"A Different Bad Time"

COLBY

It was a cold night. By then, the sun had sunk over the city. Half-past five and it was already dark. 

The air was crisp, and they were ready for action. They gathered just outside the University Church, the Catholic space of worship at Fordham’s Rose Hill campus. Illuminated by the warm afterglow of an evening mass. 

Some had made posters earlier, and passed them out. “End the Cruelty,” One read. “Jesus was a refugee,” another said.

It was November 13th, 2025. A Thursday in the middle of autumn. And these Catholics were preparing for a night of vigilance. It was part of a nation-wide day of quote-unquote “Public Witness for Immigrants.” A day to show up in support and solidarity.

TIM

Yeah, so One Church One Family is basically a popular movement of Catholics across the country...

COLBY

This is Tim, a Jesuit, who was studying at Fordham.

TIM

...that has organized these prayerful witnesses and demonstrations to express our solidarity with our brother and sister migrants. And also to call for reform of immigration. 

COLBY

And then they gathered in a circle.

The plan was to walk across the Rose Hill campus, out the gates, and west on Fordham Road toward a Catholic church, St. Nicholas of Tolentine. It was a protest walk, of sorts, against the mounting actions of the Trump Administration’s immigration crackdown. A moment to be visible. A moment to say: This isn’t right. And we’re publicly against it. 

But it wasn’t going to be a protest just yet. Not while on Fordham’s campus. 

And then they walked. Silently. Holding their signs down. Maybe three dozen strong. Away from the warmth of the chapel. Into the cold dark night. A city on edge. A city of immigrants. A city waiting for them.

No songs just yet. Just the crack of hard soles on old stones. And then they walked. Silently.

You’re listening to REVOKED? 

I’m your host Colby McCaskill

This is Chapter 6: “A Different Bad Time.”

COLBY

Okay. So, as we explained throughout these past few chapters, the events of last Spring churned up a lot of big questions. One of these questions became a real point of contention between students, and the administration. And between other students. 

There was a split, really over how loud the university should be. If you remember all the way from Chapter 4, we heard from the faith leaders at Fordham. And even President Tetlow. And they told us that the idea of Fundamental Human Dignity is essential to each of their respective faiths. 

More and more this past year, as the spring became summer, and then students returned back in the Fall, Trump’s administration continued to stress-test the constitutional protections of due process. The ways our legal system had been structured to recognize the Fundamental Human Dignity of all. 

Detention numbers climbed. Arrests surged. Deportations rose. And the language began to change too.

On November 26, so a couple months after the visa turmoil, the president posted this to social media. It’s a long post, so I’m leaving some stuff out. But he said: 

“I will permanently pause migration from all Third World Countries […] remove anyone who is not a net asset to the United States […] denaturalize migrants who undermine domestic tranquility […] Only REVERSE MIGRATION can fully cure this situation.”

And on Air Force One, just a few days later, one reporter asked Trump if he was trying to revoke citizenship.

TRUMP

If I have the power to do it, I’m not sure that I do, but if I do, I would de-naturalize. Absolutely.

COLBY

That tape is so bad, sorry. He’s saying: "If I have the power to do it, I’m not sure that I do, but if I do, I would de-naturalize. Absolutely."

Citizenship, once understood as permanent, is now explicitly being described as potentially conditional — by the President. 

And the rhetoric kept getting more sharp. And mean.

TRUMP

They contribute nothing. I don’t want them in our country, I’ll be honest with you, okay.

COLBY

These comments are about Somali immigrants Trump made during a recorded cabinet meeting.

TRUMP

We’re going to go the wrong way if we keep taking in garbage into our country.

COLBY

By early December 2025, about six months ago, the argument widened beyond law entirely and explicitly:

TRUMP

Why can’t we have some people from Norway? Sweden? Just a few. Let’s have a few. From Denmark? Do you mind sending us a few — send us some nice people, do you mind? But we always take people from Somalia. Places that are a disaster, right? Filthy, dirty, disgusting, ridden with crime.

COLBY

That contrast — Northern Europe versus African countries — echoes an older hierarchy. One that has appeared throughout  American history: from the founding, to the Chinese Exclusion Act in the late 1800s, to early 20th-century eugenics movements, to the 1924 Immigration Act that explicitly favored Northern European immigrants.

In those moments, immigration policy wasn't really about numbers. It was about national character. About preserving what the powerful described as quote unquote “civilization.”

The language in late 2025 — talk of “net assets,” of civilizational compatibility, of reversing migration — landed in that same historical terrain. 

The policies built the enforcement system.

But the rhetoric touched something deeper: Trump’s vision for who he wants to be American.

And that is where immigration policy intersects with older currents in American political thought — currents that have long blended nationalism and racial hierarchy.  

These are strange times for places that care more about human dignity than what is the preferable race of Americans.

And so the very pertinent question we’ve been tracking is: How active should Fordham be? How ought Fordham respond when the values that infuse the institution are disregarded, violated, trampled in rhetoric and policy? What should it do?

That’s what we’re diving into this chapter. The Spring 2025 visa turmoil arc is over. Next chapter, Chapter 7, is our finale. But before we end this series, we want to talk about what action might look like. 

You can kind of see Chapter 4 as a digression about discernment. What it means to think through what to do. This chapter, Chapter 6, is a digression about action. What it means to actually make it happen. 

