podcast
The Axe Files with David Axelrod
David Axelrod, the founder and director of the University of Chicago Institute of Politics, and CNN bring you The Axe Files, a series of revealing interviews with key figures in the political world. Go beyond the soundbites and get to know some of the most interesting players in politics.
Ep. 574— Sister Simone Campbell
The Axe Files with David Axelrod
Apr 4, 2024
Sister Simone Campbell has never shied away from fighting for the underdog. Since childhood, she has looked for ways to assist those in need, a drive further fueled by the early loss of her sister to Hodgkin's lymphoma. Sister Simone joined David to talk about making a name for herself as an advocate for the Affordable Care Act, deciding to attend law school in addition to taking her vows as a Catholic nun, intertwining her faith with activism, and centering her faith in the present.
Episode Transcript
Intro
00:00:05
And now from the Institute of Politics at the University of Chicago and CNN Audiio, the Axe Files with your host, David Axelrod.
David Axelrod
00:00:16
We recently mark the anniversary of the passage of the Affordable Care Act, a law that has made health coverage accessible for tens of millions of working Americans, including people with preexisting medical conditions. One of the heroes of that story was Sister Simone Campbell, who mobilized a hearty group of nuns and other faith and community leaders whose vocal support was critical to the ACA's passage. I recently sat down with Sister Simone at the University of Chicago's Institute of Politics, where she's currently a Pritzker fellow, to talk about her role in that important history and her very interesting life's journey. Here's that conversation. Sister Simone, great to have you at the Institute of Politics. You're a fellow here this, this winter and spring.
Sister Simone Campbell
00:01:04
Right. That's true.
David Axelrod
00:01:05
And, we're so grateful to have you. So you you were. Your birth name was Mary.
Sister Simone Campbell
00:01:13
Yes. That's true.
David Axelrod
00:01:16
You don't look enthused.
Sister Simone Campbell
00:01:17
Oh, no, I wasn't.
David Axelrod
00:01:19
'But the. But you chose, your chosen name, when you took your vows and joined the Sisters of Social Work--I want to ask you about that in a second--you chose the name Simone. Why?
Sister Simone Campbell
00:01:31
Right. Well, I chose Simone for Simon Peter, because I'm sort of like Simon Peter. I have a tendency to jump out of boats, if you know the Christian story about, you know, oh, there's Jesus. Oh, leap! Go! And then get halfway out the boat and all of a sudden you're thinking, oh my God, I'm sinking. I can be impetuous, but I also can be faithful. And so I picked Simon Peter as my patron. Mary was just entirely too boring for a name for me. So.
David Axelrod
00:02:03
What? Tell me about the Sisters of Social Work. I didn't even know there was.
Sister Simone Campbell
00:02:07
Well, it's actually Sisters of Social Service.
David Axelrod
00:02:10
Service?
Sister Simone Campbell
00:02:10
Yeah. Though most of us do social work. I'm not a good. I wasn't a good social worker, so I went to law school instead.
David Axelrod
00:02:17
No, I'm going to get to that.
Sister Simone Campbell
00:02:18
'Okay, we'll set that aside. But we were. The great thing about my community is we were founded 100 years ago in Budapest, Hungary. And the foundress of our community, along with a cadre of about 20 women, was the first woman in the Hungarian parliament. So we had--when she was a head of our community. So we have politics in our bones. The the sisters in Europe are credited with saving over a thousand Jews during the Holocaust. One of our sisters was martyred by the Arrow Cross in, in Budapest, in saving Jewish families who were hiding in parts of the various convents around Budapest. So troublemaking and standing up for justice is in our bones.
David Axelrod
00:03:08
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now, we have a robust Catholic community here in Chicago.
Sister Simone Campbell
00:03:13
Yes, I noticed, yes.
David Axelrod
00:03:14
And a lot of nuns. But here we're accustomed to nuns being, you know, the children of tavern owners and the children of, you know, bricklayers and laborers and the children of, maybe the occasional ward committeeman, but, which is a high office here, by the way, but not aeronautical engineers.
Sister Simone Campbell
00:03:39
Right.
David Axelrod
00:03:41
You have a somewhat different story. Your family's story.
Sister Simone Campbell
00:03:45
Well, that's true. My my parents were immigrants from Denver to Southern California.
David Axelrod
00:03:51
Although you do have, you have a quite an immigrant story from many different place.
Sister Simone Campbell
00:03:56
Oh, my gosh, from from all over.
David Axelrod
00:03:58
Spain and Russia and Germany.
Sister Simone Campbell
00:04:02
And Wales.
David Axelrod
00:04:03
Canada.
Sister Simone Campbell
00:04:04
Ireland. Oh yeah. The great one from Canada. The story is he got driven out of Canada for being a horse thief. But we won't go into that.
David Axelrod
00:04:13
This is not confession, Sister.
Sister Simone Campbell
00:04:17
But confession is always good for the soul. So, so I come from an immigrant stock, but my parents left Denver to go to Southern California, because my dad wanted to work in with airplanes. And he ended up doing the Curtis Wright School of Engineering, which wasn't a degree program as such, but then became an engineer and then ended up being, working in aerospace. But it was fascinating to me, because I'm the oldest, so he and I were partners in making rockets and figuring things out. And he always nourished curiosity on my part. And on my sister's part, too.
David Axelrod
00:04:55
Your path is different in and in other ways than sort of the traditional, the traditional path. You use the word troublemaker. You know, John, John Lewis used to talk about good trouble. Good trouble. And you've been a good troublemaker. And I'm sure there are bishops and others who would attest to the troublemaking part. I mean, they may debate whether it was good or not, but I wouldn't.
Sister Simone Campbell
00:05:22
I thought it was pretty good.
David Axelrod
00:05:23
I think so, too. That's that's why I wanted to talk to you today. But what are the roots of that in you? What inspired you to be an activist? Because when people say, Sister Simone, they say the activist nun.
Sister Simone Campbell
00:05:38
Well that's good. I take that that. That's an honor. You know, I always felt like I could make a difference and, and didn't understand that I couldn't. So like, in third grade, we had a terrible teacher. And somebody said to me once, well, didn't you go to your parents about that? Oh heavens no, I was the third grader. I was going to help. So what I did was I wrote. The thing that made me mad about our teacher is that he only called on a few of us, me included. But he didn't call on everybody. And that seemed wrong. And so I wrote a play where everybody was involved. And what I was trying to say is everybody needs to be involved. Now it was a play at Thanksgiving, so.
