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

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.