An American Catholic Perspective on Urban Neighborhoods: The Lens of Monsignor Geno C. Baroni and the Legacy of the Neighborhood Movement

• Date: 01 October 2012
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1536-7150.2012.00848.x
• Author: JOHN DAVID KROMKOWSKI,JOHN A. KROMKOWSKI
• Published date: 01 October 2012

An American Catholic Perspective on Urban

Neighborhoods: The Lens of Monsignor

Geno C. Baroni and the Legacy of the

Neighborhood Movement

By JOHN A. KROMKOWSKI* and JOHN DAVID KROMKOWSKI†

ABSTRACT. This essay reviews insights and actions that were

prompted by a contemporary crisis of American development that was

not entirely unlike the earlier crisis of growth that inspired Henry

George’s diagnosis and prescription for relief, reform, and renewal. It

traces Catholic underpinnings of social, economic, and political

thought and action and their applications to American urban life. It

highlights new themes of a developing Catholic tradition that engages

new problematic conditions and situations. These new themes and

practices became imperatives related to current dynamics of urban

and metropolitan growth. Thus this essay addresses the sources of this

approach to the crisis of development found in the neighborhood

movement and locates the particularly pivotal participation the Mon-

signor Geno C. Baroni and his vision and action regarding people and

places in our time.

Introduction

People don’t live in cities; they live in neighborhoods. Neighborhoods. Neigh-

borhoods are the building blocks of cities. If neighborhoods die, cities die.

There’s never been a Federal policy that respected neighborhoods. We

destroyed neighborhoods in order to save them.

I used to think I wanted to save the world. Then I got to Washington, and

thought I’d save the city. Now I’d settle for one neighborhood.

—Msgr. Geno Baroni

Today’s disparities and inequities occasioned by irrational land uses,

inequitable land distribution, and dislocations of communities recalls

*John A. Kromkowski is Associate Professor, Department of Politics, the Catholic

University of America.

†John David Kromkowski is an attorney in private practice in Baltimore, MD.

American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Vol. 71, No. 4 (October, 2012).

© 2012 American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Inc.

in some respects the Georgist tradition of critique of domestic policy

and the attendant invention of new formulations and designs of

justice. However, this account of contemporary social thought and

action seeks to widen the horizon of that early critique. It outlines the

fluid and broad definition of a neighborhood and the operations

of neighborhoods, providing examples of neighborhood-based

approaches and action that address the deeper crisis of our time

caused by even higher levels of urbanization.

This essay recovers the archeology and anthropology of the

Catholic social thought (CST), the origins of neighborhood move-

ment, and the insight of Monsignor Geno C. Baroni. It recounts how

they engaged the crisis of our time and articulated a new approach

that Georgists may find attractive, complementary, and entirely rel-

evant to the deepening crisis of urbanization and need to move

beyond the reform of taxation and its claims and pretense as a

sufficient remedy.

To be sure such reform is necessary, but the addition of a fuller

vision and deeper therapy found in following accounts of thought and

action bodes a renewal of founding impulses of Georgism and the

revival of Georgist action for the 21st century. Like Henry George we

should make no small-scale plans nor take on small-scale projects, but

we should recover the small-scale building blocks of neighborhood

and community action as the ground from which the work of justice

in urban life can transform the American reality and its landscape into

the country that always promised liberty and justice for all. Without

this vision and action driven by this expectation our ongoing tasks will

wither into routines and acts of the human spirit become even more

rare and in the long run, we all know what even the most hopeful

economists have foretold.

The Challenge and Opportunity

In the 1960s, the civil rights movement served notice that after

almost two centuries an American ideal of equal treatment before

the law must become a reality. It also reminded us that America was

the special nation that promised hope, dignity, and justice for all.

Yet the translation of these profound desires, first embodied by the

1096 The American Journal of Economics and Sociology

heroic actions of the civil rights movement, into the civil rights laws,

these laws into programs, and these programs into the bureaucra-

tization of the civil rights movement and civic impulses is a sobering

tale of the unexpected consequences of focusing on legalistic

strategies and state-imposed remedies. Such unanticipated and dis-

allowing outcomes suggest that the promises of the American cov-

enant cannot be achieved merely through the sound of great and

prophetic words or through legal authorization by the stroke of

a pen. The tasks of justice emerge from the specific injustices

encountered.

An additional stunning irony of this era was the expectation that

the urban crisis could be resolved by strategies designed to combat

racism. Msgr. Geno Baroni, who marched with Rev. Martin Luther

King, Jr. in Selma and was the Catholic Coordinator for the march in

Washington at which he delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech, was

among the first civil rights activists to perceive the bankruptcy of

racialism and classism in the politics and policy of the late 1960s.

Baroni and his associates at the National Center for Urban Ethnic

Affairs (NCUEA) developed an alternative approach to urban eco-

nomic and cultural contradictions (Kromkowski, Naparstek, and

Baroni 1976). This approach implied a critique of the civil rights

movement and its advocate governmental agency, the U.S. Commis-

sion on Civil Rights. At bottom this difference involved ethnic and

racial culturalism as opposed to a white versus black/majority versus

minorities vision of America and the relative importance and empha-

sis on place and community rather than individual rights and the

universal claim of social justice. These advocates for urban neigh-

borhoods and cultural pluralism argued for the creation of a National

Neighborhood Commission that would promote the renewal of

urban life and more adequately address the pluralistic character of

American culture.

Baroni and his cohorts were bridge-builders and mediators. Hence,

the “neighborhood movement” that they created was not specifically

“Catholic.” Indeed, it always sought to reach beyond mere Catholic

“parish” revitalization, beyond a movement and concrete strategies that

were only concerned about predominately Catholic urban neighbor-

hoods. Justice for all obviously meant community and neighborhood

Catholic Perspective: Neighborhoods 1097