David Axelrod
00:06:24
I'm sure he was happy to have you.
Sister Simone Campbell
00:06:25
I was a real joy. But but the play then became around what was your, we fit in all of our Halloween costumes into the play so that we had costumes. And we created a story about Thanksgiving. I forget the details of it, but we ended up putting it on for the whole school, and we were kind of proud of ourselves. But it was it was like, we could fix things. I don't know how I thought that, but I did. And so I've always been a person who looks to make it better. And if there's a problem, well, let's deal with it.
David Axelrod
00:07:02
Yeah, I want to talk in a minute about why the why the route of public life. Because you you're not a politician, but you've engaged with politicians all your life, and that isn't necessarily the path that, you know, nuns and people of faith, you know, leaders in the faith community always follow. But we'll get to that. But since you are on the school history, you know, I'm interested, because you're the name Simone also means, I mentioned to you before, hearkening. Good listener. But you were a pretty good talker from, from an early age. And I read, perhaps it was from your book, that you came to class one day without your report on ostriches, and you were called on to present your report, and you winged it.
Sister Simone Campbell
00:07:57
Literally.
David Axelrod
00:07:58
You. Yeah. Yeah. That's good. Actually, I didn't. I don't really. I'm pretty good at puns, but not usually at this time of day. But, but you went up there and you.
Sister Simone Campbell
00:08:11
I learned something that I probably shouldn't have learned. But between. Because I was a good kid, so they always put me in the back of the room. So between the back of the room and the front of the room, I made it up.
David Axelrod
00:08:25
Wow. It must been a slow walk.
Sister Simone Campbell
00:08:28
Eh, it was kind of regular speed. But then I could draw. I can't believe I did this. I drew on the board about how ostrich feathers have to be anchored in a very different way in the wing of the ostrich, because they go so fast. I have no idea if that's true or not, but I think.
David Axelrod
00:08:43
Well, your your father was an aeronautical engineer, so it probably came naturally.
Sister Simone Campbell
00:08:47
I hadn't made the connection. You're right. Wings are wings. What can we say?
David Axelrod
00:08:51
Exactly, exactly. But, you also grew up in a turbulent time. It was the '60s and civil rights movement and so on. And you're. I guess when you, in your high school years, you were in a school where that stuff was discussed quite a bit.
Sister Simone Campbell
00:09:08
Oh, absolutely.
David Axelrod
00:09:09
I guess maybe to the chagrin of the higher ups there. But I got a sense that your, yours was a very provocative kind of environment. It was a Catholic school.
Sister Simone Campbell
00:09:21
It was a Catholic school, Saint Anthony's. But it was taught by Immaculate Heart sisters who were so creative and so engaged, and they always helped us to know that Jesus wasn't historical. Jesus is now. And so the Christian dimension of faith is about now, the application to now. And so all of our, you know, yeah, we learned things about, you know, Thomas Aquinas and those kinds of guys. But for me, the exciting part was the fact.
David Axelrod
00:09:50
There aren't that many kind of guys like that. But go ahead.
Sister Simone Campbell
00:09:51
Well, yeah. Yeah, that was kind of a high level, high level guy. But the to to apply faith to that time of the struggle for civil rights, of the witness of standing up, of being engaged and speaking out from a faith perspective for the inclusion of all. That's that's what they brought. You have to know the Immaculate Heart Sisters ended up getting thrown out of the church because they were so progressive, but they gave me a faith that is that is always grounded in the now. Yes, it's historical, but it's grounded in the now and the consequence of now.
David Axelrod
00:10:29
Your family has a, a kind of interesting, tradition. I guess your grandparents on your mother's side were Catholic, but not terribly devout about church going and so on until.
Sister Simone Campbell
00:10:49
Until. My grandfather didn't go to church. My grandmother had been Lutheran and converted to Catholicism, because she was German, and then converted to Catholicism. But they'd have the priest over for dinner, but they never went to church. And then. He was the publisher of a newspaper in town, the Aurora Democrat, and the Adams County News. And.
David Axelrod
00:11:08
In Colorado.
Sister Simone Campbell
00:11:09
In Colorado. Yeah. And, so one day, the Ku Klux Klan burned a cross on their front yard. And my grandfather. It made him mad. And they burned the cross, because he was Catholic, but he hadn't been going to church. But after that.
David Axelrod
00:11:24
Every Sunday.
Sister Simone Campbell
00:11:25
By Jove, he went to church. He wasn't going to have any of those guys scaring them out.
David Axelrod
00:11:31
I also, I think you wrote or I read that your folks had a tough relationship with a pastor in your parish. So, you can say what it was or what it wasn't, but my point is that the Campbell clan with a C, not a K, had a lot of hard bark on them. So that's, something that you came by naturally, as well.
Sister Simone Campbell
00:11:56
Right. That's true. I hadn't really thought about how my folks dealt with our pastor, but the pastor was upset that they didn't make enough money in a bazaar or some such thing that they'd worked really hard on. And. And then the other piece was we didn't go to the school in our parish. We went to a different school. And so we were in Our Lady of Refuge parish. But we went to Saint Bartholomew's to school. And my mother used to always call us the refugees, because we came from Our Lady of Refuge over there. So the refugees made us realize that you could move and make choices, that you could choose what works for us, that, it became a really a life giving engagement. But the hard part, and you're probably going to talk about this, because it's important, but I'm going to jump to it.
David Axelrod
00:12:44
Well, I will now.
Sister Simone Campbell
00:12:45
Now. Okay. Well, okay. Pardon me for taking. I'm really sorry. I try to be docile.
David Axelrod
00:12:50
No, no, I don't expect that. I didn't expect that.
Sister Simone Campbell
00:12:54
Okay. But but where it went really challenging was when my sister got sick. My sister Kate was a year and a half younger than I, and we were a team of two, and we were very close. But when she was a sophomore in high school and I was a senior, she was given 3 to 5 years to live with Hodgkin's disease, and she lived five years. But that. What can I say? That diagnosis, that reality made time of a precious commodity. There was no time to waste. It was too important. There were no guarantees. And so I think I've always had the sense of urgency because of Kate. And also I realized this, I don't know, a few years ago, that I've also, in some ways lived both of our energies. Because we were both engaged in, you know, the civil rights stuff. And we were engaged in our little protests around the neighborhood that we did stuff together. And so I think in some ways, I have, people tell me I have a lot of energy, but I think part of the reason is, is because I have Kate's energy, too. Does that make any sense?
