In writing these columns I have avoided some of the most famous theorists and practitioners of gospel nonviolence, such as Dorothy Day, simply because their stories are so well-known. But Dorothy Day (1897-1980) practiced gospel nonviolence and radical solidarity with the poor during periods in when this many of the leaders of her Church (Roman Catholic) believed this to be heretical and when her nation's leaders considered it treasonous. Often a marginal person during much of her life, she lived to see many of her views begin to influence both her church and nation -- at least in fits and stages. During a time like ours, when an unelected cabal is rapidly steering the nation toward fascism (defined as the fusing of state and corporate power by Benito Mussolini) and global imperialism, and when large sections of almost all Christian denominations consider pacifism and any form of economics that resists global laissez faíre capitalism as heresy, Day provides insight and inspiration and hope.
This will be a brief re-telling of Day and the Catholic Worker movement. Those wishing to learn more are invited to explore the following resources: Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness: An Autobiography (New York: Harper & Row, 1952) is almost painfully honest (except for one area detailed below). The most thorough biography is William D. Miller, Dorothy Day: A Biography (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1982), but two others are also very useful: Jim Forest was a former member of Day's Worker community and editor of The Catholic Worker before he later became editor of Fellowship, then Executive Director of the International Fellowship of Reconciliation. Today, Forest is a convert to Eastern Orthodoxy and heads the Orthodox Peace Fellowship. His is an insider's biography of Day. See Jim Forest, Love is the Measure: A Biography of Dorothy Day, Founder of the Catholic Worker, rev. ed. (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1994). Robert Coles, a lifelong Catholic layperson is a distinguished professor of psychiatry at Harvard and a renowned expert on the moral and spiritual lives of children. He also is well-known for using biography to explore both religious and psychological questions. His biography of Day was based both on primary documents and a series of taped interviews with her. Robert Coles, Dorothy Day: A Radical Devotion, Radcliffe Women's Biography Series (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley Publishing Co., 1987). The best one-volume collection of Day's writings is found in Robert Ellsberg, ed., Dorothy Day: Selected Writings (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1992), originally published under the title, By Little and By Little: The Collected Writings of Dorothy Day (New York: Knopf, 1983). The older edition may be found in used book stores. The number of secondary studies about Day, the Catholic Worker movement, Peter Maurin (her co-founder) and related topics are far too numerous to mention.
Born to inactive, nominal Protestants, Day was early on attracted to religion and social justice. Her father, a hard-drinking newspaperman, bequeathed to her a love of writing and newspapers. Her somewhat dysfunctional family experienced bouts of poverty that allowed Day to come into contact with the ultra-impoverished. Her attraction to Christianity was stymied by the distance she saw between the churches she knew and the New Testament, viz., no one was sharing extra shirts, selling homes and pooling wealth for the poor, or giving banquets that invited the lame, halt, and blind. She studied Greek in high school and bought a used Greek New Testament to translate. How far she got we aren't told, but she would only have had to go 5 chapters before she ran into the radicalism of the Sermon on the Mount. She also discovered Marx via her older brother's employment at the socialist paper, The Day Book.
Day won a scholarship to study journalism at the University of Illinois at Urbana, but she only attended those classes that interested her. She soon dropped out to mingle more and more into a crowd of intellectual radicals. She joined the Socialist Party, moved to New York and began a career as a journalist for radical newspapers (The Call, The Masses, The Liberator). She covered strikes, the plight of political prisoners, lack of legal protection for unions, the tensions between Communists, Anarchists, Socialists and the International Workers of the World (IWW or "Wobblies"). She became more of a Potempkin-type social anarchist in philosophy, but never attended meetings of any political party except in her role as reporter. But, if asked, she would accept the title "Communist" as a compliment rather than a slur.
During this period of her life, she marched with suffragists (although she never bothered to vote after women got the franchise) and identified herself with secular feminism (though this was before that term was common), including widespread birth control availability for single women. She hung out with many female radicals who espoused "free love," but though Dorothy was theoretically open to sex outside marriage, promiscuity never interested her. She wanted high romance and commitment or nothing. Eventually, Day did fall -- and for an abusive relationship. When she got pregnant, her lover threatened to leave her if she didn't have an abortion. She did, just to please him, and he left her anyway. (As an adult convert to Catholicism, Day was so ashamed of her abortion that it is the one event she skips over in her autobiography. She relates it only in her pre-conversion autobiographical novel, The Eleventh Virgin. At one point, she was so embarrassed by the novel's depiction of the woman she was then, she tried to find and destroy every copy in print. There are hints that Day disapproved of abortion -- at least as a form of birth control -- even prior to her conversion. She definitely disapproved of women violating their consciences to please men, yet this is just what she did. Her later shame over this event was very great.)
