"To Hell With It" - Dorothy Day (Kinda interesting article from the *bad* NCR)

National Catholic Reporter ^ | Dec. 5, 2012 | Michael Sean Winters

[Mrs. Don-o]

Particularly interesting are the comments at the end - worth a click to the link, IMHO.

[Mrs. Don-o]

Ping

[what's up]

But, it does not see how Dorothy’s radicalism after her baptism was not ideological any longer because it was not rooted in an idea

I imagine Day still had "ideas" even after her baptism and many of these were radical.

Joining Cesar Chavez in his "cause" shows her radicalism was still very much alive.

[Mrs. Don-o]

It calls to mind St. Augustine, who was an ex-Manichee but never totally escaped --- until Heaven, I suppose--- some of the distorting features of Mani.

Ah well. As Oscar Wilde said: "Every saint has a past. And every sinner has a future."

[what's up]

I could never equate or even think of the two as similar. Augustine rejected Manichaeism.

Day doesn't seem to have rejected her radicalism. The bohemian lifestyle, yes, but not the philosophy of Gov't.

[Mrs. Don-o]

On tht I offer this as counter-evidence: Day's rejection of statism even in the form of Social Security:

We believe that social security legislation, now hailed as a great victory for the poor and for the worker, is a great defeat for Christianity. It is an acceptance of the Idea of force and compulsion. It is an acceptance of Cain's statement, on the part of the employer. "Am I my brother's keeper?" Since the employer can never be trusted to give a family wage, nor take care of the worker as he takes care of his machine when it is idle, the state must enter in and compel help on his part.

Of course, economists say that business cannot afford to act on Christian principles. It Is impractical, uneconomic. But it is generally coming to be accepted that such a degree of centralization as ours is impractical, and that there must be decentralization. In other words, business has made a mess of things, and the state has had to enter in to rescue the worker from starvation.

Of course, Pope Pius XI said that, when such a crisis came about, in unemployment, fire, flood, earthquake, etc., the state had to enter in and help.

But we in our generation have more and more come to consider the state as bountiful Uncle Sam. "Uncle Sam will take care of it all. The race question, the labor question, the unemployment question."

We will all be registered and tabulated and employed or put on a dole, and shunted from clinic to birth control clinic. "What right have people who have no work to have a baby?" How many poor Catholic mothers heard that during those grim years before the war!

[what's up]

Yesm, she was against SS because leaned toward being an anarchist.

She also refused to pay Federal tax.

She spoke out against capitalism and this is what she said she wanted society to be:

We would like to see a country made up of farming communes, agronomic universities, hospices, unions, cooperatives, small units of all those necessary institutions to be preserved, and a doing away with luxury in order to have the essential which is ownership of house and field and job, and the responsibility which goes with that ownership. We wish to abolish the proletariat state, rather than establish the dictatorship of the proletariat, abolish the wage system which provides men with luxuries but not the essentials.

She was a radical leftist...but more in the form of anarchy, not communism.

[what's up]

Presed the button too fast.

Please ignore the spelling errors.

[Mrs. Don-o]

Yes, that’s probably it. Not state-centered, but Anarchist. Not ideological, but Personalist. Not coerced or demanded, but Voluntary. And not Marxist, but Christ-centered.

[what's up]

And not Marxist, but Christ-centered.

The doing away with luxury and eradication of a wage system Christ-centered? Really?

No, these are Marxist ideas. But worked out into an anarchist framework instead of communist (no central Gov't).

[Mrs. Don-o]

"The doing away with luxury and eradication of a wage system Christ-centered? Really?"

Sure, really: as long as it is voluntary and not controlled by the state and other coercive mechanisms.

This is not to say that a wage system,for instance, is immoral. It is not condemned in the Scriptures, which assumes wages, and demands just wages.

The Prophets of Israel, the Gospels, and the Fathers of the Church all condemn luxury, and, for that matter, covetousness and usury; which would certainly cut the legs off of modern captialism, powered as it is by advertising and consumer credit.

A free society which respects private property (which Day also supported) will also respect a diversity which makes room for distributism, communitarianism and even monasticism. Freedom would mean you can go and come with that, as you judge best.

[what's up]

The Prophets of Israel, the Gospels, and the Fathers of the Church all condemn luxury

No,they did not condemn luxury in toto.

They only condemned luxury enjoyed at the expense of the poor. There are times in the Bible when God himself blesses beyond the essentials (condemned in the statement by Day).

Of course the Scripture assumes wages. To labor for a wage is moral. Eradication of a wage system is not Christ-centered but Marxist. To advocate a system where there would be no wage for labor is to advocate injustice which God abhors. And, no, Day doesn't says this would be voluntary. And only in utopian thinking (the thinking of anarchists) would one consider that it ever could be.