And, as you already heard, we’re taking you inside an evening vigil in the Bronx, to see how some students and professors are already answering this question. It happened just a few months ago.

But we’re also going to go back in time to the 1970s, when Fordham University faced a similar crisis, right in its own backyard. 

At that time, the Bronx was devastated. Decades of racialized disinvestment and redlining had wrought havoc on the borough. And Fordham community members decided they had to do something. 

We’re going to start there now, and give you updates as the vigil progresses. 

You’re listening to REVOKED? Don’t go away.

--

Autumn. Leaves are changing. New York is turning red and orange. The days are growing cooler. It’s the fall of 1977. And the President’s in town. President Jimmy Carter.

EILEEN

There was this idea that he needed to show that he cared about cities.

COLBY

This is Eileen Markey by the way. She’s a Fordham-educated historian. Journalist. Author. She’s writing a book about this moment in Bronx history.

EILEEN

And so his handlers decided to take this detour from wherever he was staying, instead of taking him straight to the UN, they took him on this tour of, winding tour, up into the Bronx. And he goes and stands in the rubble of Charlotte Street.

WALTER CRONKITE

President Carter took a break from his UN activities for an unscheduled visit to a slum.

ANN COMPTON

100 blocks north of UN headquarters, the President’s limousine cruised unannounced for more than an hour, through streets crumbling through neglect.

BOB SCHIEFFER

Some have suggested that if Mr. Carter wanted to see poverty, he didn’t need to go overseas, he should just come here.

STEVE YOUNG

30,000 buildings have been set on fire and abandoned in the last 10 years.

ANN COMPTON

The landscape was not so encouraging at the corner of Boston Road and Charlotte Street. 

COLBY

Charlotte street is this road in the middle of the Bronx. Right next to Crotona Park. And by October of 1977, there wasn’t much left of it.

EILEEN

There’s many years when these buildings in Charlotte Street are like a forest of abandoned buildings: empty. By 1977, they’ve actually been knocked down. Because the City would knock down abandoned buildings, because, you know, they’re dangerous. 

...

And then you’d just have a rubble strewn lot.

COLBY

The city was bleeding jobs. Manufacturing and factory careers were vanishing. Middle-class families were leaving for the suburbs.

EILEEN

So when Carter came on this tour driving through the Bronx, he gets to Charlotte Street. And that’s what it is, it’s a rubble strewn lot. It looks almost like an open field except it’s in the middle of a dense city.

BOB JAMIESON

Mr. Carter’s trip to the South Bronx was made, the White House said, to give the President a look at urban decay at the most famous blighted area in the country.

EILEEN

He’s standing in an American city. You know, a mere couple of miles from the center of global commerce, right? And the center of global diplomacy. And yet it looks like scenes people are familiar with from the end of World War 2.

LOUIS BAERGA

About four blocks down, and it looks like East Germany during the war. You know, it’s really bombed out.

EILEEN

It looks like something, you know, that there had been an aerial bombardment on. There hadn’t. What there had been was a few decades of austerity, redlining, urban renewal, suburbanization, right? Disinvestment. And this is the end result of it.

COLBY

Before this moment. Before President Jimmy Carter at Charlotte Street. Before disinvestment. Before red lines on federal maps. Before highways split neighborhoods apart. 

The Bronx was pretty rural. 

It was less like apartments and tenements. It was more like homesteads. Estates. Little villages. But transit was changing everything. Subway lines extended north. Suddenly, the borough was accessible to working families. Families who were seeking cleaner air and larger apartments. 

The Bronx came to life with an influx of immigrants. Italian laborers, Jewish garment workers, Irish civil servants. They unionized. They paved the streets. They built networks of schools, churches, synagogues, political clubs, small businesses.

Yankee Stadium opened in the middle of 1920s, it brought baseball to the Bronx. And the world to the borough. 

And that context matters. Because the devastation that would come a few years later was not some natural life cycle. It was the product of policy. And power. 

The power to draw maps. Specifically the power of...

BRIAN

The Home Owners Loan Corporation — it’s initials are HOLC, so sometimes it’s referred to as HOLC — these maps that were put out, of probably 50 major cities around the United States with different neighborhoods that were shaded in different colors.

sCOLBY

There’s a great resource online where you can see these maps, high-res scans, and a lot of other information about this thing we call “Redlining.” The site is called Mapping Inequality. Created by the Digital Scholarship Lab at the University of Richmond, in Virginia. There’s a link to it on our website.

Also I’ve got to fact check Brian on this. Theres more than 200 of these maps. But yes, as he said, they were shaded in different colors —

BRIAN

Where green meant that it was an excellent neighborhood. Blue meant that it was pretty good. Yellow meant it was declining. And red meant already declined. With this idea that the maps would serve as sort of guidelines for lending institutions

COLBY

— like banks, or, even the government —

BRIAN

to know whether or not it was safe to lend in a certain neighborhood. That’s where those maps come from.

...

But redlining is much more than the maps. The maps are a really nice visual to kind of help us see what was happening. But redlining exists apart from the maps, and existed even much later than the maps.

COLBY

Also, sorry, I forgot to mention. This is Brian Martindale. He is also a Fordham-educated historian. He got his masters in Urban Studies in 2025. And his thesis was on this topic: Redlining in the Bronx.

He’s also a Jesuit. 