By a long, complicated series of events, Day found herself in a long-term relationship with a fellow anarchist named Forster Batterham, a former biologist who was anti-industrial and anti-institutional. Their love was so mutual that Day always referred to their relationship as a "common law marriage," although New York state had long since ceased to recognize such. She described this period of her life as "natural happiness" (in contrast to supernatural faith). Batterham was a confirmed atheist, but Day was finding her way back to faith, sneaking into Catholic churches and sitting in the back. Why Catholicism? She always claimed that both the liturgy and the fact that this was "the Church of the poor and the immigrant" attracted her. This scandalized her radical friends: Religion was the opiate of the masses, as Marx had said. Further, if one had to be part of a Church, it should be any Church other than ROME, which was (by her friends' lights) the most socially and politically conservative institution in the world, arrayed against the cause of the poor and the worker. (What these New York and Chicago radicals would have thought of Southern Baptist or Pentecostal life, had they even known of them, beggars the imagination of this son of the South!)
The final catalyst of Day's conversion was her pregnancy with her daughter, Tamar Teresa, an event that Day considered a miracle. Her previous abortion had given Day the idea that she was barren, a fit punishment for her sin. (Interesting that she believed herself punished before she even believed in a God who could do the punishing.) Dorothy wanted Tamar baptized and this led to her own instruction in the faith, baptism, and confirmation. It also led to the end of her relationship with Forster Batterham. She would not be accepted into the Church unless they were legally married (preferably in the Church) and Batterham could not abide such hypocrisy. Day chose her new-found faith over the natural happiness of her relationship. Over fifty years later, however, she still referred to him as "her husband," though they had not shared a roof or bed in all that time. He came to various milestones in Tamar's life, including her wedding, and he wept bitterly at her death in 1980. Various folk have speculated that a post-Vatican II Church might have found a way for the two to remain together, both for their sakes and for Tamar's. As a non-Catholic, I have no opinion about that, but I am not sure Dorothy would have approved any compromise. During the '60s, she was fairly unforgiving with several former priests and nuns who were "laicized" in order to marry. For her, vows were vows.
The new convert kept casting about for a way to connect her newfound faith to her passion for social justice. Eventually, she met an odd man named Peter Maurin. He was a French peasant and social philosopher who always wore an old suit with books bulging from the pockets. Together, they founded the Catholic Worker movement. They formed "houses of hospitality" that housed the homeless as free guests, distributed clothing to all who needed it, and fed the hungry. Live-in Workers and guests alike of each house of hospitality would perform "works of mercy," found in Matt. 5-7 (the Sermon on the Mount), Matthew 18, and Matthew 25. Combined with these houses of hospitality were low-tech communal farms (although most Workers proved to be lousy farmers, by their own admission) that would become the catalyst for a nonviolent "green revolution" as an alternative to industrial capitalism. All this would be aided by "clarification of thought" disseminated by a radical Catholic newspaper that combined the teachings of the papal social encyclicals with Maurin's own thoughts (and later, Day's and others'). Day knew newspapers and knew she would take the lead in this part of the program. All this, plus a series of "round table discussions" between workers and scholars, would "build the seeds of a new society within the shell of the old" (a slogan Maurin stole for the Wobblies), a society in which Maurin hoped it "would be easier for [people] to be good."
The Catholic Worker movement was born, complete with The Catholic Worker which has always sold for a penny a copy. Many Catholic bishops believed the movement was too "Communist-inspired." This infuriated Maurin, but Day took the criticism in stride. After all, she was a convert from (a non-dogmatic form of) Communism and admitted that "the wine bottle will always smell of the vintage it once contained." Still, they were tolerated and eventually admired for their help for the poor. More and more Catholic churches distributed The Catholic Worker and prominent Catholic theologians and bishops even contributed the occasional article. All that changed when WWII broke out. The uncompromising pacifism of Day and the Worker movement ran into the militaristic nationalism of pre-Vatican II Catholicism during the era of the most popular war the U.S. ever fought.
