The Catholic Worker Movement

From Russia with Love (of Revolution)

From Russian Communism to Vatican II via the Catholic Worker Movement

Part 1

by Dr Carol Byrne

Communism is a Russian phenomenon in spite of its Marxist ideology.
~ Nikolai Berdyaev, The Russian Idea (1948)

The Catholic Workers Movement (CWM) was co-founded by Dorothy Day in New York, on 1 May 1933, to provide food, clothing and shelter for the destitute during the years of the Great Depression. It was a time when millions of Americans, in the throes of unemployment, homelessness and poverty, turned to radical political and social movements, under the banner of the slogan “Share the Wealth” – at least what there was left of it. With world capitalism in crisis, economies crashing, docks and shipyards abandoned, decaying slums in urban areas, the “Share the Wealth” crowd were only too eager to be influenced by slogans that appealed to their sense of victimisation, fear of long-term poverty, and resentment at the financially better off, or that suggested solutions in class warfare and social revolution (the “have-nots” being encouraged to take from the “haves”). The case for a Marxist solution never seemed more plausible, and it was easy for anyone with a gift for rhetoric and a wider agenda to create a social conscience that could be swiftly transformed into a Socialist conscience.
Into this scenario stepped the CWM with its promise of a happier future, a “better world” to be constructed around Houses of Hospitality, soup kitchens, farming communes, mutual aid and personal responsibility for our neighbour in need. As a champion of the poor, a foe of capitalism and a critic of Western government structures, Day spoke to the hopes and fears of working class Americans throughout the country, using slogans such as “make the rich poor”, “revolution from below” and a “new social order”. If she started out with the intention of fulfilling the Sermon on the Mount, it was not long before the soup she served from her kitchen had a liberal sprinkling of Marxist parsley. By the 1970s the CWM had a 581-page FBI dossier. Day herself, a former pro-Communist activist, was for decades after her conversion to Catholicism under surveillance by the FBI Director, J. Edgar Hoover, who called her “a very erratic and irresponsible person,” and suspected her of “consciously or unconsciously being used by Communist groups.” (1) Did she really deserve such obloquy? Or was she just another statistic in the campaign of rumour, innuendo and Red-baiting allegedly operated by Hoover? (N.B. just because Hoover said it doesn’t mean it wasn’t true!) In order to answer these questions we will have to examine the profile of the CWM and track its evolution against the background of its relationship with the Catholic Church, the American government, the Soviet Union and Communist fellow-travellers.
First we need to consider the protean nature of Marxism and how it can be cleverly presented in new, more sophisticated and attractive guises to charm the Liberals of the West. Its continued survival is due to its ability to change its appearance from one situation to another and crossbreed with other ideological traditions. In the early part of the 20th century, the Communist Party of the USA started its programme to get leading churchmen to support Communist policies disguised as peace initiatives and welfare work for minorities, and by 1935 the Communist infiltration of religion was in full swing. Many Marxists who were barred from making public speeches became clergymen (they would at least have a pulpit!) while retaining their affiliation with Communist projects and enterprises. One such clergyman was the Marxist-Leninist-Presbyterian-Quaker, A.J. Muste, a radical labour activist of international fame, who spent 3 decades supporting Communist fronts and causes under the banner of “Christian Pacifism”. In the 1950s Day shared platforms with “A.J.”, as he was known, and even placed the CWM under his militant leadership (The Catholic Worker July-August 1955). When he died in 1967, he was commemorated by Communists the world over (2) , and Day added her eulogy in a long obituary (CW February 1967).
Another leading agitator for world Communism with whom Day was involved was the Methodist Rev. Jerome Davis whose pro-Soviet writings, political activism and “Social Gospel” radicalism cost him his post as Professor of Divinity at Yale University, got him blacklisted by the HUAC (The House Committee on Un-American Activities) as a suspected national security risk, and placed him on the FBI surveillance list. (3) Day relates in The Catholic Worker of September 1971 that she accepted from Davis a Travelling Fellowship to Russia , financed by Corliss Lamont, but without mentioning Lamont’s connections with the National Council of American-Soviet Friendship (of which he was Chairman), composed of professionals sympathetic to Communism. Not only was Lamont himself a notorious apologist for the Soviet Union, (4) but it has been shown that Soviet friendship societies operated in various countries, (5)agitating for acceptance of Soviet policies and were used to funnel money to groups that promoted friendship with the USSR. It is also enlightening to know that the annual trips to Russia organised by Davis and financed by Lamont were not simply for cultural or recreational purposes but had all the hallmarks of political pilgrimages to transform American thought in favour of Soviet ideology and induce contempt for Western civilisation. (6) This is especially significant in Day’s case, given her infatuation, as we shall see later, with all things Russian.

