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…