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

A Daily Annoyance

When only some hundreds of New Yorkers joined the armed forces in the first days of World War One, Mayor John Mitchel built the USS Recruit in the middle of Union Square. Inaugurated on Memorial Day, May 31, 1917, it eventually accounted for 25,000 recruits.

Dorothy Day would have walked past this symbol of militarism every day while working at The Masses from May through November, 1917. The offices of the journal are marked by the arrow in the rightmost photo.

Photos: Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, LC-B2- 4211-14, LC-B2- 4212-17, and LC-B2- 4238-6.

Dorothy Day and Moloch

The last article in The New York Call with Dorothy Day’s by-line is headlined: “Europe’s Moloch Claims Old Man’s Son; He Comes To America and Starves.” 

Moloch was the Canaanite and Phoenician god who demanded parents sacrifice their children to him, “You shall not give any of your children by fire to Moloch, and so profane the name of your God: I am the Lord” (Lev 18:21).

Dorothy’s position as Special Features Writer did not offer her a wide berth to vent her opinions on the war. With her choice of Moloch as a metaphor for the European War, just recently joined by her own nation, she reaches the essence of her revulsion for war: an insane sacrifice of youth and a great blasphemy against the Creator and Jesus’ Gospel of Love. 

The Battle of Lepanto: A Victory for American Literature

On the anniversary of the battle of Lepanto, I am reminded of another anecdote from the life of Floyd Dell, one of the leading figures in Greenwich Village when Dorothy Day arrived and, for some months, her boss and housemate. 

In earlier blogs, I've recounted Dell's admiration for G. K. Chesterton.

While the editor of The Friday Literary Review in Chicago, seeking to set the trajectory of American intellectual thought in the 20th Century, Dell was mentoring a number of promising novelists and poets.  In 1912, one of these was Vachel Lindsay who had not yet written anything noteworthy.  Dell sensed a lot of promise in the young poet and recommended a chanting poetry that would "throw back at America its own barbaric music."  As  a magnificent example of a chanted poem, he sent Lindsay a copy of his favorite, G. K. Chesterton's Lepanto.

Some months later, Dell received a copy of General William Booth Enters Into Heaven, a chanting poem and one of Lindsay's most acclaimed.

Compare these poems for yourself.  Here is Lepanto and here is General Booth.

South Street by Dorothy Day

In the summer of 1917, Dorothy Day was working for The Masses and spending a lot of time with Mike Gold who, besides working as a copy editor for The New York Call and writing for The Masses, drove a horse-drawn truck for the Acme Express Freight Company to support his mother. Dorothy, Mike, and their friends would wander through lower Manhattan talking, often ending up at one of the rivers.

The opening sentence rivals Henry James for its scene painting.

South Street

By Dorothy Day

The Masses, Nov.-Dec., 1917, page 26

Drawing by John Barber

South street, where the truckmen and dockmen sit around on loads of boxes and wait for a boat to come in, where men idle in the September sunlight and dream and yawn and smoke, where the horses clatter along the cobbles dragging huge heavy trucks with a noise resembling a mob of people aroused after long repression, and where the kids sit on the edge of the dock and look with wishful eyes at the water below that swirls with refuse and driftwood. Occasionally there’s a lull in the huge noise of the place and other sensations drift in waves over you until another truck wipes them out. There is a wave of soft silence, golden in the September sunlight with its autumn smell. The smells change too, with everything else, and the mellowness is replaced with a heavy foul odor from God knows what storehouse, and from the river that gulps and gulps at the docks all day long. Then there is a tiny wave of laughter from one of the many ragged boys scurrying about the edges of things, as he succeeds in fishing out a bit of driftwood. Little waves of imagination make the urchin’s every sense more poignant. There’s always the possibility of another fellow coming up behind him and pushing him into the thick water below. And there are wild chances of a bottle drifting in from the sea with a message in it from a shipwrecked crew or a submarine or something. And sunken treasure!

And perhaps waves of imagination drift over the loafers too, as they slouch and droop and rest.

Dorothy Catches a Flu

The following is mere speculation, almost an amusement. Ferreting facts from Dorothy Day’s pseudo-autobiographical novel, The Eleventh Virgin, can be a disappointing experience. 