Nor does Day mention that the person who recommended her for the Fellowship, Virginia Gardner, personal secretary to Corliss Lamont, was a member of the Communist Party of the USA (she left it in 1962 for personal reasons), and a lifelong supporter of Communism. The Tamiment Library in New York houses the Virginia Gardner Papers which contain records of Day’s connections with Gardner. (7) If further evidence were needed of Day’s association in Marxist causes, there is her acquaintance with the London publisher, Victor Gollancz, with whom she was on social terms (see CW Feb 1967) and who published the first edition of her book, Loaves and Fishes, in 1963. Gollancz’s firm was not only a mouthpiece for world Communism, disseminating Marxist propaganda, but also a recruiting ground for the Communist Party in England, and, perhaps most tellingly, his selection policy showed a marked preference for authors who supported the Soviet regime. (8)

How Catholic is the Catholic Workers Movement?
Is this a Catholic organisation at all, or is its philosophy, to adapt a phrase from Sir Thomas More’s Utopia, “a fiction whereby the [Marxist] medicine, as if smeared with honey, might a little more pleasantly slide into men's minds”? The first and most fundamental point in the profile of the CWM from its inception is its usurpation of the title “Catholic”. In an article written in December 1966 for the Ave Maria Magazine (9) , Day admitted that it was she who put the word “Catholic” into the CWM without consulting the hierarchy, as an example of the “personal responsibility” and “freedom” she enjoyed as a member of the laity. It was a decision which involved her in protracted controversy with the Archdiocese of New York, especially as she had also entitled her monthly newspaper, (which had a distinctly Marxist flavour) The Catholic Worker (CW). Matters came to a head in March 1951 when Day received a letter from Mgr Edward Gaffney, the Chancellor, asking her to come and see him. (10) During the meeting and on the understanding that she was in contravention of ecclesiastical law for acting in the name of the Church without permission, Mgr Gaffney issued an ultimatum: either she would have to drop the title “Catholic” or cease publication of The Catholic Worker. Day recalled the incident some years later with her response:
[regarding] our use of the name Catholic. This last reproach came up again in a news report recently, and we can only repeat what I said to our former chancellor, Monsignor Gaffney, (God rest his soul) that we have as much right to the name Catholic as the Catholic War Veterans have. (11) (CW December 1965)
As a supporter of Gandhian Pacifism (12) and the godmother of every draft-dodger in the USA, Day was habitually critical of the Church for not condemning all wars; hence the snide remark about the Catholic War Veterans. Day did not disclose the content of Mgr Gaffney’s objections, but we can gather from her reply that it must have concerned accusations of Communist sympathies: her excuse was that without the word “Catholic” her newspaper would be taken over by the Church’s enemies (the Communists), whereas it would be better in her (Catholic) hands! (13) That was the subterfuge she used to justify disobeying the Chancellor’s order.
We can see from the following examples of Day’s ideas, all taken from the May 1972 issue of The Catholic Worker, that key Marxist themes were central to her outlook:

1. She claimed that capitalism is “wage-slavery” because the wage-contract is coercive: the class that owns nothing but its labour is coerced by the employer class: “The labourer is systematically robbed of that wealth which he produces over and above what is needed for his bare maintenance.” As all profit is “theft”, it would therefore be necessary for workers to “take back” their “surplus-value” and bring about “the elimination of a distinct employer class.”
2. She believed that the workers of the world would be all equal, prosperous and free only when there would be “no longer an employer-wage-earner relationship”.
3. She preached the doctrine of international class struggle – the proletariat (workers of the world) must fight and eliminate its age-old enemy, the bourgeoisie, (the moneyed class) for the right to own and operate the means of production. This militant dogma demonising the bourgeoisie as a class was sure to gain allegiances and enthusiasms from credulous supporters especially among the young.
4. For the workers’ revolution to be achieved, she advocated a society in which “the capitalist ceases to exist as a class” and looked forward to the achievement of a classless society. The political slogan, “Workers of the world unite!” which comes from Marx’s Communist Manifesto is a rallying cry compatible with the aims of the CWM.
5. When she stated that “We believe in the withering away of the State” and “in the communal aspect of property”, her goal was for a stateless society without institutions, i.e. one in which people voluntarily group together into communes in which property would be held in common and there would be “no ruling class” or social hierarchy.

