Renewing Politics from the Ground Up: Faith, Dignity, and Organizing for the Common Good. Isabela Butler and Vanessa Muturi.
The First Question: What Principle Guides and Informs Community Organizing?
Each speaker began by naming the value that grounds their work.
Julie Chávez Rodríguez emphasized solidarity and coalition building, recalling moments when Latino and Filipino workers in Los Angeles stood together during ICE raids and when local businesses joined them in resistance. For Rodríguez, true organizing means unity across struggle and shared survival.
Nicholas Hayes-Mota focused on the dignity of the human person. Drawing from Catholic teaching, he said that when people experience their own power, especially those that are marginalized and oppressed, they rediscover both dignity and agency. “The Bible,” he noted, “teaches us how to treat those different from ourselves and how to build a society that respects every person.”
Rosie Villegas-Smith framed her approach around family, prayer, and connection. She spoke about using social media and prayer communities to reach people and root activism in spirituality.
Joanna Arellano-Gonzalez stressed relationship building and intentionality. Just as prayer deepens faith, authentic relationships deepen organizing.
When asked what spirit inspires her work and what challenges face Latino communities, Julie Chávez Rodríguez pointed to faith-based action and empowering others to take ownership of change. She celebrated New Mexico’s success in passing universal childcare, showing what happens when grassroots advocacy meets legislative follow-through.
Reflecting on the 2024 election, Rodríguez noted that Democrats had lost ground among low-income workers. Her reflection on this: rebuild local bases of power. Grassroots organizing can help counteract negative policies from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. She emphasized focussing on housing, food stamps, and childcare, because these are the issues that will reignite trust and participation.
In a question about how communities can help renew national politics, Nicholas Hayes-Mota drew on thinkers from Alexis de Tocqueville to Saul Alinsky, arguing that democracy can only be experienced at the local level. “To renew politics,” he said, “we must separate people from their categories and meet them in shared experience.”
He quoted Pope Francis’s phrase that “reality is greater than ideas,” warning that social media often isolates and encourages attack rather than encounter. Renewal depends on rebuilding robust local networks that can scale upward to reimagine national politics.
On how solidarity is created in Catholic thought and how it can work nationally, Hayes-Mota emphasized mutual accountability and collective power. “We used to have robust local party chapters and unions that built real community,” he noted. “Now, we have political hobbyists instead.” He pointed to unions, fraternal organizations, and social movements as vital examples on their organizational abilities and how to counter fragmentation and polarization.
When asked how abortion and ideological politics shape Latino voters, Rosie Villegas-Smith offered a grounded perspective. She advocates for women suffering psychological pain from abortion and seeks to “give dignity back to the baby,” she also argued that abortion is not the defining issue for Latino voters. On ideology, she reflected that the Catholic Church has learned to navigate controversial ideas, being both pro-immigrant and pro-life.
The discussion then turned to how faith-based organizing might intersect with social work. Joanna Arellano-Gonzalez said invoking God in activism provides courage and clarity of purpose. She shared the example of organizing a “People’s Mass” outside the Great Lakes Naval Base, where ICE agents were being housed as an act of prayerful protest and solidarity.
When asked what secular organizations can learn from faith-based ones, she replied that the first step is truth-telling. “What’s happening to immigrants is evil,” she said. “We have to cut through dehumanizing narratives.”
In the final question: What needs to change on the national level for party politics? Joanna Arellano-Gonzalez offered a concise but powerful answer: “No more cyclical organizing.” Organizing, she argued, must be an everyday discipline, not an election-year performance. True political renewal, she suggested, begins when communities refuse to disappear between campaigns.
Overall, a consistent theme emerged: politics begins with relationships, not rhetoric.
For these speakers, Catholic social thought is about meeting people in their daily struggles, and transforming this into movement. Renewal won’t come from high up, it must come from local communities rediscovering their power, dignity, and shared humanity.