Up Close With A Revolutionary

Only 36 of Dorothy Day’s interviews in The New York Call bore her byline. One that did not was an interview with Leon Trotsky on January 15, 1917 which she mentions in The Long Loneliness.

In his memoirs Trotsky dedicates an entire chapter to his two months in New York City. He had little respect for American Socialists

To this day, I smile as I recall the leaders of American Socialism…successful and semi-

successful doctors, lawyers, dentists, engineers, and the like who divide their precious hours of rest between concerts by European celebrities and the American Socialist party...They tolerate all ideas, provided they do not undermine their traditional authority, and do not threaten – God forbid! – their personal comfort.  

My first contact with these men was enough to call forth their candid hatred of me. My feelings toward them, though probably less intense, were likewise not especially sympathetic. We belonged to different worlds. To me they seemed the rottenest part of that world with which I was and still am at war.

And of The Call itself he had little regard: “The English organ of the party, The Call, was edited in a spirit of innocuous pacifist neutrality.”

Leon Trotsky arrived on Ellis Island with his family in December, 1916 and landed in Manhattan on January 14, a Sunday. Dorothy Day interviewed him the next day at the offices of the Russian language newspaper, Novy Mir. It’s safe to say that she was the first American reporter to interview this Russian revolutionary who, 10 months later, would become world famous when he and Lenin stole the Russian revolution for the Bolsheviks.

Let me highlight 3 aspects of this interview:

1. The Russian Revolution is still 6 weeks away and inconceivable to Trotsky in New York, Lenin in Switzerland and everyone else in the world. Moreover, Trotsky would not play his crucial role until Autumn. Needless to say, Trotsky was not well known to ordinary Americans in January, 1917. However, Dorothy Day was not an ordinary American. She was well aware of who she was interviewing. “When I was a senior in high school I wrote a story of Russian revolutionists and the martyrdom of one of them which must have surprised the staid little woman who taught us English composition and theme writing.”

2. Dorothy Day was a 19 year old rookie reporter and Trotsky got the best of her. She wanted to get the details on his daring escape from a Russian prison and his subsequent expulsions from Germany, France and Spain. Dorothy remembers: “He refused to be lured into talking about his exile in Siberia or his various escapes in disguise.” He had his own agenda and insisted on it.

3. That agenda was the failure of European Socialism to stop the war. His remarks center on the collapse of the Second International of which he had been a part. The Second International, the union of all the Socialist and labor organizations in Europe, established in 1889, espoused the messianic role of the working class. At the outbreak of the next war, the workers of the world were expected to join hands and refuse to fight on behalf of their industrial and imperialist masters. When the war did come, the leaders of the majority of worker organizations chose to line up on national, patriotic lines, leaving the workers of the world to slaughter each other in the trenches. Trotsky calls this “the greatest political and moral crime of the century.” Talk of the United States entering the European War were everywhere, yet Trotsky clung to the hope that peace “will come only through the third power, the greatest the world has ever seen, that of the enlightened workers of all Europe.”

Of the 40 or so articles I cover in An Eye For Others, this interview with Trotsky is one of the most significant. Trotsky wanted to overturn the entire socio-economic order at any cost. Dorothy Day also longed for the end of – as she put it – the “dirty rotten system” but without violence which kept her praying, relying on God for a permanent solution while she spent her life taking care of those wounded and cast aside by a system which she and Trotsky mutually despised.

The Serene Face of Christ: A Cross Without A Cross

Genuine acceptance of the Mercy of God is reflected in serenity and joy.

Now if we are children, then we are heirs—heirs of God

and co-heirs with Christ, if indeed we share in his sufferings

in order that we may also share in his glory. (Rom 8:17)

In this Year of Mercy it is helpful to take note that since the early decades of the 20^th Century the Holy Spirit has been announcing something essential for us, something new and yet as old as Christianity itself. 

As far back as the 17^th Century, St. Margaret Mary Alacoque received revelations of the Sacred Heart and Jesus’ desire to make his love for all men and women known to the whole world but shortly after her death her writings and message were embargoed. It was not until the very end of the 19^th Century that they became available to the faithful which soon resulted in the canonization of St. Margaret Mary in 1920. Five years later the immensely popular St. Thérèse of Lisieux was canonized. She also had a great devotion to the Sacred Heart and God’s merciful love. These two have played a large role in propagating the message of God’s mercy but the Holy Spirit called on two other instruments to further the message.

