Penny Lernoux

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Penny Lernoux (January 6, 1940 – October 9, 1989) was a U.S. journalist and book author.

Lernoux was born into a comfortable Catholic family in California and excelled in school. She enrolled in the University of Southern California in the late 1950s and, after being nominated to Phi Beta Kappa, qualified as a journalist for the United States Information Agency (USIA), a government arm devoted to promoting U.S. policy overseas.

Lernoux began working in Latin America in 1961, just before the Catholic Church was 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 Copley News Service, to which she remained bound by contract until 1967.

By this time, Lernoux had grown aware of extreme contrasts between the wealth of Latin American politicians, businessmen and landlords, on the one hand, and the poverty of the region's masses, on the other. She adopted a radical view of Jesus Christ and tried to relate his teachings to Latin American struggles against economic exploitation and military dictatorship. As she become a freelance writer, Lernoux gravitated toward new Latin American expressions of Catholicism, notably base communities and liberation theology.

Lernoux attracted major attention from her first book Cry of the People: The Struggle for Human Rights in Latin America, published in 1977. The book outlined her discoveries about Latin American history and extreme social inequality. 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. And she continued freelance reporting, most notably for The Nation.

In the early 1980s Lernoux broadened her horizons to focus on international bank corruption. The topic was the theme of articles such as "The Miami Connection" (The Nation, February 18, 1984) and her second book, published later that year, In Banks We Trust: Bankers and Their Close Associates: The CIA, the Mafia, Drug Traders, Dictators, Politicians and the Vatican. The book exposed links from international banks to governments, the Catholic Church and organized crime, and how their corruption fueled the Third World debt crisis. The book won less acclaim than Cry of the People.

For the rest of her life, Lernoux focused largely on the clamping down on dissent by John Paul II and Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (now Benedict XVI). This was the topic of her third book, People of God: The Struggle for World Catholicism, published in 1989 after years of research in Latin America and the United States. Unlike most of John Paul II's critics, Lernoux described his attempt to fortify an authoritarian model of the church as an effort to restore preconciliar Catholicism. The book documented the church's dismissal of scholars who questioned John Paul II's papacy. It also dissected various groups struggling for control of the church and examined the popularity of Opus Dei, Communion and Liberation, the Knights of Malta and Tradition, Family and Property.

After the publication of People of God, Lernoux left Bogotá to work on a fourth book. This one focused on the Maryknoll Sisters. Later that year, however, she was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. On 9 October 1989, barely a month after being hospitalized, she died. She was so private about her life that some supporters, baffled at how she succumbed to cancer so young, wondered whether the death was an assassination by the likes of the CIA.

Her book on the Maryknoll Sisters 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 courageous, even saintly, figure, Lernoux was memorialized by the Penny Lernoux Memorial Library in Minneapolis.

[edit] Selected articles

• "Illusions of agrarian reform," Nation (15 October 1973).
• "Blood money," Penthouse (4/1984).
• "When republics go bananas," Massachusetts Review 27,3-4 (fall-win 1986):473-84.
• "Vatican silences Brazilian bishop," National Catholic Reporter (30 September 1988):7. Pedro Casaldáliga of São Felix in Amazonia.
• "Casaldáiga case begs question: who in Rome muzzles bishops?" National Catholic Reporter (7 October 1988):1,4.
• "The papal spiderweb: Opus Dei & the 'perfect society'," Nation (10 April 1989):469, 482-87.
• "Who knows? The Knights of Malta know," National Catholic Reporter (5 May 1989).
• “A society torn apart by violence,” Nation (7 November 1997):512-514.