Posted on 12/06/2012 10:00:52 AM PST by Mrs. Don-o
We continue our series of considering Catholic identity today by looking at Dorothy Day. Monday, I set the tone for the week by recalling the response of Flannery O’Connor to a group of erudite Catholics who thought the Eucharist was a great symbol: “Well, if it’s just a symbol, then to hell with it.” Then, I examined the counterfeit of faith known as civil religion. Yesterday, I looked at the Vatican new motu proprio regarding the Catholic identity of our charities and a different counterfeit form of Christianity, a reduction of the faith to a social justice ethic. Today, we examine Dorothy Day, to whom, assuredly, the adjective counterfeit has never been applied.
Robert Cole begins his short, brilliant biography of Dorothy Day by recalling the first time he met her. He went to the Catholic Worker House on Mott Street. He opened the door. Dorothy was sitting at the opposite end of the room with a distraught woman. In a flash, she signaled Cole to a chair near the door, and then returned to her conversation. The woman was severely intoxicated and quite hysterical and Dorothy was trying to calm her down. Just when it appeared that some measure of calm had been achieved, the woman would explode into a new fit of hysterics. This went on for several minutes until finally the woman was at some peace. Dorothy took her leave of the woman and approached Cole. She asked, “Were you waiting to speak with one of us?”
I first read that account several years back and, appropriately, it brought tears to my eyes. I still cannot tell that story now without my eyes welling up. Everything you need to know about why Dorothy Day was a saint is contained in that little word “us.” She was incapable of dismissing the dignity of another human person, even for a second, even for someone who would not have cared. If Levinas is correct that our human conscience is more than a prod to do right and avoid wrong, if it is deeper, about the moral challenge of the face of another, Dorothy Day had a very finely tuned conscience. And it is that, not our works, that gains us heaven.
That “us” shames all the rest of us who are not so saintly. It should make our souls tremble. She spoke of love as harsh and dreadful. No burlap banners in the sanctuary for her. She was the real deal.
I thought of that “us” when I read this account of the canonization process in the New Yorker [1]. The author follows the typical narrative that has emerged, that it is somehow strange that this woman who is understood as a champion of the left has been embraced by the conservative Cardinal-Archbishop of New York. Of course, Dorothy was no ordinary leftie, and Cardinal Dolan is more complicated than the designation conservative suggests. It does not surprise me in the least that he is championing her cause because I think he grasps the power of that “us.”
The article makes much of Dorothy’s radicalism, and surely she was radical. 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. It was rooted in an event, the passion, death and resurrection of the Lord Jesus. It was rooted in the person of Jesus whom Dorothy worshipped each morning at Mass and throughout the day in the poor with whom she came into contact. It was rooted in the community of faith, the Church, where we encounter the risen Lord still. Dorothy was not a conformist, she was a “radical,” precisely because she so obviously, so tenaciously and so heroically conformed herself to Christ.
Everyone wants a piece of Dorothy. Thus it has ever been with the saints – literally. We want their relics near us, we venerate those relics, we want to be close to them. Since the issue of Dorothy’s canonization caught the nation’s attention when Cardinal Dolan consulted with his brother bishops in Baltimore last month, both the Catholic Left and the Catholic Right claim her as one of their own.
A few thoughts for the Catholic Left to consider. Do you try and conform the Church it us, to our wishes and wants, or do you try and conform yourselves to Christ and the Church? Do you experience authority within the Church as liberating, which is exactly how Dorothy experienced it? Do you hold on to your solid, well-informed, liberal opinions more closely than the tradition of the Church? Do you reduce the faith to good works?
A few thoughts for the Catholic Right to consider. Do you recognize how counter-cultural Dorothy was? Do you let yourselves see what she saw, that one of the things that holds us back in our commitment to faith is this “dirty, rotten system”? Do you equate the faith with moral probity and conventional values? Do you look at sinners and see someone to dismiss or person with a future, even with the potential for sanctity in their future? Do you love the poor and make that your criterion for evaluating your own economic decisions and that of your society?
Dorothy had gone to God by the time Pope Benedict delivered his famous Christmas address to the Curia in 2005, in which he confronted the “hermeneutic of rupture” regarding Vatican II and proposed, instead, a “hermeneutic of reform,” emphasizing both continuity and discontinuity. Dorothy’s life could have been the Holy Father’s Exhibit A. I am not a scholar of Dorothy’s life, but I have read many of her collected letters. I do not discern an enormous difference between Dorothy before the Council and Dorothy after the Council in those letters. Certainly, she did not need to wait to read about the “people of God” in Lumen Gentium to recognize her baptismal call and its significance. She was certainly committed to social justice long before Gaudium et Spes was drafted. Robert Blair Kaiser has suggested that Vatican II “changed everything.” I do not see that it changed Dorothy.
To everyone the question looms: Would we have said “us” to Robert Cole? Here is the true radicalism of Dorothy Day. That may not be evident to a writer at the New Yorker. It may not be evident to those on the left or right who are trying to claim Dorothy as an adherent to their causes, rather than try and adhere their cause to Dorothy’s cause. It certainly is not evident to me when I am dismissive of others as I often am. But it is in that “us” that we discern Dorothy’s radicalism, the radicalism of total abandonment to Jesus Christ, the radicalism of total commitment to the poor, the radicalism of total allegiance to his Church, in sum, the radicalism of sanctity.
As you observe, Augustine rejected Manichaeism. However, Day continued to associate with and present an unrealistic and sanitized account of those whose lives resembled her bohemian past. She tolerated and enabled sexual immorality at the Catholic Worker farms. When I visited Tivoli in 1971 I was puzzled and confused by the things I observed, and naively thought Dorothy must not be aware of the goings-on, such as a couple living together without benefit of clergy. But her diary (”The Duty of Delight,” 2011) reveals that she knew what was happening (pp. 419, 454), decided to sell the farm (p. 486), and then took 10 years to do so (p. 675).