He and Eileen are going to be our tour guides over the next few minutes, as we unpack how the Bronx came to the breaking point, and how Fordham responded to that crisis.

Anyway. Redlining, Brian explains:

BRIAN

is that, rather than looking at an individual's reliability for returning money that has been loaned to them, they would look at a neighborhood. 

COLBY

So, these banks, or even the government, would decide, because of the race of the people who lived in that neighborhood,

BRIAN

it's too high of a risk to lend there because we don’t think the people that live there are going to give us our money back. And so we don’t lend to that kind of a place.

COLBY

And mostly based on a neighborhood’s racial makeup — and the racist attitudes of the ones making the decisions.

BRIAN

This is a predominantly black neighborhood, this is a predominantly migrant neighborhood, this is a predominantly jewish neighborhood. And so, we don’t think that those people are trustworthy. So we’re not going to lend there.

COLBY

In the Bronx, redlining worked a little differently. In other places, these maps and policies would mean people couldn’t get enough loan money to buy their first home. 

But uptown, it was mostly renters.

BRIAN

So, rather than individuals being not able to access financial resources, landlords weren’t really able to access financial resources. And so the buildings that people lived in in the Bronx oftentimes couldn’t get loans to be able to be rehabilitated, or continue to improve those buildings.

COLBY

So, it’s like the landlords were the ones who couldn’t get the money. But —

BRIAN

The residents are, of course, the ones who end up suffering. Because they’re the ones living in buildings where the front door’s lock is broken and isn’t getting fixed. Where there’s broken windows. Where the roof is leaking. Where locks on their door isn’t working. Paint is peeling. Et cetera.

COLBY

The locks rusted.

The roofs slowly started to leak.

It became apparent that the system was creaking as well. 

The post-war housing boom highlighted these racist policies in sharp contrast. And the next war — Vietnam — made these inequities even more stark. Trust in the government fell. 

And as the nation rounded 1970, New York City fell into even more disarray. 

Lines at the gas pump curled around city blocks. 

Inflation chewed through paychecks. 

Bronx landlords turned to fire. 

New York turned red and orange.

EILEEN

So a whole bunch of things were going wrong.

... 

And what that meant, in what you saw in the Bronx in the 1970s, was neighborhoods really emptied out and hollowed out. And then this rash of fire. 

...

And what the RAND corporation suggested was closing a lot of fire houses. Closing a lot of fire houses in fire-prone neighborhoods. It did this because they had a statistical sample, right? About as elegant as a lot of the algorithms that run our lives today, meaning it wasn’t at all. 

...

So, bad planning, bad ideas.

...

This emergence of fire, and then eventually the emergence of arson for profit.

COLBY

When buildings lost value as housing, the only value left was the insurance claim. Fire became a financial instrument to recoup lost profit.

BRIAN

It was all blamed on the residents. But as the time went on, people realized that oftentimes it was landlords who were paying some kid on the block a hundred bucks to go light their building on fire.

COLBY

These landlords —

BRIAN

They didn’t feel like they could get enough money from their rent to make the building work. They weren’t able to get loans to improve the building situation. So, the only way that they understood that they could get any money out of this building, was to light the building on fire, collect the insurance premium, and walk away.

EILEEN

Most people I know who are of that age, if they grew up in the Bronx, and you say: Where’d you grow up? And they’d say: Well, 138th and Alexander. Well, and then 140th. And then here. And it’s a hopscotch, a hopscotch out of the frying pan. People had five and six and seven addresses because there were fires all over their buildings.

COLBY

The instability became generational. Childhood memories became a sequence of temporary addresses. Churches changed. Social networks fractured. Housing insecurity became the norm.

EILEEN

This didn’t happen overnight. It really happened over 15 years. But by the mid '70s, many many blocks of the Bronx, lets say from the very tip at the bottom where 138th and Mott Haven is, up, almost as far as the Cross Bronx, were just pock-marked with abandoned buildings. 

COLBY

And there was an open question, as to how far this practice of fire — this manifestation of institutional malice and neglect — how far that would reach.

BRIAN

There was a fear that it was going to eventually cross Fordham road, which was kind of the breaking point.

...

And that’s what Fordham University feared as well — Is that, if this was happening in the South Bronx, how do we survive in an environment where it feels like the whole place is just burning down around us.

COLBY

Fordham is right-smack-dab in the middle of the Bronx. Not 3 miles from Charlotte Street. But even though our university was physically close, it was also really far away.

BRIAN

While the neighborhoods around Fordham are experiencing this disinvestment, and are unable to get the financial resources to continue to invest in their neighborhoods, Fordham has access to all kinds of financial resources that the others don’t. And so if we think of redlining as a discriminatory practice that prevents certain people from accessing financial resources based on their geographic location, which is often, then, code for race or ethnicity or background or whatever, Fordham was not affected in the same way as the rest of the neighborhoods.

COLBY

Fordham still had access, easy access, to —

BRIAN

HUD funding, bank loans, private donations as well. And endowment interest.

...

And so, that’s the insulation piece, that Fordham had access to money that the rest of the neighborhood didn’t.

COLBY

Keep in mind also, there’s an element to this where Fordham kinda benefited from these racist policies.

There were local bankers and Real Estate brokers on Fordham’s Board of Trustees. Fordham, as an institution, is not innocent in this system. 