Someone has said that it is easy to be a pacifist between wars. I am not so sure. In a militaristic culture, pacifists are suspect at the best of times. Still, it is definitely true that it is much harder to be a pacifist during a popular war. Throughout WWII, U.S. pacifists were persecuted. Only a few belonging to the "historic peace churches" were recognized as legal conscientious objectors and allowed to serve "alternative service" (often under harsh conditions that tried to force the C.O.s to still contribute to the war effort). Others were drafted against their will (where they faced the choice of refusing to fight on the battlefield -- an act of treason that could lead to a firing squad) compromised with their principles as little as possible and strove to survive. Still others faced harsh prison sentences.
Peter Maurin was too old to be drafted and, as a woman, Dorothy was exempt from military service. Others in the Worker movement were not so lucky. Friends of the Worker movement urged them to be quieter about their pacifism until the Nazis and Japanese were defeated, but Dorothy would have none of it. She would not suspend the Sermon on the Mount for the duration of the war. So, she faced the repression of the FBI and her own Church.
She had begun to face criticism even in the '30s as The Catholic Worker editorialized against all forms of fascism. Although reproving them for using violence, she supported the democratic socialists of Spain -- which infuriated bishops who thought she support the fascist Franco because of his pro-Catholic policies! And although maintaining their commitment to nonviolence, Day and the Workers pressed the cause of the Jews when many Catholics (and others!) preferred not to notice the genocide taking place.
The Workers paid a price for their faithfulness to the way of nonviolence. Churches canceled their subscriptions to The Catholic Worker and stopped donating money, food and clothing to the Houses of Hospitality. Many of the other Worker volunteers found Hitler's evil too much for their pacifism and they quit the movement to enlist in the army or find other ways to serve the war effort -- sometimes after heated arguments with Dorothy. Entire Houses of Hospitality abandoned the movement out of disagreement with Day's absolute and uncompromising pacifism. Bishops threatened to close down the movement and so did the FBI. By the end of the War, The Catholic Worker movement was a shell of its former vitality and the start of the Cold War made it hard to recoup losses since Day's condemnation of the Bomb and of nuclear deterrence was sharp.
Still, her persistence -- and it was hers, I believe. I think that, by himself, Maurin would have obeyed the orders to keep quiet about nonviolence in order to concentrate on his work with and for the poor and his "green revolution." But for Dorothy, the works of mercy were a seamless garment that could not be separated into parts. Her persistence began to pay off. By the end of WWII the Workers had birthed something new, though it was still small and vulnerable: American Catholic radicalism. Other parts of this wider movement began contributing to The Catholic Worker and receiving contributions to their efforts and publications in return. Moreover, Day and her cohorts were grassroots ecumenists long before Vatican II made that an acceptable part of Catholicism. (They still thought Protestants were WRONG, but they recognized them as sisters and brothers in Christ rather than as heretics doomed to hell -- a radical view for the times.) Day and other workers (like Ammon Hennacy and Jim Forest) joined the ecumenical pacifist group, the Fellowship of Reconciliation and helped to form a Catholic Peace Fellowship. They were an indirect influence on Pope John XXIII's encyclical, Pacem im Terris ("Peace on Earth"), which first declared a Catholic support for democracy and human rights and made peacemaking central to Christian discipleship. Later, during the 2nd Vatican Council, Day and other Workers influenced some documents that, for the first time in centuries, declared that pacifism was a legitimate position for Catholics to take. When Pax Christi International was born, several of the leaders of the U.S. branch were Workers or former Workers. Day and the Workers also practiced the nonviolence they preached. During the 1950s, New York, like most major U.S. cities, had mandatory "civil defense drills," where all residents were expected to seek fallout shelters at the sound of an air raid siren. Dorothy considered this cooperation with the evils of the Cold War and nuclear deterrence -- planning for nuclear genocide. They began to commit civil disobedience by remaining outside during the drills. They were repeatedly arrested, but their example began to spark imitators until eventually the drills were abandoned for lack of citizen cooperation.
When the Civil Rights movement began, Day and the Worker were its immediate champions. She and other writers for the Worker movement volunteered in several campaigns and traveled South to interview Martin Luther King, Jr., the leaders of SNCC and others. Eventually, Day also became involved in the nationwide strike and boycott of Cesar Chavez' United Farm workers. (See the "Random Chapter" on Chavez, here.)
Day also influenced other Catholic pacifists like Thomas Merton and the Berrigan brothers, who, in turn, influenced others. Today, the Catholic Worker movement is thriving -- even outside of the U.S. It has been at the forefront of a radical Catholic peace and justice movement that has transformed the shape of Catholicism in many ways.
