A radical holiness:
Vree, Dale
ON THE CATHOLIC WORKER'S FIFTIETH ANNIVERSARY A radical holiness DALE VREE DOROTHY DAY died in 1980 at the age of eighty-three and it's fitting that we begin taking the full measure of this...
...But many radicals were also building careers for themselves in the movement and selfishly trying to find their own moment in history...
...And yet, Day could not quite make do with the limp concept of what is now called "the invisible Christian...
...Man's dignity...
...And he does this not only in Poland, but throughout the world...
...As Dorothy stated the dilemma engendered by her pregnancy:'' A woman does not want to be alone at such a time...
...But many others too, whose walk with God is in danger of being derailed by secular politics, could benefit by taking another look at her pilgrimage...
...It pits sister against brother...
...Social action and a basic faith commitment are not in a zero-sum relationship...
...And as a very principled anarchist who would never submit to the "rituals" of any institution, Forster would not agree to a church marriage...
...In red ink...
...But after no doubt struggling with her humility for a few moments, she obliged me with her signature...
...But, alas, the path to Mother Church was not to be smooth...
...But the world in the sense of "being worldly"-of being fixated on worldly things-is evil...
...This odd attraction to Rome was not quite accidental...
...Or so it seems to me...
...The nostalgie de la boue of too many radicals also reflected an effort to find cover-and justification-for decadent habits, and Day was frankly "revolted" by sexual promiscuity...
...They poured in and out of her doors...
...And so her Catholicism quickly put up a barrier between her and her radical friends...
...She . .. broke friendships, tossed free-loving hippies out on their ears, forbade Catholic deviants access to her paper...
...A voluntary poverty, on the other hand, can free one from that appetite...
...She gave birth to a daughter, out of wedlock, and then quickly realized that the greatest thing she could do for her beloved Tamar would be to bring her up in the church...
...IN MANY WAYS, the tensions between Day's new-found faith and her on-going radicalism were resolved when-through the good offices of George Shuster, then managing editor of Commonweal-she met Peter Maurin, the French-born peasant-philosopher and troubadour of Christ...
...Dorothy abjured possessions for herself, but she conceded that her example was not obligatory for every Christian...
...Help the poor?Yes...
...She was an actual instance of that Christianized "man come of age" that Bonhoeffer elusively wrote about from the hopelessness of a prison cell and that modern theologians have ineptly fantasized about for the last two decades...
...The poor should certainly have their necessities met-but there's a big difference between sufficiency and affluence...
...She doesn't say why she might have felt this way, but neither does she seem to feel that such an assumption needs any explanation...
...rather, it is a beacon in the dark...
...Day was experiencing inner turmoil, and yet the balance still tipped away from Christianity and toward secular radicalism...
...Too many of us start out with a strong faith, which leads into social action, which then results in an erosion of that faith and a co-optation by secular forces...
...She felt a ' 'blind instinct'' for reverence, for worship, to bow her head in prayer, to kneel in church...
...Sadly, however, in the process her heart grew colder and harder (as did mine...
...Justice...
...The world in the physical sense-the creation, of which the body is a part-is good and to be honored...
...And, lo and behold, we find Pope John Paul II endorsing such plans for workers' self-management in his encyclical Laborem Exer-cens) Day's and Maurin's anarcho-syndicalist vision had-and still has-the signal virtue of being the only radicalism around that recognizes that if people are to change society they must also change-and be allowed to change-their own hearts and minds...
...Rereading The Long Loneliness eighteen years later has been a vivid experience...
...The answer is Christian love...
...Dorothy DAY had a happy and protected childhood...
...How, without falling into self-refutation, could Day and Maurin embrace Lady Poverty (i.e., voluntary poverty for themselves) and yet fight against the involuntary poverty suffered by others...
...In America, you see, it was (in her words)' 'not the style" to be a Catholic, and this was a real plus...
...Ironically, on the other hand, atheistic radicals "were eager to sacrifice themselves here and now, thus doing without now and for all eternity the good things of the world which they were fighting to obtain for their brothers...
...It struck her as being an opiate: people turn to God in their weakness and misery, when they are finally "grossed out" by sensuality, when they need or want to get something...
...Few of her admirers or detractors have grasped this...
...Picking up on that invitation, I'd like to meditate aloud here on the latter volume...
...And such a love necessarily brings complications...
...participating in his sin from a prideful humility, this is self-deception indeed...
...I must confess, sadly, that the book then made no impression on my impatient soul-though when Dorothy Day came to campus to give a talk, I respected her enough (however superficially) to take my copy to the lecture room, march up to her after the talk, and plead with her to autograph the book...
...When, later, Day entered the University of Illinois she joined the Socialist party-from whence she moved to New York City (the East Side) and fully immersed herself in the world of radical politics...
...And this distinction turns on the primacy of the spiritual...
