The Catholic Worker Movement Part 2

FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE of Revolution - PART 2
by Dr Carol Byrne

Day’s anti-clericalism
Just as in Robin Hood’s day when the Church was under attack by anti-clerical preachers, so we find scattered throughout The Catholic Worker a constant barrage of Protestant-style slanders written by Dorothy Day against the alleged “scandal of the wealth of the Church, the luxury of the Church which began in the very earliest days” (1) She also berates the Church for neglecting the poor in anticipation of a “fuller life” hereafter: the religious, she wrote, “so neglected the needs of the poor and of the great mass of workers and permitted them to live in the most horrible destitution while comforting them with the solace of a promise of a life after death.” (CW September 1962) “What kind of homes do priests live in?” she once asked, “How large are their rectories, their monasteries, their house of studies? How can they speak of “home” so glowingly, how can they talk of the large family with such unction, when they see the two-room apartments, the four-room apartments on Mulberry street, on Mott street? (CW Sept 1946) For her, “religion, as the Marxists have always insisted, has, too often, like an opiate, tended to put people to sleep to the reality and the need for the present struggle for peace and justice.” (CW November 1959) And she rejoiced in the impoverishment of the Church’s temporalities: “Fortunately, the Papal States were wrested from the Church in the last century.” (CW July-August 1969)

Day herself would like to have wrested property and ownership of land from the Church: even the sight of a monastery surrounded by acres of land would induce a paroxysm of envy: “the poor continue to live in shacks and shanties, and the religious are housed in the equivalent of palaces.” (CW February 1953) The situation, in Day’s estimation, would easily be remedied by the clergy and religious changing places with the poor, moving into substandard accommodation so that the poor may occupy the presbyteries and episcopal residences.(She even asked Bishop (later Cardinal) McIntyre to turn one of his rectories over to the poor.) In her estimation Catholic churches should not be built as long as poverty exists: “On the one hand Churches are being rebuilt, and on the other the poor are still living in rubble in America as well as in Europe.” (CW July-august 1949) “Right under one's nose”, complained Day, “there is always plenty to complain of: Churches, schools, monasteries being built while the municipal lodging house is packed with mothers and children separated from husbands and fathers because of lack of housing.” (CW December 1949) She even begrudged the religious their victuals, quoting reported gossip: “Last month one of our workers washed dishes in a monastery for some days and witnessed the thick steaks, chops, roasts which were served twice a day to the fifteen or so members of the community.” (CW March 1954)

Why the vitriol against the clergy? Therein lies the Socialist Revolution which aims to undermine the Church’s authority over temporal affairs and with it the Social Reign of Our Lord Jesus Christ. All this is, of course, the staple of Liberation Theology which is the logic behind Day’s social activism: her outlook conveys the belief that getting people to heaven is less important than getting them good living conditions on this side of the grave, and that material concerns are the most meaningful things in human life. Day had no scruples about subordinating religion to politics. She even supported a group of young demonstrators against the Vietnam War who disrupted a Mass she was attending: “I have permitted my name to be used by the group in their effort to raise funds to defend themselves.” (CW February 1967) We cannot overlook the fact that funds had also to be raised for Day to defend herself against the consequences of breaking the law in numerous civil disobedience campaigns which were political statements with no obvious connection to the Works of Mercy.

CWM-approved priests
As part of her anti-clerical campaign, Day publicly associated herself and the CWM with some of the most influential liberal clerics whose pioneering revolutionary work paved the way for Vatican II reforms:

• Dom Virgil Michel (1890-1938) and the Collegeville rot
Fr Michel, a Benedictine priest from St John’s Abbey, Collegeville, Minnesota, has the dubious distinction of being the founder of the Liturgical Movement in America, and together with his European counterparts such as Dom Lambert Beauduin and Odo Casel (whose ideas he transplanted on to American soil), sowed the seeds of revolutionary reform which led to Vatican II’s Constitution on the Liturgy. What master plan did Fr Michel have in mind in the way of liturgical renewal? He explained:

One of the effects of a wide liturgical revival in the Church will undoubtedly be that of considerable changes in her liturgy made in terms of the new conditions and needs of our day. [Emphasis mine] (2)

So subtle was Beauduin’s plan for liturgical reform that it took decades to expose his harmful influence; let us not be deceived by Michel either: What goes for Beauduin goes for his disciple, Michel. As Fr Didier Bonneterre pointed out, the Modernists “had recourse to the Marxist notion of praxis, having understood that the Church could become modernist through action, especially through the sacred action of the liturgy”. (3)
Michel was a friend and co-worker of Day with whom he shared a kindred spirit – being a radical Socialist (4) and virulently anti-capitalist, he saw the economic disparities in society as the result of the “bourgeois mentality” (a Leninist term). (5) In the 1920s he set up a department at St John’s and founded a magazine, Orate Fratres, to disseminate his radical views on economics, agrarian communes, labour, separation of Church and State (6) (and also liturgical reform) which coincided with those of the CWM. (7) Ecumenical outreach was one of the main planks of Michel’s reforms.(8)

Day co-operated in many ways with the spread of Michel’s ideas among American Catholics, so that “their thinking will be influenced by the teachers who come from St. John’s.” (CW December 1935) It was his radical political outlook that fired Michel’s revolutionary idea of linking the liturgy of the Church with Social Justice, with the “Mystical Body of Christ” blasphemously used as a metaphor for the “reconstruction of society” along Socialistic lines: active participation for lay people in the liturgy, he argued, would provide the model to create communities committed to the struggle for the liberation of the oppressed masses and the redress of social injustice. That is the key to understanding why he worked together with the CWM and contributed regular articles to CW. It throws light, too, on his own agenda to dissolve the distinction between the clergy and the laity which, in his view, separates Catholic spirituality from social activism instead of uniting them. It also explains the demise of traditional Catholic devotions such as novenas which had sustained Catholics in their faith in a personal way – these did not promote the goals of the Liturgical Movement envisioned by Michel and his followers (i.e. social activism through liturgical participation), consequently they were considered not to be “liturgical” and were marginalised. Popular devotions which had nourished the faith of many generations of Catholics were condemned for supposedly leading towards a selfish and “individualistic” pursuit of personal piety to the detriment of the communitarian aspects of the liturgy. According to Michel, everyone had to act “liturgically” and not be “passive spectators”!