David Axelrod
00:14:10
It does. Yes it does, it does. And she you feel she would be fighting the battles that you.
Sister Simone Campbell
00:14:16
Oh my gosh. Absolutely. I mean, in many ways, she was younger than I, but she was even more determined. Hard to imagine, bu trye.
David Axelrod
00:14:25
You went to college and while you were in college is when you joined the Sisters of Social Service. Why why did you join? And was it your intent to become a nun? Was that. I mean, I'm sort of interested in why you became a nun.
Sister Simone Campbell
00:14:44
That's a good question. I think for me, I joke about most things, but that Jesus and Justice are obviously connected. They both begin with J. Hello. So they go together. But the other part is to, my community, Sisters of Social Service, are all about working at the margins of our society, about being connected with those who are too often left out. And so, to be in my community is to walk, walk to the margins and be present. Let me give you an example from yesterday. Yesterday? Yeah, yesterday. I think it was the day before. I've had a lot of experiences last two days, but I was at Chicago CRED, and one of the guys I was talking.
David Axelrod
00:15:29
We should just say for our listeners who may not have heard my podcast with Arnie Duncan, the former education secretary, that Chicago CRED is a program that he's started to try and essentially wrest gangbangers away from that life and put them on a different path and bring some peace to the.
Sister Simone Campbell
00:15:51
To the neighborhoods.
David Axelrod
00:15:52
War torn communities of Chicago.
Sister Simone Campbell
00:15:54
And change this.
David Axelrod
00:15:56
The trajectory of their lives.
Sister Simone Campbell
00:15:57
The paths for these young people. Well, it was so cool, because I met this one guy who was obviously kind of tough and found out his name was Peter. And I go, You're Peter. Oh that's fabulous. And I'm Simone, and that's like Simon Peter. And it was in a, in one of the church with the pastor and all this and, and so we became buddies and. But to hear and receive his story was so sacred. But that's what our community teaches us. It's about being open to receive people's stories and to know that each one is sacred, and to be willing to ask for that story and to receive it. It's gift. It's real gift. But I think not many there, not many religious communities who hold that listening and responding at the heart of their work. And so often, I mean, it's good to be a teacher and it's good to be a nurse and it's good to be organized. But for me, it's all about touching people's hearts and having my heart touched and changed.
David Axelrod
00:16:56
You got, one of your first assignments in the Sisters of Social Service, you wanted to help people in need. They sent you to Beverly Hills.
Sister Simone Campbell
00:17:07
I know, isn't that hysterical? I know, my first, first full time assignment going to Beverly Hills. Yeah. Right. And I did parish social work, which was I worked with the teen club, and I did, census, which is going door to door and, you know, asking who's there. And you went to the front doors to ask who lived in the house, and then you went to the back down the alley to the back doors to find out who were the domestics, as we called them at the time. And I ended up starting like a group for the domestics. I sort of got in trouble for that. But.
David Axelrod
00:17:41
And so the story begins.
Sister Simone Campbell
00:17:43
And so the story begins. Yes. But it was so exciting to be, to learn that it's not just economic poverty that creates poverty. My teen group were in as much of a ghetto as the folks in East L.A. And so I'd piled the teens in the car. We'd go up in small groups, we'd drive around town. They'd never been outside of Beverly Hills. We drove to, I'll never forget this. There's one kid, Paul. We're driving through East L.A., and he goes, well, there are kids on the street. They're playing ball. Why are they playing ball on the street? And I said, well, that's where they've got to play ball. But they're smiling. How can they be smiling? This is poor here. It was like, because happiness is not economics.
David Axelrod
00:18:34
Well, were those kids happy?
Sister Simone Campbell
00:18:37
Well, that was a big question. That was a big question. Some were, but so many were wrestling with drugs or with depression. And this one. I think it's in my book, but this one kid had to tell his parents that he needed drug treatment. And I went with him to tell his parents. And we're in this house on the hills, and and the curtains are open and you see the whole LA Valley. You know that the basin. And he was, I was so proud of him, because he could, he said to his parents, I need drug treatment, I need help. And his mother's first words out of her mouth after he says this is, the neighbors don't know, do they? It just broke my heart. Here he had so much courage to talk of his need and she couldn't receive it. I it just.
David Axelrod
00:19:25
Did you say anything?
Sister Simone Campbell
00:19:27
Oh, I'm sure I did. I don't remember.
David Axelrod
00:19:29
I'm sure you did too. I don't know why.
Sister Simone Campbell
00:19:32
I'm reticent. I know, no, I'm sure I did.
David Axelrod
00:19:37
We're going to take a short break and we'll be right back with more of the Axe Files. And now back to the show. You went up to Portland and you were. Your official assignment was to work on curricula for the Catholic schools.
Sister Simone Campbell
00:20:05
'No, it's actually a non-school setting. So it was I was the religious. Okay. I'm 23 years old. Vast experience. And I'm the religious education consultant for high school and junior high school programs in non-school settings. So these are all the kids that go to.
David Axelrod
00:20:23
Must've been hard to get on a business card.
Sister Simone Campbell
00:20:25
Right? I was so low down I didn't have a business card. I didn't know about those at the time, but. So I had Western Oregon. That was a whole western Oregon doing programs for high school and junior high school kids that went to public school.
David Axelrod
00:20:39
Oh, I see.
Sister Simone Campbell
00:20:40
And it was glorious. It was fabulous. I had a great time. But I was young, so I also had a lot of energy. So on the side, I did community organizing in Portland. So I did.
David Axelrod
00:20:52
Around tenants rights.
Sister Simone Campbell
00:20:53
'Yeah. Tenants right. So we were trying. And Oregon at the time, it probably still is true. It was very conservative, especially when it came to property issues because of all the farmers. And so we were trying to get tenants rights so that--about and around evictions, 30 day notices, all of that kind of thing, that it just didn't exist. And so we're down at Salem testifying and had all the testimony organized. It was beautiful. And this curmudgeon of a legislator was probably, I thought he was ancient, he was probably younger than I am now, but I won't say anything but the he says, well, what about the covenants of something or another? And I didn't know what he was talking about. And I hate power imbalance. Just hate it. So I go home and I say to my sisters who I lived with in Portland, I go, I have to go to law school. That's it. I have to go to law school. And they were like, law school?
