Initiative on Catholic Social Thought and Public Life

You’re really involved in the Georgetown Solidarity Committee. Can you talk a little about the different ways you’re involved in social justice and activism on campus?

So I joined the Georgetown Solidarity Committee (GSC) when I was a freshman, and it was, at first, very much a shock to my system. My parents are very Catholic and always emphasized the idea of social justice and the idea of Catholic social teaching but being in a group that was actually on the ground doing organizing work and grappling with injustices on our campus was very eye-opening to me and I really learned a lot over time.

My freshman year I helped to unionize Einstein’s [Bros. Bagels], Hoya Court, and the hotel, because they were the only workers in Aramark who weren’t unionized at that time. I also helped to organize in Leo’s because they had re-signed their contract with the university, so that was kind of my first foray into those efforts. Since then, I’ve done work with different workers on campus. Right now I’m kind of in the midst of a campaign around international labor issues. I’m on the Licensing Oversight Committee—a board made up of students, professors, and administrators that oversees use of Georgetown logo and the Georgetown name.

Right now, we’re having a problem with Nike because they won’t sign our code of ethics and code of conduct, so we’re kind of at a point where they either sign it or they don’t. It’s very different from organizing on campus, because I don’t know any of the workers who work in Nike factories in Vietnam. I’ve never met them, but I think it also has a really interesting connotation for how we view Georgetown. It’s very symbolic: “Georgetown” is emblazoned across sweatshirts and mugs and whatever. We’re trying to make sure that those things are produced ethically and that we’re as conscious about the university’s global impact as we are about the impact on our own campus.

You mentioned that your parents’ emphasis on Catholic social teaching has been influential in your life. Has the source of your passion and interest always been
your faith or are their other factors involved?

The people and communities that I was exposed to early on were formative. My parents were always very conscious not to keep us sheltered in a little suburban bubble, to actually encounter different people. Since coming to college, I have thought a lot about the intersections between my faith and social justice. Sometimes it’s really difficult to see those connections, particularly when I sometimes see the Catholic Church not always taking views that I believe in or that I believe are essential to social justice. Being able to grapple with that dimension has been very positive for both my faith and activism. I also would say a lot of my concern about these things comes from just being a really avid reader, an NPR listener, and also being from New Orleans. New Orleans is a city that has a long history of both social justice activism, but also a lot of social injustices. There are racial tensions, poverty, environmental injustices there. Having been exposed to that throughout my life and calling New Orleans home has been formative in thinking about social injustice.

You said you’ve been trying to reconcile social justice and your faith. Has Catholic Social Thought (CST)—perhaps the ideas in Rerum Novarum, or the principles of rights of workers and dignity of work—helped bridge the gap between the two at all, or informed your understanding of social justice or your work?

The principles of Catholic social teaching are foundational for me in activism around labor. When I was first exposed to ideas about unions and international labor and the supply chain, it was a very complicated vocabulary and a different way of thinking. Catholic social teaching specifies the right to organize, fair wages, and the like, but it elevates the human person and emphasizes what is most important. And that’s a really powerful way to ground activism.

At Georgetown and as a society we tend to think of work as the hours we put in to our jobs or the problem sets and the papers we have to write or the career that we’re working towards to make a living. But in the tradition of CST, work means a lot more—it’s an expression of our human dignity, a way to participate in human creation. So what does work mean to you?

That’s a challenging question. The principle that work must have inherent dignity and that it should be an expression of one’s own human dignity is really powerful, but it also makes me question the idea of work. I’m always a bit cautious to represent work as "this glorious thing" because for a lot of people, a lot of workers on our own campus, work can be really challenging, and sometimes people are harassed on the job, or are exploited but they need to pay the bills. To me, work is ideally an expression of human dignity. I think work is a way of encountering. It’s such a fundamentally human act that really intersects with a bunch of different other ideas. So if you care about workers, if you care about workers' rights, if you care about worker justice, you really care about a lot of things because it’s intimately tied with other issues. It’s so intersectional.

You went to World Youth Day in Krakow, Poland this summer. Did Pope Francis say anything in particular that informed or inspired your social justice work on campus in a new way?

There was one speech that Pope Francis gave that really touched a nerve with me. He talked about being able to move past self-doubt. Sometimes when I look off into the future, I feel like "I can never fix anything. Nothing I’ll do will ever have a big enough impact," and his message was to get up off the couch. He was talking about getting up and doing and encountering and working and seeing and that action is a kind of mandate for Catholics. It’s a privilege for me to participate in an event like World Youth Day, to see the different people who were excited not only their faith but also about making a positive change in the world. I see myself as having this positive obligation to actually follow through with that, to be mindful of when I’m doing something, when I’m not doing something, if I’m doing it for myself or if I’m doing it for others.

This is not necessarily directly related, but it made me think a lot about—I’m going to steal this one from Fr. Greg [Schenden], because this is really his thing—what we need, what we don’t need in life, but also in our pilgrimage in Poland specifically, and how that applies to the rest of my life. I think that really fit in well with conclusions that I had come to—especially working in GSC—about what it means to be successful, what it means to be content with what you have, and it made me think a lot about things like materialism, and making money, and capitalism. It made me think a lot about what is important, and I think community and being able to live out my life in a way that’s pointed toward justice and toward the good of others is a lot more important than anything else.

Julia Greenwood (C'19) is an undergraduate studying American studies at Georgetown. Lily Ryan (C'18) is an undergraduate studying government, sociology, and education at Georgetown.