Nevertheless, in the novel June (Dorothy) has left her room in the East Side tenement and moved to a room in an Episcopal rectory. There she catches a flu and is visited by Ivan (perhaps Irwin Granich) which scandalizes the wife of the rector who calls Dorothy’s mother.

There are three lapses in Dorothy’s writings in The Call which might account for a flu: December 25 to December 30, December 31 to January 14, and March 5 to March 30.

Of these three, the third is least likely. It is more probably due to the absence of a managing director. Chester Wright resigns on March 9 and the staff may have been in disarray until the appointment of Charles Ervin as managing director on March 30. Dorothy admits to attending the rally at Madison Square Garden on March 21 and accompanying Columbia students at anti-draft activities throughout the month.

Although no argument can be made for or against the second lapse, the first one seems most likely. Under this theory, Dorothy worked on December 23 and 24 and filed two articles without her by-line but definitely with her style that appeared on the 25th and 26th, then caught the flu on Christmas, 1916 or the night before.

The evidence supporting this is that in The Eleventh Virgin Ivan brings her a piece by Maxim Gorky. An essay by Maxim Gorky appears in The Call’s Sunday Supplement of December 24. Further, the Diet Squad series should have run through the beginning of January but is terminated abruptly on December 27 with a piece perhaps prepared with the help of Ivan. If this theory is correct, Dorothy recovered in time to enjoy The Guillotine’s feast on December 30 (see the chapter Holiday Cheer).

There are not enough facts here to warrant inclusion in my upcoming book, Unwavering Protest, A Teenage Dorothy Day writes for The New York Call, which I hope you will purchase when it is published in November.

Dorothy Day Meets Margaret Sanger

While the special features writer for The New York Call, 19 year-old Dorothy Day covered the imprisonment and release of Margaret Sanger’s sister, Ethel Byrne [January-February, 1917]. Dorothy’s interviews were with Margaret Sanger, rather than Ethel who was kept away from the press. Dorothy’s complicity in promoting these two “Birth Control Martyrs” at the behest of her employer, her distortion of the truth, was a painful memory for years to come.

Seven years after covering the story, still years before her conversion, in her autobiographical novel, The Eleventh Virgin, Dorothy gives a candid look at these events using the thinly-veiled Mrs. Edith Burns as the birth control martyr being covered by June Henreddy of The Clarion.

***

Then came those thrilling days after Mrs. Edith Burns had been taken to Blackwell’s Island and started her hunger and thirst strike. The first prisoner in America, the Clarion pointed out, to hunger strike for a cause… Even the capitalist press was aroused and printed headlines on the condition of Edith Burns. One afternoon she was dying. The next afternoon the jail doctors vehemently denied the report. As a matter of fact, they said, it was all bluff and the prisoner had probably secreted cakes of chocolate on her person when entering the jail with the intention to strike. Five days and there were rumors of brutal treatment. Four men, the papers reported, had held the frail little woman to the bed while nourishment was being poured down her throat through a tube. They clamored for the governor to take action and pardon her. Birth control as an issue was disregarded. The important fact was that an American woman was being brutally treated by jail authorities and it was up to the chivalric American press to object…

The Tact of Margaret Sanger

Mike Gold, Dorothy Day and Louis Weitzenkorn all worked together at The New York Call and were friends. On June 5, 1917 all young single men were required to register for the draft. Weitzenkorn registered and was drafted. Gold chose not register and eventually had to flee to Mexico.

It’s entirely possible that Dorothy was at the party that Gold describes below since she was a friend of Weitzenkorn. Further, she admits to spending a lot of time with Mike Gold that summer and fall and Dorothy was also well known by Margaret Sanger and her sister, Ethel Byrne.

There was always people, our friends coming or going, drafted, assigned to some place they had to report, some fort… I remember one night at the home of the fellow named Louis Weitzenkorn. He was the editor of a column, a literary column in the Daily Call, the socialist newspaper, and he wrote poetry. He had a good, warm, living feeling for literature and all of us used to write in his column. I wrote poems and one of my brothers contributed poems. We were up in his house,… he had just been drafted and he was going into the army. He did not choose to resist or to run away, or do any of the usual things to get out of the horrible chore of killing half the world to save your exploiters.