David Axelrod
00:21:53
So you went back and you took your vows, your final vows, and then you went to law school, right?
Sister Simone Campbell
00:22:00
I did, I did.
David Axelrod
00:22:01
Yeah. Has anybody else ever done that before?
Sister Simone Campbell
00:22:04
Not in our community. No. But then you know what happened, David?
David Axelrod
00:22:08
Did you get resistance?
Sister Simone Campbell
00:22:08
No. Actually, I wrote a I wrote what I consider my first brief arguing how it fit with our mission and charism. And so it got approved. And the way we do things is that we take turns going to school. We take vows of poverty, so we consolidate. We put together all our revenue, and then we take turns going to school and we pay for it. So everything is held in common. So that's how. We try to get scholarships as much as we can. And the community was supportive. Everybody was into it.
David Axelrod
00:22:38
You know, I shouldn't leave the, Portland issue before asking, how did that turn out? Were you able to make a difference?
Sister Simone Campbell
00:22:46
No.
David Axelrod
00:22:47
Hence law school.
Sister Simone Campbell
00:22:48
Hence law school. Yeah, yeah.
David Axelrod
00:22:50
So you went to UC Davis Law School. And then you went to Oakland and you started a legal clinic there. Talk about that, because you were you ran this clinic for 18 years. Tell me what your what the concept was. It sounded very much like a legal aid.
Sister Simone Campbell
00:23:06
It was like legal aid to the extent that we serve the working poor. But we really served those who didn't qualify for legal aid but couldn't afford private counsel. So the working poor, that's who we served.
David Axelrod
00:23:19
Great big gap in there.
Sister Simone Campbell
00:23:23
Huge gap. And so I picked the highest density of blue collar workers in California as the place to start. That if it was going to work, if the model was going to work, where we charged everybody on a sliding scale and supported us ourselves on that, then I would do it where we had the highest density of potential clients. It made sense.
David Axelrod
00:23:45
Now, was this associated with the Sisters of Social Service?
Sister Simone Campbell
00:23:49
Well, it was like my my ministry, and then my sisters, I couldn't get seed money because nobody had ever done it. I don't, I never understood how seed money is supposed to be for innovative programs, but you need a track record.
David Axelrod
00:24:03
Right. No, I.
Sister Simone Campbell
00:24:05
So. So my sisters said, one of my sisters celebrated her Jubilee. I forget it was 25 years. 50 years. She had an extra $150. So she gives me $150 from her Jubilee. And then the five other sisters I lived with, they said, well, Simone, just started here. So what I did was, we had a telephone closet that I took over as the office, and then I made a deal with parishes in the flatlands, the poor parts of Oakland, and if they advertised in their bulletin that I'd be there, then I held office hours in the parishes one day a week, one day a week or every other week, I forget exactly how it worked out. But that's how I got our first clients. And then after a year, we had enough money to move downtown and have an actual office. But the thing for me that was so important was that.
David Axelrod
00:24:55
Did you have other lawyers?
Sister Simone Campbell
00:24:56
Well, not then. I. I did say we a lot. It was sort of like the royal we. It made me feel better.
David Axelrod
00:25:06
Must have made firm meetings go better.
Sister Simone Campbell
00:25:07
You didn't have a lot of dissent. It was very good. But after a year, then we were there was enough money to get an office downtown. And the thing that was really important to me was that my clients be accorded the dignity of having a regular office, of not a storefront, not a fly by night place. You know, legal aid so often has its very dusty windows and their store fronts. And anyway, I found that not conducive to acknowledging the human dignity of the people that we served. And we ended up doing all the high conflict, low income family law cases in our county. So, which was challenging, fun. I loved it. It was great. So. And we got known by the court and we got known by about everybody in town.
David Axelrod
00:25:58
Again, I mean, I'm very interested in how. I understand that the mission was of your law work was consistent with the mission of your vows. But how did they interact? In other words, what were, did you have additional responsibilities as a member of of?
Sister Simone Campbell
00:26:21
Well, it's hard to explain. They were the substance of my prayer. After I had done the law center, I ended up getting elected to be in leadership. But the thing that I learned was how much my clients really nourished my prayer to be rooted in that gospel call, to be present, to be poor in spirit, to be, you know. Hunger and thirst for justice. It was my clients that led me to that. And so it was like the lifeblood of my commitment was provided by my clients.
David Axelrod
00:27:05
I should ask what were what were the cases that, were there cases that stood out in your mind that. When you talk about this movement, you say how you were moved. Were there cases that stick with you?
Sister Simone Campbell
00:27:20
Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. Probably the most among the most challenging was I would get appointed to represent kids in family law cases. And this one horrible, horrible, horrible case, the this dad. I had interrupt. I had interrupted and didn't know it, I had interrupted an alcoholic syndrome in this family, where the mother, where the stepmother was a dry alcoholic and the father was active, and my intervention caused the stepmother to start drinking, too, and the violence escalated. Well, the dad's answer in his poor processing thinking was he brought the little girl, Kristen, down to my office. He comes up, we were in the fifth floor and he. The elevator opens and he sends her down with a note pinned to her saying, here, you take her. I was like, oh my God. And so I. This girl had been ping ponged around from way too many people, and I could not bear to put her into the foster program. So I just took her home, and my sisters, luckily, who I lived with, they were like, well, that's fine. And we knew the sisters who ran the school nearby. So we put her in school for a couple of weeks till we got it organized, and she finally got returned to what was going to be the adoptive family. But the thing that was so. The thing I.
David Axelrod
00:28:51
Are you still in touch with her?
Sister Simone Campbell
00:28:52
No I'm not. But when I got a little bit famous with the bus, I heard from her adoptive mom. And here she is, married. She and her husband, her husband's in the military. She was in in England. And she was having her first child. It was so exciting. The nice thing about getting a little famous.
David Axelrod
00:29:11
I want to talk to you later about what getting famous does to you, but, after 18 years of running this clinic, you got a desk job running the Sisters of Social Service as director. You don't look, I this is a podcast, so people can't see.
Sister Simone Campbell
00:29:29
Oh, they can't see my face.
David Axelrod
00:29:32
You're not looking fondly back on those memories.
