Dorothy Day: neocon saint?

In the November/December 1995 American Enterprise, the bimonthly journal of the American Enterprise Institute, Bill Kauffman writes a "Flashback" column titled "Saint Dorothy." He argues that Dorothy Day was an unstinting critic of Washington and of "the welfare bureaucracy, from the New Deal through the Great Society." He implies that Day disdained government efforts at relieving poverty and would approve recent efforts to gut such programs, We have asked three knowledgeable contributors to respond. THE EDITORS

Patrick Jordan

Patrick Jordan, Commonweal's managing editor, is a former managing editor of the Catholic Worker.

Bill Kauffman's short, admiring piece on Dorothy Day--prefaced by a quote from Cicero: "To know nothing of what happened before you were born is to remain ever a child"--is an example of how ideological and political slant sometimes slouches toward propaganda. For Kauffman quotes Dorothy Day selectively to make points she would not fully espouse, and to serve causes she would disdain.

It is true that Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin, cofounders of the Catholic Worker movement, were not in favor of big government or what has come to be known as the welfare state. They were interested in "those tiny, invisible molecular forces that work from individual to individual," the words of William James that Day often quoted. Maurin and Day were Christian personalists. They practiced voluntary poverty and lived with the poor because Christ was poor, but also because they wished to redress the injustices of society. Day called American capitalism a "filthy rotten system" because it places war-making and profit-taking over the needs and dignity of working people and their families. The problem, therefore, is not simply the size of government. It is the nature of the profit-driven system, a system bolstered and maintained by government.

The term "Catholic Worker" is thus poles apart from the couplet "American Enterprise." For "Catholic" implies a universalist and sacramental understanding of the human condition (in Christ, we are all members of one body), and is not tied to the fortunes of a particular state. "Worker" indicates that humanity is enhanced by the labor of hands, head, and heart performed in the service of others, not by the amassing of fortunes by a few. To the contrary, Day often quoted Saint Gertrude that "Property, the more common it is, the more holy it becomes." One wonders whether Mr. Kauffman has read enough of Dorothy Day to encounter her searing comments on interest taking, arms profiteering, and the withholding of adequate wages from workers; or to meet her praise of the emergency efforts of national governments when disasters had struck.

Day and Maurin wanted to create a "new society within the shell of the old." But they did not wish to "destroy" the old one first. Rather, their aim was to offer alternatives for the future by creating "cells of good living" now. They would have applauded the writings of a Wendell Berry and his concern for husbanding natural and human resources. They would not have countenanced throwing people onto the street to balance the budget, especially while raising military spending and reducing the taxes of the wealthy.

Like Mr. Kauffman, I have no doubt that Dorothy Day is a saint. I worked with her for a number of years and have never known a more holy, interesting, discerning, challenging, and captivating person. But one still has to get her in the right heaven! In Washington, I think that would be at the Catholic Worker house on T Street, N.W., not at the American Enterprise Institute on 17th.

Robert Coles

Robert Coles is the author of numerous books, including two on the Catholic Worker: A Spectacle unto the World (Viking, 1973), and Dorothy Day: A Radical Devotion (Addison-Wesley, 1987).

Dorothy Day put no great hope in bureaucratic liberalism as the answer to the big questions this life presents to us. All the time she worked tirelessly, tenaciously, concretely on behalf of the poor. I will always remember her being "on the line," so to speak--helping to prepare food, serving it to some of the walking wounded of our twentieth-century industrial society. But I also heard her worry about another kind of poverty, that of secular materialism: the sad and pitiable preoccupation of some of us who, finally, believe in ourselves as all that matters.

For her, "poverty" was not only a "socio-economic variable," but something universal and inevitable, the experience of human limitation and vulnerability. She knew the poverty Ecclesiastes describes, the pride, the ever-resilient egoism that inform our daily lives and cloud our vision. For her, the helper and the helped in a soup kitchen were both ever-so-needy pilgrims, worthy neither of smug satisfaction (the helper) or romanticized condescension (the helped).

Sometimes she could be abrasively critical of an apparently well-intentioned benevolence: "I wonder why so many people pay attention to the poverty here [in the nearby Bowery], but don't notice the terrible poverty in Wall Street, almost next door." I was twenty-four when I heard those words, and was frankly confused by them--a judgment, of course, on me and the kind of education I'd received.

Dorothy Day's mission, actually, was to try to teach some of us the reasons for such an observation. And doing so, she called upon Jesus of Nazareth, the prophets of Israel, and the ethically awake story-telling voices of Tolstoy and Dickens and Dostoevsky, her three great favorites, whose novels have given us the humble, half-starved poor, but also the rich and powerful poor, whose snotty self-importance and arrogant self-satisfaction signal a particular and (these days, in certain precincts of America) a not-rare kind of destitution: a moral bankruptcy that is, ironically, now celebrated in newspapers and magazines and movies and on television.