...Raised an Episcopalian, she was devout, attended church every Sunday, and was especially fond of the anthems, psalms, and Collect prayers...
...For, as with her, the time eventually came for me to jettison my Marxism and embrace the only radicalism worth hanging in with-viz., Christianity...
...Bonhoeffer said that "when Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die...
...To her, churchgoers were "the tepid, the mate rialistic, who hoped that by Sunday churchgoing they would be taking care of the afterlife, if there was an afterlife...
...Catherine of Siena, who added, "because He said, 'I am the Way.'" Christ's Kingdom is "not yet"-and still, it can be found within us...
...Day and Maurin had no wish to create a Leviathan state that would simply force people to be good...
...Self-satisfied, I waltzed off...
...All the way to heaven is heaven," she loved to say, quoting St...
...You sow what you reap...
...Were the material goods of this world more equitably distributed and used for human well-being instead of personal aggrandizement, the poor could perhaps be freed of their envy and the rich of their greed...
...Is this disdain for mere charity a radical's arrogance...
...Meanwhile they would get everything they could in this...
...This notion became particularly puzzling when, in love, she experienced these forbidden feelings in a profound way...
...In any case, one can speculate that the genteel and latitudinarian Episcopal church was impotent to force her to choose uncompromisingly between God and man, which choice was the only kind she took seriously...
...Secondly, she noticed the plight of the poor and the reality of class struggle...
...It was hard to contemplate giving up a mate in order that my child and I could become members of the church...
...Years later I foolishly gave my prize away-free!-not thinking that one day-today-it would be a collector's item...
...As Day put it so poignantly: "We were ready to 'endure wrongs patiently' for ourselves . . . but we were not going to be meek for others, enduring their wrongs patiently.'' Dorothy Day does not make the awesome parallel, but it should be made: Christ healed and rescued others, but himself he would not deliver from the pain and death of the cross...
...And it was her radicalism that drew her precisely to the Roman Catholic church:'' Without even looking into the claims of the Catholic church, I was willing to admit that for me she was the one true church...
...Things were to become even more complicated...
...Dorothy Day had fallen in love with Jesus in a drastic way...
...A sword pierced her heart, and she was launched into her "long loneliness...
...Oddly, Dorothy Day was afraid of "going over to the opposition"-but, actually, over the years the church has, in the development of her social doctrine, been coming over to her...
...And yet and yet: "my happiness made me know that there was a greater happiness...
...She was also repelled by the vain ambition she encountered...
...A "bitterness" came over her as she realized she had fundamental philosophical differences with them, for the 1930s were a time for collective action, and she found herself-distrusted by radicals and ill-at-ease in the church-out in the cold...
...Her problem with Christianity was a common one for a radical...
...But in his "Introduction" to this new edition of The Long Loneliness, Daniel Berrigan complains that it was "cruel" for Dorothy to break with Forster, that her rigorous choice between God and man adversely colored her attitudes toward sex and marriage: "A time would come when priests and religious would marry, despite the law, when lay men and women would divorce and seek other partners...
...Church seemed to be telling Dorothy to ignore the poor...
...She was mortified-and gave me a long, dubious look...
...In retrospect, I can see that Dorothy Day was so right about so many things (and this is said by one who cannot count himself a "disciple" of hers...
...But Dorothy Day's life is a monument to the truth that this need not-and must not-be so...
...Happily, Harper & Row has invited us to reconsider Dorothy Day by bringing out William D. Miller's definitive biography of her and by re-issuing Miss Day's spiritual classic, The Long Loneliness (288 pages, $5.95), her account of the first fifty or so years of her life...
...Day liked to cite Eric Gill, who said Christ came to make the rich poor and the poor holy...
...And that reason is holiness...
...But no, "my very experience as a radical...
...The sundering of body and soul-just like the divorce of this world from the next-are Gnostic enterprises, and Day would have nothing to do with either...
...Apparently so...
...The radicals' desire for solidarity with the poor sometimes mixed with an attraction to the more dissipated sectors of the poor...
...Becoming a Catholic would mean facing life alone and I clung to family life...
...Perhaps, like others, she could believe without belonging to a church...
...I've found so many things I utterly missed the first time round...
...Forster would have nothing to do with religion or with me if I embraced it...
...I did not see anyone taking off his coat and giving it to the poor...
...Day knew well that "the world" has two meanings for a Christian...
...When one reflects on the social encyclicals and utterances of recent popes, it is amazing to contemplate what a pioneer Dorothy Day has been...
...DOES GOD-we might ask, following the lead of a certain Moral Majoritarian-hear the prayers of a fornicator...
...They knew that people want happiness, and that the chance for goodness makes people happy...
...Day was, like me and so many others, torn between a hypocritical Christianity and a passionate (but entirely this-worldly) compassion for the poor...