The ideas found in these examples share a number of thematic roots: class warfare, “surplus-value”, modes of production, abolition of inequalities, eventual communal ownership of property, anarchism – all ingredients of the Marxist dialectic which is rooted in atheistic Communism. They are not the basis of a Catholic philosophy, which is why the Popes had already condemned such notions. As Pius XI stated:

When all men have finally acquired the collectivist mentality in this Utopia of a really classless society, the political State, which is now conceived by Communists merely as the instrument by which the proletariat is oppressed by the capitalists, will have lost all reason for its existence and will “wither away”. (14)
The CWM, therefore, stands in the tradition of revolutionary Communism, starting with Karl Marx who saw the workers and peasants as the agents of social change. Marxism has spread on an international scale by the creation of a network of “basic communities” or revolutionary Marxist-type “cells”, such as those found in the CWM, rooted in their local class struggle.
Is God a communist?
According to Day’s Messianic vision, “the general aim of the Catholic Worker Movement is to realise in the individual and in society the expressed and implied teachings of Christ.” (CW May 1972) This statement implies that if Christ were walking the earth today, He would have taught the very same Marxist doctrines espoused by the CWM and urged a Socialist revolution to overthrow the “bourgeois imperialists” and the economics of capitalism. Its corollary is, in the words of former President of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, that “Christ was the first Socialist” (15) , and that all who work for social justice, freedom, equality and human values are fulfilling the Gospel. Day believed in this and applied it to Fidel Castro: “God bless Castro and all those who are seeing Christ in the poor. God bless all those who are seeking the brotherhood of man because in loving their brothers they love God even though they deny Him.” (CW July-August 1961)

Let us not forget that the CWM would not have had the slightest chance of success among Catholics without a religious backing; as long as Marxism was seen as essentially godless (Day was keen to let everyone know that she opposed atheistic Marxism), the movement would have had a limited appeal. But newly baptised and given a Catholic name, it would have considerable potential for political success. Day always claimed that the cornerstone of her work was the precept of the Works of Mercy found in chapter 25 of the Gospel according to St Matthew. But the rationale behind Day’s enterprises had little to do with traditional Christian doctrine and everything to do with creating the Workers’ Paradise of the gospel according to “St” Marx. She had simply recast the biblical message about the rich and the poor as justification for the Marxist dialectic of class struggle: every Scriptural criticism of the rich was a mandate for the poor to avenge themselves on the capitalist landowners, and every biblical expression of sympathy for the poor was interpreted as a rallying call for a revolution by the workers and peasants. She used the spiritual teachings of both the Old and New Testament to bolster her own social advocacy programme.

Is there any such thing as “Christian Communism”?
It is interesting to note that the expression “Christian Communism” (an oxymoron if ever there was one) employed to designate the “true” pattern for lay people living in society has no validation in Catholic Tradition. It was simply conjured up and is used by the religious Left, including Day, as part of their propaganda campaign to prove that communism existed in the early Church and should become the standard for Catholics today. In Acts 4:32 it is stated that the early Christians were “united, heart and soul; no one claimed for his own use anything that he had, as everything they owned was held in common.” Day pounced on this passage, twisting its meaning to make a compelling case for her variety of “Christian Communism” and made it the basis for the CWM: “We believe in the communal aspect of property as stressed by the early Christians”, she wrote in The Catholic Worker, in November 1949, and in a later issue she called for

widespread and universal ownership by all men of property as a stepping stone to a communism that will be in accord with the Christian teaching of detachment from material goods and which, when realised, will express itself in common ownership. (CW May 1972)

