https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jun/14/martin-gugino-buffalo-police-catholic-worker

Friend says Martin Gugino is a longtime follower of the Catholic Worker Movement – a group that advances peace and justice

Gugino’s presence at the protest and his attempt to engage the police was in keeping with the Catholic Worker Movement, which Gugino and Daloisio are aligned with. The movement takes its position not from a political tract, but from what they see as the most radical passage in the New Testament.

“I know exactly what he was doing. I’ve seen him do it a hundred other times,” says his close friend, fellow activist and public defense attorney Matt Daloisio, in a telephone conversation.

“What I think he was doing was trying to offer them something to read on his phone: about the law, about the right of people to assemble. Or asking why they were preventing people from exercising that right.”

Gugino remains in hospital due to the serious head injury he received at the hands of Buffalo police. Daloisio says that although he has left the ICU, he sustained a brain injury, and “it’s not clear what long-term effects that will have”.

Gugino’s presence at the protest and his attempt to engage the police was in keeping with the Catholic Worker Movement, which Gugino and Daloisio are aligned with. The movement takes its position not from a political tract, but from what they see as the most radical passage in the New Testament.

“Different people figure out ways to live out the Beatitudes,” Daloisio says, referring to the precepts outlined in the Sermon on the Mount.

The passage is familiar to anyone who has even a casual acquaintance with Christian teaching: Jesus inverts worldly values to elevate the poor, the sick and the meek. In Sunday school, it might have the force of a platitude, but Catholic Workers take it with the utmost gravity.

Dorothy Day, the co-founder of the movement, described it as their “manifesto”.

Even though the movement – which Daloisio calls “anarchist” – has no binding structure or formal membership, those aligned with it engage in actions to advance peace and justice as they see it, from voluntary poverty in the service of the poor, to protest, to sometimes controversial forms of direct action.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/15/2020 08:40AM by anybody.

Thanks. I thought he was the president of Ateefa.

Antifa, short for antifascist, and it's not really one organization at all.

Effin’ maniacs.

This sums up my thoughts and feelings perfectly:

https://youtu.be/Iw7vHuhgYTk

Thought this thread would get more play.

these victims are going to 'own' the cities that employed those abusive police / sheriffs.

then, the insurance companies will bail out of coverage or increase the premiums so high that cities/counties can't afford them...


this isn't going to end well, I Promise.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/17/2020 12:40PM by GNPE.

I was not familiar with the Catholic Worker movement prior to this incident. It seems to me to be a distant cousin of South America's Liberation Theology movement in the Catholic Church (one with which Pope Francis would be deeply familiar.) I think it serves to show that Catholicism is a "big tent" religion with may different beliefs and movements.

Regarding Martin Gugino's fall -- I think that falls can be life-threatening for elderly people. Prior to the series of strokes that proved fatal for my elderly mother, she suffered from a fall on a hard sidewalk that resulted in a bone fracture. My sister-in-law always felt that my mother's decline dated from this fall.

I've seen that.

I've seen elderly people who were active, exercised, and were intellectually sharp. Then they fall and break a hip or some other bone and are bed ridden for a week or two or three. Then it transpires that their good health was tenuous, depending on their exercise and activity. When they arise from the bed, they are sometimes different people with less balance and coordination, less strength, and less mental acuity.

The change can be dramatic and sudden.

https://www.cdc.gov/homeandrecreationalsafety/falls/fallcost/deaths-from-falls.html

"Falls are the leading cause of injury-related death among adults age 65 and older, and the age-adjusted rate of fall death is increasing.1,2 The age-adjusted rate of fall deaths is 62 deaths per 100,000 older adults and this rate is increasing.2

Fall death rates among adults age 65 and older have increased more than 30% from 2007 to 2016.2 The increase was observed in 30 states and the District of Columbia. The fastest growing rate was among adults aged 85 and older (4% per year)"

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/67/wr/mm6718a1.htm

https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/different-kind-catholic

When the Jericho Road Community Health Center asked Martin Gugino to explain why he was a donor, he responded with a passage from the New Testament. “Jesus said to clothe the naked, shelter the homeless, feed the hungry and give drink to the thirsty,” he wrote in the Buffalo nonprofit’s newsletter last fall, praising its Vive Shelter for aiding asylum seekers, including a large group of Congolese immigrants.

Now Gugino is under the glare of a much bigger spotlight, known internationally as the seventy-five-year-old protester whom Buffalo police officers pushed to the ground, causing him to bang the back of his head so hard on the pavement that blood flowed immediately from his right ear. He is the subject of one of President Donald Trump’s most asinine tweets—speculation that Gugino faked his injury as an Antifa tactic—and the victim of Trump-inspired conspiracy theorists who wildly distort who he is.

People who actually know Gugino say his Catholic faith is the root of his political activism, and that he’s a gentle man who advocates nonviolence. “He’s a devout Catholic, and really I think part of the reason that the two of us have developed a friendship is because that’s where my own social activism comes from and I recognize it in him,” said Mark Colville, who founded the Amistad Catholic Worker House in New Haven with his wife, Luz. Colville is awaiting sentencing as one of the Kings Bay Plowshares 7, the seven peace activists convicted of federal charges for breaking into a nuclear arsenal at the Kings Bay submarine base in Georgia as part of a protest on April 4, 2018.

Colville, who spent more than a year and a half in jail after his arrest, said Gugino contacted him constantly during his confinement. Postcards were the only permissible mail, and Gugino sent him twenty-five a week, “sometimes more,” he said. “He was with me all through the whole pre-trial and trial process.”

Colville said he asked Gugino to serve as a character witness for his sentencing. To prepare, Gugino began making videos, posting them to YouTube so Colville could review them. (They have since been removed from YouTube.) Many of his friends said Gugino has read deeply in both theology and constitutional law, and he used that knowledge to argue that Catholic social teaching justified the Plowshares defendants’ civil disobedience. Gugino also cited the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King’s quotation that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Colville said Gugino added his own twist: the arc “doesn’t bend by itself,” but “we have to bend it.”

Colville said Gugino went with him on long drives to Washington D.C., where they took part in one to two weeks of fasting and protest with Witness Against Torture, which advocates for the shutdown of the U.S. detention facility at Guantánamo Bay. The group’s origins are in the Catholic Worker movement and, as the Catholic Worker newspaper said in 2006, WAT holds that the jail “degrades the humanity not only of the victims but also of its perpetrators,” adding an appeal “to the soldiers at Guantánamo, our brothers and sisters, to end the torture.”

Jeremy Varon, a history professor at The New School in New York and a “sort of token, secular Jew in this group,” said most members “are coming from a deep place of religious faith. They feel called upon by God to do the work of social justice…. They point out that Jesus himself was the victim of torture. That kind of perspective makes for extraordinary commitment.” Gugino is “right in the heart of that community,” Varon added. It’s not a commitment for the sunshine protester.

This article provides marvelous insight, anybody--and without you posting it here, I never would have known it existed.

Thank you!

Thanks Anybody, very interesting.

In the 1980s, I knew a 'worker priest' (prêtre ouvrier) whose calling was to go out into the workplace and minister to workers. He was a very active, pretty left-wi_ng trade unionist, which made me laugh as, being a "good" Anglican boy myself, he remains the only Catholic priest I have ever known well.

He was a lovely, gentle but determined man.

Tom in Paris

Edited to add this link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker-priest



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/18/2020 02:42PM by Soft Machine.