He was going and one of his guests that night was Margaret Sanger, the birth control pioneer, and her sister Ethel, a trained nurse and we were having a few drinks and talking and discussing the war and in the course of our discussions I suddenly saw that Louis Weitzenkorn had become very serious and Margaret Sanger was sitting there and she was holding his hand and looking into his eyes and she was very serious and we all stopped and asked what was happening and Margaret Sanger … who evidently believed in spiritualism and all that stuff, the return of people from the grave, and she had just asked Louis to promise her that if he was killed in the war, he would come back and tell her about it. And this poor guy, he turned a little pale for a minute but it was not a very pleasant thought on the eve of his going into the army. But he laughed and took another drink and promised her faithfully that he would come back.

Copied from transcripts of tapes made in preparation for a unpublished biography of Mike Gold which I found among the Mike Gold Papers at the University of Michigan.

Yes! A Halo for Dorothy Day

Colman McCarthy’s commitment to peace and justice is unquestionable. His writings have often shaken me from my complacency. Now, his argument against the canonization of Dorothy Day, Putting a halo on Dorothy Day shows her no love, has shaken me to write a reply.

McCarthy is concerned that her radical adoption of Jesus’s message – her pacifism, her objection to the “system,” her criticism of hypocritical clergy – will be defanged, transformed into a placid plaster statue; her legacy reduced to a bowl of soup. Emotion reigns. God is made small.

The long-term ramifications of Dorothy Day’s canonization will be a tremendous boost for Catholicism in the United States, lifting millions out of lethargy and lukewarmness, encouraging millions to re-examine pacifism, our industrial society and the formation of the clergy. Dorothy Day teaches us that these objectives will not be achieved through the personal efforts of even great numbers of people if these efforts are not done in union with Jesus in the Holy Eucharist.

Last month, Archbishop José Gomez referred to Dorothy Day as one of the finest spiritual writers. Her canonization will make her writings more widely read; and who can read her writings without being drawn into her worldview which comes down to a radical acceptance of the entire gospel message. Profoundly needed today is her emphasis on the virtue of Christian poverty.

Archbishop Gomez added “She makes me want to be a saint.” She needs to be held up on a pedestal so that young Catholics and non-Catholics can see what she did not see in her young and non-Catholic years: a person fully-committed to Jesus and the gospel values.

Most of us are not called by God to activism and jail time. Suffice the ordinary things of life to provide fodder for our constant contact with God and our ordering human affairs according to His will.

Dorothy Day should not be locked up in a closet. That would make God small. We need her to shake up Catholics in our country, now and permanently.

Canonization? Bring it on! 

A Philosophy of Work

“The root of our evil is the lack of a philosophy of work.” Peter Maurin

St. John Paul II has left us a philosophy of work within the framework of his Christian Anthropology: the human person is made in the image of the Trinitarian God. An important element of this anthropology is WORK, particularly the “subjective dimension” of work. “Through work the worker becomes more a human being."

Human work is the fundamental and decisive key to solving – gradually solving - the social question which is ultimately a matter of “making life more human,” or, in the language of Peter Maurin, making it “easier to be good.”

Jesus, God and man, “devoted most of the years of His life on earth to manual work at the carpenter’s bench” demonstrating that “the basis for determining the value of human work is not primarily the kind of work being done but the fact that the one who is doing it is a person.” (Laborem Exercens, n.6).

Dorothy Day As An Example of Character

New York Times columnist David Brooks has been writing and lecturing on character in recent months, finding inspiration in, among others, Dorothy Day. Here is an excerpt from his most recent article, The Moral Bucket List:

ENERGIZING LOVE Dorothy Day led a disorganized life when she was young: drinking, carousing, a suicide attempt or two, following her desires, unable to find direction. But the birth of her daughter changed her. She wrote of that birth, “If I had written the greatest book, composed the greatest symphony, painted the most beautiful painting or carved the most exquisite figure I could not have felt the more exalted creator than I did when they placed my child in my arms.”

That kind of love decenters the self. It reminds you that your true riches are in another. Most of all, this love electrifies. It puts you in a state of need and makes it delightful to serve what you love. Day’s love for her daughter spilled outward and upward. As she wrote, “No human creature could receive or contain so vast a flood of love and joy as I often felt after the birth of my child. With this came the need to worship, to adore.”

