A Public Journey of Faith

To choose what is difficult
all one's days
as if it were easy,
that is faith.
-- W.H. Auden, from For the Time Being

WITH THESE WORDS Penny Lernoux concluded her monumental book, Cry of the People, in 1980. One decade later they serve to summarize more than the struggling Latin American church of which she wrote. They speak of her own life and the spirit she brought to her work.

Penny Lernoux was a Christian journalist until she died, October 8, one month after being diagnosed with cancer. Her career inspired a generation as she moved from observer-reporter through gradual awakening into conversion and on to become an impassioned advocate for the poor of Latin America. Penny was always a professional, and her work was a public faith journey influenced by and paralleling that of the Latin American church. Thus, she was able to share with her audience -- as no other journalist could -- both suffering lives and messages of liberation and hope.

Penny's death in a New York state hospital leaves many friends and colleagues stunned and mourning, but, beyond the shock, also expressing gratitude for the gift she had been -- and the awakening she had stirred. She wrote courageously of courageous people, seldom leaving her readers unmoved. Class conflict, she learned two decades back, was a pervasive, ugly reality throughout Latin America. And she took sides -- with the poor. Always factual, always thorough, Penny did not apologize for her partiality. And she was good at what she did. The best.

Editors sought her out. She wrote for Harpers, Newsday, The Nation, Newsweek, Sojourners, and the National Catholic Reporter. Her books, jam-packed with facts, detailed the ways powerful people and institutions oppress the powerless of Latin America: Cry of the People (Doubleday) documented U.S.-supported persecution, In Banks We Trust (Anchor Press/Doubleday) examined crime in the international bank community and the weight of foreign debt on the Latin American poor, and The People of God (Viking Penguin Inc.) looked at recent Vatican policies and their spirit-depressing impact on the increasingly independent churches of Latin America.

TRUST GOD

"ALL WE CAN DO IS TRUST IN GOD," Penny said as she concluded her shocking telephone conversation September 7 from her home in Colombia, where she lived and worked for the past 15 years. She had just shared the news of her recent cancer diagnosis. "Trust in God," she repeated.

Her worst fears had been confirmed. A biopsy of her hip contained cancer cells. For five months, she said that day, she had been suffering severe back pains. Doctors had advised rest and exercise to rid her of stress. She tried to comply, but the pains persisted. The cancer diagnosis had been an unexpected and devastating blow. She and her husband, Denis Nahum, quickly decided to fly to New York for further diagnosis at the Sloan-Kettering Institute.

Responding to the moment, the Maryknoll sisters, whom Penny much admired, helped with arrangements, taking her into their community in Ossining, New York. Penny had been working for two years on a book about the history of the Maryknoll nuns. She had finished dozens of interviews and had written six chapters.

The news the doctors continued to tell Penny was not good. Further examinations showed her primary cancer was in the lungs, and it had spread into her bones and liver. Penny, who had faced injustices head-on many times before, decided to fight the disease. She began chemotherapy even as her physical condition grew quickly weaker.

From Maryknoll she wrote me a letter two weeks before her death, ending with these words:

I feel like I'm walking down a new path. It's not physical fear or fear of death, because the courageous poor in Latin America have taught me a theology of life that, through solidarity and our common struggle, transcends death. Rather, it is a sense of helplessness -- that I who always wanted to be the champion of the poor am just as helpless -- that I, too, must hold out my begging bowl; that I must learn -- am learning -- the ultimate powerlessness of Christ. It is a cleansing experience. So many things seem less important, or not at all, especially the ambitions. Peace and love, Penny.

Many times in recent weeks my mind has wandered through those words, often lingering on the phrase "the ultimate powerlessness of Christ." Penny had long learned from the Latin American poor the presence of a tender and caring Christ in their midst, in their very powerlessness. It was a faith act and, ironically, an empowering realization.

Journalists are a schizophrenic lot. Often they become wrapped up in the lives of those of whom they write, but they are also, in their very act of writing, removed from those lives. When compassion and love are involved, the distance can be painful.