• Fr Hans Reinhold (1897-1968) and the Socialist Liturgy
Another of Day’s favourite clerical radicals was Fr Reinhold, a Benedictine oblate from the monastery of Maria Laach (the home of liturgical experimentation in Germany) who was very much out of favour with authority, both civil and ecclesiastical. Exiled from his homeland, he travelled widely on speaking engagements as a labour activist to rally Catholics, especially the young, to his Left wing ideas. According to his biographers, everywhere he went he was “continually plagued by difficulties with the local bishop”. (9) As one of CW’s earliest subscribers, Day invited him to come to New York, and he found a ready welcome and a sympathetic ear from her when he visited the Catholic Worker headquarters in 1936. (10) The Auxiliary Bishop of New York, James McIntyre, refused to grant him faculties because of his subversive politics, his liturgical innovations (he said Mass facing the people) and his anti-Franco stance, but Day allowed him to address CWM meetings. She recalls with indignation how he was summoned to the Chancery and threatened with expulsion from the diocese for rallying support among the seamen in the 1936 East Coast Maritime strike, and forbidden to speak in public. (CW March 1968) (11)
Reinhold took over Michel’s innovative ideas for liturgical renewal, and in a series of articles in Michel’s monthly magazine, Orate Fratres, he urged American Catholics to “act liturgically” not only at Mass but also by speaking out against social injustice and the capitalist system. Divine worship, therefore, was all about producing a Socialist society. He became a key figure in the Liturgical Movement in America (12), and published many books (13) which influenced the direction of the Vatican II reforms in both liturgy and church architecture long before the Council opened. In fact the ideas he inherited from Michel first began to circulate at the time when Annibale Bugnini was appointed Secretary to Pope Pius XII’s Commission for Liturgical Reform (1948) – a timely coincidence which disproves the myth that the reforms were brought about by the misbegotten “spirit of Vatican II”.

• Don Luigi Sturzo (1871-1959) and the Priestly “Political Vocation”
In the December 1941 issue of CW, Day commended the “political vocation” of this Sicilian priest (ordained in 1894), one of the foremost exponents of liberal Catholicism, who became a near-legendary figure for his challenging of both Church and State in Italy during Mussolini’s regime. What did this “political vocation” consist of? As a priest and labour leader he pursued a clear radical agenda (14) organising workers and peasants against the landowners and against the interests of the bourgeois financial and industrial ruling class; he also served as deputy Mayor of his native town of Caltagirone from 1905-1920. In 1919 he founded a political party, the Italian Popular Party (PPI), outside of Vatican control – perhaps that is what Day was referring to when she stated admiringly that he “led by example rather than by law” (CW February 1954) – but the Vatican compelled him to resign as Party Secretary and ordered him into exile.

While in exile Sturzo continued his “political vocation” by rallying young people to his cause, first in London and later in the USA. In London he founded the People and Freedom Group in 1936 (15) under the chairmanship of Virginia Crawford, an arch-feminist and errant wife whose high-profile divorce had earlier given rise to a national scandal. (16) Fr Sturzo contributed articles to CW. Along with Jacques Maritain and his friends on the Catholic Left (Fr Virgil Michel, Fr Hans Reinhold, Emmanuel Mounier and Day), Sturzo refused to back the Church’s defence of Franco in the Spanish Civil War. (17) Day even put the Generalissimo on a par with Hitler! (18)
There were other “labour priests”, too numerous to mention, who collaborated with the CWM under the banner of Catholic Action. Among them were Mgr Reynold Hillenbrand,(19) national chaplain for the Christian Family Movement in the USA (20), and an innovative rector of St Mary of the Lake Seminary in Chicago (1936-44) who invited Day as the first woman to lecture to his seminarians. And there was Mgr Charles Owen Rice whose ecclesiastical career was devoted largely to political activism and social reform. (21) He was actively involved in the Civil Rights movement, marched with Day and Martin Luther King on anti-war demonstrations in New York (CW May 1967), stood in picket lines in Pittsburgh and even ran for election to the Pittsburgh City Council in 1971. (22)

All these priest friends of Day were anti-bourgeois, anti-clerical and anti-monarchical. For the Catholic Left they constituted a communion of saints who waged a brave struggle against “clerical fascism” – the alleged oppression of the laity by an intolerant and paternalistic hierarchy. Together with Day they spread the Communist propaganda that the Church, being hierarchical, was the natural ally of the rich and powerful (i.e. the bourgeoisie), that the hierarchy was the enemy of the workers and that the clergy formed a political choir in support of Fascism.

Taking the above developments fully into account we can see to what extent the Vatican II reforms owed their genesis and continued survival to the infiltration of Socialist ideologies into the Church under the mantle of “the Mystical Body of Christ”.

Light from the East: Day’s growing infatuation with Russia
From her teenage years, Day looked to the East to enlighten the darkness of the “bourgeois mentality”, to Russian authors (Dostoevsky, Tolstoy etc.), Russian philosophers, Russian Orthodoxy, the Russian Revolution and Marxism, all products of the land which Our Lady of Fatima said would spread its errors – a heady mixture to imbibe at an impressionable age.

While it is valuable to read Dostoevsky from a Catholic perspective and ponder his insights into the problem of suffering, sacrifice and the human condition, certain precautions are needed. His novels have contributed to a conception of man that has fed into the existentialist tradition: philosophers such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus acknowledged their debt to him for the manner in which they conceived of human nature and the world. (23) One lesson, however, that Day did not learn from Dostoevsky was his condemnation of “Social Gospel” Catholics who were more preoccupied with man’s material needs than those of his soul. Day was also an admirer of Tolstoy, a nobleman who idealised the Russian peasantry (he went around dressed like a peasant). He promoted a “New Age” Christianity without dogma, laced with a morality that was purely sentimental, revolving around “love”. For that reason he became an idol of the Peace Movements of Gandhi, Martin Luther King, A.J. Muste etc. who were supported and eulogised by Day.