Sister Simone Campbell
00:29:35
Well, they turned out to be the biggest gift in my life. But here's the trouble. My community, we're all social workers of one kind or another. And social workers root for the underdog. By definition, when you get elected to leadership, you're no longer the underdog. And so all these things that people have been wanting to tell you for 25 years, they now can tell you. Simone, you talk too long. Simone, you used too big words. Simone, what was another one? Oh, Simone, you're so corporate. Well, I've been a lawyer for 18 years, and I wrote a letter that had three points and a summary, and they didn't appreciate it. But what happened was, I learned through that through. It was very painful in many ways. But it was gift, because in the end, after five years, I did a Zen retreat for, I don't know what, seven weeks, something like that. But at the end of that I realized I had come to know the divine in a new way. And that discovery was so, I don't even know how to put words in words to it. But it like, it turned the whole struggle golden. Because, but for that struggle, I would have never come to this insight. So in the end it was good news. The process, the process was extremely challenging.
David Axelrod
00:31:06
Given the nature of the Sisters of Social Service, what was your relationship with the archdiocese?
Sister Simone Campbell
00:31:16
When I got elected, we'd had this insight that we are the church. And so we go, we are the church. And we said, we own, we know it, we own it, and will act on it. Well, the other insight, the corollary of that insight is that the governance structure of our beloved church needs to hear our stories of the people we work with, of, of the folks we encounter. We need to have everybody hearing the story. And if leadership doesn't hear the story, then their leadership is going to be less because of it. And the corollary is I need to hear the leadership. I need to hear the story of leadership and have a bit of compassion for these guys that drive me a little crazy. So the way I saw my job as the head of my community was to do missionary work of bringing the story to the bishops where our sisters were, to try to open up a different perspective, soften the heart, make it more complex.
David Axelrod
00:32:20
And how was that received?
Sister Simone Campbell
00:32:23
As you probably imagine. But I'm stubborn, so I'll keep at it. And eventually, bit by bit, drop by drop, I think I helped. It helped me feel like I was representing my sisters.
David Axelrod
00:32:40
You've been outspoken on the issue.
Sister Simone Campbell
00:32:42
Of everything.
David Axelrod
00:32:43
Of, clerical, sexual abuse. Were you aware of the problem, then? And how do you feel the church has dealt with it?
Sister Simone Campbell
00:32:57
It's horrifying how the church has dealt with it. I really wasn't aware of it then. It wasn't my experience, but hearing about it is horrifying. But the thing I know, the thing that frustrates me so much about the church's response, is that they gave the response to lawyers, and that's wrong. The lawyers were wrong. The lawyers got them all about, well don't say anything. You know, that cautionary litigation strategy. That is not the gospel. That's not Jesus. We won't get out of this mess till we weep together about what happened. And I don't see many people leading the weeping. I just find it horrifying. Just horrifying.
David Axelrod
00:33:38
But I'm sure the concern was, as you suggest, the legal aspects of it.
Sister Simone Campbell
00:33:46
But how can we.
David Axelrod
00:33:47
I'm not. I'm not justifying.
Sister Simone Campbell
00:33:48
I know, I know, you're right. You're not the lawyer for the diocese. But how can that be the initial response? Is fear about how we're going to deal with our money? As opposed to the pastoral response of care. What happened to these people? And quite frankly, how flawed. Well, I didn't even know what language to use about priests who did these kinds of things. So how do we break through that? To say compassion for people who've experienced this and a wake up call about what does that mean for priests? How isolated and frightened and whatever that they felt. So anyway, I got the lawyerly response. It was a corporate, pragmatic decision, and I think it was wrong, said she authoritatively.
David Axelrod
00:34:43
You, you lobbied for the sisters in in an issue on issues of importance, presumably around poverty and so on in, in Sacramento. And then you end up in Washington running something called Network. Not a network of the kind of people watch on TV. But, this was a, this was a network of nuns and others, around social justice issue.
Sister Simone Campbell
00:35:15
Right. So after I did leadership, then I did for a few years, a couple of years, I did California state policy and then got recruited to apply to Network.
David Axelrod
00:35:25
You know, before we get actually to you going to Network, before you actually got there, you were sort of an outspoken opponent of the war in Iraq, and you went to Iraq as part of a peace delegation. Tell me about that.
Sister Simone Campbell
00:35:40
Oh my God. Right. In December of '02, before we invaded. Oh, man. I went with seven others to, I think it was seven, to Iraq.
David Axelrod
00:35:52
All faith leaders or?
Sister Simone Campbell
00:35:54
Well, we were all Catholic or some description. And the Dominican sisters had done a lot of work with the Dominican Iraqis who were based up in Mosul and had hospitals in, Baghdad, and they had worked during sanctions to be supportive to them. So we had a Dominican, two Dominicans with us, and we flew to Amman, and then we drove to Baghdad. It's a long drive. And, oh, there are a lot of stories, but, so we get to Baghdad, and I had been nervous about going, but we figured as long as, remember the UN inspectors, as long as they were still work looking for weapons of mass destruction, we were okay, that the U.S. wouldn't start bombing and we get to other.
David Axelrod
00:36:43
So you were nervous about the US bombing while you were there?
Sister Simone Campbell
00:36:46
Yeah. Yeah.
David Axelrod
00:36:47
Not about how you would be received.
Sister Simone Campbell
00:36:48
Well, I was a little nervous, because. I was little nervous until we got there. And then it was like people were wonderful. However, we get in the elevator to go up to our room in the hotel, and this guy is our carrying our suitcases. And he said, he stops the elevator and I thought, uh oh, this could be trouble. And he says, I could go to Canada. Should I go now? Should I take my family? What do you know? It was like, oh my God, I don't know anything. And, he said, I'm a dentist. I could get certificates there. And I said, well. We didn't know what to say. Yeah, it's coming, but. I don't know. And that was repeated often.
David Axelrod
00:37:32
What did you hope to accomplish there?
Sister Simone Campbell
00:37:34
I went to be a witness. To bring back the story. Because what was happening in our country was only the war story, the drumbeat of war. I just went to see what was happening there. And what we discovered was in the Iraqi government, what was in the ascendancy, because we talked. They talked to us. It was amazing. We talked to all kinds of Iraqi government officials. And I can, you could see.
David Axelrod
00:37:59
Not Saddam Huseein.
Sister Simone Campbell
00:37:59
No, we didn't talk to Hussein.
