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