While still in her youth, Day read and was much impressed by the works of one of Russia’s foremost Anarchists, Peter Kropotkin (1842-1921), whose influence on her life she mentions in The Long Loneliness. She was drawn to Kropotkin’s vision of a utopian society organised around “mutual aid” co-operatives providing work for everyone in small-scale agriculture for local consumption where all had to be content to chew their cud. This inspired Day’s idea of a pseudo-Christian, egalitarian and miserablist society where people live in self-managing agrarian communes with a primitive economy based on “the mutual relations which existed during the mediaeval times” (CW November 1949). Kropotkin shared many of the tenets of Marxism – revolution by the workers and peasants, the abolition of private property and wage labour, and a society without class distinctions due to unequal wealth distribution. What appealed to Day fundamentally was his emphasis on personal freedom: he was opposed to all political order based on authority. For Kroptotkin, as for the later Marx, the State was to be eliminated and everyone made equal and self-ruling. But this is not consistent with Catholic doctrine which teaches that the State is established by God’s ordinance and has its existence in the necessity of man’s nature: a society without authority could not support Christian ideals such as family values or patriotism (neither of which Day respected). Nor could it give expression to the Social Reign of Our Lord Jesus Christ. Pope Pius XII explained that anarchism is against reason and criticised its supporters for causing chaos in society and confusion in people’s minds:

He is guilty of this fault who thinks he can experiment with the social order, and especially he who is not resolved to make the authority of the State and the observance of its laws prevail among all classes of society. It is perhaps necessary to demonstrate that weakness in authority more than any other weakness undermines the strength of a nation, and that the weakness of one nation brings with it the weakness of Europe and imperils the general peace. (New Year’s Day Message, 1954) [Emphasis mine]

It was not until Day met Helene Iswolsky, a Russian émigrée and daughter of a former Russian ambassador to Paris, that her Slavophile tendencies really blossomed. Iswolsky, a convert to Catholicism in the 1920s, was a key activist in Ecumenism long before Vatican II. She founded the ecumenical group, The Third Hour, which met in various venues including churches and the Protestant Union Theological Seminary, Manhattan. Day was an enthusiastic member of the group whose purpose she said was to “work for peace between the Churches: Russian Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Lutheran, Anglican, and, indeed, all Protestant groups.” (CW January 1976) With reference to the Third Hour, Iswolsky said that “Dorothy Day spoke at many of our meetings” and added that “she had actually been involved in ecumenical work for years.” (24) In fact, Day’s involvement with Ecumenism was decades ahead of Vatican II, and was based on the thoughts of CWM co-founder, Peter Maurin, an ex-member of the Sillon:

Peter began his teaching of the Thomistic doctrine of the common good by pointing out that since we lived in a pluralist state we had to find common ground with believers and non-believers, and he much approved the kind of discussion which will celebrate this May Day in workers halls, and at which The Catholic Worker editors will speak, with Communists, socialists, anarchists and other radicals. (CW May 1957)

But St Thomas Aquinas never taught that religious pluralism could lead to the common good. Still on the subject of Ecumenism, Day recalls that

One of the great things that Ammon (25) did for the Catholic Worker back in the thirties (we began publishing in 1933) was to increase our ecumenical spirit. There was not much talk of ecumenism in those days in the Holy Roman Catholic Church. His association with us began in the city of Milwaukee where he was living at that time and where we had a house of hospitality. Communists, socialists, anarchists, and an assortment of unbelievers and Protestants, of who knew what denomination, used to come to our Friday night meetings. (CW February 1970)

It was not long before Ecumenism developed into Inter-faith relations. As Day records:

Father de Menasce, French Dominican, spoke at the Third Hour meeting last month … and said through the mystics of every faith, the Sufi of the Mohammedans, the guru of the Buddhists, the prophet of Israel and the saints of the Protestant and Catholic and Eastern Churches we would meet on a common ground in a stretching out of the soul to God (CW April 1952)

And all that before Vatican II – Day was truly a prophetess: “The Catholic Worker crowd was always satisfied with ecumenism which meant learning from Hutterites, Doukobors (26), Indians, Mennonites, Amish, Brethren, as well as Quakers”. (CW May 1971)
One of Day’s biographers, Jim Forest, a former editor of CW, relates how she took him to meetings of the Third Hour in Manhattan (27) where Iswolsky was promoting Russian Orthodoxy. He also records that Day introduced him to liturgies in New York’s Russian Orthodox Cathedral of St Nicholas which she herself attended.(28) (This is the official church of an anti-Catholic country, loyal to the Moscow Patriarchate, and was a puppet of the Soviet government.) Day also attended a liturgy in Leningrad at the Monastery of St Alexander Nevsky (CW 1972), one of the few functioning churches to preserve the spirituality of the Russian Orthodox Church.

Iswolsky also introduced Day to two major contributors to the Russian philosophical tradition, Vladimir Solovyov (1853-1900), and Nikolai Berdyaev (1874-1948), both Russian Orthodox who sought a “third way” between Communism and Capitalism based on a blending of Marxism and Christianity. Day fell for their syncretist ideas and adopted them as guiding stars of the CWM, accepting them as leaders in Catholic theology. She frequently talked of Solovyov and cited his works (CW July-August 1962), acknowledging her debt to him as the “prophet of ecumenism”. (CW October-November 1971) Berdyaev, whom she quoted throughout her life, was hostile to the bourgeoisie as a class and was a major influence on the foremost intellectuals of the French Catholic Left – e.g. Emmanuel Mounier and Jacques Maritain – when, as an émigré from Russia, he brought with him his plans for a new Christian social order based on the Gnostic philosophy of Personalism.(29)(It is characteristic of Russian philosophers that they elaborated large-scale projects for the transformation of the world.) In Berdyaev’s scheme, Russia (which Our Lady of Fatima warned us about) would be the model for the new society! What was the significance of the Personalist philosophy for the Church? It was embraced by Modernist thinkers such as Maritain, Urs von Balthasar and John Paul II because it was premised on the freedom of the individual: liberty was the context of each person’s existence and the basis of human dignity.

