The Just Word wrapped up at the end of this past liturgical year. At the end of Year C of the liturgical calendar the Just Word has offered a reflection on over 190 Catholic Sundays, Holidays, and Solemnities. There is a world where now the Just Word is simply a finished resource. A collection of writings that will sit in a back office of the FutureChurch website until someone dusts it off, and says “Remember when we did this?” 

We, Tess and Ben, have spent the last couple of weeks and months reflecting on exactly what the legacy of the Just Word will be. Will it be seen as a collection of progressive theologies dotting the way toward a more just Church? Will someone search through the “invitations” and be offered guidance on a moral quandary they have? A pastoral quandary? Could it be turned into a systematic orthodoxical creed detailing the beliefs of this broad and overarching group called “Progressive Catholics?” Printed out in type six font to be folded into a Progressive Pocket Summa? But maybe in our reflection what we hope the Just Word turns into is simply a spiritual story. As we reflected on the evolution of The Just Word, we realized what this project has become to us: not a mission to impose contemporary progressive beliefs on the Bible, but rather about the theological reflections that come from communities working for their liberation.

When the Just Word was started in early 2023 by Karen Gargamelli it actually started with a different name: “Being Catholic Today.” Karen recruited Jim Robinson to help put together the format and methodology of the piece. From these meetings came the ever familiar format we see every weekend, Explore Engage, and Embody. The idea was simple and powerful. What if there was a lectionary resource, like Give Us This Day, but more explicitly by and for “emerging theological voices,” more explicitly political, and unapologetically progressive? What if we also were able to make that unintelligible but life-giving and rigorous theology more intelligible and accessible to people?

Before the project began, Karen got a job that required she shift her attention to worlds outside of The Just Word. We, Tess and Ben, had just graduated from Union Theological Seminary. We had moved into the Catholic Worker in New York City, choosing to fertilize our hatred of getting a job instead of sending in applications. The three of them met through these Worker connections and Tess and Ben were oriented to steer the project from then. This all happened about a month before the first Sunday in Advent Year A, at a time when Deborah Rose was still at FutureChurch. 

The Just Word has been full of intriguing and difficult questions since the beginning of Year A. Who is the audience for this project? Who in the Catholic world is writing and doing theology in the world that speaks truly to liberation? From where does the most powerful and challenging theology come? We began recruiting writers from the academic world that we, Karen, and Jim knew, as well as our friends and connections from the Catholic Worker.

Right as Year A was wrapping up, the entire globe was forced to reckon with its world order. On October 7th the Palestinian Resistance from within Gaza sent an attack into the heart of Israel that brought their anti-occupational and anti-imperial fight into the front of the world’s eye. The world was forced to reckon with the Palestinian Question. Israel returned indiscriminate bombings as collective punishment, citing their right to self defense and trying to erase over 100 years of politics, occupation, displacement, and violence since Zionism took root in the late 19th century. America consistently reaffirmed their commitment to Israel and the Zionist project through propaganda lies and billion dollar arms sales. The Palestine question was begging us to understand it as broader than just a question about Palestine. It was an indictment of the imperial world order made by European powers, and handed off to the United States after World War II. It was an indictment of the American economy’s dependence on war, both through weapons manufacturers and through the need to violently abuse, displace, and lay waste to entire peoples and landscapes in order to extract resources at the lowest possible prices (greatest possible profits). It was an indictment of international law and the protections that were supposedly set up to protect people from such vapid violence by the “enlightened West.” Slowly over time it was these questions that the Just Word started to wrestle with. Nearly every week authors submitted pieces in which some section or sentiment had its germination in the Palestinian cause and resistance. What does it mean to be a Christian when our way of life was built on mass graves, destruction, and blood? 

Most explicitly, in Year B we started to encounter more and more authors wrestling with what an actual decolonial theology could look like. What are its methods? Where do we as Catholics and Christians begin? Was it not the Papal Bull called the Doctrine of Discovery that laid a foundation for these world relationships of domination and dehumanization? Of course we also at times were explicitly searching for people who could speak to these questions, and authors who were writing a second or third piece were turning to them. It was a dialectic of the questions in the ether and the responsibility we felt to wrestle with them. 

When we look back on how this time changed both of us individually and how we personally were wrestling with these questions and how those wrestlings made it into the Just Word. What we also find is a yearning to engage not with simply liberative theologies, but with communities demanding liberation. This had always been a part of the Just Word in the form of highlighting communities in the Embody Section, but it seemed to take a deeper turn as Year B formed and turned into Year C. It was not that people only wanted to highlight communities that were doing great work that was in line with progressive Christian and Catholic values, but people seemed to turn to these communities as a driver of their theologies. How do undocumented immigrants drive our theology? How do Palestinians drive our theology? How do the Yemeni people drive our theology? How do trans and queer people drive our theology? How do the unhoused and tenants drive our theology? In reflection it seems that the ether and authors were turning not just toward liberation theology, but toward its foundational communities – toward the experiences from which people create this theology.

This deeper embracing of liberation theology and more specifically its methods perhaps are also a sign of the spaces that emerged throughout the world. Many readers of the Just Word have a complicated relationship with the concept of “church,” and especially physical ones. And at the same time what we have heard countlessly from readers of the Just Word is that they have a yearning and spiritual desire for “community.” So as cracks in the world open up through Palestine solidarity encampments on college campuses, to undocumented immigrant court accompaniments and other forms of ICE Watch, to growing protest and demonstration, and growing tenant and labor union movements, these cracks also become places of community and church. And it is here in the actions, minds, hearts, and sometimes words that theological reflection is happening. It has always happened here and will always happen here. Over time it seems the Just Word was not just trying to highlight communities doing good work, but was first and foremost trying to put words to the reality of God found in the communities of resistance. 

As both of us, Tess and Ben, wrestle with our own relationships to church it also became clear that these communities that created cracks in the world were also places that changed the world. Through both a tenant union and anti-militarism work we found these communities dropped a sense of trying to get people to think differently about the world or Christianity, and instead focused on building power in order to change the world. It seems both of us, and many authors of the Just Word, put a greater focus on what changes the world – what makes the world turn and makes the world turn toward justice. In this sense these communities were a lot less about places where people tried to shift public opinion but instead tried to leverage power to get material gains. God was found when people came together to make their own destiny, and specifically to have more say about their housing and what their local economies made money off of. Belief became a lot less about spiritual discipline than action.

We are writing this reflection, not to pat ourselves on the back, but actually to recognize the incredible theology that came from Just Word authors. We believe that so much of this writing is the future of liberation theology in the Catholic world. It’s an expansive theology that demands we think of liberation as even bigger than social justice principles – it asks us why those principles matter. Liberation that unraveled through the three years of the Just Word is not something to believe in, but something that boils up from communities fighting for their own survival against states, government, and corporations that have marked them as surplus, or sites of exploitation.

So remember The Just Word. Remember the reflections our authors have offered us, reflections born out of the corners, the margins, and the great pain in our world. Remember that the tradition we come from holds many complex, sometimes contradictory stories within it. And remember that in the end, it is full of stories that ask us what it means to live well together.