The French Connection

Maria Teresa Desandais was a 26-year-old nun in the monastery of the Visitation of Dreux in France when she began receiving revelations about the Merciful Love in 1902. Regarding these revelations she wrote, “Love is not Loved because it is not known. Before this situation, Merciful Love wants to reveal itself to this world. To know God is also to know Merciful Love. Merciful Love is not a new thing; the Church has taught it from the beginning. It is the love of the Savior, his manifestation of the new Law. I do not want you to embrace this devotion hoping to find in it some new form of spirituality.”

Globalism vs. Familysm

There is a troubling characteristic of our society to rely on government to solve all the problems. I’ve even heard folks comment that a “true humanism” obtains when government takes care of all the needs of its citizens. Poor Government! It was never meant to work so hard.

In this sense, Tony Magliano’s political platform for all people (Making a Difference, July 18, 2016), so obviously right regarding what is wrong, gets it all wrong as to doing it right.

We need to correct the wrongs with the least government possible. True humanism is one human helping another human in a spirit of mutual cooperation and love. This humanism relies on Christian virtues lived every day, particularly the Christian virtue of personal poverty which is absolutely necessary for staying awake to the needs of those around us.

A great weight must be put on the individual responsibility of every Catholic, particularly laity engaged in human affairs, to be Jesus Christ and thus to bring Jesus Christ into her or his environment: into work, into family, into society.

Unfortunately, Mr. Magliano simplistically relies on government programs: the redistribution of tax dollars from the military budget to curing poverty. This impersonal approach to charity has not proven successful in the past 100 hundred years because it does not touch the hearts of either the giver or receiver.

The social teaching of the Catholic Church was intended to inform human consciences, not government programs. Here in the United States we got off on the wrong foot in 1917 when the U.S. bishops organized the National Catholic War Council to preach the “duty” of all Catholics to support the war effort. This coercion of consciences, by the predecessor of the USCCB, makes God small by demonstrating skepticism that the Catholic lay person – informed by the Holy Spirit and the teachings of the Church – is capable of making proper decisions in his or her personal engagement with the world.

Yet, this is where the true revolution lies and it starts in the heart of vibrant Christian families where the basic lessons of a person’s dignity and responsibility to the world are learned. Our revolutionary creed is spelled out in Familiaris Consortio and Amoris Laetitia. 

Let’s read these, learn their lessons, and do our part. Let’s let Christ reign!

Greed of Capitalists Assailed in St. Patrick's Cathedral

From the Socialist newspaper, The New York Call. Dorothy Day was working for The Call on Christmas of 1916 but she commented in her memoirs that she never noticed this article. In fact, she was not aware that the Catholic Church had a social teaching until she met Peter Maurin.

The Call followed up this piece with an interview of Fr. O'Rourke by Dante Barton on January 7, 1916 which I will post here in a few days.

Crazy in Love With the Mother of God

“Don't imitate me in anything, except for my devotion to Our Lady.”

St. Josemaría Escrivá de Balaguer

Many who knew St. Josemaría in the early days of Opus Dei have testified to his love for Our Lady . Recently, I came across another example of this in an article in Studa et Documenta by Gloria Toranzo, “Los comienzos del apostolado del Opus Dei entre mujeres (1930-1939)” (http://www.isje.org/setd/2013/Toranzo-setd-7-2013.pdf).

Our Lady of Torreciudad
Another craziness of St. Josemaria

From the moment in 1930 that God showed him that there were to be women in Opus Dei, St. Josemaría set about looking for women who could understand a life of dedication to God in the middle of the world. One by one, a cousin of someone or a friend of someone else, he began imparting this spirit to women in Madrid. By the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, there were 18 in all plus María Ignacia García Escobar who had died of tuberculosis in 1933. None of these others continued in Opus Dei after the war as explained in the essay.

In interviews with those who were still living after St. Josemaría died in 1975 these women all related, in one way or another, that the founder of Opus Dei “amaba con locura” the Mother of God. The author gives as an example a statue that St. Josemaría had commissioned in 1934 “describing all the details, with the intention that the statue would accompany the path of the women of Opus Dei from its beginnings.” The result was a beautiful image of polychrome wood, about one foot tall. Our Lady is carrying the Child in her arms; at her feet are two doves that are not simple decorations but, as St. Josemaría explained in 1961, “they are a symbol of goodness, of fidelity, of purity.” On another occasion, he described it as “Muy sympatica.”

Escrivá de Balaguer had each woman keep the statue in her home for a few days and then pass it on to the next woman. He most likely got the rotation idea from a similar custom in his native region with an image of the Miraculous Medal.

All the women affirmed that this practice had a great benefit for their interior life and forty years afterwards they could still affectionately describe the image, its origins and the rotations. One of the women remarked, “Never have I seen an image of Our Lady that provoked so much piety,” and another sighed, “The Virgin was ours.”