Who can blame Edgar Hoover for Red-baiting Day when we consider her social contacts? Her personal friend and long term correspondent, Anna Louise Strong (1885-1970), an American citizen who spied for Stalin, (30) is a case in point. Day paid tribute to her when she died (CW June 1970) while concealing from readers any information on her Soviet proclivities. Strong was a journalist and radical Left-wing activist who worked in the same field of social activism as Day. (31) She flitted between the United States and Russia, founded the English-language Moscow Daily News, wrote many books supporting Communism (32) and served as an agent for Soviet intelligence under the code name “Lira”. An enthusiastic admirer of Stalin, she wrote a steady stream of agitprop for Western consumption, (33) and portrayed him as a harmless man struggling to moderate his Party’s excesses. But Stalin finally arrested, imprisoned and kicked her out of Russia when he suspected that she had double-crossed him by spying for China! (34)

Did Day actually meet Strong? Proof that the two friends had met and continued corresponding with each other exists in the form of a sheaf of personal letters (of which I have photocopies (35) ) which mention their meeting and subsequent mutual invitations – Day invited Strong to stop with her in New York, and Strong returned the invitation on December 27th 1952 by inviting Day to stay in her home in Montrose, California. (36)

When Strong went to live in China in 1962, Day maintained correspondence with her through an unnamed third party in New York, even though in those days it was forbidden in the US to send anything to China, (37) (which is one of the reasons why US citizens who did so were placed under FBI surveillance) and asked to be put on the mailing list for the ‘Letters from China’ which Strong sent to friends and benefactors. A significant point is that American government money ($2.00 per copy) was required to cover the cost of each issue Day received, payable to Strong’s friend in Canada, which shows Day’s willingness to support financially a Communist rag.
Strong’s ‘Letters from China’ are now published in book form (38), and are full of propaganda about Communist life under Mao. What is significant for our study is that Day absorbed and perpetuated these myths about the “success” of Communist regimes which she wanted the West to adopt as the solution to society’s problems:

We are living in an era in which vast countries like Russia and China have solved the problem of agribusiness by abolishing private property altogether and setting up communes, which may be areas consisting of thirty villages, as in China, or collective farms, as in the Soviet Union and Cuba. (CW July-August 1969) [Emphasis mine]

We should indeed be thankful to Russia, China and Cuba for having proved conclusively that Socialism (which includes “abolishing private property altogether and setting up communes”) does not work and that it has brought death, misery, starvation and economic ruin to populations on a vast scale. (39) And we are indebted to Strong’s biographers (see note 34) for the crucial information that just as Strong had allowed Stalin to “edit” her pro-Soviet writings, she took orders from Mao on how best to convey the situation in China to the rest of the world. Day’s co-operation in this propaganda mill can then be seen in its true light.

Day’s legacy: Marx for today
Is this not bizarre? 25 years after Day’s death, the CWM is still in existence, and we can see how amply Day’s epigoni and spiritual heirs have striven to justify selling the “Myth of Socialism” according to which everything can be transformed – economic and social structures, the institution of the Church, even human nature itself – in the fiery crucible of revolutionary zeal. CWM members and admirers are still committed to her elusive and unrealisable vision of social equality, but are oblivious to the historical evidence that Socialism is bound to end in failure and lead inevitably to the horrors of a totalitarian regime. (40) As Orestes Brownson, the 19th-century Catholic thinker and former Socialist, foresaw:

social equality is necessarily the annihilation of religion, government, property, and family. The same principle which would justify the Moderate Republicans of France in dethroning the king would justify M. Proudhon (41) in making war on property, declaring every rich man a robber, and seeking to exterminate the bourgeoisie. (42)

The in-built proclivity of Socialism to revolution was also noted by Brownson: “Its progress towards that end is irresistible; and when it happens to be downward, as at present, it is fearfully rapid, and becomes more fearfully rapid in proportion to the distance it descends.” Ironically, when Day claimed that CWM members follow “the downward path”, (43) she was not referring to the slippery slope but to their rejection by the rest of the Church for “fidelity to the Gospel”. This, according to Day, is the path “of salvation”, but she could not have been more deluded: the movement has now hit rock bottom as some CWM groups, taking Day’s acceptance of Religious Liberty to its logical conclusion, support the whole gamut of “human rights” issues including abortion. (44)

Can the CWM be exonerated from the taint of Marxist association now that Marx’s predictions have been proved wrong and Communism has failed throughout the world? Not if we take into account the presence of neo-Marxism which, through a system of cross-fertilisation, retains a powerful influence under different guises: Feminism, Multiculturalism, Liberation Theology, Justice and Peace movements etc., all antagonistic to Christianity and designed to destroy the traditions and institutions of Western civilisation. These trendy forms of ideology retain the same forms of analysis on which Marxism was based and simply fill them in with new content. The enemies of society are no longer simply Capitalism or Imperialism, as the list of victims of “oppression” has multiplied: women are oppressed by men, lay people by clergy, ethnic minorities by whites, children by adults, and so on, spawning ever new “liberation” movements. The characters may have changed, but it is still the same play!