In addition, Day allowed Ammon Hennacy to remain a “Catholic” Worker (he had become Catholic because Dorothy was Catholic) after he married outside the Catholic Church. Ironically, Joan Thomas, Ammon’s second wife, met him at the CW after Day had told her, “Oh, you must meet Ammon. He knows all about fasting. And he likes pretty girls”; Thomas found this “an extremely puzzling remark for a bona fide Christian woman” to make (Joan Thomas,”The Years of Grief and Laughter,” 1974, p. 7). Day eulogized him in “Ammon Hennacy: Non-Church’ Christian” (CW,February 1970).
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1)You claim that Day “forced austerities on nobody except herself.” Perhaps you are unaware of the famous “retreat” embraced by Day and given by Fr. John J. Hugo at the Catholic Worker many times (Carol Byrne, “The Catholic Worker Movement(1933-1980): A Critical Analysis,” 2010, pp. 232-238). The retreat—which urged austerities on the laity with no loopholes—did little good, according to longtime Catholic Worker Stanley Vishnewski in “Wings of the Dawn”(1984, pp.208-215). Day’s daughter Tamar had austerities forced on her and detested the retreat. The retreat was so controversial Hugo was “silenced” and the retreat called “Jansenistic in tendency” (William D. Miller, “Dorothy Day,” 1982, p. 340). When Day died, Fr. Hugo was to say the mass, but the funeral mass was said by then-Fr. Geoffrey Gneuhs, the CW chaplain, because Day’s daughter Tamar refused to attend with Hugo (R. G. Riegle, “Dorothy Day: Portraits by Those Who Knew Her,” 2003, p. 184,note 2). Day herself reneged in later life—the retreat inveighed against listening to the radio and having linoleum—and reports in her diary listening to radio and watching television programs (pp. 647, 650, 659) and accepting half a bottle of port (p. 658).
2) As for Day’s “authority, which she had by example only,” Day’s co-workers would disagree. CW Tom Cornell said, “[We] Let everyone know that if they talked to reporters, that would be against Dorothy’s will, which is tantamount to saying good-bye. (We had no redress, no committees or any of that shit. If you’re out, you’re out)” (R. Riegle Troester, ed., “Voices From the Catholic Worker,” 1993, p. 40). Similarly, Michael Harrington stated that Day was the head of the CW, and after people engaged in a discussion, she did what she wanted (Maurice Isserman, “The Other American: The Untold Life of Michael Harrington,” 2000, p. 73).
Dear me, you may feel “she is as good as bread,” but some who read her diary feel the need of a stiff drink!
Keep in mind that anyone can become a Catholic, from whatever background, if he or she is respondng to divine grace. The Church has patriarchalists transformed by the Gospel, and feminists transformed by the Gospel. Monarchists and democratic/republicans. Leftists and Rightists.. What matters is not "Left" or "Right". What matters is the transformation.
As for Day's faults --- all sinners have them, and that means everyone. Dorothy used to say, "You can go to hell by imitating the vices of saints." She also had a short fuse. On being told she ought to hold her temper, she remarked, "I hold more temper in 10 minutes than you hold in a lifetime."
She struggled. I would do better--- much, much beter --- if I struggled as well as she did.
Let me close with these thoughts:
Gerald Vann, O.P. wrote in his book *The Heart of Man* (Ch. III) that “where there is obvious wickedness, we must protest and fight against the external crime, indeed, but we can never judge of [another person’s interior] sin because we can never know the human heart.”
As Vatican II’s constitution *Gaudium et Spes* stated (in Section 28), “[God] forbids us to make judgments about the internal guilt of anyone.”
In any case, I will wait serenely to see if she gets her two miracles. That should settle things.
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.
Yes,I do pray and will continue to pray for the millions starved to death and executed brutally by the Communists who Day idolized. May they rest in peace.
In closing, I note that again you shift from the subject (Day) to others. As “what’s up” remarked in post 14, “You seem to be missing the point.” Your comments confuse the issue. For example, it’s nice to know you believe (post 11) the wage system is “not immoral” or “condemned”—it’s too bad that neither Day nor Peter Maurin would share your view.
As Carol Byrne points out in “Complete Supplementary Notes to ‘The Catholic Worker [CW} Movement (1933-1980): A Critical Analysis,’’ for page 152:
Day stated that “Peter shocked people by calling for an ‘abolition of the wage system’” in CW May 1953.In CW April 1963, Day quoted Peter Maurin who reiterated the expression “fire the bosses” and also “Work not Wages”, “Labour is not a commodity to be bought and sold”.
Byrne’s notes can be read online at “Dorothy Day Another Way.”
I don't see Day as ever repentent of her damaging beliefs. Far from it.
Like Jane Fonda...if I saw evidence that she now worked in favor of freedom, I would believe she was truly repentant. But this was not so with either Fonda or Day.
There's something very wrong with the idolization of Day. Way too many Catholics idolize the poor (which has led to their social justice politics) much like the communists idolized or romanticized the peasantry. I wish they regarded freedom with the same sentiment. Putting Day up as a saint only amplifies that serious mistake. Thanks for your posts.
I agree that Day never abandoned her Communist beliefs, and most of those supporting her cause—which was introduced with a denial of this key fact—still will not admit the error.Day remained unrepentant, just like “Hanoi Jane” Fonda, who richly deserves that title. “Moscow Mary” was Day’s. Thanks for your posts.
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