Ed Marciniak's City and Church: A Voice of Conscience by Charles Shanabruch (review)

Reviewed by: Ed Marciniak's City and Church: A Voice of Conscience by Charles Shanabruch Dominic Sanfilippo Ed Marciniak's City and Church: A Voice of Conscience. By Charles Shanabruch. Chicago: ACTA Publications. 390pp. 24. 95. In August 1966, after moving to an apartment on Chicago's West Side, Martin Luther King Jr. led civil rights marchers through the city's Marquette Park neighborhood to help draw attention to racially discriminatory housing practices. In the course of a few hours, King was hit in the head with a rock while dodging bricks, bottles, and other projectiles hurled by hundreds of hostile residents. He would later famously tell reporters he had "never seen such hostility and hatred anywhere in my life, even in Selma" (241). My father, born into a Catholic, Italian American family in 1965, grew up in Marquette Park. He was an infant when King walked nearby his family's home and was in grade school when National Socialist Party of America organizer Frank Collin regularly rallied Nazi sympathizers right down the street. "It was amazing how there was seemingly little reaction from my neighbors to Collin's gatherings, " he told me recently. "I think it was out of fear of going against the young Nazis who lived among us and kept a headquarters nearby. " After the Marquette Park rally, as the public face of efforts to dialogue on racial reconciliation through his leadership of the Chicago Commission of Human Relations (CCHR), Ed Marciniak received death threats as he endeavored to move the discourse "off the streets. . . to the conference table" (243). Many questions would follow, then and now: How does change best occur? Is participation in the messiness of local politics effective strategy, or jaded compromise with partisan interests? Throughout his recent book Ed Marciniak's City and Church: A Voice of Conscience, Charles Shanabruch offers up dozens of other anecdotes from Marciniak's life as a mirror for our own times. In an era when vitriolic rhetoric and civic dysfunction often seem to dominate contemporary public discourse in church and state alike, Ed Marciniak's story provides both a meditative respite on a singular twentieth-century American Catholic life and an argument that community End Page 63 members from markedly different backgrounds can come together to foster real (albeit imperfect) change. In Shanabruch's account, the many hats Marciniak wore over his decades of work in and for the city of Chicago—a young Catholic Worker community organizer grappling with the church's emergent social teaching; Mayor Richard J. Daley's CCHR appointee; the longtime president of Loyola University's Institute of Urban Life; and an informal "advisor to union officials, mayors, senators, congresspeople, judges, and cardinals"—all emerged from his deep-seated vocational drive to live out God's justice and love as a lay person embedded in everyday society. Shanabruch, a faculty member and administrator at St. Xavier University in Chicago's Mount Greenwood neighborhood and a longtime community organizer himself, walks readers through nuanced episodes of Marciniak's life thematically, not chronologically. In a key example, different moments from Marciniak's work leading the CCHR (and mixed reactions, then and now, to his joining Mayor Daley's machine in such an official capacity) are explored in the subsequent chapters "Fighting for Racial Justice" and "Organizing Neighborhood Renewal and Livable Cities. " The effect is kaleidoscopic and largely effective. As Steven P. Millies, the director of Catholic Theological Union's Bernardin Center, reflected in the Chicago Catholic, "to read this biography is like looking at a painting: a detail catches your eye, you shift your gaze to another detail, then (you) step back and see those details together again. " Ed Marciniak's City and Church benefits from both the author's extensive access to Marciniak's papers, family, and colleagues as well as his own decades-long immersion in similar Chicagoland organizing and policy circles. As a result, the text's tone is consistently warm and familial, without veering too much into hagiography. Many continue to wonder how increasing religious disaffiliation and jadedness toward institutional involvement will affect the decision-making of a generation of young Catholic Americans drawn to work for justice. Shanabruch's fascinating. . .