David Axelrod
00:38:01
He was not a social justice leader.
Sister Simone Campbell
00:38:03
He wasn't a social justice leader. That is true. But a bunch of the, a bunch of other people were. And we were in the hospitals we were in, oh man, one hospital for kids with cancer, and this woman says to me, you could save my son. You could save my son. Sanctions had stopped medicine from. There were four medicines that were needed for the treatment of leukemia. Had stopped one medicine from going in because it could be weaponized. And so kids were dying of leukemia because they couldn't get this fourth, fourth medicine. It just made me nuts. But what we discovered was in the government in Iraq at the time, the more peaceful negotiators were in the ascendancy. And, in the U.S., the hawks were in the ascendancy. And they were just missing each other. There was no conversation. It was just, it was gone. And so I did become sort of nuts on the topic. I spoke every place.
David Axelrod
00:39:07
We're going to take a short break and we'll be right back with more of The Axe Files. And now back to the show. You took over at Network. And this is where I became aware of you, because I was in the White House working on the Affordable Care Act. You talked earlier about your sister and her battle with Hodgkin's. How much did that inform your passion about this issue?
Sister Simone Campbell
00:39:45
Well, that's that's interesting to the extent that it gave me a passion for everybody who's left out. That's a piece of it, but I don't. I'm not a medical person, so it's not like medicine's the thing. The thing that was hard with the ACA was the the fact that so many people were left out of care. And I know with my family, my sister got all kinds of experimental treatments, but none of it was covered by insurance.
David Axelrod
00:40:15
And so yeah, I told you before we started that, yeah, I have a daughter, Lauren, who has epilepsy. I've talked about it a lot here on the podcast, from the time she was seven months old, and I was a young newspaper reporter at the time at the Chicago Tribune, and I what I discovered was that insurance was useful. My insurance was useful as an HMO as long as we were healthy. But when she got sick, they didn't cover anything. So a lot of that. She needed new medications that were quite expensive. They wanted to do brain surgery. They wouldn't pay for a second opinion. So, we were very quickly in financial straits, because of it. So I wept the night that it was passed, because I knew other families wouldn't have to go through what my family went through, but it might not have passed but for people like you. You mobilized a group of nuns and were very outspoken on the Affordable Care Act. This was a place where you did clash, with the bishops, because, there was a big debate as to whether the Affordable Care Act would cover, abortion services. Ultimately, a compromise was reached, and that's the reason that it passed the House. In fact, I was just the other day with Joe Donnelly.
Sister Simone Campbell
00:41:28
Oh, yes.
David Axelrod
00:41:29
Who was, you remember, a congressman at that time from South Bend, then a U.S. senator, now he's the ambassador to the to the Vatican. Vatican. And he was recalling the whole story, but there were a group of Catholic legislators.
Sister Simone Campbell
00:41:45
Catholics in the House.
David Axelrod
00:41:46
In the House that were opposed, and that was worked out. But tell me about, because there was public back and forth between you and the nuns and the bishops.
Sister Simone Campbell
00:41:55
I know. Wasn't that great?
David Axelrod
00:41:57
I don't know, you tell me.
Sister Simone Campbell
00:41:59
It was. It was.
David Axelrod
00:42:00
I mean, I'm a Jew, I know nothing.
Sister Simone Campbell
00:42:03
You know a lot. But the thing was that. Okay, sister Carol Keehan at the Catholic Health Association was trying to get the bishops to come out with CHA, Catholic Health Associations doing a joint statement. And she kept pushing Cardinal George, who is here in Chicago, who was the president to do it, to do it, to do it. She had. I think I can say this now. It's far enough away. She had made friends with the housekeeper, his housekeeper. And so she would fax things to his house, and the housekeeper would put them on his plate so to get her to get the message direct. But he was being controlled by the staff in DC. And so Carol comes out with basically the statement she wanted George to join in on. And that was, I think like a Saturday. And I see it. I'm in LA for community meetings. I send her an email right away saying, Carol, we're with you. We'll do a support letter where we stand with you when you get pushback from the bishops. And she's not a very good predictor of the future. She emailed back pretty promptly, saying, oh, I don't expect pushback from the bishops, but I expect pushback from Fourth Street, which is the the staff of the bishops. Surprise. So I do a letter, a sign on letter. How many million sign on letters have we have we done in DC? It's always the thing to get people to sign on and make it a thing. So I thought, who could I get? I'm very strategic. And so I thought, who we need are the leaders of Catholic sisters communities who run hospitals. What a better testimony? And so I write this letter. I send it around to my friends, ask people to to share it around. Monday afternoon, I get a call from a colleague in the White House and he says, he's Catholic, and he says, oh, Sister Simone. I go, what's wrong. And he goes, I think I'm Buddhist. And I go, Buddhist? You're not a Buddhist. What are you talking about? And the bishops had come out opposing it. And I, because I was home with my sisters, I burst into tears. I just wept. Because I was like, how could you do this? I get tears in my eyes just thinking about it. But. But I knew we had the letter out. So I come back to my community, works in English and Spanish. And so I come back to the committee meeting, and some representatives from Mexico are there, and they see me crying. They go Simone, what's going on? Not understanding our politics. So I pull it together, I think, okay, we've got the letter. We'll see what we can do. I got home Wednesday morning on a redeye and we released it that afternoon. It was Saint Patrick's Day, and we released a letter, and we had 58 Catholic sisters who had signed on, and they signed on knowing that the bishops were opposing it. And I have been so proud of my sisters standing up for what what our people need.
David Axelrod
00:45:11
And what was the response of the bishops?
Sister Simone Campbell
00:45:14
It took a while. Two years later, there's a censure of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious. And it was totally related to the fact that we won on health care and they lost. They're sore losers, but they hold on to memory for a very long time. So they got the Vatican to say, our organization, okay, we have nine full time staff. This is 2012. Two years after the ACA, almost to the date. We have nine full time staff and they say our organization was a bad influence on Catholic Sisters. We promoted radical feminist themes incompatible with the gospel. And it was like, well, you never talk to us. How can you say that? That was, oh brother. But the thing was to learn to use this. I had been on retreat. I came to realize that too often we push back against things. When you push back against something, you get stuck in that pushing back, because you got to keep pushing. Otherwise the other side is going to push forward. And rather, what I kept trying to do was to fight for a vision so that you could stand shoulder to shoulder and fight for vision. So I never said a negative thing about the bishop, though Lord knows I thought it, and what we did was I said, how do we use this moment for mission? Because we had all this notoriety. Because the Leadership Conference of Women Religious that had been censured, they had to work with the Vatican. So they had to be quiet. We didn't. We could be public. It was kind of fun.
