Penny Lernoux

Penny Lernoux (born January 6, 1940; died October 9, 1989) was a US journalist and writer.

Related Topics:
January 6 - 1940 - October 9 - 1989 - US - Journalist

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Little is known of her early life, but it is known that Lernoux was born into a comfortable Catholic family in California and excelled at school, joining the University of Southern California in the late 1950s and, after being nominated to the Phi Beta Kappa scholarship honour, qualifying as a journalist for the USIA, an organisation devoted to promoting American foreign policy overseas.

Related Topics:
Catholic - University of Southern California - USIA

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Lernoux began working in Latin America in 1961, just before the Catholic Church was about to be transformed by Vatican II. She worked in Rio de Janeiro and Bogotá for the USIA until 1964 and then moved to Caracas to write for various newspapers Copley News Service, to which she remained bound by contract until 1967.

Related Topics:
Latin America - 1961 - Vatican II - Rio de Janeiro - Bogotá - Caracas - Copley News Service

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By this time, Lernoux was aware of the extreme contrasts in all Latin American nations between the wealth of politicians, businessmen and landlords on the one hand and the poverty of the masses on the other. She became strongly influenced by the most radical ideas of Jesus Christ and became a strong believer in attempting to relate Christ's teachings to the struggle of the Latin American masses for justice in the face of a powerful élite and the takeover of most countries by military juntas. Becoming a freelance writer, Lernoux was strongly attracted by new developments in Latin American Catholicism - notably base communities and liberation theology - seeing them as a means of achieving a Church much closer to the teachings of Christ.

Related Topics:
Jesus Christ - Junta - Base communities - Liberation theology

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Her observations of the struggle against the US government of the Latin American poor were seen in many of her articles as a freelance writer in the 1970s, but Lernoux first attracted major attention when she published her first book Cry of the People: The struggle for human rights in Latin America in 1977. In this book Lernoux gave an outline of what she had discovered about the history of Latin America and how its extreme social inequality had been maintained up to the present. Cry Of The People won a Sidney Hillman Foundation Book Award in its third (1982) edition. At that time Lernoux joined the National Catholic Reporter as a Latin American correspondent. Nonetheless, she continued to write freelance for The Nation and other journals about issues in Latin America.

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In the early 1980s Lernoux broadened her horizons to focus on the corruption of international banks in articles such as "The Miami Connection" (The Nation, February 18, 1984), and more deeply in her second book published later than year, In Banks We Trust: Bankers and Their Close Associates: The CIA, the Mafia, Drug Traders, Dictators, Politicians and the Vatican. In In Banks We Trust Lernoux shows clearly how the international banks are closely linked with governments, the Catholic Church, and organized crime and how their corruption played a major part in the Third World debt crisis.

Related Topics:
Bank - Organized crime - Debt

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The book did not win as much acclaim as Cry Of The People, and Lernoux for the rest of her life was primarily concerned with dealing with the clamping down of dissent by John Paul II and Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (now Benedict XVI). Her observations on this topic were seen in her third book People Of God: The Struggle For World Catholicism published in 1989 after years of research both in Latin America and the US. In this book Lernoux - unlike most of John Paul's critics - sees his as attempting to restore preconciliar Catholicism with his emphasis on what she sees as a powerful, authoritarian model of Church and documents some of the many scholar who have been dismissed from the Church since John Paul rose to the papacy. She went into great depths to study the groups who were struggling at the time for control of the Church, and examined why people - especially John Paul himself - are attracted to such sects as Opus Dei, Communion and Liberation and the Knights of Malta.

Related Topics:
John Paul II - Benedict XVI - Opus Dei - Communion and Liberation

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After the publication of People Of God, Lernoux left Bogotá to work on a fourth book concerned with the story of the Maryknoll Sisters. However, in September of that year it became clear to her that she was seriously ill, and, when she was admitted to hospital, she was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. This illness did not take long to claim Lernoux's life, for she died on 9 October 1989 - barely a month after being hospitalised. She was so private about her life that some supporters, baflled at how she succumbed to cancer so young, belived the CIA had assassinated her with no evidence.

Related Topics:
Maryknoll Sisters - Lung cancer - CIA

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Her book on the Maryknoll Sisters which she had been writing shen she became terminally ill was finished by Arthur Jones and Robert Ellsberg and published in 1993 as Hearts on Fire: The Story of the Maryknoll Sisters. Regarded by those who knew her as a remarkably courageous, even saintly, figure, Lernoux was later memorialized by the Penny Lernoux Memorial Library in Minnesota.

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