A Patron Saint For Progressives
HILLARY Clinton and Barack Obama badly need a role model and one is available if they're interested. Rocco Palmo notes that the voice of liberal Catholicism in Britain, The Tablet - known in some quarters as The Bitter Pill - this month features a special essay on Dorothy Day (1897-1980). Robert Ellsberg's article interweaves thematically with this month's publication of her diaries and next month's celebration of the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Catholic Worker Movement. The woman herself didn't want to be regarded as a saint - at least not in her lifetime - but the cause of her canonisation has officially begun, having been approved by Pope John Paul II in 2000. That process is likely to be one of the more interesting exercises in saint-making of recent times. Not because she isn't revered as saintly by Christians of all persuasions but because the faith she lived was politically - less so, today, theologically - contentious. Not Jeremiah Wright 'contentious' either: no earthly McMansion for her. She was the real deal.
Today known in the Catholic Church as the Servant of God Dorothy Day, she was the New York activist for the poor and voiceless whose combination of social-political radicalism and traditional religiosity has always struck many as a prophetic synthesis for our times. The iconography of her personal cultus sacralises the journalism that was the vocational centerpiece of her advocacy. The Marian-Magdalene duality might appeal to some but there is another in hagiography that seems more apposite to the Day arc. As pious mother of a movement, she was a veritable Saint Monica but her yearning intellectualism and early life in the Smart Set also bring Monica's celebrated son to mind. Like Augustine, she was certainly no saint from the cradle. She had two common-law marriages, one abortion and one child born out of wedlock before her conversion in 1927. The Great Depression and the hot and cold global wars that followed became the spiritually guiding signs of her times. The City of God was her true home thereafter.
___________________________________________________
Her pacifism during the Spanish Civil War, the Cold War and even the Second World War - as well as the naivety many saw in her attitude to Castro - earned her the contempt of many Americans. By marching on Guantanamo Bay to protest the alleged treatment of detainees held there, her descendents continued what some still see as a one-sided sort of charism. Was it Christ-like to stay out of a fight with the Nazis? Was protesting civil defence drills, for which she was once arrested, as apt as picketing a Soviet consulate about the Gulag Archipelago? Similarly, her third-way economic doctrine was considered a morally expedient but ultimately statist mix of small enterprise communalism and vague distributivism. All these are important questions still - and not only to the amateur advocatus diaboli. Yet however exploitable to the secular left her various stances, Dorothy Day's fidelity to the Church has always been seen - no less than her service to the poor itself - as the true measure and even message of the woman.
It's remarkable how familiar she'd be with contemporary social and political debate. A world - as ever - at war, dire straits on Wall Street, a supposed housing and defaulting catastrophe, a US President being likened to Herbert Hoover, the lionisation of Franklin Roosevelt and two candidates insisting on the recrudescence of Keynes over Smith. The one thing this single mother and exemplar of holistic truth-telling might find strange is so-called Catholic Democrats of America rallying to "social justice" but totally ignoring their Church's doctrine on the radically libertarian right to life. Many even back the "hope" salesman who likens some babies to punishment. "Hard Heads, Soft Hearts" was the description for modern progressives used by Kevin Rudd at a left-of-centre governance conference hosted by the spiritual father of the cow-human hybrid in Watford yesterday. Dorothy Day - who saw the contradictions of the world much as the Prince of Paradox did - might have quietly told Mr Rudd he got that precisely back to front.
Today known in the Catholic Church as the Servant of God Dorothy Day, she was the New York activist for the poor and voiceless whose combination of social-political radicalism and traditional religiosity has always struck many as a prophetic synthesis for our times. The iconography of her personal cultus sacralises the journalism that was the vocational centerpiece of her advocacy. The Marian-Magdalene duality might appeal to some but there is another in hagiography that seems more apposite to the Day arc. As pious mother of a movement, she was a veritable Saint Monica but her yearning intellectualism and early life in the Smart Set also bring Monica's celebrated son to mind. Like Augustine, she was certainly no saint from the cradle. She had two common-law marriages, one abortion and one child born out of wedlock before her conversion in 1927. The Great Depression and the hot and cold global wars that followed became the spiritually guiding signs of her times. The City of God was her true home thereafter.
Her pacifism during the Spanish Civil War, the Cold War and even the Second World War - as well as the naivety many saw in her attitude to Castro - earned her the contempt of many Americans. By marching on Guantanamo Bay to protest the alleged treatment of detainees held there, her descendents continued what some still see as a one-sided sort of charism. Was it Christ-like to stay out of a fight with the Nazis? Was protesting civil defence drills, for which she was once arrested, as apt as picketing a Soviet consulate about the Gulag Archipelago? Similarly, her third-way economic doctrine was considered a morally expedient but ultimately statist mix of small enterprise communalism and vague distributivism. All these are important questions still - and not only to the amateur advocatus diaboli. Yet however exploitable to the secular left her various stances, Dorothy Day's fidelity to the Church has always been seen - no less than her service to the poor itself - as the true measure and even message of the woman.
It's remarkable how familiar she'd be with contemporary social and political debate. A world - as ever - at war, dire straits on Wall Street, a supposed housing and defaulting catastrophe, a US President being likened to Herbert Hoover, the lionisation of Franklin Roosevelt and two candidates insisting on the recrudescence of Keynes over Smith. The one thing this single mother and exemplar of holistic truth-telling might find strange is so-called Catholic Democrats of America rallying to "social justice" but totally ignoring their Church's doctrine on the radically libertarian right to life. Many even back the "hope" salesman who likens some babies to punishment. "Hard Heads, Soft Hearts" was the description for modern progressives used by Kevin Rudd at a left-of-centre governance conference hosted by the spiritual father of the cow-human hybrid in Watford yesterday. Dorothy Day - who saw the contradictions of the world much as the Prince of Paradox did - might have quietly told Mr Rudd he got that precisely back to front.
<< Home