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, “it was in my home,” noted Ramona, “later it was moved to the home of Hermógenes.” St. Josemaría asked Hermógenes to keep it safe during the hostilities and afterwards it was returned to him. Since then, it has accompanied the apostolates of Opus Dei with women and today presides over the conference room of the Central Advisory in Rome, the governing body of women of Opus Dei. A photograph of the image can be found on the last page of the article.

Feb 9: the 99th Anniversary of the Anti-War Edition of The New York Call

Here is an excerpt from my book on Dorothy Day's months at The New York Call:

Throughout 1916 the prospect of joining the war against Germany was not popular with Americans, as can be gathered from by the success of Wilson’s slogan. The 20,000,000 casualties, the fields of corpses and leveled villages astonished and sickened the public who, for the first time, were seeing the carnage on the newsreels at their local motion picture theater. At least 15% of the population was German or of German origin, and most of the Irish had no desire to fight for Britain, which had so ruthlessly crushed the Easter Rebellion. Yet, by December, despite the repugnance to war on the part of many Americans, Wilson was urging Congress for a law that would suppress domestic opposition to the war,  another to require compulsory military service for all men and yet another forbidding strikes against munitions companies (labelled the “slave” law by The Call).

Additionally, Wilson created a public relations department within the White House to popularize the war, demonize the Germans and define “patriotism.” The director was a well-known, seasoned journalist, George Creel, who had written for The Masses and other radical publications.

 On the copy desk of The Call there was a guy named Norman Watson, a pretty good writer. At intervals when there was nothing to do, we would discuss theoretical matters of socialism and I thought he was very intelligent and very well aware of socialism and one night, we worked at night, he said you know Mike I want to ask your advice. I said go ahead. He said “I have a letter here. I’ve just been offered a good job by George Creel.” The government had formed a staff of ex-radicals for the purpose of propaganda to win over the intellectuals and trade unionists to the war. See, they had to pump it up all the time. So Norman Watson had gotten the offer, I forget what they paid, but they paid well, and he said “Should I take it? It would be a turning point in my life.” I was always a little too easy and I helped him off the hook by saying, “Well, no one can advise you. It is your own life…You have your own conscience. You must be honest with yourself.” Sure enough the next week he was on the staff of George Creel. (Mike Gold Papers)

George Creel and Norman Watson openly turned on their friends. Others did it more covertly:

The Miracle of Brotherhood

St. Josemaría’s Love for the Poor

By Martin Schlag

Few themes raise as much passion as that of socio-economic poverty and the material misery in which individuals and large swaths of the population find themselves. Revolutions, protests, and class struggles have been and are still today social convulsions grounded in conditions of indigence: the human sense of justice rebels against the gravely unequal distribution of the goods of the earth and even more so a Christian heart, imbued with the spirit of justice and charity proclaimed and lived exemplarily by Jesus of Nazareth.

Likewise, poverty, in its ascetical and spiritual aspect, as a personal and collective virtue, has raised enduring controversies even within the ecclesial community; for instance, within the Franciscans of the 13th century. Perennial tensions arise on the question of poverty: How to live it? In what measure is an absolute lack of possessions necessary in order to live “evangelical” poverty and identify in this way with Jesus Christ? And in what measure is a Christian obliged to give alms to the poor? Only from surplus? Or even from what is necessary? What is necessary?

All these questions are not just academic; they get into the daily life of each Christian, conscious that, at the final judgement, Christ will judge us according to our works of love and mercy.

It can be categorically affirmed that St. Josemaría lived and taught a “preferential but not exclusive option for the poor,” a phrase coined in 1968 that has since become one of the basic principle of Catholic social teaching. Yet demonstrating this affirmation presents a complex challenge. The Founder of Opus Dei never used the term itself due to its immediate co-option by the Marxist interpreters of liberation theology (the term was only rehabilitated after his death when St. John Paul II used it at Puebla in 1979), so showing the correlation of his own words with the term “preferential option for the poor” we must correctly interpret his words without making the author say things he didn’t or, on the contrary, failing to discover his richness of content when dressed in unfamiliar clothing.

Christocentric Love for the Poor

In order to orient our exploration, let’s clarify that the concept we want to examine here is that of the love of the poor in the socio-economic sense, i.e., the poor understood as a social group, distinct from the powerful and owners of goods. Therefore, this article does not deal with detachment, except that it is impossible to speak of love for the poor according to the mind of St. Josemaría without mentioning the virtue of poverty, because both values, love for the poor and poverty, spring from the same source: the desire of the Christian to imitate Christ, our Lord, to the point of becoming one with Jesus, our model. In other words, the source, motive and propelling force of love for the poor is the love for Christ.  First comes love for the Lord and, later, love for the poor. Certainly, when one