That today’s culture wars lack a convenient place to pigeonhole Tom Cornell, whose seven decades of activism in the Catholic Worker movement continued until his passing on August 1, shows their limitations rather than his.
In a 2002 profile, Andrew Blackman noted that Cornell "shares common beliefs with liberals and neo-conservatives, communists and cardinals, and he harshly criticizes all of them." Cornell was the sort of radical for social justice who told liberals that radicalism didn’t mean being "liberal but more so,” since his analysis of the ills of war and poverty traced them to fundamentally "different premises." He wasn’t any more accommodating to those who professed his anti-abortion position but who seemed to be only "concerned about people … until they’re born."