Regarding the Marxist-feminist perspective, Day’s biographers never mention that she dumped her daughter for her “career”. They quote her thus: “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”, but the euphoria of childbirth was short lived and the reality of family life conflicted with her multifarious activities. With a busy schedule of constant speaking engagements which took her all over the USA, various social engagements, a frenzied commitment to support industrial strikes, anti-war demonstrations and to expand the CWM empire (not to mention the day-to-day editorship of CW), Day had little time to spend with her own daughter. Tamar Day Hennessy, born in 1926, told the National Catholic Reporter:

I was only 8 years old when it started. She was travelling a lot, and I was left to be taken care of by various people, and I got very ill. It was hard for both of us. She had her work, and yet at the same time she had me. She was devoted. She was torn. (45)

Even in school holiday time, Day sent Tamar away to relatives or summer camps. In 1933, Day herself recalls that her daughter “is spending most of the summer on my sister's farm and I am free for work.” (46) [emphasis mine] That is what Lenin would have termed exporting your internal contradictions. “A lot of other children did have a difficult time being in the Worker,” (47) Tamar said. “I think Dorothy was very aware of the fact that you can’t do both well, and she was right.” Where was Day’s insistence on “personal responsibility”, one of the cornerstones of her philosophy, or her much touted fidelity to the papal encyclicals, when it came to fulfilling her duties of state? (48) In this she resembles Mrs Jellyby of Dickens’s Bleak House who organises efforts on behalf of the distant natives of Booriaboola-gha while neglecting the poor state of her own family.

Here we come to the very nub of the Marxist-feminist perspective: Day’s contempt for the Christian concept of the home and family life displayed in her grand ‘domestic revolution’ which completely inverted the traditional concept of family life. First she described her Houses of Hospitality as a family, treating them as the “domestic sphere”, though they were really only communes open to all comers, then she proposed these communal homes as models for the individual family home. She wanted the “bourgeois” household (too individualistic and shut up in its own privacy) to lose its “private” and “domestic” character by having a “Christ’s-room” –– an idea she got from Peter Maurin. By this she meant that every home should share its living space with strangers in need of accommodation – ex-prisoners, the unemployed, vagrants etc . (49) On this assumption, any poor person could say, “I am entitled to use your house tonight”, walk in and crawl into your bed; by refusing admission you would be exercising “coercion” against the poor (whom Day regards as the “ambassadors of Christ”.) The implications of this subversive plan are obvious: once the walls of the domestic family home have been breached and the house itself turned into a public institution, the commune supplants the “nuclear” family as the basic unit of society. We should note that this Marxist transformation attacking the inviolability of the Christian family is camouflaged under the slogan of solidarity with the poor. Furthermore, each CWM House was a revolutionary “cell”, an ideologically charged site that was the scene of radical meetings where Communists, Anarchists, Catholic Liberals and all subversive breeds convened to discuss and spread Socialist doctrines.

Then there is the “mystique” that surrounds Work. We have seen examples of how she twisted the Scriptures to fit her own agenda. According to Day, Work, especially manual work, trumps every other consideration (Church, family, law-keeping etc.) This parallels the basic tenets of Marxism, an earth-bound, pre-Christian philosophy (let us not forget that Marx came from a Jewish family) that stresses the centrality of manual work in the human condition.

Day’s religiosity
Some people are incredulous about evidence of Day’s complicity in the promotion of international Communism on the grounds that she went to daily Mass, read the Bible and said prayers every day. But so, no doubt, did a host of Liberation theologians and other Catholics who were Communist collaborators of various stripes. (50) Day’s religious convictions can best be described as idiosyncratic with little evidence of the “Clarification of Thought” of which the CWM boasts.

It was the same with the Church Fathers and the papal encyclicals: here she developed an expertise in choosing which phrases to emphasise, which to distort and which to suppress. Day was not the only Catholic “Social Justice” activist to approach Catholic Social Teaching from an entirely different perspective from that of the major social encyclicals of the 20th-century Popes – proponents of Liberation Theology did likewise. Ever the Liberal, Day had an ingrained love of freedom, hence her acceptance of Religious Liberty. She refused to be pinned down by the strictures of doctrinal rectitude, and entertained many unorthodox or obscurantist notions about the Church, poverty, work, the family and society. It is clear to any ordinary observer that her beliefs on these points go beyond Catholicism into a gnostic fantasy land attainable only by the politically initiated. Instead of expounding the Gospel message faithfully, she retreated into her own form of moralism which she then translated into social action. When action replaces belief, the criteria for judging the right direction to take are unclear, and the result can only be to lose one’s way.

Day’s ideal was a form of religious humanism, a blend of different religious faiths and secular ideologies that might save humanity from the scourge of “bourgeois individualism” through high spiritual ideals – but not specifically Catholic ones. After all, you do not have to be a Catholic to be opposed to the rampant consumerism of modern society, which explains how Day was chosen for the Ethical Humanist Award, granted on May 13th 1979 by the New York Society for Ethical Culture “for the pursuit of social justice for the poor and commitment to religious and political ecumenism.” (51)

Conclusion
So where exactly did Day stand on Communism? “Flamma fumo est proxima” – as close as the flame is to the smoke, to quote from a play by Plautus. (52) Using the metaphor of a bottle that keeps the smell of the liquor it once contained, we can say that her writings had a distinctly Marxist whiff. Like many former Communists who had left total Marxism behind, she continued to approach social problems from a Marxist habitus, an intellectual disposition that remained embedded throughout her life and from which she never totally escaped. While she may not have been a card-carrying member of the Communist Party, even after her conversion she still retained the remnants of her old pro-Communist idealism. She rejected only the atheistic basis of Marxism, but could not bring herself to condemn the political ideals of Marxism in principle. Deep down, she could not accept that a system which promised a workers’ paradise in a new world order turned out to be a world-wide failure.

It is futile to protest that Day was not advocating some form of Communism on the grounds that State ownership of industry and centralisation of government were anathema to her – we must remember that the existence of the centralised State, in Marx’s ideology, was only a transient passage to his ideal of stateless or “pure” Communism which would supposedly come about when the capitalist system was destroyed. That was Day’s ideal, too – a post-capitalist, stateless society of perfectly harmonious members (the only difference between Marx and Day on this issue was that she wanted to bypass the State and have the “new social order” immediately.) This utopian ideal is not something gleaned from Catholicism, for the Church has never taught us to believe in the perfectibility of humanity at large, as her mission is directed to the salvation of the individual soul. Nor does the Church teach that society should be restructured by reformers to eliminate class distinctions, but that the poor should look to God for consolation.

