God's panhandler
Mayer, Milton
God's panhandler She was one tough, lusty Christian, full of brightness and beans Milton Mayer Among the mitred of the Earth, few since Richelieu have had the clout of the late Francis Cardinal...
...The church moves glacially, with all that real estate on its back, and the Cross besides...
...The workers walked off the finger-freezing job in January 1949, and became the most widely celebrated grave-diggers since Hamlet...
...All she had done was the least of the things he had done—and the most of the things he had enjoined upon her (and upon you, and upon me, and upon His Eminence) in Matt...
...It had been a long, long time since anybody had gainsaid His Eminence—any hierarch or lowerarch, or layman (or laywoman out of the Bowery, even one who, in her ecclesiastically appropriate mantilla, would one day receive the Eucharist from the hands of the Pope...
...Let us, this once, steal a phrase from e.e...
...A college socialist, she wrote for the socialist and communist papers and had long since reached the settled conviction that organized religion, "the Church," was a flim-flam—all tip and no iceberg...
...He that believeth on me," said Jesus Christ, "the things that I do he shall do likewise...
...So His Eminence Francis Cardinal Spellman was compelled, when she came out in the vanguard of the grave-diggers, to pretend she wasn't there—perhaps to grind his teeth of nights, perhaps to pray for her in his closet, but never to say a mumbling word in public by way of anathema, rebuke, or even inquiry...
...Dorothy Day was not bucking for sainthood—"I don't want to be dismissed so easily"—but for mere salvation...
...She believed that there was no salvation without those three chapters of Matthew and no salvation against them...
...Not likely...
...I read so much, and my eyes tire...
...A saint...
...she will be a sharp saint...
...And if the Cardinal had ever ordered her to give up her work, would she obey...
...No more...
...His administrator of that office was Bishop James Francis Mclntyre (who would one day also get his middle name changed to Cardinal...
...And then she was transformed and became more Catholic than the Catholics: a mountain moved by faith...
...Gladly," she said, and added, with her rich, unjaded smile, "There are many ways, you know, to handle a Cardinal...
...The Worker costs a penny a monthly copy...
...The Cardinal called the strike an "anti-American, anti-Christian evil," "a strike against the Church...
...She once, near the end, asked for something for herself: a Bible with large print...
...God's panhandler, she asked and she asked and she asked...
...5,6, and 7. She was the Martha of "many things" and the Mary of "the better part," first and last a believer...
...She was one tough, lusty Christian, full of brightness and beans to the last...
...And to keep it rolling he refused a forty-hour week to the Church's cemetery workers...
...She died in her room, one room, at Maryhouse on the Lower East Side, leaving us all behind, the young of many riches, the old of many more riches...
...He was afraid," said Jim O'Gara of the Catholic Commonweal, "that he just might be dealing with a saint...
...In 1977 she was eighty, and another mitred porkchopper was asked if he could name "a good or great" American Catholic...
...There are many ways to handle a Cardinal...
...cummings and assert that Dorothy Day never up-grew or down-forgot...
...It wasn't Dorothy Day who had become respectable...
...it was the Church, called to respectability by John XXIII...
...She bypassed the Prince of the Church and went right to the top—to Christ the King—and got the green light...
...The strikebreaking Cardinal led a hundred seminarian scabs through the Catholic picket line and dug the graves...
...But her indiscriminate and uncompromising love was fiercely infectious, and over the indiscriminate and uncompromising decades her apostolate influenced some of the very best young Catholics in the land, with names like Merton, Harrington, Berrigan, Cogley, and thus was the American Catholic Church transformed torrentially...
...Canonization asks for the proof of miracles (usually two...
...And the Cardinal knew it, and knew that hers was the surest way of all: the indiscriminate and uncompromising love of God uncluttered by clout, uncluttered by cant, uncluttered by cassock, uncluttered by cathedral...
...Calvary Cemetery belonged to St...
...Milton Mayer is The Progressive's Roving Editor...
...When she is 180, or 280, or 380, the Tribunal of the Congregation of Rites of the Roman Catholic Church may have finished its glacial examination of her "case" and concluded that while she was here she was doing what came su-pernaturally...
...of New York...
...She was a sharp sinner...
...I want in," I say, "I'm a friend of Dorothy's...
...Again and again he let it be known—oh, he had his means of letting it be known— that he was thinking of rebuking her...