But her interpretation of Acts 4:32 was premised on a number of factual errors:
1. The quotation does not mean that the first Christians eschewed private property or were pooling all their resources and redistributing their wealth from a common kitty. The Latin version (erant illis omnia communia) makes it clear that their possessions were “held” i.e. considered to be not for themselves exclusively but for sharing with their brethren whenever the need arose. (This was the point made by St Thomas Aquinas regarding private ownership.) (16) From both a legal and a moral standpoint, they had ownership of their goods and could dispose of them as they saw fit. St Paul nowhere advocates that they should renounce private property.
2. The New Testament accounts do not support the idea that the first Christians were actually living as an ideal community detached from the goods of this world. Caring and sharing did not characterise the early Christians generally. A few pages later we read about wrangling and dissension over the inequity of distribution of goods, and find that the “Hebrews” (Palestinians) were shortchanging the “Hellenists” (Greeks) (Acts 6:1) – an example of early racial discrimination!
3. Not once in these chronicles is the idea of a “new social order” discussed. Social reform to “make a better world” is quite unsupported in the New Testament, in Acts or elsewhere. In fact the subject is completely alien to the early Christians who were convinced that the world would probably be coming to an end within their lifetime, and the society they forged for themselves, being short-lived, would not be a pattern for future generations.
4. It was certainly not the teaching of the apostolic period to seek the elimination of the government and the establishment of a classless society. This is what Day advocates in order to achieve a “Christian Communism” modelled on the supposed lifestyle of the early Christians.

Neither can a case be made for a “Christian” form of Socialism in our times. Day compares the CWM to the Benedictine monastic tradition which incorporated common ownership of property, and even quotes St Gertrude the Great’s dictum that “property, the more common it is, the more holy it is” in order to give a Catholic underpinning to her movement. But the analogy is false. St Gertrude, a 13th century Benedictine abbess, was referring to the religious life which required the renunciation of private property, and prefaced her remark with the words: “our gain is increased, God is more glorified and the Church is strengthened and supported.” (17) Besides, the religious communities were intended only for the very few, those with a vocation who withdrew from society to follow Christ’s counsel to seek spiritual perfection. Their radical poverty and communal way of life are utterly unsuited to the majority of lay people living in the world. Their object is not, and never has been, socialistic, i.e. for social reform or the redistribution of goods.

Socialism of any variety can never be the answer to society’s ills. As a system it has been condemned by all pre-conciliar Popes, both as a general doctrine and with regard to specific points, because it has its roots in revolutionary Marxism. The papal condemnations apply not only to strict Marxism but to all schools of Socialism and its analogues in different countries, including Fabianism. Leo XIII said it “would rob the lawful possessor, distort the functions of the State, and create utter confusion in the community.” (18) Pope Pius XI pointed out the incompatibility between Christianity and Socialism:

Religious socialism, Christian socialism, are contradictory terms; no one can be at the same time a sincere Catholic and a true Socialist. Whether considered as a doctrine, or an historical fact, or a movement, Socialism, if it remains truly Socialism, even after it has yielded to truth and justice on the points which we have mentioned, cannot be reconciled with the teachings of the Catholic Church because its concept of society itself is utterly foreign to Christian truth. (19)

Yet Day eulogised Julius Nyerere, the first President of Tanzania, as a “Catholic and Socialist” (CW October 1970) who introduced a collective farming project into his newly independent State, noting how closely it corresponds to the CWM ideal. (20) (But the Socialist reform brought chaos and economic ruin on the Tanzanians, as Nyerere forcibly uprooted the prosperous farming population, relocating them into communes; millions of peasants became impoverished, incentive and productivity declined and the project was abandoned – but not before Tanzania went from being one of Africa’s largest agricultural exporters to its largest importer.) Day’s admiration for Nyerere gives the lie to her assurance that the CWM seeks social reform on a voluntary basis. Day also mentioned Nyerere’s support for the Maryknoll General Chapter of New York, which is the main centre for Liberation Theology propaganda and activism in the USA; many of the Maryknoll Fathers and Sisters aided Communist terrorists in Central and South America. Maryknoll is now the main publisher of Day’s books.

How loyal was Day to papal social teaching?
Writing in the first edition of The Catholic Worker, Day stated that “In an attempt to popularise and make known the encyclicals of the Popes in regard to social justice and the programme put forth by the Church for the reconstruction of the social order, this news sheet, The Catholic Worker, is started.” (CW May 1933)
What precisely is this “programme put forth by the Church for the reconstruction of the social order” that Day has in mind? Nothing of the kind exists. The pre-conciliar Popes never promoted a particular political agenda, valid for all times and places. They taught only general Catholic principles and had warned Catholic workers of the subversive intentions of politicised representation. If they favoured the Guild system, it was as a possible alternative to trade unions for pastoral, not class-driven, reasons. Whenever they spoke on behalf of the workers, it was specifically to protect them from the attraction of sin and to exhort the faithful to make working conditions accord with the most basic of Catholic principles. In short, the Catholic position on social questions was to “defend the weak”, and is incompatible with Day’s (Marxist) agenda to “make everyone equal”.