She made unshakable commitments in all directions. She became a Catholic, started a radical newspaper, opened settlement houses for the poor and lived among the poor, embracing shared poverty as a way to build community, to not only do good, but be good. This gift of love overcame, sometimes, the natural self-centeredness all of us feel.

NY Times Sunday Review, April 11, 2015 

The whole article may be found here.

The Lustig Family

The Lustig Family by Dorothy Day, New York Call, Nov. 1916

This is a partial transcript of one of the articles in The New York Call with Dorothy Day's byline.

Wolfe Lustig – it’s a husky sounding name.  But the man is a rattling bag of bones.  Day and night he lies in his bed and wonders why God doesn’t kill him quick.  For the first time in weeks, he propped himself up in bed yesterday to have his picture taken.  Look at it.

Pauline, the eldest child, is six.  Jakie comes next.  He’s four. Little Maurice, with the schmoochy face, is three and the cuddly baby with the big dark eyes was sentenced to life only five months ago.  Her name is Yetta.

Lustig was operated on two years ago. He doesn't know why. But he does know that the operation didn't turn out right and he has been in bed ever since.

His Wife - Sick Too!

His wife is sick, too, but she has to drag herself around and rub him with alcohol and make beef tea. Her face is puffed with neuralgia. The cold, stale air of the room is maddening. Daily, she goes out to peek at the push carts, hoping vaguely that prices have fallen. She comes in and her face and her heart hurt.

Beer and Holiness (Part II)

Beer and Holiness Converge in the Life of This Young Entrepreneur

A Profile of Luis Gordon

This is the second part of a post that began here.

A successful entrepreneur by his late 20s, Luis paid himself a high but not outrageous salary, enjoyed wearing good clothes, drove a flashy, yellow car and was actively engaged in politics promoting his view of the world in the rough and tumble politics of Spain in the late ‘20s.

The Gordon’s had been Catholic all the way back to Scotland which most likely contributed to Arthur’s decision to move to Spain 200 years earlier. Luis himself was a devout Catholic with an authentic piety. His reputation at home was "A treasure of a man… serious and formal, yet friendly and affectionate…Everyone in the family regarded him as a saint."

Floyd Dell on G. K. Chesteron, Part 2

A month ago, I posted the first part of Floyd Dell's review of G. K. Chesterton's "A Short History of England."  Here's the rest:

The philosophy of Christianity is generally – save in the Calvinistic sects – a free-will philosophy.  A good Christian wants to believe in miracles.  And a good Christian who happens to be a revolutionist wants to live in a world where the miracle of revolution is possible – where the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.  Not for him the cut-and-dried universe of Marxian determinism!  And not for some millions of other excellent people who, I am sure, would gladly take their places behind the first barricade of the Revolution.  Professor Milyukov, it is said, sat in a balcony and watched the Petrograd mob go against the machine-guns.  “It will all be over in half an hour,” he said.  He knew too much to believe that a mob could suddenly overthrow the solid tyranny of Tsarism.  But the mob didn’t know.  And so it went and did it.  Since then we have learned that success of the Russian revolution was, for a lot of reasons, inevitable, predestined, economically determined.  But for about twenty-four hours what was needed was Christian courage and the faith that is beyond knowledge.

Floyd Dell by John Sloane (1914)

It is characteristic of this mode of thought, however, that it does not wait for the Revolution, but rather continually creates revolutionary forms of action, some hopeless and some fruitful, out of its ever-youthful energies.

 [Mr. Chesterton champions] the movement for the creation or restoration of small peasant holdings of land [and] Guild Socialism intending to restore to labor the chief of its medieval virtues, the ancient virtue of handicraftsmanship. It will be noted that the mind which is free from the obsession of the Present is free to conceive a restoration of the Past.  To the determinist there is something at once sacrilegious and wasteful in this attempt, which he describes as “setting back the clock.” To the free-willist, however, this is no clockwork universe.  Going back to the path from which we wandered a few hundred years ago may be the most progressive thing to do – particularly if we have wandered into a bog.