But, as Brian writes in his thesis —

"There are no simple answers to characterize Fordham as “good” or “bad” in its relationship to this tool of racial segregation or the neighborhood it affected."

But yeah, Fordham was fiscally insulated from arson and redlining. Like it didn’t really hurt their bottom line. But it was still a problem.

BRIAN

I found a handwritten note from President Finlay in the archives after he visited alumni in Arizona or something, where it says something along the lines of: They don’t want to send their kids to the Bronx. Or: I would never send my kid there, having seen what it looks like.

...

If we say that insolation is neutral, and try to weigh: did it benefit more or suffer more? I think they benefitted more. I think the ways in which they were negatively impacted were pretty minor. Especially because their enrollment was increasing at Lincoln Center at the same time. So, they didn’t even lose the tuition money. 

COLBY

Fordham had options. It had geography. It had alumni networks. It had a second campus in Manhattan. If one location felt unstable, then there was somewhere else to go.

Nationally, the borough had become a symbol of urban collapse. And yet, there were still people there.

EILEEN

Still living and still managing lives!

COLBY

But the Bronx didn’t have a backup plan.

Store owners didn’t have an alternate storefront waiting in Midtown. Churchgoers didn't want to suddenly up and leave their parish. And kids couldn’t suddenly transfer their childhood to Manhattan. 

While institutions were debating enrollment strategy and reputation management, residents were negotiating their survival. They were learning to work, pray, to live, with sirens in the background.

EILEEN

By 1977, the Bronx was famous for being a disaster zone. Because it’s really, at that point, ten years into fires.

COLBY

This is how you get a bombed-out Charlotte street. It was —

EILEEN

really the result of a confluence of major public policies, huge institutional and social change.

...

Urban renewal, redlining, right? Big, big, huge social phenomena. Each independent in their own way. But they all sort of merged together to result in absolutely catastrophic outcomes in the Bronx.

COLBY

And to the outside observer, it was just unreal.

BRIAN

There’s like front page New York Times articles about Jimmy Carter seeing this sea of rubble in the Bronx. And people after that — and probably before a little bit too — but I think that that is a significant moment where people around the country are like: Oh my gosh. The Bronx is falling apart.

EILEEN

Those photos are really shocking, not to the people in the Bronx, right? Because the people in the Bronx had been living through this for ten years already. But it’s the President of the United States. So those photos get beamed around the world. And a lot of people in the United States and elsewhere see them, and say: Oh, my God. What happened to the Bronx?

BRIAN

And when people find out that Fordham’s in the Bronx, they’re scared to send their students there.

COLBY

Disinvestment, arson, and other policy failures converged. The Bronx was genuinely under threat of destruction by these unholy powers and policies.

At risk: Fordham’s home borough, its neighborhood.

And so the question of the moment: How would this Catholic university respond?

COLBY

They arrived at Fordham road, right next to the Metro-North station. 

One of the student organizers was AnnaMarie Pacione. You might remember her from Chapter 4. She explained later that before she had left the campus — Eileen, our historian, and one of the organizers of the event, had told her a bunch of people had arrived outside the gates a little early.

As AnnaMarie walked with the Fordham crowd, A biting chill flew down the wide street, cutting between the cars. 

But on the other side of the street, a dark mass of people huddled. They were bundled up to stave off the weather, gathered in a circle.

As she drew closer she could hear it just above the usual din of a city street.

Singing.

ANNAMARIE

And then when I realized that she was talking about the big crowd, I was just overcome with emotion.

COLBY

The circle was lit by hand-held electric candles. These Bronxites had been waiting for the Fordham crowd to arrive. These fellow travelers on the vigil walk had begun to sing.

ANNAMARIE

And more of them than us. And what does that say to us of our need to show up, and our need to be with them.

COLBY

A few more songs. And then the group, now seemingly a hundred strong, began making their way up the hill that is Fordham Road. 

They overfilled the sidewalk, so some walked in the street. They carried signs and rosaries. Ave Maria rippled down through the crowd. From those at the front, all the way to the back. West on Fordham Road, they walked. And kept watch.

--

By the early 1970s, the Bronx was in crisis. Buildings had burned, landlords had walked away. Jobs were leaving. Families were leaving. Heat was disappearing from apartment radiators in the dead of winter. And in the middle of it all sat Fordham University — a Jesuit Catholic institution. Founded before the Bronx was part of New York City. 

EILEEN

Fordham is here, you know, right here in the middle of the Bronx. And it’s seeing all these things that are happening to cities happening to its city too.

COLBY

So, the question was unavoidable: What is Fordham’s responsibility to its surroundings?

One of the people asking that question was Paul Brandt.

EILEEN

Paul Brandt was actually an engineer by training.

COLBY

And he was part of New York City’s Urban Fellows Program — which was not a church program. It was a city program.

It recruited young professionals and placed them inside the government not so much to theorize about urban collapse, but to confront it. Fellows worked in agencies and studied policy, and learned how power actually moved through City Hall.

EILEEN

But he’s very practical minded. His engineer mind, you know? So, he comes out of that Urban Fellows program being like: Aright! What are we going to do? How are we going to help the city? Gets involved in the community board just a little bit south of Campus, actually. He’s based at Fordham. Fordham is his home. And he just kind of starts learning about things that are going wrong in the neighborhood around the campus.

