Dear me, you have not responded to the issues in my post, just stated obvious things—about baptism, not judging someone’s interior state, who may convert—that are not being questioned.
If you read what Dorothy Day wrote, you might discover that her “transformation” from Marxism was incomplete. Would that you had read Day’s diary (”The Duty of Delight,” 2011, p. 43), where she notes that her Russian friend Helen Iswolsky “has said I was too kind to the Communists in my book [”From Union Square to Rome”] and the attitude taken by our opponents is that we do not realize what they are capable of.” Years later Day wrote about “what they are capable of”: “These men were animated by the love of brother and this we must believe though their ends meant the seizure of power, and the building of mighty armies, the compulsion of concentration camps, the forced labor and torture and killing of tens of thousands, even millions”(”Catholic Worker” [CW], May 1951).
Similarly, Day’s co-worker Tom Cornell in “Voices from the Catholic Worker” (1993, p. 78) states that Day did not like Baroness Catherine de Hueck Doherty’s “lapses into anti-Sovietism at all.” The Baroness was the Russian emigre who founded Madonna House in Combermere, Ontario, and is a Servant of God.
True, Day prayed for the salvation of her prominent Communist friends Rayna Proehme, Mike Gold, Anna Louise Strong, and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn throughout her life. She also praised their support of the Soviet Union (and overlooked their efforts to foment violent revolution) repeatedly in the CW, often without identifying their positions in the Party. For example, Gurley Flynn was one of the three founders of the USA Communist Party and became its head. Both she and Proehme received state funerals in Moscow.
Day’s praise of the political stands of these committed Communist friends should not be a surprise, given her remark that “When people are standing up for our present rotten system, they are being worse than Communists, it seems to me” (”Duty of Delight,” p. 98) and her treating Lenin, “who had nowhere to lay his head,” and “Papa Marx” as secular saints in the April 1948 CW.
Having posted this “kinda [confusing] article from the *bad* NCR”—which is now publicly identified as a “non-Catholic” publication by Bishop Finn, in whose jurisdiction it is—please rest serenely as you await the required miracles for the canonization of the woman one blogger calls “Dotty Day.”
Thanks. I’ll pray. You, too.
One of the things I find challenging in the Lives of Saints and Blesseds is their struggle with being men (or women) of their age: Chrysostom could have been called with some justice an anti-Semite; Augustine an incompletely-converted Manichee or a proto-Calvinist; Charles de Foucauld a French imperialist (up to the end: had a cache of French military weapons in his hemitage at the time of his death, 1916); Cyril of Alexandria a mobocrat; Josemaria Escriva a Fascist; Thomas More a burner of heretics; John Paul II a naive gull of corrupt clergy --- I could go on.
I love all these men. They distanced themselves slowly and imperfectly from the sins of their age. They can be faulted for where they came from. I am far more interested in where they were going.
Here I say Finis. Peace to you. Peace to the soul of Dorothy Day.