Beer and Holiness

Beer and Holiness Converge in the Life of This Entrepreneur
A Profile of Luis Gordon

Somewhere in the furthest branches of the family tree there might have been gin but the fashionable homes of England awakened to a taste for sherry and by the middle of the 18^th Century Arthur Gordon had moved to Spain to satisfy this thirst.  A prosperous business was handed from Gordon to Gordon but the talent wore off in the 19^th Century and the business collapsed leaving Juan Gordon, Luis’ father, to start over with very little.

Luis was born, the tenth of fifteen children, in Cadiz in August, 1898 but his father’s import business failed, perhaps due to some chicanery of a competitor. The family moved around Spain during Luis’ formative years, definitively settling in Madrid in 1915 when Luis was 17.

Nothing is known of his university education which, most likely, took place in Madrid and concentrated on Industrial Engineering. In September, 1922, Luis enrolled in a graduate program at Ecole de Brasserie, Nancy, France.  The most prestigious brew school outside of Germany, it had been founded in 1893 as a department of the University of Nancy and specialized in the low temperature fermentation of beer popular in Germany (in comparison to high temperature fermentation in Great Britain).

Ecole de Brasserie, Class of 1923. Luis is in the front standing row, third from the left

The Economist Offers Advice of a Torturer

Yesterday, The Economist send out a tweet quoting Francis Bacon with some advice about getting information out of people.  

Bacon was well experienced at this.  For instance, in April, 1597, he signed the report of the examining board at the Tower of London as a witness of the interrogation of Fr. John Gerard, a Jesuit who later wrote:

Floyd Dell on G.K. Chesterton (Part I)

One of Dorothy Day's friends in Greenwich Village was Floyd Dell who at the time had a well deserved, national reputation for his book reviews.  Floyd, a Socialist at age 16, became the editor of The Friday Review of Books in 1906 at the age of 23 and saw that he could contribute to setting the trajectory of American culture in the 20th Century through his book reviews and consciously promoted those books offering alternatives to the established American narrative.

An agnostic (if not a pagan), a big fan of women's emancipation ("A guy doesn't have to marry the girl") and a serial seducer, his most favorite socialist author was G.K. Chesterton despite his "peculiar religious prejudices."  Here are some abridged excerpts from his 1918 review of Chesterton's "A Short History of England":
 
G. K. Chesterton is one of the exponents of a mode of revolutionary thought which is older than Marxian socialism, which in all of its phases and sects numbers millions of adherents and which has made a profound impress upon revolutionary history.  Yet this mode of thought is not exclusively Anarchist or Syndicalist, or even extremist.  It is not a movement, but a philosophy, bearing a peculiar relationship to that which underlies scientific socialism.  It has been generally either hostile to or contemptuous of the aims and methods of the Socialist movement, and it still competes as formidably as ever with Marxian socialism for the soul of man.

It cannot be described in a phrase, except perhaps by saying that it really is revolutionary in its essence, which Marxian or scientific socialism is not.  It will be remembered that the Marxian theory was rooted in Hegelian evolutionism and is hence evolutionary in spirit.  But those two words have become so obscured by much use that the best way of indicating the very real and profound chasm which divides the energies of the movement to which we all belong, is perhaps to say that half of the vital intellects of this century, as of the last, do not, and cannot, and will not believe in economic determinism.  The refuse it credence, not because it is economic, but because it is determinism.  They can and must, and do believe in free-will.

Giving up INDIFFERENCE for Lent

In his 2015 Lenten Message, Pope Francis invites us to confront the "globalization of indifference."

My indifference is local, directed to specific people.  I suppose I best start shedding my indifference today, rather than waiting for Lent.

Let's get something like "I'm giving up indifference for Lent" to TREND on Ash Wednesday.

Here is the Pope's message.

Broken Windows

In her Sunday NY Times column, Big City, Ginia Bellafonte focuses on differing opinions regarding the NY Police Department's "broken windows" policy but is there a policy for a broken system?

Dorothy Day railed against the “dirty rotten system” that the police are called upon to enforce.  Unfortunately, the academics and policy makers work within that system.

Dorothy Day and Ferguson

In her first years in New York, Dorothy Day longed for the "complete transformation of society," in the words of Peter Kropotkin, one of her favorite anarchists who she regarded as a "saint."

Closer to home, in fact, among her many acquaintances, was Emma Goldman who in 1917 published her "Anarchy and Other Essays" in which she makes a point about government which reverberates today in the discussion of the proper use of force by the police:

"There is hardly a modern thinker who does not agree that government, organized authority, or the State, is necessary only to maintain or protect property and monopoly. It has proven efficient in that function only.