...And insofar as the poor hunger for what the wealthy cling to, they too need liberation from the spirit of the world-in this case, from envy...
...It was Day's strong sense of'' man's dignity and worth, and what was due to him in justice" that made her resent the charitable institutions of the church...
...It did not entail Gnostic flight...
...The Long Loneliness was first published in 1952, but I first happened on it as an undergraduate at Berkeley in 1964, some six or so months before plunging into the Free Speech Movement (and from there into Marxist-Leninist politics, and from there into a period of' 'expatriation'' in East Germany...
...But, you may ask, how can one be spiritual and still love the world...
...And why not...
...Money is not evil in itself, but the love of money is the root of all evil...
...Not at all...
...We felt a respect for the poor and destitute as those nearest to God, as those chosen by Christ for his compassion...
...led me to want to associate myself with others, with the masses, in loving and praising God...
...She simply wanted to give him praise, to rejoice in his name...
...And incredibly, she didn't even want any favors from him...
...Unlike the secular radicals-who have perhaps done the right things, but for the wrong reason (which, said Eliot, is the greatest treason), Dorothy Day did the right things, and for the right reason...
...This may have sounded Communistic in the 1930s, but it is Catholic teaching...
...Like the radicals, Day romantically loved "the masses," but-in spite of her gritty, day-by-day involvement with the most unlovely of people-she loved actual human beings even more...
...For Day, however,' 'the gesture of being dirty because the outcast is dirty [or] of...
...For Day, vigorous "works" counted for more than a limp faith...
...This lament, of course, represents the lure of the easy out: Expect Little of Others, Expect Little of God, Expect Little of Yourself...
...The trouble with involuntary poverty is that it is destitution, the misery of which often only inflames the appetite for worldly things...
...The Christian attitude toward possessions must be one neither of flight nor adoration but of indifference...
...His Kingdom has not yet come in its fullness, and yet the way to the Kingdom is the Kingdom too-or at least it can be for those who abandon every facet of their lives to their Lord...
...She reached the point where she had to choose between the church or Forster, or in her stark words, between "God or man...
...But Dorothy Day had surely heard this siren, but in a different idiom, for if she had wanted to go that route she might have tried to forge a modus vivendi with Forster by, say, seeking out the vague and nonceremonial wing of the Society of Friends...
...So, what does Day do...
...Just as our Lord taught us to pray that God's will be done on earth as well as in heaven, Dorothy sought to let her light shine in such a way that this life became for others a foretaste of heaven...
...Day kept weighing her incipient faith and her unyielding radicalism...
...Well, just ask yourself: Does Pope John Paul II content himself with begging the rulers of Poland to give the workers more charity...
...She fell deeply in love with Forster Batterham, a biologist and anarchist, and they lived (as it used to be said) in sin...
...Even the most hardened, the most irreverent, is awed by the stupendous fact of creation...
...And that reason is holiness...
...Insofar as the wealthy are gripped by the spirits of acquisitiveness or possessiveness or by an unwillingness to share, their "impoverishment" could be redemptive for them...
...Together they founded the Catholic Worker movement, the purpose of which was to work for a society in which it is easier for people to be good...
...IF YOU'VE ever known the utter despair of personal loss or loneliness, you'll recognize Dorothy Day's choice as one of truly heroic proportions...
...However radical Day has been, she was first and foremost radically Catholic...
...And so, I feel myself to be, in a very small way, a fellow pilgrim of Dorothy Day's...
...In every case her reaction was unyielding...
...Unlike so many secular radicals, they did not harbor a secret distrust of ordinary people...
...For, as J. M. Cameron has noted, she "had as little vanity as is conceivable in a human being...
...And the pope is no Communist...
...Consequently, Dorothy Day's story is not a period piece...
...Understandably, she chose the latter...
...Day was finally able to see that there need be no chasm-as there had been in her childhood-between the sensual and the spiritual or between this world and the next...
...ON THE CATHOLIC WORKER'S FIFTIETH ANNIVERSARY A radical holiness DALE VREE DOROTHY DAY died in 1980 at the age of eighty-three and it's fitting that we begin taking the full measure of this amazing woman, who credibly asserted that when it came to the Catholic church she went "to the right as far as I can'' but when it came to labor and politics, then she went' 'as far as I can to the left.'' Who was this living "sign of contradiction" who confounded and scandalized both pious Babbitts and Zeitgeist worshippers...
...Was this to be a paternalistic do-goodism of the routine sort...
...But if poverty (however voluntary) is so great, why did the Catholic Worker Movement want to relieve the poor of their (admittedly involuntary) poverty...
...Rather, I'm sure I was being treated as just another (undeserving) charity case...
...Oh yes, the church gave out plenty of charity, but there was "too little justice...
