2020-08-05
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February 1942
“But we are at war,” people say. “This is no time to talk of peace. It is demoralizing to the armed forces to protest, not to cheer them on in their fight for Christianity, for democracy, for civilization. Now that it is under way, it is too late to do anything about it.” One reader writes to protest against our “frail” voices “blatantly” crying out against war. (The word blatant comes from bleat, and we are indeed poor sheep crying out to the Good Shepherd to save us from these horrors.) Another Catholic newspaper says it sympathizes with our sentimentality. This is a charge always leveled against pacifists. We are supposed to be afraid of the suffering, of the hardships of war.
But let those who talk of softness, of sentimentality, come to live with us in cold, unheated houses in the slums. Let them come to live with the criminal, the unbalanced, the drunken, the degraded, the pervert. (It is not decent poor, it is not the decent sinner who was the recipient of Christ’s love.) Let them live with rats, with vermin, bedbugs, roaches, lice (I could describe the several kinds of body lice).
Let their flesh be mortified by cold, by dirt, by vermin; let their eyes be mortified by the sight of bodily excretions, diseased limbs, eyes, noses, mouths.
Let their noses be mortified by the smells of sewage, decay and rotten flesh. Yes, and the smell of the sweat, blood and tears spoken of so blithely by Mr. Churchill, and so widely and bravely quoted by comfortable people.
Let their ears be mortified by harsh and screaming voices, by the constant coming and going of people living herded together with no privacy. (There is no privacy in tenements just as there is none in concentration camps.)
Let their taste be mortified by the constant eating of insufficient food cooked in huge quantities for hundreds of people, the coarser foods, the cheaper foods, so that there will be enough to go around; and the smell of such cooking is often foul.
Then when they have lived with these comrades, with these sights and sounds, let our critics talk of sentimentality.
“Love in practice is a harsh and dreadful thing compared to love in dreams.”
Our Catholic Worker groups are perhaps too hardened to the sufferings in the class war, living as they do in refugee camps, the refugees being as they are victims of the class war we live in always. We live in the midst of this war now these many years. It is a war not recognized by the majority of our comfortable people. They are pacifists themselves when it comes to the class war. They even pretend it is not there.
Many friends have counseled us to treat this world war in the same way. “Don’t write about it. Don’t mention it. Don’t jeopardize the great work you are doing among the poor, among the workers. Just write about constructive things like Houses of Hospitality and Farming Communes.”Keep silence with a bleeding heart," one reader, a man, pro-war and therefore not a sentimentalist, writes us.
But we cannot keep silent. We have not kept silence in the face of the monstrous injustice of the class war, or the race war that goes on side by side with this world war (which the Communist used to call the imperialist war.)
Read the letters in this issue of the paper, the letter from the machine shop worker as to the deadening, degrading hours of labor. Read the quotation from the missioner’s letter from China. Remember the unarmed steel strikers, the coal miners, shot down on picket lines. Read the letter from our correspondent in Seattle who told of the treatment accorded agricultural workers in the North West. Are these workers supposed to revolt? These are Pearl Harbor incidents! Are they supposed to turn to arms in the class conflict to defend their lives, their homes, their wives and children? (…)
Perhaps we are called sentimental because we speak of love. We say we love our president, our country. We say that we love our enemies, too. “Hell,” Bernanos said,“is not to love any more.”
“Greater love hath no man than this,” Christ said, “that he should lay down his life for his friend.”
“Love is the measure by which we shall be judged,” St. John of the Cross said.
“Love is the fulfilling of the law,” St. John, the beloved disciple said.
Read the last discourse of Jesus to his disciples. Read the letters of St. John in the New Testament. And how can we express this love—by bombers, by blockades?
Here is a clipping from the Herald Tribune, a statement of a soldier describing the use of the bayonet against the Japanese:
“He [his father] should have been with us and seen how good it was. We got into them good and proper, and I can’t say I remember much about it, except that it made me feel pretty good. I reckon that was the way with the rest of the company, by the way my pals were yelling all the time.”
Is this a Christian speaking?
“Love is an exchange of gifts,” St. Ignatius said.
Love is a breaking of bread.
Remember the story of Christ meeting His disciples at Emmaus? All along the road He had discoursed to them, had expounded the scriptures. And then they went into into the inn at Emmaus, and sat down to the table together. And He took bread and blessed it and broke it and handed it to them, and they knew Him in the breaking of bread! (St. Luke, 24, 13-35.)
Love is not the starving of whole populations. Love is not the bombardment of open cities. Love is not killing, it is the laying down of one’s life for one’s friend. (…)
(The Catholic Worker, February 1942)
The Works of Mercy
Fall appeal letter—November, 1955
Dear Friends of the Catholic Worker:
In the light of our present difficulties it is necessary to restate our position and tell our readers again just what it is we are trying to do–what it means to us to perform the works of mercy, spiritual and corporal. The most important thing in the world to us is to grow in the love of God, to try to do His will. Our Lord Jesus told us that what we do to the least, we do to Him. St. Paul told us we are “members one of another, and that when the health of one member suffers, the health of the whole body is lowered.”