BRIAN

There wasn’t room for him at the Jesuit community on campus, because there were so many Jesuits at that time. So he and a few other guys, I think including, at one point, Tania Tetlow’s dad, when he was still a Jesuit. They lived in an apartment on Marion Avenue, I think is the name of the street. Which is a little bit to the west of Fordham, I think.

COLBY

This is true, by the way. Brian asked the Jesuits and they confirmed it.

BRIAN

They just started to get to know their neighbors and notice stuff.

...

There was a bunch of trash that wasn’t getting picked up one time, or something. And so they kind of got a crew together to pick up this trash. And they called the Department of Sanitation to get some mattresses out of some empty lot, or something like that.

...

And people around them were like, what are you doing? The city doesn’t come here. People don’t just get together and pick up trash around here. This place is — this is not what happens here. And he kind of became curious, and so he shifted from the engineering degree. He did like a year —  work with the city kind of thing. And he was in the health department with the City, which gave him more of an introduction to the rest of the reality in the Bronx and elsewhere in New York City.

...

And so he sort of, I think, just fell into this urban reality and was like Hey, I think somebody should do something about this.

EILEEN

And Fordham’s trying to figure out: What is its responsibility to this borough as, indeed, jobs are leaving. Indeed, conditions are getting worse. Indeed a lot of the people that Fordham had traditionally served are moving away.

...

So, Paul Brandt was like: We need to figure out something to do. And his old seminary buddies were like: What it needs to be is organizing.

MITCH

I had this research and kind of operational background in housing. And so Paul said Mitch could do the housing piece. And Roger can do the organizing piece.

COLBY

This is actually one of Paul’s buddies. Jim Mitchell. Mitch. Still, actually, a professor at Fordham. Brian interviewed him for his thesis, and they both agreed to let us play tape from that interview.

MITCH

And that's how it happened. We came here

...

just after Labor Day in 1972. And we were going to live with Paul.

EILEEN

So these pastors of all of these parishes in the Bronx were getting news from their members, right? You might go to your pastor if you had a problem. So, people were increasingly going to their pastors and saying: Hey we don’t have heat in my building anymore. Or: We call the landlord and he doesn’t make repairs anymore. Or: We haven’t had a super in two years. Or: the landlord is trying to evict me because I haven’t been paying my rent. But I’m not paying my rent because I don’t have any heat.

MITCH

But Paul had been talking with these priests. And talking to them from the standpoint of: You know, if you don’t do something, you’re going to lose all your people. 

...

So, we started by organizing buildings. 

...

So, by the summer — you know, we got, I don’t know, 10, 15 tenant associations. 

...

— went to the parishes, the 14 parishes, and took up a second collection to start the coalition. Which was huge. It was, I don’t know, 35,000 bucks or something. 

COLBY

A couple of years pass. That becomes something called the Northwest Bronx organizing project. And then eventually that becomes the Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition. The NWBCCC.

EILEEN

And so it’s this interesting intersection between the energy of these young men, who have these interesting experiences, and are able to think kind of ambitiously. And the really organic, extant relationships within each of these parishes. And the fact that the parishes, which are diocesan run, obviously, have some relationship with Fordham. So that Brandt can go to each of these pastors at these ten parishes — north of the Cross Bronx Expressway, west of the river, the Northwest Bronx quadrant — and say: You all know that things are getting worse in your neighborhoods. How about we try to approach it this way?

COLBY

This was a people-centric approach to an institutionally-perpetrated problem. And it was revolutionary, not just for the Bronx, but also for the Catholic Church.  

In 1962, Pope John the twenty-third had opened the Second Vatican Council. People typically call it “Vatican II.”

This was maybe the most significant event in recent Church history. 

BRIAN

So Vatican II kind of — people talk about it as like: Opening up the windows of the Church up to the world. 

...

Vatican II is like: Okay, actually, the Church should be engaging in the world.

COLBY

The Council’s documents spoke of the People of God, of shared dignity, of the baptismal call that belonged not only to clergy but to factory workers, mothers, students, janitors.

EILEEN

Among the theologies of Vatican II was a sense that the people in the pews, the regular people, the majority, the non-preists, were adults. Right? Were not just supposed to be there doing what they were told, you know, sitting and standing and kneeling. But rather, that they have a full and active conscience, an active faith life, expertise of their own. And a responsibility to build the church around them.

COLBY

Authority was not erased. But responsibility was widened. Conscience was taken seriously. The people in the pews — they’re called the “laity” — were not spiritual children. They were adults; they were free moral agents, capable of reading the signs of the times and acting on them. 

In the Bronx, neighborhoods were burning. Landlords were abandoning buildings. 

Policy decisions were hollowing out city blocks 

And so this theology was not abstract. It was calling people to action.

EILEEN

Like a real sense of: Alright, so you think your neighborhood is in bad shape? What are you going to do about it? Right? Don’t just complain about it. What are you going to do about it? So, all of these different pieces mean that they can all kind of match together. Okay, the pastors are sort of ready to do something because their neighborhoods are suffering. The pastors are also ready to say to the regular parishioners: Well, you’ve got some rights and responsibilities, how are you going to act? You have these Jesuits who have this really interesting formation, both intellectually and in practical work, ready to make change. And all those elements can come together. And they do, in the birth of the Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition.

...