Christ the Worker?
Central to the CWM is the glorification of manual work and therefore of the working class. It comes as no surprise that the “workers”, i.e. artisans and peasants are the lynch pin of the “new social order” proclaimed by Day. Here she echoes the Marxist view that they are the agents of social revolution. If we look more closely into what Day has grandly termed her “Philosophy of Work”, we will see that it is no more than a collection of theories about manual labour which conflict quite noticeably with Christian teaching. Decades before Vatican II, she was using the untraditional and totally novel title “Christ the Worker” for various Houses of Hospitality (CW May 1947) and mentioned that a Catholic Worker Shelter in Portland, Oregon, has a chapel of that name. (CW March 1940). She stated that “Our Lord was a worker, yes, as well as a priest” and was convinced that the CWM was “a continuation of the mission of Christ the Worker” (CW September 1946), a fanciful notion, as the Gospel narratives do not contain any substantial evidence that Our Lord was a worker in the ordinary meaning of the word; (21) on the contrary, He was known throughout Galillee as a miracle-worker and a teacher (Rabbi) and was addressed as magister (Master).

Yet the image of Christ as a labouring man, first mooted by the religious Left, became part of Vatican II thinking. It features prominently in John Paul II’s encyclical, Laborem Exercens (1981), along with other Modernist inventions supported by Day such as a “Gospel of Work” and the co-operation of the worker in God’s creative work. This is a departure from the Scriptures which stress the penal aspect of work as the Curse of Adam, the fruits of Original Sin that make work so difficult, painful and frustrating for us.


Worker-Priests
Now we come to what lies behind the CWM’s promotion of “Christ the Worker”: according to Day, Our Lord was not only the first Socialist, but also the first worker-priest! Ever the radical, Day wholeheartedly supported the worker-priests of France organised by Cardinal Suhard, Archbishop of Paris, an innovative pastoral experiment which was to become a cause célëbre. Her reasons? “To try to bridge that terrible gap between the clergy and the laity, between the man of God and the man of the family – truly this is a great work, and a work which we must comment on, and commend.” (CW November 1946). In other words, she was in favour of diminishing the essential distinction between the priest and the layman so that they could both be identified as manual workers. After all, that was the aim of the worker-priests, to become “one of the workers”, dress like them, live among them and work alongside them in factories, shops and on construction sites, “in order to enter into the mentality, problems and culture of the workers”, as she put it. She was keen that priests should roll up their sleeves, engage in manual labour, think like their fellow workers in union and social matters and, above all, become enmeshed in the class struggle. These thoughts led her to support the nascent Liberation Theology movement founded by Dom Helder Camara in Latin America (whom she often eulogised) with “priests and laymen and laywomen working together among the ‘republics’ we mentioned in Colombia, among the tin miners in Bolivia, the fishermen of Recife, Brazil.” (CW March-April 1967) But she was oblivious to the incompatibility between the priestly and lay states of life, and the dangers to a priest’s chastity posed by his being immersed in a secular milieu.
Day continued to take the part of the worker-priests in their opposition to the Vatican’s suppression of the movement in 1954. In a mocking tone she chastises the Holy Office for its intervention as a “crucifixion of the good” because the worker-priests “have been doing what Jesus Christ Himself told them to do in their great love of God and of their brothers.” (CW March 1954)

Working mothers
Another CWM departure from Catholic teaching is seen in Day’s attitude to work which overrides family values, particularly the role of the mother. With reference to child poverty, she saw the solution in communal childcare arrangements: “There is great need of a nursery school for children under one year of age” in order to enable their mothers to seek and retain work. (CW November 1934) But diminishing the mother’s role, as Pope Leo XIII stated, would “act against natural justice, and destroy the structure of the home.” (22) Her ideal, which she referred to in the Introduction of Loaves and Fishes (1963), and often mentioned in CW, is the kibbutz, a 20th-century Israeli system of agricultural settlements owned by those who work the land. It is based on the communal rearing of children where mothers, instead of spending hours a day raising children, are free to work in the fields. The complete equality of men and women in the workplace which this system upholds is not only a Communist ideal but constitutes one of the demands of the feminist agenda. That explains why Day was so impressed with her visit to a kibbutz-style farming commune in California (CW January 1972) where mothers and fathers worked “day and night”, seeing their children only in the evening.