...I have thought of sending in a million-dollar subscription, which would bring me the paper for 8,333,333 years (and three-and-a-third months...
...Jesus Christ enjoined the works of mercy as the criteria of salvation—ministry to the down and the out, to the lovelorn of a loveless society (and a loveless Church...
...I see myself outside the Pearly Gate, a South Side Jewish boy from Chicago, disguised as a Quaker...
...In her youth she had been an anarchist atheist, saying, "Do what you will," and doing what she would among her fellow-hellers in the Hell-Hole, a literary saloon in Greenwich Village...
...That," says the Gatekeeper, "is what they all say how...
...The striking grave-diggers of 1949 felt constrained to take an oath "as Catholic gentlemen" that they were anti-communist...
...Dorothy Day's papers were in order...
...A friend of the poor and the rich, he found a place in the order of things for both breeds and left them in their separate places...
...You can bet your breviary that Spellman tried...
...But Dorothy Day in her penny-an-issue Catholic Worker told the strikers that their strike was Christian and that they themselves were the Church...
...Nor did Dorothy Day gainsay him now...
...she ignored him, since his authority, by extension from Rome, extended only to faith and morals and his stricture against the "immoral strike" was patently bogus...
...And in that same 1972 President Theodore Hesburgh of Notre Dame presented her with the University's highest honor, the Laetare Medal, for having "comforted the afflicted and afflicted the comfortable...
...Thus brandished Dorothy Day the Cross...
...When she and Peter Maurin began their work in the Bowery forty-seven years ago with the first of their hospices for the dispossessed, she was one of the weirdos of a rabidly reactionary American Catholic Church given over to Cardinal Spellman's anti-communist crusade...
...He knew that all his clout was helpless against Dorothy Day and her clout-less Catholic Worker movement...
...Her holy mischie-vousness finessed him, and all the rest of his life (and hers) she continued to egg on the grave-digging malcontents of his archdiocese...
...She wasn't interested in the form or reform of the State or the "just" war to preserve it or the just revolution to overturn it...
...He could name one—could Archbishop Jean Ja-dot, the Apostolic Delegate to the United States: Dorothy Day...
...She found herself an anarchist Christian saying, "Love God, and do as you will...
...And this the Cardinal Archbishop knew...
...God's panhandler She was one tough, lusty Christian, full of brightness and beans Milton Mayer Among the mitred of the Earth, few since Richelieu have had the clout of the late Francis Cardinal Spellman—"Was his middle name Cardinal, Pop...
...of Thomas Aquinas someone said, "His whole life was a miracle...
...All she ever did was shelter the homeless and feed the hungry and clothe the naked and never ask questions of them, without ever believing that she could do more than that—or disbelieving that to God all things are possible...
...Like Peter Maurin, the French roustabout philosopher of "Utopian communist communalism," with whom she established the first House of Hospitality, she was interested only in the person, always in the person, the person who would be restored by personalism and would one day make a society "in which it is easier for people to be good...
...She did not ask the Cardinal's permission or petition him...
...And his rebuke could have been his order to close down her forty merciful Houses of Hospitality and communal farms all over the country and suspend the Catholic Worker, which preached absolute pacifism—refusing to support the "Christian" fascists in the Spanish Civil War!—and absolute poverty: "It is only when we embrace voluntary poverty for ourselves that we can expect God to provide for us...
...But in one transformed woman's lifetime of eighty-three years it moved torrentially in the direction of the preachment her practice preached...
...In 1972 she went to jail for the eighth time—she was seventy-five years old—for picketing with the United Farm Workers in California...
...But the grave-diggers of St...
...Patrick's Cathedral, so the office of burying the dead was Cardinal Spellman's...
...Well, young man," says the Pearly Gatekeeper, a little superciliously, as well he might, "and what do you think you're doing here...
...Silver and gold had he none, but he ran an archdiocese that was rolling in it...
...Maybe I could get Dorothy to give me an assist, without having to sell what I have and give it to the poor...
...Between these two gigantic bananas of Christendom the agitation was enough to unstring the grave-diggers of New York, but the grave-diggers remained strung...
...She was the most conservative of Catholics in her "indiscriminate and uncompromising love of the Mystical Body," in her holy obedience to the Holy See and her holy adherence to the canons of the Roman Catholic Church...
...nobody, and no Cardinal, could catch her out, devotionally, liturgically, or sacramentally...
...Pat stood pat and won the strike...
Vol. 45 • February 1981 • No. 2
