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.