David Axelrod
00:46:53
So you jumped on a bus?
Sister Simone Campbell
00:46:55
Well, we asked we asked our secular colleagues what to do. And at the end of an hour and a half meeting, whatever happens in an hour and a half meeting? May 14th, end of an hour and a half meeting, we were going on the road. We were pushing back against the Ryan budget. We were lifting up the works.
David Axelrod
00:47:12
Paul Ryan, as austere budget after the Tea Party election.
Sister Simone Campbell
00:47:15
It was horrible.
David Axelrod
00:47:16
2010.
Sister Simone Campbell
00:47:17
Right. And it was going to decimate all the programs. And what people didn't necessarily realize is that some of the programs run by Catholic sisters, it was going to decimate too. So. And then this is the best part. We found a press conference, or a press statement from the bishops conference that they had issued on a Friday late afternoon. You always know that's prime time. So late afternoon, they issued this press conference, or press statement that said the Ryan budget fails a basic moral test. So we made hundreds of copies of this.
David Axelrod
00:47:56
And they were grateful, I'm sure, for you amplifying their message.
Sister Simone Campbell
00:48:00
So thoughtful. And then we could say we stand with our bishops. It was wonderful.
David Axelrod
00:48:07
The, that be and that became, you know, on a number of issues. The Nuns on a Bus became very active and very visible. One of those issues was immigration.
Sister Simone Campbell
00:48:18
Immigration.
David Axelrod
00:48:20
And, we're still grappling with that issue today. You helped. An immigration reform bill was passed through the Senate, and I guess 2013, House wouldn't take it up.
Sister Simone Campbell
00:48:31
Boehner wouldn't take it up.
David Axelrod
00:48:35
But, now you're in the city of Chicago here. We're very much focused on this issue because of the migrants coming from Texas and so on. Tell me how you see that issue now.
Sister Simone Campbell
00:48:49
Well, the thing that I find so difficult in the United States is that the reporting is only as if it's what happens on our border. Or happens internally in the US. But last summer I went on a small delegation to Panama and we met with the Panamanian government. We went to the Darién to see people coming through the jungle, through the gap. It's a river of people who were desperate. And who couldn't eat, had no food, had no possibility. This one woman I met with her three daughters from Ecuador, that she had seen her husband killed in front of her. She grabbed her three daughters and runs. And so I say, well, where would you like to go? After they've been through the jungle. It was so dangerous, so dangerous. She says, well, where are you going? She goes. Chicago. Porque Chicago? Why Chicago. Ooh they have good jobs. I know they have good jobs. Well do you have family there? Oh no. They have good jobs. But the hunger to work, to support a family when there's so much devastation. And the folks from Venezuela who hadn't eaten in three days before they left to get to Colombia, finally they get some food. But the Colombians are forcing them out. They'll give them a free ride on the boat to the start of the path through the Darién.
David Axelrod
00:50:17
Sister, let me ask you about this. I mean, I'm, you know, I'm the son of an immigrant and a refugee, so I, you know, I have strong feelings about that. And great affection for America, for, taking my family in and making so much possible. But don't. There is an issue here, isn't there? I mean, you can't have millions of people just flowing across the border without.
Sister Simone Campbell
00:50:41
Oh, I agree. The the immigration.
David Axelrod
00:50:44
Your law. You helped, the law you helped pass that through the Senate would have helped greatly.
Sister Simone Campbell
00:50:49
'Oh my God. Yeah, absolutely. This is a broken law. But the thing that is so annoying is the willful refusal to fix it. The willful refusal to engage in the reality of what's going on in this world. And the other problem, David, that I have a really hard time with, is that a bunch of the movement of migrants is the result of global television and global internet and the capa--the fact that people, hungry people, see signs of hope. Hungry people are going to move towards hope. And we keep exporting. We don't export the problems. We export the Hollywood glitzy perspective.
David Axelrod
00:51:35
So I thought you were going to go somewhere else, which is, the immigrant you describe is a lot different than the immigrant that say Donald Trump describes.
Sister Simone Campbell
00:51:45
I don't mention the T word, though I'll work against him. To have a politics without compassion is to have our hearts frozen. To have our beings frozen. And, a deep freeze. It's cold outside today. You don't want a deep freeze as the national perspective.
David Axelrod
00:52:10
So let me ask you something. We've had this conversation, and you're very passionate on a bunch of issues that I'm very passionate about, as well. But we also see on the sort of the evangelical side, the Christian nationalist side great passion that is imbued with sort of religious.
Sister Simone Campbell
00:52:31
Hate.
David Axelrod
00:52:32
Yeah, but in invoking religiosity in service of a political agenda, and they would say listening to you. Not even they, but people less than they in terms of their fury and partisanship would say, you're not a nun, you're a politician.
Sister Simone Campbell
00:52:52
That could be nice. I'm a person of faith, and I go where faith faith leads me. See, that's. But I'm not a, I'm political. I'm not a politician.
David Axelrod
00:53:02
Do you worry about the invocation of religion in the service of politics?
Sister Simone Campbell
00:53:07
Oh, I think that's what that's the difference.
David Axelrod
00:53:09
That's what I'm asking.
Sister Simone Campbell
00:53:11
It informs my life. It informs my life. But I don't need it to inform yours. It informs my life and leads me in this path, which is the biggest gift in my life. But we meet all kinds of people on the path. You don't have to share the motivation. But that's that's how it. I mean, that's what I learned in DC, is finding ways of weaving together coalitions that care about similar parts. And so you can create a coalition without sharing all the reasons behind it. But we've got this result that we want, that we share, that we want.
David Axelrod
00:53:44
The thing that I find troubling is not, and this is not directed at you, but the ease with which we sort of deny our common humanity and the ease with which some people challenge other people's faith, because they disagree on a particular issue. Is there a danger of that from the left as well as the right, or.
Sister Simone Campbell
00:54:09
Mostly on the left. People are like, oh, religion, let's stay away from that.
David Axelrod
00:54:14
What about that?
