COPS/Metro Launches 50th Year with Powerful Assembly

In December, more than 1,000 people packed an athletic arena at St. Mary’s University to launch a yearlong celebration of the organization’s 50-year history — and to plan for its future. Sitting with their churches amid the electric energy of a political rally, the crowd cheered as their pastors and lay leaders secured commitments from the city’s political and business leaders to work together on a variety of initiatives.

They are also the leading example of a movement that has revitalized a strategy of community organizing that originally spread throughout the U.S. at the tail end of the Great Depression. Saul Alinsky, a community activist and political theorist who wrote “Rules for Radicals,” and others founded the Industrial Areas Foundation in Chicago in 1940, rallying with leaders, including clergy, in impoverished, often urban, neighborhoods to improve residents’ lives.

Led by Ernesto Cortés Jr., COPS revised Alinsky’s tactics to push more deeply into congregations, especially Catholic parishes, developing the organizing skills of their lay members, particularly women, and turning them into community leaders.

“What changed in San Antonio was a real further grounding of organizing in parishes, in the life of ordinary Catholics, in the Catholic social tradition,” said Nicholas Hayes-Mota, assistant professor of social and theological ethics at Santa Clara University in California. “It’s in San Antonio with COPS that you see a real deepening of community organizing’s relationship to the Catholic Church.”

[Photo Credit: Aleja Hertzler-McCain, Religion News Service]

In San Antonio, a Pioneer of Modern Faith-Based Community Organizing has Deep Roots, Religion News Service