...So while Day had resolved old inner conflicts she was faced with a new one: "I was just as much against capitalism and imperialism as ever, and here I was going over to the opposition, because of course the church was lined up with property, with the wealthy, with the state, with capitalism, with all the forces of reaction...
...But Forster was an ardent atheist, and so he would not consent, even to baptizing Tamar...
...I guess it's one of the ironies of sanctity that refusing to give an autograph can be an act of pride...
...Surprising even herself, she habituated "visible" churches-in particular, Roman Catholic ones...
...But, again, being "spiritual" did not mean being indifferent to the pain of the world and to violations of human dignity...
...I didn't see anyone having a banquet and calling in the lame, the halt, and the blind.'' The church preached a radical otherworldliness to the poor, but not to its own prosperous members...
...If the angels were rejoicing, she didn't hear them-nor did she expect to...
...Day's bliss was an awkward one, however, and was not meant to last...
...and for the right reason...
...Furthermore, she reports, "it was the great mass of the poor, the workers, who were the Catholics in this country, and this fact in itself drew me to the church...
...She had come down through the centuries since the time of Peter, and far from being dead, she claimed and held the allegiance of the masses of people in all the cities where I lived...
...Apparently, it wasn't accidental that this bleak choice had been precipitated by that hulking and demanding institution, the Roman Catholic church...
...Her vibrant love for the creation led her to the Creator of all things...
...Ownership cultivates responsibility, and only when the workers own and operate their own factories will they act responsibly toward their enterprises, and only then will enterprises truly be run for the benefit of all...
...It is precisely because the church is not in capitalism's hip pocket that the Michael Novaks and Ernest Lefevers are currently attacking the social stance of the church...
...She was-without being disloyal to the magisterium or even disrespectful to the likes of Cardinal Spellman-simply a bit ahead of her time...
...Strangely, Day had already been a confirmed member of the Episcopal church, but her behavior revealed an uncanny assumption that that church is not the church Catholic, nor even (as it claims i itself to be) a "branch" thereof...
...Obviously, she could not be happy with a church-less phantom-or a Protestant earlobe or sectarian fingernail, for that matter...
...Mired in sin, Day nevertheless "found it"-and in a way that only she could find it...
...It would strain credibility for anyone to claim with a straight face that today's church is simply "lined up with property,'' etc...
...But why this special concern for the poor...
...Day's eyes were opened to God, not by fleeing the world, but by loving it more...
...Today's "conservative" pope openly affirms the church's "preferential option for the poor...
...Only a radical Christianity could tame her radical soul...
...Jesus loved the poor all right, but he paid meager attention to the things of this world, and said we'd always have the poor with us...
...Dorothy and Peter wanted to give people responsibility for their future, and that could not be done by simply transferring ownership of the means of production from the capitalists to the state...
...Personal conversion, not social engineering by government, is the key, for Day and Maurin always insisted on the "primacy of the spiritual...
...And so, Miss Day prayed even more...
...BUT DAY quickly espied new hypocrisies...
...But I think she got the last laugh...
...No, ownership would have to be transferred to workers themselves...
...The world as such is not evil, but the worldly spirit is...
...It was the working-class's sense of solidarity -as opposed to the bourgeoisie's individualism and self-indulgence-that, she says, made her "gradually understand the doctrine of the Mystical Body of Christ whereby we are the members one of another...
...Nevertheless, she saw that "the rich were smiled at and fawned upon by churchgoers.'' As Day explains it with characteristic understatement: "Children look at things very directly and simply...
...But in Day's ease, she found herself turning to God at a time of strength and acute happiness, a time of intense sensuality...
...Only the Catholic Body would do...
...Did Dorothy and Peter, like the secular radicals of our time, simply want to make the poor affluent...
...And this incarnationalism was to be the key to her spirituality and her continuing radicalism...
...Fundamentally, these are spiritual concerns, not political ones...
...In church she picked up the notion that Christianity is unequivocally against "the flesh" and the "pride of life...
...The motives were blazingly Christocentric...
...She mortifies her desires, leaves Forster, and joins the church...
...He announces the dignity of man- which is rooted in the Incarnation and thus calls for a just social order...
...But, "it was killing me," she said, to think of leaving Forster...
...These philosophical materialists were the true idealists while the philosophical idealists (the Christians) were the real-and really rank-materialists...
...Just as she sought out a way of reconciling body and soul, so she longed for a reconciliation of this world and the next...
...And that meant baptism, for starters...
...This, I think, is why so many people-even those who disagree with the particular stands Miss Day took on the issues of her day-honor and esteem her...
...Alms are not enough...
...Did this celebrated "saint" give in to her celebrity status...
...Unfortunately, however, her faith ran into two major problems (by no means unique to Episcopalians...
...If she were to open herself to grace, it would have to be a "costly grace...
Vol. 110 • May 1983 • No. 9