Penny had grown close to the Latin American poor. She knew, however, that she had power they did not. She could cry out about injustice. They were powerless to do so. And thus, a form of separation, until almost the end. Until Penny, suffering grave illness, was powerless, too.

I was blessed to be able to see Penny one more time at Maryknoll. She had grown very weak. We held hands, saying little, sharing much. It was decided the time was right to bring her daughter, Angela, 11, up from Colombia. Her mother and sister flew in from Los Angeles. She spent two days with them and then lapsed again. She was taken to a hospital and on Sunday, shortly after midday, October 8, Penny Lernoux, 49, completed her earthly journey.

THE AWAKENING

PENNY FIRST WENT TO LATIN AMERICA in 1962 to work with the U.S. Information Agency, the year the Second Vatican Council in Rome was getting under way and getting set to turn the church on its head. The council would soon have an enormous impact on Penny's life, although she had no clue at the time. She soon left the information agency to join Copley News Service, where she worked for a decade, reporting from Caracas, Buenos Aires, and Bogota.

Raised a Catholic, she was distancing herself from the church during those years, as she explained in a letter she wrote to the Maryknoll Sisters Central Governing Board in December 1987, asking for permission to write the Maryknoll book:

My reasons for wanting to write about Maryknoll are personal and have to do with my faith commitment. I admire women and men from other religious orders, but I owe a special debt to Maryknoll because it was through your missionaries in Chile that I regained my Catholic faith. Although I was educated in Catholic schools, I began to drift away from the church after I arrived in Colombia in the early 1960s, before [the impact of] Vatican II. The institutional church seemed so wedded to the upper classes, particularly the Conservative Party.

My experience of this near-feudal institution was so painful that, for years afterward, I was estranged from the church. But in the early 1970s I came in contact with Maryknoll missioners in Chile, who showed me a different church -- the church of the poor. It was through them that I became aware of and entered into another world -- not that of the U.S. Embassy or the upper classes, which comprise the confines of most American journalists, but the suffering and hopeful world of the slums and peasant villages. The experience changed my life, giving me new faith and a commitment as a writer to tell the truth of the poor to the best of my ability.

There is a saying in this church of the poor: "You make your path by walking it."

Penny began to walk "in solidarity with the poor," she would explain to those who cared to ask. And she was not alone.

Speaking at the University of Notre Dame last March, Penny further explained the beginnings of her Latin American faith journey:

I think my own journey in search of a different, more mature faith paralleled that of many Latin Americans who stumbled along the rocky outcrops of a strange, new landscape that took form after the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s -- a place where, as we Christians say in Latin America, we had to make our path by walking it in solidarity with the poor. Many incidents and accidents occurred along the way, but as I look back along that road, I see the hand of God on every signpost. As the bishops in Latin America have often said, the Holy Spirit was evident in the long-awaited awakening of the Latin American church.

Penny's earliest encounter with that awakening church came in Paraguay, she recalled. That was where she found church leaders actively promoting peasant leagues and other social-political organizations. She met some remarkable religious leaders, she said, including Bishop Ramon Bogarin, one of the Latin American church's early defenders of poor peasants and slum-dwellers as well as a strong supporter of the Latin American church's new "preferential option for the poor," a phrase coined at the historic 1968 gathering of Latin American bishops in Medellin, Colombia. It was an unexpected turning point for the church, one Penny missed because she was not yet tuned in to what was going on in the church, she noted.

But if Paraguay was the beginning of Penny's discovery of a recommitted faith, Chile and some Maryknoll missioners were "the cause of conversion."

She recalled at Notre Dame that she, like most other North American journalists, was initially suspicious of the leftist President Salvador Allende government because it had expropriated copper mines belonging to the U.S. multinationals. However, she also recognized in Allende's efforts a laudable attempt to redistribute income to benefit the poor.

Like the bishops of Medellin, I had gradually faced up to the reality of "institutionalized violence" against the poor majorities by governments of and for the rich. Chile was typical of the greed of the upper classes.