In spite of the clash in principles between Socialism and Christianity, Day found it useful for her purposes to exercise the mental facility of holding incompatible doctrines, which is everywhere the hallmark of the Modernist. She recalled how Peter Maurin came to her “with Kropotkin in one pocket and St Francis in the other.” (CW February 1974) One can find scattered throughout her writings some contradictory statements – she has made some good Christian points and can be quoted as having criticised some aspects of Communism (its ruthlessness, its dictatorship etc.); she has even admitted a modicum of private property (so did Stalin who dubbed any peasant owning more than two cows an evil kulak), but her work mirrors Marxist techniques and the whole drift of her ideology is towards Communism. After all, one can hardly invoke Marxist principles and terminology without ultimately embracing Marxist goals. So we must conclude, in line with Catholic teaching, that dabbling with Marxism should be avoided altogether.

Day held the immanentist view that human beings were “all temples of the Holy Spirit” (CW April 1952), which led to her collaborating with people of all religions on the grounds of the “Brotherhood of Man.” (But one cannot really speak of “brotherhood” where class struggle, envy and hatred simmer under the surface). In spite of her elaborate attempts to distinguish between the CWM and Communism (see CW July-August 1949), these remarks show her belief that there is no fundamental antagonism between believers and unbelievers fighting for Social Justice. This dovetails with the spirit and objectives of the Sillon, and promotes the same false principles that produce the evil consequences she is supposed to be remedying.

Like many Westerners of the early to mid 20th century who had a fascination with Russia (“addiction” would not be too strong a word) and whose allegiance went to a foreign government, Day could well be considered unpatriotic. A Jacobin at heart, Day fell easy prey to the attraction of revolutionary Communism, a product of Russia, described by Archbishop Lefebvre as “the greatest enemy of the Church.” We have seen how she surrounded herself with liberal clerics who strove to introduce Communism into the Church via the Liturgical Movement and Liberation Theology, poisoning the minds while filling the stomachs of the poor.

The history of the CWM is a cautionary tale that illustrates the dishonesty of recasting Marxism in Christian terms and proposing it for adoption as “Christian Communism”. The hubris of the CWM was to think that it could solve the “social problem” by inventing a system of religious Communism as the antidote to atheistic Communism, ignoring the fact that Catholicism and Communism are irreconcilable and mortal enemies. While the Church needs organisations of Catholic Social Action to help bring about the reign of Our Lord Jesus Christ, these must be subordinate to the clergy and completely orthodox in doctrine. Our Lord’s kingdom will come through the Priesthood, not by any secular organisation founded by man – or woman – independently of the Church. Like all Liberal social activists, Day has effectively neutralised the work of Catholic Action by misapplying the social doctrines of the Church in areas involving civil government, social class and the family. The CWM is therefore another instrument in the hands of the Liberals to undermine the Social Reign of Our Lord. As the Popes have warned us, those who are imbued with the principles of Liberalism are used by the Church’s enemies to “pave the way for Socialism”. In an age when Christianity has often been turned into mere political and social activism, Day’s programme would not only be “Socialising” society, but “democratising” the Church!