Sister Simone Campbell
00:54:15
Well, I mean, it was hard for me when I first went to DC because the, religion makes Democrats nervous. Or made Democrats nervous.
David Axelrod
00:54:23
Their Democratic Party has become more of a secular party.
Sister Simone Campbell
00:54:27
'Yeah, but actually I feel more. Okay, now would be a name dropper. In '12, I got to speak prime time at the convention. I was so well-received that it told me the heart of who we are together shares a commitment to the common good. And how we get there, it doesn't matter to me, but it's a common good that we care about.
David Axelrod
00:54:52
You were well received in part because you were a hero for having helped pass the Affordable Care Act.
Sister Simone Campbell
00:54:56
Well that did help. That did help.
David Axelrod
00:54:57
Uh.
Sister Simone Campbell
00:54:58
And the bus. We have just done the bus.
David Axelrod
00:55:00
But I, you know, I do worry that, I'm worried about this idea of Christian nationalism, because we were a country built on pluralism. And, that's that's, you know, many of the same people who invoke the Constitution call themselves Christian nationalists. Well, they better reread it.
Sister Simone Campbell
00:55:18
Amen.
David Axelrod
00:55:19
Because the whole. I mean, one of the reasons families like mine came here was because they could practice their faith freely.
Sister Simone Campbell
00:55:26
Absolutely. But okay, can I can I give a little plug? I am in the documentary God And Country, which takes on the issue of Christian nationalism, white Christian nationalism, and the mistaken view of faith to justify actions that are very worrisome, that are very worrisome.
David Axelrod
00:55:46
It sounds like well worth watching. You talk about celebrity and notoriety and you've embraced it, but there is a sort of. You also, I think we've written and spoken about the kind of corrupting nature of that, you know, the siren song of, of celebrity and notoriety. Talk about that.
Sister Simone Campbell
00:56:07
Well, I think it can be, it can be a temptation. An example is, but okay, so I ride the bus. I don't have a car in DC. I ride the bus, take the metro. And here in Chicago, my favorite bus is the number six. And so I was meeting up with some of the Emerson Collective people, and they were gonna they were going to send a car. Well, don't send a car, I'm riding the bus.
David Axelrod
00:56:34
Don't they know about Nuns on the Bus?
Sister Simone Campbell
00:56:35
I know, I know. Well, they do now, but but but it's it's the human thing. The thing is, this notoriety is not about me. It's about the gift of of what we've been able to do that has nourished people in surprising ways. That's that's the gift.
David Axelrod
00:56:55
But you, do you find where there are times in your life where you said to yourself, I need to step back. I need not to be such a, I need not to be such a celebrity. I don't need to be. Yeah, right. Exactly.
Sister Simone Campbell
00:57:12
Oh, okay. Where that happens is when I'm home with my sisters. I'm just one of the sisters. It's just me and community. And then you know what happened? What they did? Good God. What they did was last.
David Axelrod
00:57:26
Take your television away?
Sister Simone Campbell
00:57:27
No, they didn't take my television away. What they did was they elected me to our council, which I had not considered because I thought I was safe, that they wouldn't want my notoriety around, but they did. So that was a shock. That was a shock. But they're sweet.
David Axelrod
00:57:42
So you are, I use the term advisedly, retired now?
Sister Simone Campbell
00:57:50
Well, I don't have a regular paid employment. Should we put it that way? But I'm very busy. Can I talk about what I'm doing?
David Axelrod
00:57:59
I asked.
Sister Simone Campbell
00:58:00
Okay. Going to. So my big thing is getting people, trying to understand people who think differently. And so last summer, I. I tried to get conservatives and progressives to talk to each other. That was impossible. I talked to, I don't know.
David Axelrod
00:58:15
Shouldn't be.
Sister Simone Campbell
00:58:15
It shouldn't be. I talked to like 35 conservatives. Oh, we'll talk to you, sister. Oh, we couldn't be public. Oh, I couldn't do it. So I said, all right, that didn't work. So what can I do? So I looked at the map of the U.S., and I said, The South scares me, and I don't know the South, so I.
David Axelrod
00:58:33
You probably scare them, too.
Sister Simone Campbell
00:58:34
I know. So what I did was I went to the South, I took my books, went to bookstores in southern states, and used the books as a way of getting people to come and then say, okay, here's my book, but really, I'm here because I don't know about the South. Could you educate me? Talk to me about it. What's your experience? And the glorious thing about doing it this way is it makes everybody in the room an expert, and me the learner. And so people were.
David Axelrod
00:59:01
And what did you learn?
Sister Simone Campbell
00:59:02
'Oh my gosh. Things like most people in the South don't really travel out of the South. A lot of southern niceness. This one guy in Birmingham said he thinks the South is really nice because they learned it pre-Civil War to cover slavery. That having to be nice no matter what the price was. And so that pain of that. Another thing was in Mississippi, my heart broke in Mississippi when I finally realized the reason they won't expand Medicaid from that crazy Supreme Court decision. At least Roberts affirmed it, the Affordable Care Act, that's a whole nother story. But that Mississippi can't expand Medicaid because for them, it's like another surrender at Appomattox. It's a surrender to.
David Axelrod
00:59:52
Federal authority.
Sister Simone Campbell
00:59:53
Federal authority. No matter. And I'd been using all these arguments about how your people need it. This is an identity issue. Which, I mean, doesn't that break your heart?
David Axelrod
01:00:05
Yeah. But it's also important to have those conversations and understand.
Sister Simone Campbell
01:00:09
Oh, absolutely. Absolutely.
David Axelrod
01:00:12
But I really hope that you continue having these dialogs because, I do believe in the fact that we have common humanity and, we have all these forces that are driving us apart. Social media and our politics mirrors social media. And, at the end of the day, we all are human beings and brothers and sisters. And, we need people like you out there continuing that dialog. Thanks, Sister Simone. Thank you so much.
Sister Simone Campbell
01:00:44
Oh, thanks for this opportunity.
Outro
01:00:49
Thank you for listening to The Axe Files, brought to you by the Institute of Politics at the University of Chicago and CNN Audio. The executive producer of the show is Miriam Finder Annenberg. The show is also produced by Saralena Barry, Jeff Fox, and Hannah Grace McDonald. And special thanks to our partners at CNN, including Steve Lickteig and Haley Thomas. For more programing from the IOP, visit politics dot uchicago dot edu.