"It is difficult to ascribe to governments any capacity for order or social harmony. Order derived through submission and maintained by terror is not much of a safe guaranty; yet that is the only "order" that governments have ever maintained.

"True social harmony grows naturally out of solidarity of interests. In a society where those who always work never have anything, while those who never work enjoy everything, solidarity of interests is non-existent; hence social harmony is but a myth. The only way organized authority meets this grave situation is by extending still greater privileges to those who have already monopolized the earth, and by still further enslaving the disinherited masses. Thus the entire arsenal of government--laws, police, soldiers, the courts, legislatures, prisons,--is strenuously engaged in "harmonizing" the most antagonistic elements in society.

"The most absurd apology for authority and law is that they serve to diminish crime. Aside from the fact that the State is itself the greatest criminal, breaking every written and natural law, stealing in the form of taxes, killing in the form of war and capital punishment, it has come to an absolute standstill in coping with crime. It has failed utterly to destroy or even minimize the horrible scourge of its own creation.

"Crime is naught but misdirected energy. So long as every institution of today, economic, political, social, and moral, conspires to misdirect human energy into wrong channels; so long as most people are out of place doing the things they hate to do, living a life they loathe to live, crime will be inevitable, and all the laws on the statutes can only increase, but never do away with, crime. What does society, as it exists today, know of the process of despair, the poverty, the horrors, the fearful struggle the human soul must pass on its way to crime and degradation." 

Comes to my mind the heavily armed federal police who protect the Supreme Court each January from the prayerful opponents of abortion.

Jesus and "The Masses"

Dorothy Day worked for The Masses for six months in 1917.  The Masses, the most polished magazine of this genre, George Bellows, Boardman Robinson, and Art Young used Jesus in their cartoons to protest against injustices to workers, the call for peace, the injustice of prejudice and the determination of the industrialists to go to war.  Stripped of supernatural trappings, Jesus’ teachings were a convenient source of authority for their social ideas and the Beatitudes offered a useful cudgel to bludgeon the hypocrisy of the so-called practicing Christians.

Jesus and his teachings had a recurring presence in the radical political conversation in and around Greenwich Village before World War I.  In

Pope Francis, St. Joseph and Dorothy Day

Pope Francis has demonstrated a great personal devotion to St. Joseph.  His pontificate was inaugurated on the Feast of St. Joseph and he soon added St. Joseph to the other three canons of the Mass.

Popular devotion to St. Joseph began in the sixteenth century with St. Teresa of Avila.

The Catholic Worker movement has also demonstrated a devotion to St. Joseph from its beginnings; a statue of St. Joseph stands prominently in the window of the Catholic Worker office on Mott Street.  This might have been more influenced by Peter Maurin than Dorothy Day but there can be no doubt that her attention to St. Joseph began during her years in Greenwich Village when she followed the working poor to Mass on those freezing Advent mornings of 1917.

“There was many a morning after sitting all night in taverns or coming from balls over at Webster Hall that I went to an early Mass at St. Joseph's Church on Sixth Avenue. It was just around the corner from where I lived, and seeing people going to an early weekday Mass attracted me. What were they finding there?

The God of Surprises

In his homily on October 14, Pope Francis spoke of Jesus' confrontation with the Doctors of the Law who "failed to understand that the law they guarded and loved" was a pedagogy towards Jesus Christ. "If the law does not lead to Jesus Christ if it does not bring us closer to Jesus Christ, it is dead. And Jesus rebuked them for this closure, for not being able to read the signs of the times, for not being open to the God of surprises”.

Reading this, I was reminded of St. Josemaría's attempts to explain the new pastoral phenomenon of Opus Dei to Spanish bishops in the late 1930s. They could not comprehend that young professional men would dedicate themselves to God for their entire lives in apostolic celibacy without vows.  Each of them assumed that, despite the pious intentions of that holy young priest, sooner or later, his initiative would become a religious order.  He returned home one night and wrote in his diary "How small they make God."

How small do we make God?

St. Peter's Square during the canonization of St. Josemaria

Read a summary of Pope Francis' homily HERE.