Day's secret, besides an excellent journalistic style and a stubborn consistency, was that she drew deeply on the Church's own teachings: She focused on Jesus and his teachings (and she was deeply familiar with the text of the Scriptures long before that was common or even encouraged for Catholic laypeople), which she interwove with the writings of the Saints: especially St. Francis of Assisi, St. Catherine of Siena, St. Teresa of Avila and St. Thérèse of Lisieux and Thomas à Kempis' The Imitation of Christ. To these sources, Day added the writings of Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, the social teachings of the papal encyclicals, and the Catholic personalist philosophy of Jacques Maritain (who often contributed to The Catholic Worker). In theology, she was a traditional, even conservative Catholic, somewhat uncomfortable with many of the changes brought in by Vatican II. (Although she was open to women in the priesthood. When asked in an interview, she responded that while she had no such vocation herself, she had no problems with the concept. If their could be women prime ministers and presidents, why not a woman pope?) This conservatism on most doctrinal matters, although often annoying to some of her reformist Catholic friends, gained her more of a hearing for her radical discipleship. She would lecture bishops for investing church money at interest instead of giving it to the poor: Was not usury (lending at interest) condemned in the catechism? And her advocacy of nonviolence was conservative, in her eyes, since it was simply refusing to part with the teachings of Jesus.
As we enter a dark time in history, one that may well rival the dark times faced by Dorothy Day and the early period of the Catholic Worker movement, her story gives us hope and resources, especially for those whose vision is to reclaim gospel nonviolence for every Christian congregation and denomination. After all, when Dorothy and Peter Maurin began the first House of Hospitality in 1932 and published the first copy of The Catholic Worker (which, in my book, has always been more radical than the Communist Daily Worker with which it is often confused), not many people could have predicted that by 2003 gospel nonviolence would be practiced by a large (and growing) minority within the Catholic Church. Virtually no one could have predicted that it would one day attract bishops and that Pope John Paul II would come so close to espousing pacifism in many of his statements that he would actually worry Catholic moral theologians in the Just War tradition. (I saw this myself several years ago. In 1991, at the end of the Persian Gulf War, the papal pronouncements had been growing ever sharper in condemnation. An unsigned article appeared in the Italian publication, La Civilita Catolica, that said, in effect, that the failures of Just War theory to stop modern wars might render the entire theory useless as a guide to Catholic morals. Perhaps it was better just to stick to the words of Jesus concerning nonviolence. Now, the articles of this particular publication have to be approved by the Vatican itself, are assumed to carry the pope's blessing and often prefigure new papal pronouncements. This article appeared just before the 1991 annual meeting of The Society of Christian Ethics, the professional society for moral theologians and Christian ethicists in North America. Harvard's Rev. J. Bryan Hehir, S.J., a renowned just war theorist and one of the advisors for the 1983 pastoral letter by the National Council of Catholic Bishops, The Challenge of Peace, was vocally worried that the pope was about to become a pacifist! He had to be reassured by Catholic lay-theologian Lisa Sowle Cahill of Boston College, although she is either a pacifist or very sympathetic to the pacifist position! That exchange became part of numerous discussions throughout the rest of the weekend conference! Since then the pope has continued to use the principles of Just War Theory -- as he has recently by stating bluntly that a new war against Iraq would be unjust by JWT standards -- but has also continued to make statements about the normativity of nonviolence and the need to abolish war.)
I do not, as a Protestant observer, know if we are about to see the Catholic Church officially embrace pacifism as normative teaching for the first time since the Fourth Century. But if this does happen soon, it will be, in part, a flowering of the work of Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker. So, we Christians in all faith traditions, faced with a world where political and military leaders use Just War Theory not to limit wars but to provide cover for wars of aggression with few or nor limits in conduct, can take hope as we reclaim the gospel nonviolence of Jesus and the apostolic era. If we are as faithful and persistent as Dorothy Day and the Catholic Workers, risking our lives for the sake of the truth we have found in Jesus and his radical solidarity with the poor and suffering, we may find more and more churches joining with us in renewing the peace witness of the whole Church, the oecumene, the Church catholic. And, as our motto declares, if every church practices and teaches what Jesus practiced and taught, then the church(es) can turn the world toward peace. We, like Day and the Workers, may pass through some very dark times first, but we can also build "a new society in the shell of the old." May God grant it so.
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