Non-violent Revolution?
As no Socialist country has ever succeeded or could ever be brought into existence without the use of force, we are permitted to be sceptical about Day’s claim to create a voluntary co-operative system based on the “brotherhood of man”. Her support for Castro illustrates the ambivalent nature of her thinking on the issue of peaceful revolution:
We are certainly not Marxist socialists nor do we believe in violent revolution. Yet we do believe that it is better to revolt, to fight, as Castro did with his handful of men; he worked in the fields with the cane workers and thus gained them to his army – than to do nothing. (CW July-August 1962)

In fact, Day was fascinated by any Socialist scheme anywhere in the world – Russia, Cuba, China, Africa, North Korea – regardless of its violent beginnings and inhumane consequences as long as it was organised on “the constructive activity of the people, the masses” (CW November 1949) and fomented a world-wide class struggle of poor nations against rich, industrialised ones. She was eager to speak out against every case of poverty, every injustice, every industrial scandal anywhere in the world, provided it could be laid at the door of the capitalist land- or factory owner. She was fond of “quoting Marx, Lenin, Mao-Tse-Tung, or Ramakrishna to restate the case for our common humanity, the brotherhood of man and the fatherhood of God.” (CW, May 1951) “We are on the side of revolution”, she said while praising Castro’s armed takeover of Cuba (CW July-August 1961) and simultaneously preaching a doctrine of non-violence. And whose side was she on in the Spanish Civil War – the Catholic Nationalist landowners or the Communist-backed workers? Her pretended “neutrality” (CW September 1938) revealed her failure to support the Catholic side under Communist threat.

However, violence lurks beneath the surface, for her interpretation (a Marxist one) of the plight of “the masses” in various countries of the world is a minatory one: either the bourgeoisie will share its wealth with the less well off or the latter will resort to arms to “take back” what “rightfully” belongs to them. That, for Day, is Social Justice, based on the “complete equality of all men” (CW May 1972), with revolutionary uprising (alias war) as the only alternative: “If we do not do our Christian duty of loving and serving, the poor of the world will take by force that which is denied them by justice.” (CW July-August 1954) But when the poor are told that their situation is unendurable, “debasing and degrading”, and that “class war is a fact” (CW November 1949) and when they find that there is precious little of “loving and serving” around, they will need no second bidding to rise up against the rich, their “oppressors”. In spite of her lip service to peaceful solutions, she has always adhered to the Marxist dialectic which incites the world’s poor, the large majority of whom are peaceful and hardworking, to revolution. The result of whipping up human passions? Social destabilisation leading ultimately to violence. By advocating a wholesale policy of Socialism which can only be realised by force, Day has effectively made herself once again a propagandist for Marxist revolution. Far different is the teaching of the Church on this social question. “It is false and irrational” said Pope Leo XIII to believe that class is naturally hostile to class: it is ordained by nature that these two classes (capital and labour) should exist in harmony and agreement.” (Rerum novarum)

Robin Hood rides again
Nothing could illustrate more clearly how far Day has departed from Christian teaching on holy poverty than her two-pronged manifesto “to make the rich poor and the poor holy”. The first is a desire for class revenge for the inequities suffered by the poor, a Robin Hood sentiment designed to warm the hearts of all Socialists; the second is a usurpation of the priestly ministry, for only God can “make holy”, which He does through the Mass and Sacraments. There is no holiness to be found in Day’s idea that the poor ought to feel resentment toward the rich and to blame them for their poverty. (Pope Leo criticised Socialists as they “encourage the poor man's envy of the rich”), which is forbidden by the 7th and 10th Commandments. Day herself habitually coveted the lands, houses and property of others, including the estates of the clergy and religious, and wanted to have them expropriated (thus creating a new dispossessed class!) Her inability to appreciate the importance of private property prevented her from seeing that the law of God forbids even the desire to have such things for ourselves simply because they belong to another. That is also at the root of her unCatholic notion that “what anyone possesses beyond basic needs does not belong to him but rather to the poor who are without it.” (CW May 1972). But the Church has never preached either “radical poverty for all” or heroic almsgiving as the ordinary means of charity to the poor. On the contrary, the teaching of the Church is that each should give alms, as St Paul said, from “what he can afford” (I Cor 16:2). That is after much more than “basic needs” are taken into account, without jeopardising “social prestige”, i.e. living in keeping with one’s position in society (even a bourgeois one!). (23)

