In a meeting room under Holy Name Cathedral, a rapt group of black Roman Catholics listened as Barack Obama, a 25-year-old community organizer, trained them to lobby their fellow delegates to a national congress in Washington on issues like empowering lay leaders and attracting more believers.\u00a0<\/span> In a meeting room under Holy Name Cathedral, a rapt group of black Roman Catholics listened as Barack Obama, a 25-year-old community organizer, trained them to lobby their fellow delegates to a national congress in Washington on issues like empowering lay leaders and attracting more believers.\u00a0\u201cHe so quickly got us,\u201d said Andrew Lyke, a participant […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-815","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n
<\/span>\u201cHe so quickly got us,\u201d said Andrew Lyke, a participant in the meeting who is now the director of the Chicago Archdiocese\u2019s Office for Black Catholics. The group succeeded in inserting its priorities into the congress\u2019s plan for churches, Mr. Lyke said, and \u201cBarack Obama was key in helping us do that.\u201d\u00a0<\/span>
<\/span>By the time of that session in the spring of 1987, Mr. Obama \u2014 himself not Catholic \u2014 was already well known in Chicago\u2019s black Catholic circles. He had arrived two years earlier to fill an organizing position paid for by a church grant, and had spent his first months here surrounded by Catholic pastors and congregations. In this often overlooked period of the president\u2019s life, he had a desk in a South Side parish and became steeped in the social justice wing of the church, which played a powerful role in his political formation.\u00a0<\/span>
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<\/span>This Thursday (March 27, 2014), Mr. Obama will meet with Pope Francis at the Vatican after a three-decade divergence with the church. By the late 1980s, the Catholic hierarchy had taken a conservative turn that de-emphasized social engagement and elevated the culture wars that would eventually cast Mr. Obama as an abortion-supporting enemy. Mr. Obama, who went on to find his own faith with the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr.\u2019s Trinity United Church of Christ, drifted from his youthful, church-backed activism to become a pragmatic politician and the president with a terrorist \u201ckill list.\u201d The meeting this week is a potential point of confluence.<\/span>
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