FOOTNOTES
1 ‘The Meaning of Poverty’, Ave Maria, December 3, 1966
2 ‘Liturgy and Catholic Life’, Orate Fratres, quoted in Paul Marx, Virgil Michel and the Liturgical Movement, Liturgical Press, Collegeville, Minnesota, 1957, p. 56. Michel introduced the ‘dialogue Mass’ and called for the full, active participation of men and women in the liturgy (for which the use of the vernacular would eventually be essential), the reinstitution of the Offertory Procession and a radical redesigning of churches which should be both simple and functional so as to facilitate the activity of the congregation and reflect the unity of all humanity. Michel published an article in his Orate Fratres magazine (14 July 1929), pp. 278-279) by architect Maurice Lavanoux proposing the simplification of the sanctuary and a new arrangement for the altar which should be free-standing, separated from its superstructure. He was sympathetic to “Mass facing the people” and the eventual introduction of the vernacular into the Roman rite. (Paul Marx, op. cit., p.381) Day supported Michel’s reforms and was an “ardent supporter of the vernacular movement.” (CW March 1966) She dismissed the priest’s Latin as “meaningless mutter” which “sounds like magic”. (CW Sept 1962) and preferred the modern liturgy: “I do love the guitar Masses, and the Masses where the recorder and the flute are played.” (CW May 1967) And she praised the “charismatic movement” as “a return to scripture” which brings “a profound joy and sense of prayer, and a deep concern for our brothers and sisters.” (CW October-November 1975)
3 This was shown by Fr Didier Bonneterre in The Liturgical Movement, Angelus Press, 2002
4Fr Michel admitted that social injustice aroused in him “feelings akin to radical Socialism.” (op. cit., p. 31)
5This expression, used extensively by radical Socialists like Dom Virgil Michel, was a term of abuse used by Lenin to arouse hostility to the bourgeoisie. See V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, 4th English Edition, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1965, Vol. 27, pp. 323-54.
6 “In regard to the relations between Church and State, Michel believed that in modern, pluralistic society, the only reasonable and practical conclusion seemed to be separation with co-operation.” (Paul Marx, op. cit., p.316)
7 See CW December 1935 and October 1953 for an account of his connections with and influence on the CWM.
8 Paul Marx shows that Michel was “in contact with “High Church” and “liturgical movements” among various non-Catholic communions as well as with Anglican and Orthodox religious communities”, and was sympathetic to the eventual introduction of the vernacular into the Roman rite (op. cit., p. 381). For a more detailed coverage of Michel’s ecumenical outreach, see Patrick Henry, ‘Virgil Michel and Ecumenism’, Ecumenical People, Programs, Papers, April 1989, Institute for Ecumenical and Cultural Research, Collegeville, Minnesota. Henry compares Michel’s efforts in ecumenism to those of Frs Yves Congar, John Courtney Murray, Lambert Beauduin, Cardinals Bea and Willebrands in that “he was doing ecumenical work at a level deeper than dialogues and merger negotiations.” (ibid., p. 8), all conducted in an underground manner, as Pope Pius XI had forbidden such activities! Also to be considered are Michel’s attempts at inculturation during his 3-year stay among the native Indians of Northern Minnesota when he adapted the liturgy to the spirit of the indigenous customs of the Indians, challenging the Church to adapt and accommodate to the diversity of cultures.
9 Mentioned in Linda Kulzer and Roberta Bondi (eds.), Benedict in the World: Portraits of Monastic Oblates, Liturgical Press, Collegeville, Minnesota, 2004
10 Quoted in Keith F. Pecklers, The Unread Vision. The Liturgical Movement in the United States of America: 1926-55, Liturgical Press, Collegeville, Minnesota, 1998, p. 138
11 This is confirmed by Fr Reinhold himself in H.A.R., The Autobiography of Father Reinhold, Herder and Herder, New York, 1968, pp. 105-7
12 Foreword by Fr Michael Mathis in H. A. Reinhold, Speaking of Liturgical Architecture, University of Notre Dame Liturgical Programme, Indiana, 1952
13 E.g. Speaking of Liturgical Architecture (1952), The American Parish and the Roman Liturgy (1958), Bringing the Mass to the People (1960), The Dynamics of the Liturgy (1961), all anticipating the changes in the Roman rite brought about by Vatican II
14 Nicholas Timasceff, The Sociology of Luigi Sturzo – the Revolutionary Thought of a Great Philosopher-Scientist, Helicon Press, Baltimore, 1962
15 See Giovanna Farrell-Vinay, ‘The London exile of Don Luigi Sturzo (1924-1940)’ in The Heythrop Journal, Vol. 45, Issue 2, April 2004, p. 158. The association’s aim was to educate young people about Christian Democracy (Sturzo-style), and the first course of action its members took was to launch a public campaign against Franco’s involvement in the Spanish Civil War, slander his name as a Fascist and try to prevent him from gaining control of the country.
16 In a court hearing of 1885 Mrs Crawford, a Catholic, admitted adultery with Sir Charles Dilke, MP, heir-apparent to Gladstone. The publicity of the lawsuit ruined his political career and caused him to lose his parliamentary seat in the 1886 General Elections.
17 Archbishop Lefebvre realised the necessity of supporting Catholic States for the furtherance of the Kingship of Christ. He said, “I remember well that in General Franco's time, in Spain, Pope Pius XII used to tell me that never had there been realised an agreement so conformed to Catholic doctrine as the agreement reached with the Spanish government.” Conference given in Buenos Aires on August 31 1981, published in the January 1982 issue of The Angelus.
18 In 1935 the CW began publishing a series of articles on Fascism. Of particular interest is Day’s denunciation of both Franco as an authoritarian figure opposed to Religious Liberty.
19 Mgr Hillenbrand stood at the forefront of liturgical renewal. He said Mass on a table “facing the people” in the 1950s and promoted lay participation in the liturgy. Like Fr Virgil Michel, he misinterpreted the doctrine of the Mystical Body of Christ to link liturgy and social action. In Chicago he became Chaplain of the Young Christian Workers founded by Cardinal Cardijn of Belgium in association with Marc Sangnier to continue the work of the Sillon which had been condemned by Pope Pius X.
20 This was an organisation founded by Pat and Patty Crowley who were one of the few married couples to be invited to take part in Pope Paul’s Birth Control Commission in 1964 where they opposed the ban on contraception. Mrs Crowley was later vociferous in her rejection of Humanae Vitae, but as Mgr Hillenbrand had subordinated his priestly ministry to lay activism, he was powerless to exercise his spiritual authority. As the lay leader of the CFM, one of her designated tasks was to prepare couples for marriage!
21 After ordination in 1934, Fr Rice became actively involved in workers’ unions. He co-founded the Catholic Radical Alliance and was a director of the Association of Catholic Trade Unionists to combat Communist influences, but was won over by them himself, later famously regretting his anti-Communist stance and “wished there was a stronger Communist presence in the trade unions today.” (See B. and R. Shultz, The Price of Dissent: Testimonies to Political Repression in America, University of California Press, 2001). In 1937 he founded the St Joseph’s House of Hospitality which Day describes as “a branch of the Catholic Worker Movement.” (CW June 1944). He was a regular columnist for The Pittsburgh Catholic and aired a weekly radio programme from 1937-1969.
22 Charles J. McCollester (ed.), Fighter with a heart, writings of Charles Owen Rice, Pittsburgh labor priest, University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, PA. 1996