For many of us, Dorothy Day and her fellow Catholic Workers were and are members of what Irving Howe called "the homeless Left": George Orwell, James Agee, Ignazio Silone, Danilo Dolce--they could, indeed, be found scorning big government and its demeaning ways. But their idiosyncratic mix of anarchy and Judeo-Christian generosity of spirit, their egalitarian and populist yearnings, not rarely lived out, serve poorly any effort to bolster what obtains now so influentially in Washington's (or London's) corridors of power. What Dorothy Day told my students in the early 1970s (that she didn't believe "Washington, D.C. is the moral capital of America") would surely be a conviction she'd want to declare today with no less ardor. I used to watch her reading the New York Times, her head occasionally shaking. I fear that today, were she with us, her eyes would fill up with tears as she read that paper, and maybe her hand would once in a while come crashing down in righteous anger on one of those old tables on which she and others have served so many bowls of soup to so many hurt and humble fellow human beings.

Mel Piehl

Mel Piehl, professor of history at Valparaiso University, is the author of Breaking Bread: The Catholic Worker and the Origins of Catholic Radicalism in America (Temple University Press, 1982).

In the present climate, it was probably bound to happen: Someone at the American Enterprise Institute house magazine has tried to enlist Dorothy Day in the war to end welfare as we know it. While appealing to the great American Catholic authority on poverty must have seemed like a good idea, it could turn out to be a riskier business than the publication's editors think.

The piece begins with a few quick paragraphs that assert Day's importance and announce her sainthood. After that it turns mostly into a pastiche of quotes, which are lifted willy-nilly from Dorothy's writings. Selected to demonstrate Day's moral compassion for the poor, most of these statements also serve as groundwork for the ideological spin the piece provides: that Dorothy Day, a "saint," was also a prescient critic of the welfare state, and so perhaps aligned with the main currents of certain Washington think tanks today.

It is writer Kauffman's loaded introductory phrases that spin the quotes they enclose: "Day scorned the dehumanizing poverty industry," one tag begins; and another declares that she was "an unstinting critic of the welfare bureaucracy, from the New Deal through the Great Society." Dorothy Day did say the things attributed to her, but their contextual framing by such assertions could seriously mislead readers who know little about Day or the Catholic Worker movement.

It is quite true that Dorothy Day was an old-time native American radical, a Christian communitarian anarchist, and an often sharp critic of the modern state. But her criticism of welfare bureaucracies derived from an utterly different--indeed opposite--foundation than those embedded in phrases like "the poverty industry." Day's criticism of government programs for the poor was that they were almost always grudging, parsimonious, and mean, rather than generous, open-handed, and kind. Their elaborate codes and "eligibility requirements" often served to demean the poor rather than elevate their dignity as "ambassadors of God."

In Dorothy Day's experience, and in the long history of Catholic Worker houses of hospitality, a familiar scenario was the crisis call from government welfare offices or social service agencies asking the Workers to care for people whom the official system was somehow unable to assist. It was such experiences that underlay Day's criticism of much public welfare and fueled her alternative vision of voluntary poverty and Christian responsibility. This is not, to say the least, the vision that motivates most present-day critics of "the poverty industry."

Though potentially misleading, the article does provide a backhanded acknowledgment of Day's increasing importance for American social thought about poverty. But one wonders if the editors at the American Enterprise might some day rue their early canonization of their new expert on poverty. For as the Catholic church has learned, from a considerably longer experience in the matter, saints who at first seem appealing are not always comfortable people to have around in the long run. People of various stripes try to fit them into their own political agendas, but saints usually refuse to stay in line or obey orders from ideological commanders, while their strong sense of divine justice and mercy has an unnerving capacity to disturb even those who profess to admire them. And then their voices often become much less welcome than they seemed at first.

So it may be that we will have to wait, perhaps for a very long time, for some more Dorothy Day statements like this to appear in sequels to Mr. Kauffman's article:

Love of brother means voluntary poverty, stripping

one's self, putting off the old man, denying one's self.

It also means nonparticipation in those comforts and

luxuries which have been manufactured by the exploitation

of others .... If our jobs do not contribute to

the common good, we pray God for the grace to give

them up .... This would exclude jobs in advertising,

which only increases people's useless desires, and in

insurance companies and banks, which are known to

exploit the poor of this country and others. Whatever

has contributed to the misery and degradation of

the poor may be considered a bad job, and not to be

worked at [Catholic Worker, December 1948].