[to be continued]

NOTES
1. The declassified records of Day’s 581-page FBI file are kept at the FBI Reading Room.
2. Just weeks before he died, Muste had been warmly received by the North Korean Communist leader, Ho Chi Minh, when he went to Hanoi with 3 Communist-sympathising clergymen on a “Peace” mission. Records of his work are kept in the archives of the Tamiment Library, New York, which specialises in Communist history.
3. According to the Yale Alumni Magazine, Old Yale, Professor Davis, a staunch supporter of the Bolshevik leaders, was fired from his university post in 1937
4. Corliss Lamont (1902-95) founded and subsidised the Marxist Quarterly and was the author of The Myth of Soviet Aggression (1952). He also directed several Popular Front organisations which included Communist Party members in their ranks.
5. Louise Nemzer, ‘The Soviet Friendship Societies’, Public Opinion Quarterly, Vol. 13, No. 2, 1949
6. See Paul Hollander, Political Pilgrims: Travels of Western Intellectuals to the Soviet Union, China, and Cuba, OUP 1981 for a fascinating account of how travel to Russia by members of the Western intelligentsia, including religious and cultural leaders, was the chief means of pro-Soviet propaganda which duped politicians, the media and the general public for decades
7. The Dorothy Day files are contained in Box 5, Folder 68
8. Paul Laity (ed.), Left Book Club Anthology, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2001. Gollancz later embraced “Christian” Socialism.
9. A weekly magazine for Catholic families started in 1865 by Fr Edward Sorin, founder of the University of Notre Dame, Indiana
10. Geoffrey B. Gneuhs, First Things, May 1998. Gneuhs, the lay chaplain for the CWM during Day’s lifetime, mentioned this incident during the eulogy he made at her funeral
11. The Catholic War Veterans were established in 1935 with the permission of the Bishop of Brooklyn, New York.
12. Day was a lifelong admirer of Gandhi and disseminated his philosophy and works at every opportunity. Even though he was a Hindu, she presented him as the epitome of Christianity: ““Greater love than this no man hath – that a man lay down his life for his friends.” There is no public figure who has more conformed his life to the life of Jesus Christ than Gandhi, there is no man who has carried about him more consistently the aura of divinised humanity, who has added his sacrifice to the sacrifice of Christ, whose life has had a more fitting end than that of Gandhi…In him we have a new intercessor with Christ; a modern Francis, a pacifist martyr.” (CW Feb 1948)
13. Gneuhs spoke with evident approval of Day’s stance regarding the hierarchy
14. Divini Redemptoris, 1937, #13
15. Sunday Times, Review, 05. 06. 05
16. “man must not hold external things as his own property, but as everyone's; so as to make no difficulty, I mean, in sharing when others are in need", Summa Theologica, II-II, Q. Ixvi, a. 2.
17. We read in The Life and Revelations of St Gertrude the Great, Chapter 2, that “the Saint could not bear either to possess or retain anything that was not absolutely necessary for use.”
18. Rerum novarum,1891, # 4
19. Quadragesimo anno, 1931 # 117-120
20. Nyerere was influenced by Fabianism while studying at the University of Edinburgh, and was a proponent of “Third World Socialism”, an offshoot of Communism.
21. It is true that the people of Nazareth referred to Jesus as “the carpenter” (Mark 6:3), but that is only how they remembered Him from His childhood days as the helper of St Joseph at home. It cannot be taken as evidence that He was a carpenter by profession, no more than their observation that Jesus was “the son of a carpenter” (Matt. 13:55) means that St Joseph was His father.
22. Rerum novarum, # 14
23. This would include the duties of a head of a family to provide generously for the health, education and financial security of his children, and other indispensable interests relating to the Christian life such as professional and cultural pursuits, all of which involve considerable expenditure of capital.