23 Camus himself claimed that one cannot understand 20th-century French literature without reference to Dostoevsky
24 No Time to Grieve; An autobiographical Journey from Russia to Paris to New York, Winchell Company, Philadelphia:, 1985
25 Ammon Hennacy, a member of the CWM, described himself as a “Christian Anarchist”. In 1961 he founded the Joe Hill House in Salt Lake City, named after the songwriter and founder of the Industrial Workers of the World (also known as the Wobblies). A prominent feature of this CW House was an enormous mural of Joe Hill, the folk hero and “labour martyr” alongside Jesus Christ.
26 The Doukobors were a gnostic Russian sect which had been connected with opposition to Christianity since the early centuries. Their defining characteristic is their rejection of all external authority.
27 James H. Forest, Love is the Measure: A Biograpbhy of Dorothy Day, Orbis Books, Maryknoll, New York, 2000. Forest later left Catholicism and converted to the Russian Orthodox Church.
28 ‘Getting from Here to There’, in Toward the Authentic Church, ed. Thomas Doulis, Light and Life Books, Minneapolis, 1996
29 Catherine Baird, ‘Religious communism? Nicolai Berdyaev's contribution to Esprit's interpretation of communism’ in Canadian Journal of History, April 1995
30 John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, in Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America (Yale University Press, 1999) show that Anna Louise Strong conducted her espionage under the code name “Lira”. The Venona Papers, published in 1986, uncovered the infiltration of the American government, big business and the media by Soviet agents.
31 The main manuscript collection of Anna Louise Strong is kept in the Suzzallo Library of the University of Washington, and other records are preserved in the Communist Collection (1916-1970) at Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts, Series 1, Box 1, Folder 8, and also in the Virginia Gardner Papers, Tamiment Library, New York, Box 8, Folder 13
32These included How the Communists Rule Russia (1927), Workers' Life in Soviet Russia, (1927), Peasant Life in Soviet Russia (1927), The Soviets Conquer Wheat (1931), her very popular autobiography I Change Worlds: the Remaking of an American (1935), This Soviet World (1936), The Stalin Era and The Soviet Constitution (1937)
33 Ironically, The Soviets Conquer Wheat was written just before the Ukrainian famine killed millions, and The Soviet Constitution coincides with the time Stalin was conducting his purges. This is what she wrote about the gulags in This Soviet World: “The labour camps have won a high reputation throughout the Soviet Union as places where tens of thousands of men have been reclaimed… (p. 256)…So well known and effective is the Soviet method of remaking human beings that criminals occasionally now apply to be admitted.” (ibid., p, 262).
34 Information supplied by Strong’s great-nephew, Tracy B. Strong and his wife, Helene Keyssar , authors of Right in her Soul. The Life of Anna Louise Strong, Random House, New York, 1984
35 obtained from the Raynor Memorial Libraries, Marquette University Archives, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Series D-1, Box 5 and 14
36 “It was a rare privilege to meet you…If I do not see you until you again come west, may I say that I have an extra bedroom and would be honored if you cared to stop there. I have no maid; you would either get your own meals, or combine on meals with me, as you choose.”
37 In a letter dated 2. 8. 64, Strong wrote to Day: “A mutual friend writes me from New York that you would like to be put on the mailing list for my “Letter from China” but that you prefer that it arrive from an intervening country…I am asking my friend Mrs B M Wheeldon, Rr 1 Qualicun Bay, BC Canada, to send you a copy of Letter no 18, which is going out today.” Day was still receiving these up until Strong’s death in 1970. (See CW June 1970)
38 New World Press, Peking, 1963
39 In CW February1965, Day recommended the work of the British economist, Joan Robinson, who went to China and was impressed by Mao Tse Tung’s communes, in spite of the fact that his land reforms known as The Great Leap Forward were a monumental debacle resulting in the deaths of an estimated 70 million Chinese people and the impoverishment of the entire country. Robinson was a radical political economist whose 1942 Essay on Marxian Economics was influential in getting people to take Karl Marx seriously as an economist. She not only drew inspiration from Marx but also sought to influence others to put his theories into practice.
40 A good illustration of this is provided by one of Day’s most admired heroes, Fidel Castro. When he came to power he revised the Penal Code (which had placed limitations on the application of the death penalty) so that he could apply “Revolutionary Justice”, in other words execute or imprison at will the so-called “enemies of the people” who obstructed the progress of the Revolution.
41 Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809-1865,) one of the “Fathers of “Anarchism”
42 Brownson's Quarterly Review (January, 1849)
43 Houses of Hospitality, Sheed and Ward, New York, 1939, p. 275
44 Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker Movement. Centenary Essays, eds. J. Thorn, P. Runkel and S. Mountin, Marquette University Press, Milwaukee, 2001, p. 20
45 Margot Patterson, ‘Dorothy Day’s daughter Tamar: an extraordinary, difficult childhood’, Cover story: National Catholic Reporter, 7 March 2003
46 Houses of Hospitality ,Chapter 1, Sheed and Ward, New York, 1939
47 The same article mentions that Day’s promoters for canonisation, Mark and Louise Zwick, followed her example. Their son, Joachim, said that when his parents started the Casa Juan Diego Catholic Worker in Houston in 1980, he had to share a house with a constant stream of immigrants and refugees who occupied his parents’ attention.
48 In her autobiography, The Long Loneliness, Harper Collins, New York, 1952, p. 23, Day tried to justify this with reference to Christ’s admonition (Mark 10:29) to give up family attachments for the sake of the kingdom of heaven: “No matter how many times I gave up mother, father, husband, brother, daughter for His sake, I had to do it over again.” The implication is that she was trying to sublimate her natural affections in order to love God more “purely”, but the real reason for this unchristian behaviour, a feminist one, was contempt for the duties of motherhood: “women especially are social beings, who are not content with just husband and family, but must have a community, a group, an exchange with others. A child is not enough. A husband and children, no matter how busy one may be kept by them, are not enough” (ibid.)
49 Day fraudulently attributed this idea to St Jerome in an attempt to coerce Catholic consciences. When St Jerome (who himself founded a hospice in Bethlehem) praised hospitality for the poor, he was not referring to the private Christian home. His words “Welcome poor men and strangers to your homely board, that with them Christ may be your guest” were part of a treatise on the clerical life dedicated to St Nepotian, Bishop of Altino in Italy. (Letter LII, 384 A.D.) Also he commended the example of the Roman senator, Pammachius, who had become a monk and opened a Hospice for Strangers in the Portus Romanus (Letter XLVI, 397 A.D.) Day also commits the Modernist fallacy of “seeing Christ in the poor” (which makes no sense) instead of “seeing the poor in Christ” who must be loved for His sake.
50 Take, for instance the case of Stanislaw Wielgus, Archbishop of Warsaw, recently appointed by the Pope, who was forced to resign in the face of incontrovertible evidence that he was a spy against the Church from around the time of Vatican II to the fall of the Soviet government in 1989.
51 Marquette University Archives, Special Collection, Series D-5, Folder 4, Box 27
52 Curculio, Act I, scene I, line 53