Heresy

This interview, by Jeff Dietrich and Susan Pollack, was originally published in the December 1971 Catholic Agitator. You may want to compare this with the portrait drawn of her in Cardinal O’Connor’s application for her sainthood.

CATHOLIC AGITATOR: I’d like first to ask you, are you an anarchist? And what does that mean to you in terms of your daily action?

DOROTHY DAY: Do you want me to go back into history? When I came from college, I was a socialist. I had joined the socialist party in Urbana Illinois and I wasn’t much thrilled by it. I joined because I had read Jack London—his essays, The Iron Heel, and his description of the London slums. I also read Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. All of these made a deep impression on me. So when I was sixteen years old and in my first year of college, I joined the Socialist Party. But I found most of them “petty bourgeois.” You know the kind. They were good people, butchers and bakers and candlestick makers—mostly of German descent—very settled family people. And it was very theoretical. It had no religious connotations, none of the religious enthusiasm for the poor that you’ve got shining through a great deal of radical literature.

Then there was the IWW moving in, which was the typically American movement. Eugene Debs was a man of Alsace-Lorraine background. A religious man, he received his inspiration from reading Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables. That started him off because he could have been a well-to-do bourgeois, comfortable man. But, here you have this whole American movement. The IWW has this motto: “An injury to one is an injury to all.” That appealed to me tremendously because I felt that we were all one body. I had read scripture, but I don’t think I’d ever really recognized that teaching of the “Mystical Body”—that were are all one body, we are all one.
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Today let us remember Constance Coltman, the first woman ordained to Christian ministry in Britain, who was ordained 90 years ago this day.

(See also this earlier entry: Florence Li Tim-Oi.)

On Sunday morning, I went to a united service of Collinwood Road United Reformed Church, Oxford Korean Presbyterian Church, United Asian Evangelical Church, and Brazilian Assemblies of God. We were blessed four times at the end of the service, in turn English, Portuguese, Punjabi, and Korean. It was encouraging and exciting. There was a lunch feast afterwards with yummy Korean food. Then in the afternoon, I went to a service of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of England meeting at my church, Saint Columba’s United Reformed Church. Note that this is not the Evangelische Synode Deutscher Sprache in Großbritannien which has a congregation meeting at the University Church of Saint Mary the Virgin.

(This Saturday, I went into London to see the exhibition Sacred at the British Library, and the film Helvetica.)

Today on the 349th anniversary of his death, let us remember Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector, Commonwealth of England, who prayed:

Strengthen us O God, to relieve the oppressed,
to hear the groans of poor prisoners,
to reform the abuses of all professions;
that many be made not poor to make a few rich;
for Jesus Christ’s sake.
Amen.

Today let us remember San Bartolomé de las Casas OP, patron saint of the Americas and all Indigenous Peoples.

In the same week when His Holiness Benedict XVI was reiterating the alleged “defectus” of us “ecclesial communities of the Reformation”, I went to the General Assembly of the United Reformed Church in Manchester, where we headed each set of agenda with the question “What are the ecumenical implications of this?”
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In his visit to San Diego in 2002, Samuel Ruiz García, Bishop Emeritus of San Cristóbal de Las Casas, taught me to say the Κύριε with the understanding of the Trinity in mind, and brought to my attention the idea of “the preferential option for the poor”.

Recently, this term is again in the news. Derek Wall, a Principal Speaker of the Green Party of England and Wales, and a practicing Zen Buddhist, recently said that the Pope must show solidarity with the poor, with reference to the Vatican’s notification on the works of El Salvadorian theologian Jon Sobrino.

Yesterday, our minister Susan Durber preached at Saint Columba’s saying:

Whatever you say about Jesus – it’s clear that he believed that God blesses the poor, that the rich have some hard thinking to do, and that those who are poor have plenty to teach the rest of the world about what it means to know God. There’s a theologian from Latin America called Jon Sobrino who says, ‘When the church has taken the poor seriously it has then become truly apostolic.’ If the faith the apostles’ shared was founded on Jesus’ teaching then it would have to be a faith that took the poor seriously. It’s often said in the church in Latin America – that ‘the poor evangelise us’ – and of course it makes me wonder why the ‘us’ of the church are not themselves ‘the poor’ but I think I know what they mean. The Jesus we know from the New Testament was one who said over and over again, in so many different ways, that the poor often know the truth about the real fundamentals of life and the rich are so often deceived. This is a real challenge to us of course who, mostly if not all, by definition, live the life of the rich.

Let us remember today Florence Li Tim-Oi, the first female priest to be ordained in the Anglican Communion, who was born 100 years ago this day.

Daniel Dick, past president of the Tatnuck Brook Watershed Association and creator of the Energy Studies curriculum at Worcester State College, talks about Worcester’s water supply. From the 2007 conference on Catholic Social Teaching at Anna Maria College, April 16, 2007.

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A votary of truth is often obliged to grope in the dark. Ahimsa is a comprehensive principle. We are helpless mortals caught in the conflagration of himsa. The saying that life lives on life has a deep meaning in it. Man cannot for a moment live without consciously or unconsciously committing outward himsa. The very fact of his living eating, drinking and moving about necessarily involves some himsa, destruction of life, be it ever so minute. A votary of ahimsa therefore remains true to his faith if the spring of all his actions is compassion, if he shuns to the best of his ability the destruction of the tiniest creature, tries to save it, and thus incessantly strives to be free from the deadly coil of himsa. He will be constantly growing in self-restraint and compassion, but he can never become entirely free from outward himsa. Then again, because underlying ahimsa is the unity of all life, the error of one cannot but affect all, and hence man cannot be wholly free from himsa. So long as he continues to be a social being, he cannot but participate in the himsa that the very existence of society involves.

– Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi: The Story of My Experiments with Truth: Part IV: A Spiritual Dilemma