Which ends up having this really important role in fighting redlining. And in building hundreds of tenant associations in those years.

COLBY

These Fordham-affiliated advocates built tenants associations. They pushed building managers to fix the roof. Or replace the front door locks. They met with bank leaders, pushing them to keep landlords accountable. To invest in the borough again. And if that didn’t happen, they picketed! They got in front of politicians and city leaders and demanded answers and change. Lots of real, practical steps to reverse the effects of redlining and institutional disinvestment.

And that’s great and all, but, like, why are jesuits doing housing advocacy? Like isn’t their job supposed to just be preaching the bible.

I asked Brian to make it make sense.

BRIAN

This isn’t from Vatican II. This is from the — it’s from the decrees of the — accompanying documents of the 31st through 35th — so the general congregation of the society of Jesus. So, this is a Jesuit specific document. 

COLBY

So he went over to his shelf. Picked out a book of Jesuit decrees. And began reading.

BRIAN

The mission of the society of Jesus today is the service of faith, of which, the promotion of justice is an absolute requirement.

COLBY

Therefore, he explained,

BRIAN

this whole faith thing, if we take that seriously, we can’t not promote justice. 

...

The way that I’ve kind of understood it and learned about it in my formation in Jesuit schools, and then as a Jesuit, is that justice is not only being nice. Not only feeding people who are hungry. But it’s also looking at the structures behind what leads to human suffering. Or what leads to oppression. Or what leads to marginalization. And working to try and change those structures, so the marginalization or oppression, or suffering, doesn’t happen in the first place.

COLBY

But he also said this belief is based on his understanding of the christian scriptures.

BRIAN

There are those lines from the book of Isaiah that Jesus reads at the beginning of his ministry: I’ve called, ah. My scripture memorization is not so good. But, it’s like: Um, I call a day acceptable to the Lord, the oppressed go free, that the captives — ah. Okay. Let me see. What's that? It’s from Isaiah. Jesus reads it from the beginning of Luke. 

...

Here it is! Uh, let’s see. Yeah, Isaiah 61. The spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring glad tidings to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to captives, and recovery of sight to the blind. To let the oppressed go free and proclaim a year acceptable to the Lord. So, if part of our mission, as people of faith, is to bring about this vision of the Kingdom of God that Jesus names. And he reads and says: Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing. Like: I want this to actually happen. 

...

Yeah, this is the idea. The captives should be freed. The poor should be well. Recovery of sight to the blind. Like if we’re trying to make that Kingdom of God a reality, it requires the changing of these systems. So, I think the Jesuits at Fordham are trying to grapple with: What does it look like for us to live in such a way that brings justice to the world, here in this place. 

...

That’s where I think it comes from. And like why is it that Jesuits are doing this thing that seems not very religious. But it’s coming from that place of faith has to be engaged with justice.

EILEEN

You know, the bishop for this part of the Bronx went parish to parish, delivering this amazing homily, that people who were a part of that era refer to as the Nazareth Homily. It’s like: What good can come from that place?

COLBY

Nazareth. It’s a backwater village in first-century Galilee. The Roman Empire controlled it, it had no political power; no prestige; no reason to really expect anything remarkable. 

In the Gospel of John, when Philip tells Nathanael that the Messiah has been found: “Jesus of Nazareth.” Nathanael responds with a line edged in skepticism: “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?”

By the 1970s, the Bronx had become America’s Nazareth; it was a borough spoken about with disbelief, pity. Sometimes contempt. Burning buildings on the nightly news. Insurance fraud. Redlining. Disinvestment. And that was the bishop’s point.

EILEEN

And he’s saying: The Bronx, what good can come from that place? But of course good can come from that place if all of us work together. We love our neighborhood. We can defend our neighborhoods against these forces of entropy. These can be good places. These are good places. And it’s our responsibility, we the people in the pews, and us the clergy, to work together to make that happen. That’s the bishop. That’s the bishop going —

...

every weekend for several weekends, to a different parish speaking and raising money for the nascent coalition to be able to hire organizers, some of the first of whom are young Fordham grads.

COLBY

You can read the whole homily on our website. But I do want to read to you a couple of particularly grabbing paragraphs.

NAZARETH HOMILY

The Holy Father has declared 1975 a year of Reconciliation and Renewal. The Universal Church will be concerned with these themes. In the Church, the local Church of the Northwest Bronx, we’re going to try something very concrete and practical, action-oriented; something that seems secular but which really is a religious vision calling for moral uprightness and prayer. And so far as we know, what we’re undertaking for 1975 in the Northwest Bronx is unique in the American Church, both for its scope — and for its challenge — to every Catholic, and indeed to every person who lives or works or studies in our area.

The scope is to renew the neighborhoods of the Northwest Bronx; to reconcile conflicting interests in the common enterprise of survival; to renew the spiritual bonds between men which make for strong community life, lively and clean politics, responsive government; to build up rather than to tear down.

The challenge is an enormous one. It involves spiritual labor and emotional labor and intellectual labor and physical labor. We're trying to understand; we're trying to move the heavy burden of inertia and to change the way things have always been done — or left undone! We're trying to persuade people to set aside their fights and feuds, which consume so much of their energies and distract us all from the work at hand — which is, namely and to wit: HOW DO WE SAVE OUR CITY? HOW DO WE SAVE OUR SELVES?

