to offer us for the present time."

Jesus the `commie punk'

Influenced by Swidler, Andersen wrote in Positive Force's Off Center magazine an article titled "Jesus Was a Commie Punk." It was designed, he said, "to engage folks in the underground in a re-assessment of Jesus as friend rather than foe."

Jesus was re-engaging Andersen, too. Andersen met workers such as Marie Dennis (now with the Maryknoll Justice and Peace Office in Washington) and Franciscan Fr. Joe Nangle of the Assisi Community, whom he accompanied on a Pax World Foundation trip to the Middle East.

But key, he said, was meeting Meridith Welch, a Vincentian volunteer working at Emmaus. "She gave me a window into the very vibrant Catholic volunteer network. She works with Youth at Risk in Boston now.