[Mrs. Don-o]

They certainly did condemn luxuy, e.g. the rich man who ---unlike Lazarus who reposes with blessed Abraham --- is sent to hell: there's not a hint that he stole the money or acquired it by fraud, or even that he spent it for vices like drugs and whores. It's that he was not compassionate to Lazarus.

And what Jesus said about camels going through the eye of the needle: even if that meant going through a small gate into the city, they'd have to be divesed of all their cargoes before they got through. It was a warning: wach out! Don't make your salvation difficult!

A valuable warning against the acquisition of riches.

And don't get me started on usury!

[what's up]

I already addressed this.

They did not condemn luxury completely.

Of course they did when it was being used to exploit the poor. However, as I said God also blesses with plenty. Other Scriptures can be cited supporting this.

You seem to be missing the point.

[Mrs. Don-o]

Well, the condemnation didn't just extend to those who *exploited* the poor. It extended also to those who simply *ignored* them. To keep your grip on luxuries in the face of so many who lack necessities, is to have a grip that puts your soul in mortal danger.

I look to myself on that one. It's a hard examination of conscience, one which I am not comfortable about at all.

[lastchance]

Reads as if she took many of her economic ideas from Chesterton. You know that Commmie Fink/s

[Mrs. Don-o]

1) She certainly was a voluntarist. In fact, most criticism of her is that she was too darned much so, i.e. she did not coerce even those close to her, let alone those who ran far-flung CW houses as they saw fit. She was the diametrical polar opposite of a dictator. She forced austerities on nobody except herself.

2) Her authority, which she had by example only, rested in this: that there was not an ace of difference between what she believed, what she wrote or spoke, and the way she lived her life. It was nothing but the gentle personalism of traditional Catholicism: personal obligation of looking after the needs of our brother, daily practice of the Works of Mercy.

And no skin off of your nose or anybody else's.

Exceptionally good journalist (or I could say "diarist") as well. ANybody would be enriched by reading her for twenty minutes a day. She is as good as bread.

[Mrs. Don-o]

:o)

[DBeers]

Thank you for finding and posting this.

[ubipetrusest]

Yes,Dorothy Day called herself a “propagandist” and an “agitator.” She insisted that the early Christians’ and religious orders’ cooperative efforts were a form of “Catholic Communism.” She declared more than forty years after becoming a Catholic: “Fortunately, the Papal States were wrested from the Church in the last century, but there is still the problem of investment of papal funds. It is always a cheering thought to me that if we have good will and are still unable to find remedies for the economic abuses of our time, in our family, our parish, and the mighty church as a whole, God will take matters in hand and do the job for us. When I saw the Garibaldi mountains in British Columbia ... I said a prayer for his soul and blessed him for being the instrument of so mighty a work of God. May God use us!” (”Hutterite Communities,” “Catholic Worker” [CW], July-August 1969).
Despite Cardinal O’Connor’s claim that she left behind her Communist friends and beliefs, she did neither. She told Robert Coles (not “Cole”) that in her youth, most of her friends were “Communists and Socialists. (I think I called them radical friends in the section of ‘The Long Loneliness’ where I discuss my Chicago days.)” (Robert Coles, “Dorothy Day: A Radical Devotion,” 1987, p. 27). On April 9, 1959 she wrote, “My work in the labor field, and with the radical group was very much in accord with my conscience—that is why I still love them all” (”All the Way to Heaven: Selected Letters of Dorothy Day,” 2010, p. 252). She maintained a lifelong friendship with Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, who became the head of the Communist Party USA. In her diary (”The Duty of Delight,” 2011) Day notes on December 23, 1958: “visited Gurley Flynn and her sister who has been ill” (p. 248). In her September 16, 1964 diary entry, Day wrote: “Dreamed last night of writing speech for Gurley Flynn’s memorial service at Community Church next Tues. They called me up about it and I told them I would write a letter” (p. 361). Day’s letter praising Flynn was read publicly at the memorial service by CW Tom Cornell, and also published in the November 1964 CW as “Red Roses for Her.” Flynn had already had a State funeral in Moscow’s Red Square with Khrushchev present, as Carol Byrne notes in her essential “The Catholic Worker Movement (1933-1980): A Critical Analysis,” (2010, p. 6). Day also maintained a lifelong friendship with Mike Gold, a former “radical” boyfriend who became a columnist in “The Daily Worker.” For more details, see Carol Byrne’s book and its “Complete Supplementary Notes.” These notes are available at the blog “Dorothy Day Another Way.”