COLBY

Week after week, parish after parish, the bishop translated theology into encouragement. 

Vatican II's language about the People of God became line items in organizing budgets. Because if the Church was going to proclaim — in the Gospel and in the sanctuaries — that grace could rise from Nazareth — from the Bronx — then it had to invest in that claim. 

And that meant non-clergy organizers on payroll. Young graduates knocking on doors. Parish basements turning into strategy rooms. 

EILEEN

Most Catholics are not priests.

...

The Arch-diosceces of New York is sponsoring housing programs — is providing, you know, moral heft in these organizations’ arguments with the City, where they’re able to say: Well this is the Catholic Church saying you need to rebuild housing, not just, you know, five people. Or even two hundred people. Or even just this priest. But, no, it’s The Church.

...

When I think of the Bronx, I don’t think of the Bronx abandoning itself at all, no. I think of people who stuck to their guns who really really loved their neighborhoods, and had intense commitments to their neighborhoods. And stayed with the neighborhoods against all odds. And one of the institutions that stayed with the Bronx against all odds was the Catholic Church.

COLBY

The Bronx did not rescue itself overnight. It took lawsuits and tenant associations. It took parish meetings and organizing drives. It took bishops willing to spend political capital and laypeople willing to spend evenings pushing for change. It took young organizers like Paul Brandt and the hundreds of other residents who didn’t stop fighting. 

And slowly, block by block, the fires stopped. Buildings were reclaimed. Housing was rebuilt. 

You know, that same trip, when President Jimmy Carter visited Charlotte Street, he stopped and spoke with some Bronxites rebuilding a home.

JIMMY CARTER

I’ve been pleased at some things. As we passed the high-rise apartments, a few blocks back, it was obvious that in the midst of devastation and blight and deterioration, they’re holding their own. People seem to be very proud of them. They’ve not had vandalism or graffiti damage. The park area there was well used by the children. It was just like an oasis in the midst of a desert.

COLBY

So even as the world was seeing the Bronx decay, locals were working to bring it back to life.

Paul Brandt eventually left for Chicago to study theology and returned to Fordham in the 1980s where he became director of campus ministry. 

But the Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition did not disappear with him. It remains today.

The Bronx of the mid-1970s fought against it’s marginalization. It was not totally and utterly destroyed. It’s still standing.

COLBY

Welcome back to REVOKED? So for this whole chapter, we’ve been bringing you different stories from history. Recent, and not so recent. 

Because we really wanted to give you an example of what it looks like to stand up against injustice, against policies of racial animosity, both nowadays, and in times gone by. 

And as we wrap up, I want to talk about what it all accomplished.

First up, the vigil.

ANNAMARIE

I’m so moved that so many people came, and so many that are at high risk and still decided to come.

COLBY

The vigil had ended up where a lot of things seem to end up in the Bronx. A church basement.

ANNAMARIE

Earlier today, I was like: Damn it. Why are we praying? That feels so watered down. Are we praying because it makes it more palatable? But that is something that I really think unified us.

COLBY

She’s reflecting on the event as she walks back to Fordham’s campus. What did she learn?

ANNAMARIE

It is that we are the body of Christ. I was touched that people, as they passed us, they were doing the sign of the cross. There was nothing they were holding — there was no big crucifix that said that we were like a Catholic group of people. But it was just the mass of people together that shows that we are the body of Christ. The body of Christ has no limits, as he said at the end.

COLBY

After the vigil walk ended, the rector of St. Nicholas of Tolentine said a few words to the crowd. They were still fresh in her head.

ANNAMARIE

Jesus didn’t say: We welcome the citizen. We welcome all!

COLBY

For AnnaMarie, it was a spiritual victory. 

She’s been wrestling with her place in this big wide world — in a nation turning more and more hostile toward immigrants. 

And taking part in an event like this was exactly what her heart needed.

ANNAMARIE

Bringing communities together. For Fordham students, bringing us out of our little bubble. For me, giving me hope. It is when I’m with communities like that that restore my hope.

...

So, no, we’re not changing any laws. Us being here and gathering together isn’t necessarily making the situation any better, but it’s restoring us to each other. 

COLBY

We also wanted Eileen’s take on what all this history means. What relevance does it have for our age? For our new political moment in this new America? She gave us some perspective.

EILEEN

The Church has a spotty record on fascism.

COLBY

She told us, the same Church that helped rebuild housing in the Bronx is also a Church that has, at times, stood too close to power. Or too silent before it. 

EILEEN

The Catholic Church has a spotty record on fascism. We haven’t gotten it right several of the other times when it has reared its head. 

COLBY

Its structure gives it reach. Its history gives us warning.

EILEEN

Whether we’re talking about Franco, right? Or whether we’re talking about Hitler. Or whether we’re talking about Argentina. Or whether we’re talking about Chile.

COLBY

The Catholic Church has not always chosen the vulnerable when authoritarianism has risen. 

So the question now isn’t whether the Church is powerful. 

The question is: will it use its power for good this time.

EILEEN

We could get it right this time. This is our chance. We could get it right this time. 

...

