Faithful to the Truth

The suddenness of Penny Lernoux's death has left all of us reeling from a loss we had no time to prepare for.

Penny was just 49 years old when she succumbed to cancer on October 8, 1989. First diagnosed only one month earlier, she had come to stay with the Maryknoll Sisters in New York while she received treatment. But it was too late. The prophetic voice that had reported to us for more than two decades from Latin America fell silent. None of us was ready. Penny Lernoux was buried in the Maryknoll Sisters cemetery.

It was only several weeks earlier that I had received a letter from Penny telling me she was on schedule for the special Sojourners issue on drugs we had planned together for the next spring. She would do the story from Colombia, where she had lived for many years. We would tell the story from Columbia Heights, where we live in the inner city of Washington, D.C. She sounded fine in the letter and made no mention of any problems.

The previous spring, Penny was with us in Washington, D.C., as part of her national book tour for People of God, her newest release. I introduced her at the book-signing party as a journalist who tells the truth and keeps the faith. It was that combination that made Penny Lernoux so rare and extraordinary in our time or in any time. She made a great impression when she spoke to the Sojourners magazine staff the next day.

For other journalists, she provided a bright light. She practiced her vocation with such integrity and courage and, in so doing, demonstrated how a Christian should be a journalist and how a journalist can be a Christian.

The memorable time we shared together over dinner before she left became an even more precious event in the light of her passing. That evening Penny expressed great concern for the Catholic Church. The future of the Church is with the poor, she believed, and Rome's fear of the base communities and liberation theology might cause the hierarchy to miss such a critical historical moment.

IN ALL OUR CONVERSATIONS, Penny wrestled with the questions of integrity. How do we find the strength of our convictions and the support of one another to say and do what is true? Especially, how do we persevere in vigorous and honest truth telling in the face of opposition, intimidation, and threats? Penny loved the church enough to challenge it to be all the people of God are supposed to be -- to be all the world needs the church to be. She once wrote, "Guts -- the courage to be different for Jesus' sake -- was what the early Christian church was about."

Bastions of entrenched political, economic, and ecclesial power were dealt serious blows by her writing. Penny Lernoux was the most profound and persuasive critic of the United States government's policies toward its neighbors in Central and South America. But she also upset some ideologues of the Left for not toeing the party line. She was too independent for them as well, and also too consistent.

Penny Lernoux could be counted on for finding the people whose rights were being trampled and whose rights were being destroyed. The perspective of a peasant was always more important to her than the perspective of a president. As a journalist, Penny Lernoux practiced the biblical bias for the poor.

Poor people were really the only ones who could take comfort from her words. In all of her writing, Penny Lernoux articulated the "cry of the people," which was appropriately the title of her best-known book. She once said, "At stake are two different visions of faith: the church of Caesar, powerful and rich, and the church of Christ, loving, poor, and spiritually rich."

As a journalist, she displayed a breadth and a depth of courage that was truly remarkable. In whatever subject she took on, she became an expert. For sheer hard work, exacting standards, and quality of writing, she had no match in her field. Most journalists treat foreign assignments as career stepping stones. Penny Lernoux stayed. In covering Latin America she became a Latin American.

As a woman, she showed the strength of compassion. In a church where women struggle to find their voice, her voice was one of the clearest and most compelling. To Latin America's most prophetic church leaders, she was an adviser and friend. Of church leadership she wrote, "The power of ... great church leaders comes from the people, and it grows in proportion to its use for the common good."

The vocation that she took most seriously was her vocation as a Christian. Her faith was truly at the center of her work and her life. Though she was a great success in the journalistic and literary world, she measured her own success in terms of the gospel. She believed that "faith is lived out through service to the community, such service being an expression of deep spirituality."

BECAUSE OF HER FIDELITY to the gospel, Penny Lernoux stands among those who have helped to show us the power of Christ in the world.

We thought we would have more time with Penny, but we will always have her memory and example. May they grow even stronger now that we no longer have her among us.

In the closing words of her last book, Penny leaves us with a call to faith:

The People of God will continue their march, despite the power plays and intrigue in Rome. And the Third World will continue to beckon to the First, reminding it of the Galilean vision of Christian solidarity. As a young Guatemalan said, a few months before she was killed by the military, '"What good is life unless you give it away?' (Mark 8:35) -- unless you can give it for a better world, even if you never see that world but have only carried your grain of sand to the building site. Then you're fulfilled as a person.

Penny Lernoux surely left her grain of sand at the building site of a better church and a newer world. Indeed, she left us much to build upon. Although it was cut short, we can say that Penny's life was fulfilled. Most important, her life fulfilled the words of Jesus in his first sermon at Nazareth: "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor."

Penny took those words as her own commission and carried it out with great faithfulness, courage, and love.

Jim Wallis is editor-in-chief of Sojourners.