We believe not only in St. Thomas’ doctrine of the common good, but feel it can be affected only if each one of us alone realizes his personal responsibility to his brother, that his love for God must be shown in his love for his brother, and that love must be expressed in the works of mercy, practiced personally, at a personal sacrifice. So we live together, here at The Catholic Worker, pool resources of money and abilities, and so are able to take care of far more than just ourselves.
People have so far lost that sense of personal responsibility that our country is becoming a country of institutions and a gigantic part of our income goes to support them. State responsibility has come to take the place of personal responsibility. Doctors at mental hospitals and veterans hospitals have said that a tremendous number of patients could be cared for at home if their families would take the responsibility. On the other hand, houses and apartments become smaller and smaller so that there is “no room at the inn.” We are able to have fifty people in our own home here at Chrystie Street because it is two old houses thrown into one, built at a time when people wanted space. When people come to us we cannot say, “Go, be thou filled,” and refer them to an agency. So we have come to be feeding and clothing a vast number of people who come in to us day after day, the lame, the halt, and the blind.
But we are not organized as an institution of any kind and the city does not know how to classify us. We are not a multiple dwelling, a rest home, a convalescent home, a shelter or an asylum or a convent. We are a group of people living together under one roof with one head, which is Charlie McCormack, now that Tom Sullivan has gone to the Trappists. Often I am considered to be the head, being older and the publisher of the paper. I get the summonses, the complaints. We are not registered as a charitable agency, it has been pointed out. But we hope our dear Lord recognizes us as charitable people. We try to keep the laws and regulations about housing, health, fire prevention, and take as good care of our family as we can. But we find we are always coming up against some ordinance, some infraction. We will always be in trouble with the city and the state because though we also consider ourselves good citizens and lovers of our country as well as children of God and try to bear our share of the responsibility of brother for brother, the city and the state have come to feel that this is their field (since it has been left to them). A western Bishop said to me once that he did not believe in state ownership of the indigent. God wants man’s free service, his freely bestowed love. So we protest and cry out against every infringement of that great gift of God, freedom, our greatest gift, after the gift of life.
That love of brother, that care for his freedom is what causes us to go into such controversial subjects as man and the state, war and peace. The implications of the gospel teaching of the works of mercy, lead us into conflict with the powers of this world. Our love of God is a consuming fire. It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God. It is a living God and a living faith that we are trying to express. We are called to be holy, that is, whole men, in this life of ours. We are trying to follow this call. It has led many of our workers into the priesthood, into Trappist monasteries, into convents. But we as a group, not having this vocation, are not classified as a religious group, not even as a Catholic group, and so do not have the protection of that classification. We are individual Catholics, not Catholic Action.
Many have left us to marry and raise a little community of their own, and endure all the sufferings of trying to lead this life in the factory, on the farm, enduring the frustrations of seeing their talents unused, their best energies of all their work days put into meaningless work in the cities, and not having the help we have of our community life and the assistance of our friends in our houses and farms.
We never intended to have breadlines, to care for so many, but it is always so hard to turn people away. Men out of hospitals, with no place but the public shelter housing other thousands, turned loose on the streets by day. We have had people come in to us from the streets who have died a few weeks after, from their long endured miseries. We still have people coming who sleep in doorways and spend their days with us and share our meals. It is so hard to limit oneself, and then too our Holy Father, Pius XII, told some Sisters once never to be afraid to run up bills for the poor. Of course it always comes back to the fact that we are not an accredited agency. We are not a charitable institution. And we are never going to turn into that because we are trying to make the point, by our lives, by our work, that personal responsibility comes first. We are born alone, we die alone, we must, each one of us, do what we can for God and our brother, not God and country, but God and our Brother, as Christ stated it. We are in difficulties now, not only with our bills, but with the State, with the City. We cannot print our usual Fall appeal, without pointing this out. But we are begging you to help us to continue to keep going with these ideas of ours about mutual aid, voluntary poverty, and the works of mercy. If we were forced to cease, how great a burden which we are bearing now, would fall upon the state or city—mental hospitals and convalescent homes, relief rolls and the bread lines of the Municipal Lodging house. And how many would be just wandering the streets, crouching in doorways. Oh God, look upon the face of Thy Christ in these poor, and help us to keep going.
So we are asking you, as our Lord himself told us to ask, for your help once more. And may God and His Blessed Mother whose month this most specially is, bless you a hundred fold, heaped up and running over.
In His Love,
Dorothy Day
(The Catholic Worker, November 1955)
