WWDDD? Some thoughts on Dorothy Day and May 1, 2011

Yesterday was May 1^st – International Workers’ Day – and the 78^th anniversary of the founding of the Catholic Worker. It was 78 years ago that Dorothy Day and a handful of others stood in Union Square and sold the first copies of the Catholic Worker newspaper for a penny apiece.

I’ve been fascinated with Dorothy Day since being introduced to her writings in college. I credit her with making my politics what they are today and often joke that it’s her “fault” that I stayed Catholic as long as I did. I still frequently use her writings to challenge myself, to shake myself out of complacency, to remind myself of the persistent need to work to create a more just world. And because it was May 1^st, I had Dorothy Day on the brain for much of the day yesterday.  It’s no surprise, then, that when the news broke last night about the death of Osama bin Laden, and I was trying to make sense of my somber reaction in relation to the elation, jubilation, even glee expressed by others on facebook, on the news, on twitter, my mind came back to Dorothy Day. What would Dorothy think of all this, I wondered? I tried to imagine her, if she were still alive today, taking in the news, and perhaps sitting down at a desk not far from ground zero, where thousands gathered last night to celebrate bin Laden’s death, to write an editorial for the Catholic Worker about the event.

What I pictured her writing was this: We cannot rejoice over the death of bin Laden. All deaths, and especially all deaths brought about by violent means, are to be mourned, not only because of the loss of a life but because violent deaths remind us of how unbelievably broken our world is, our world that Christ tries over and over again to redeem through us, the members of His Mystical Body.  The only way for “justice” to come about is for us all to start treating each other as if each of us is Christ – to recognize the dignity in all other people and to resist any and every social structure, process, or interaction that undermines that dignity, including and especially war.

This would all be written in the context of a larger critique of U.S. foreign policy in general, of course. Dorothy Day wrote tirelessly against war in her day, including during World War II – so I think we can be confident that, were she alive today, she would have used her editorial desk to protest the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan with a persistence that most of us who oppose these wars, weary after almost a decade, lack. Given that yesterday was the Catholic Worker’s anniversary, I imagine she might have used the anniversary issue of the paper to take stock of the Catholic Worker’s mission in light of the current state of things – she might have even published an editorial yesterday about the need to stop the wars, and it wouldn’t have been out of character for her to remind her readers that bin Laden, and all our “enemies,” like all of us, are children of God.

This 1938 editorial is typical of Day’s writings on war. “As long as men trust to the use of force,” she wrote, “only a superior, a more savage and brutal force will overcome the enemy. We use his own weapons, and we must make sure our own force is more savage, more bestial than his own. As long we are trusting to force—we are praying for a victory by force.” Force can only beget more force. Violence can only beget violence. Rather than victory, Day insisted, we should be praying – and working – for peace.  “We are not praying for victory for Franco in Spain, a victory won with the aid of Mussolini’s son who gets a thrill out of bombing; with the aid of Mussolini who is opposing the Holy Father in his pronouncements on “racism”; with the aid of Hitler who persecutes the church in Germany. Nor are we praying for victory for the loyalists whose Anarchist, Communist and anti-God leaders are trying to destroy religion. We are praying for the Spanish people—all of them our brothers in Christ—all of them Temples of the Holy Ghost, all of them members or potential members of the Mystical Body of Christ.”

Were she alive today, reflecting on yesterday’s events, I like to think that Dorothy Day might have recycled her words, still so relevant some 73 years later:

We are not praying for victory. We are praying for the American people, the Afghani people, and the Iraqi people – all of them our brothers (and sisters!) in Christ – all of them Temples of the Holy Ghost, all of them members or potential members of the Mystical Body of Christ.