What I spend my — when I’m trying to think about moral clarity in this moment, I’m trying to position myself at  like when we have the Truth and Reconciliation Commission for this period, fifteen years from now. What’s going to be the indictment? Like, how am I going to respond when those commissions, when those hearings are going through. Right? When we’re doing the Hague tribunals. When we’re doing the Truth and Reconciliation interviews, the post conflict interviews. Where will my actions line me up for those testimonies? And maybe that’s — 

COLBY

that’s quite dramatic — 

EILEEN

yeah, maybe that’s too dramatic. Anyway, that’s how I’m thinking. That’s how I’m thinking. And nobody can tell other people how to think. But for myself, that’s the thing that I’m — I’m responding out of my own ways of thinking and relationships and stuff. But just like this is bad. It will get worse. It’s not one hundred percent analogous to other periods in history. It’s easy to draw simple parallels. And history is not actually simple. So it’s not one hundred percent analogous to previous periods. But there are similarities. And we have enough knowledge of previous authoritarian regimes to know that accommodation doesn’t work.

...

I would like my church that — you know, fifteen hundred years embedded in, to come out on the right side of that. That it wasn’t equivocating. That it wasn’t trying to find a way to be non-offensive. But that it was clear. 

COLBY

And looking back at all this history in the Bronx, Eileen summed it all up for us like this:

EILEEN

They were able to leverage institutional power. They were able to leverage numerical power. And they were able to leverage moral power. To fight for and defend neighborhoods that the rest of the City — the rest of the country — had written off as not worth saving. 

...

There was this tremendous amount of energy. And this tremendous amount of moral clarity, of being able to say, what’s happening to the Bronx is wrong. The idea of letting it fall to pieces is wrong, and it is injust. And we’re not going to stand for that. And that happened in a bunch of different ways, in a bunch of different movements. But one of them was through people’s parishes. And through their faith lives.

...

And people, really working class, workaday people, became real experts in City policy and budgeting, fire policy and financial policy — in order to advocate for their neighborhoods. And they were given literal space. They were given funding. They were given moral authority, within the structures of their parishes, as well in their neighborhoods. 

...

Times were bad off campus. And Fordham thought about itself as a place in the community: What is our responsibility to the community? Not just our responsibility to the students on our campus. But our responsibility to the neighbors around us. And they played this important — and in many ways transformative — role. So, if there’s any lessons to be drawn from fifty years ago, and it’s dangerous to do so. But if we are trying to think about, fifty years ago, Fordham played this role. What role would it play today? Look, Fordham could do everything possible to advocate for its international students. And that wouldn’t be enough. 

...

All the neighborhoods around Fordham are under assault by masked men, who are taking mothers away from their children, in unmarked cars, to for-profit detention facilities. In many cases where the people cannot be reached. And in almost all cases without due process. I would argue that that’s as bad as redlining. I would argue that that’s as bad as watching neighborhoods decline because of deindustrialization, because of irresponsible landlords, because of all these financial problems. And so what is Fordham’s obligations to its neighbors now? It played this important role in the 70s. And that was a role outside of its gates. It wasn’t about keeping its own house in order. There were all kinds of things happening internally as well. But this is a role that it played as a Bronx institution, to help defend the people of the Bronx, and to help activate the people of the Bronx. The people of the Bronx today are in dire fear. 

COLBY

As immigration enforcement intensified in 2025 and 2026, Catholic leaders across the country decided to respond. Parishes were fielding calls from frightened families. Catholic schools were asking what to do if agents arrived at their doors.

And the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops issued a statement. We asked Eileen to read it.

EILEEN

"We lament that some immigrants in the United States have arbitrarily lost their legal status. We are troubled by threats against the sanctity of houses of worship and the special nature of hospitals and schools. We are grieved when we meet parents who fear being detained when taking their children to school and when we try to console family members who have already been separated from their loved ones." 

COLBY

How do you feel when you read that? 

EILEEN

I’m glad they said something. I’m glad they get it. I’m glad they’re using their still considerable voice to speak clearly. Everybody I know, everybody my kids go to school with, everybody that my son plays soccer with, everybody in the park, everybody I buy groceries from, and say hello to on my stoop, and go to church with, is living this fear. And it’s — and it’s good to hear the Catholic Church saying it clearly.

COLBY

Sometimes, it can feel hopeless when a community feels injustice happening literally right outside of its gates. You read about rising detention numbers, you hear stories from neighbors, and it starts to feel unprecedented. Like the scale of it must mean that there’s no way to push back.

But the Bronx has lived through moments that felt just as irreversible. There was a time when entire blocks were burning, when disinvestment and policy decisions hollowed out neighborhoods. When many people assumed the decline was permanent. 

That history doesn’t make the present easier. But it does mean that even when things feel immovable, they can still change. 

EILEEN

I think what we can learn from a different bad time is that things can be really really bad. Things can be like all the forces arrayed against you. And they can get better. There are few scenes more dire than what the South Bronx looks like in the mid 1970s and the late 1970s. And those — that dire picture, the result of forty years of financial and racial and governmental decision making that just about killed the city.

...

That’s really stark. That’s really bad. And the full forces of racial capitalism resulted in dozens, scores of blocks in the center of an American city reduced to rubble. People having to collect in a bustelo can to get money for their boiler. And it doesn’t look that way anymore.

COLBY

Next chapter is our finale. And we’re taking stock of how Fordham looks after this visa turmoil roiled the university community. We’ll be answering the question: Does it still look that way? And asking a different one: Will it always look that way?

That’s next time, on REVOKED?