This was the lesson taught her by the missionaries working in Santiago's shantytowns. They introduced her, she said, to the "sounds, smells, hopes, and sufferings" of the underworld poor. "You can look at a slum or peasant village, and I had seen enough in my reporting, but it is only by entering into that world -- by living in it -- that you begin to understand what it is like to be powerless, to be like Christ."

Powerless and Christ-like. It was a riveting faith insight, one she would continue to carry in her work. The poor were no longer simply the subjects of her writing, not the objects of charitable acts, but rather educators and preachers of the Word, carrying experiences and messages needing to reach wider audiences. Penny had connected the powerlessness of the poor with the power of the gospels. She would hold that connection to the end of her life.

CONVERSION

CHILE NOT ONLY RADICALLY CHANGED my reporting, but also led to my conversion to the church of the poor -- the church of Medellin. Something similar happened to the bishops, many of whom had signed the Medellin documents without understanding the implications of such a radical shift from rich to poor.

It was a shift that led to persecution of the church, so much so that by the end of the 1970s more than 850 bishops, priests, and sisters had been killed, exiled, arrested and/or tortured. But the blood of martyrs was also having a positive effect by helping to awaken a generation of North American Christians to the urgent need for social justice in Latin America.

Through her writings, Penny had become a critical link between the churches and peoples of North and South America. Every year or two, she would return to the United States for speaking tours, talking in church halls, classrooms, and informal gatherings, wherever interest in Latin America was shown. She seemingly had endless energy, though her work, no doubt, took its toll.

She frequently spoke about the journey of "the people of God," the pueblo, or povo de Deus -- meaning, in Latin America, "the masses, the poor." Whereas the church had previously encouraged fatalism, she explained, the church after Medellin was teaching the poor they were equal in the sight of God and should take history into their own hands by seeking political and economic changes.

SIGNPOSTS

AS PENNY HAD GROWN CLOSER to the concerns of Latin American poor people, she also grew in the admiration of many Latin American church leaders. Among these was Brazilian Archbishop Cardinal Paulo Evaristo Arns of Sao Paulo, whom Penny and many others affectionately call Dom Paulo. Penny shared Arns's deep and active human rights concerns.

Arns noted recently that he "never imagined" that the sharing with her of his outrage against the practices of the international bank system would lead to her 1984 book, In Banks We Trust. Learning of Penny's death, he called her "a Christian journalist who understood the cry and helplessness" of the poor. He noted her as a great journalist and friend. "I will miss her dearly," he wrote.

The Brazilian church was a special focus of Penny's writings. Not only because it is the largest in South America, but also because it initiated reforms well before the Vatican Council and has been a leader in progressive church commitments.

Penny had also come to know a short, frail-looking Brazilian priest with enormous vision -- retired Recife, Brazil Archbishop Helder Camara, a man largely responsible for pushing early reforms. Helder Camara had played a key role at the Medellin conference, where he had encouraged the bishops to take a stand against poverty and injustice. He was another inspiration for Penny and the subject of many of her early reports.

Penny once recounted a particularly telling story of a meeting she had with Brazilian liberation theologian Franciscan Father Leonardo Boff. In 1975, both attended a Brazilian conference on base communities to which peasants and farm workers from all over Brazil had come.

"The military believed the communities to be subversive, since poor people were not supposed to question the regime's semi-feudal system and the communities kept insisting on the civil rights," she wrote. As expected, police arrived to break up the gathering, but the presence of religious leaders, including Boff, kept them from acting. The church, she said, was providing "protective space in which the communities could breathe and grow."

In the church's new role as servant of the people, Penny explained, religious leaders made no attempt to direct the agenda but rather listened to the communities' needs and agreed to support their priorities. Boff, who served as "animator" at the gathering, noted to Penny that one of the greatest challenges he initially faced was learning to listen to the people in their own halting language.

Penny recognized that it was Boff's ability to listen -- and pick up the agenda of the people -- that gave strength and credence to his theological writings. This is because, she noted, those writings came "from the heart of the Brazilian poor."

Penny, it seemed, had learned another lesson. As a result, her journalism was to grow in strength and credence, too. Her agenda had come "from the heart of the Brazilian poor."

Penny had missed Medellin in 1968; she was not about to miss a follow-up meeting of the bishops in Puebla, Mexico, in 1979. By then, she was later to write, "The church of the poor had not only become an important story; it was also the focus of my faith and professional life." Penny had learned to look for the hand of God in history and noted that it seemed present in curious ways at Puebla.

She told one story of the conference about that "bear of a man" Archbishop Ivo Lorscheider, then general secretary of the Brazilian bishops' conference. The conference, initially controlled by conservative bishops, had the bishops walled into a seminary and cut off from the press and liberation theologians. Security was excessive, purposefully hindering free discussion. Not long after the conference had begun, Lorscheider, who had been away from the seminary discussing strategy with Peruvian priest and liberation theologian Gustavo Gutierrez, was denied by guards entrance to the compound.

That was the breaking point, and he was the wrong person to harass. Lorscheider exploded, protesting the security measures. The journalists, Penny recalled, quickly joined in. The guards backed off and the journalists, walking with Lorscheider, crowded in. "Access to the delegates," Penny wrote, "was no longer difficult ... Such unplanned developments made me believe ... that the hand of God was evident."

In recent years Penny, sharing Latin American concerns, had become increasingly upset by the rightward shift in the church, primarily the result of Vatican episcopal appointments. Newly appointed bishops were no longer emphasizing peace and justice and, instead, were talking personal piety. But through the tears she often laughed it off, repeating that there is no turning back, that faith and history compel the church forward.

Echoing the words of Archbishop Camara earlier this year, Penny encouraged us to stay the course with the poor. Revealing characteristic confidence -- confidence derived from the people of God, she stated:

I believe that those who seek a new path, whether in the church or secular society, should not expect roses but must be prepared to endure the prophet's life in the desert. Yet, as the archbishop [Camara] notes, "The desert also blooms -- as we have seen in Latin America ... Meanwhile, those of us committed to the church of Medellin and to Vatican II must continue the struggle. Sometimes it is hard, as I know from my reporting on the church in Latin America, but I also believe it is the only way to remain steadfast to Christ's vision.

No, never easy, but possible -- with faith. Thank you, Lord God, who hears the cry of the poor, for the gift of Penny Lernoux.

Tom Fox was editor of the National Catholic Reporter when this article appeared.

The following passages were taken from the wake service for Penny Lernoux, held in the main chapel at the Maryknoll Sisters' Center on October 10, 1989.
-- The Editors

GOD IS LOVE, AND LOVE IS stronger than death. Our God is a God whose compassionate love transforms all destructive forces in the universe. It is to this God of compassion and love that we who are family, friends, and colleagues of Penny Lernoux commend her life and her life's work which has been for us a bright, burning flame of justice, peace, and love.

In the name of the Maryknoll Sisters' Community, I would like to welcome all of you, her brothers and sisters in Jesus Christ, who come here this evening to mourn, to celebrate, and to give thanks for the wonderful life and work of our dear friend, Penny Lernoux. All of us who weep at her going and anguish at her loss ask the Lord God to help us rejoice in her lasting transformation ...

Our God is a God whose compassionate love transforms our world and builds the reign of justice, peace, and love. May God heal all broken hearts and wipe away all tears ...

It is a profound mystery why God called Penny at this moment in her life, and we stand in awe, not understanding God's plan, but believing that the Source and Sustainer of all creation does have a plan for Penny, for each of us, and for our world. It is fitting that Penny Lernoux's body reposes in our chapel tonight, that the Mass of Resurrection will be celebrated for her here tomorrow, and that her body will be buried in our cemetery. She thought of us as her spiritual family, and we will always think of Penny as our sister. She died far away from her home in Bogota, Colombia, but we are happy that she spent her last weeks on earth here at our Maryknoll home.

We love Penny. We believe that she has gone to God and that we remain united with her in the communion of saints.

-- Barbara Hendricks

Barbara Hendricks, M.M., worked in the communications office at the Maryknoll Sisters' Center in Ossining, New York when this article appeared.