Orthodoxy

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.
Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s Rev. Emmanuel Charles McCarthy’s “Questions & Answers on Gospel Nonviolence” in podcast form: podcast feed

More info at the Center for Christian Nonviolence site. (I just made a podcast feed out of the audio they’ve posted, so it will be easier for iTunes users to download the whole series.)

I just finished listening to his series Behold the Lamb, and I recommend it to you.

1. Cleansing of The Temple
2. What if Someone Is Going to Kill your Wife or Children?
3. Just War/Just Revolution Theory
4. Violence in the Old Testament
5. Christians in the Military/Police
6. Surely this Is a Purist Gospel?
7. What about Hitler?
8. Buy a Sword? Luke 22:35-38

Here’s the first part of “Questions & Answers on Gospel Nonviolence”, to whet your appetite:

Cleansing of the Temple [ 0:01 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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?”
Read the rest of this entry »

I plan to attend the General Assembly of the United Reformed Church next month. Please pray for us. Here is an excerpt from the prayer card:

God, we thank you for the United Reformed Church and its part in your purposes.
We pray that you will continue to guide and encourage, inspire and provoke us to work for your kingdom.
We thank you that we are a rich body of people and that you speak to us all.
We pray for the General Assembly and ask for the guiding power of your Spirit to rest upon all those who are preparing, those who are participating, those who are anxious, those who feel that it has little impact on their journey with you.
Living God, may the breath of your Spirit move through Assembly,
through the preparations,
through the four days in Manchester,
through those who will attend,
through the FURY conference ‘What do you think?’,
through the Children’s Assembly,
and through the lives of the individual churches and communities which will continue your work, striving to make a difference in this world.
In Jesus’ name,
Amen.

Please pray for

• Stephen Orchard, Moderator;
• David Cornick, General Secretary;
• Lucy Brierley, Chaplain;
• James Breslin, Clerk;
• William McVey, Assembly Arrangements Convener;
• and all others who are preparing for Assembly, especially those working hard in less public roles.

Our brother HH Pope Benedict XVI said in his World Day of Peace message (at 9):

The close connection between these two ecologies [the “human” and the “social”] can be understood from the increasingly serious problem of energy supplies. In recent years, new nations have entered enthusiastically into industrial production, thereby increasing their energy needs. This has led to an unprecedented race for available resources. Meanwhile, some parts of the planet remain backward and development is effectively blocked, partly because of the rise in energy prices. What will happen to those peoples? What kind of development or non-development will be imposed on them by the scarcity of energy supplies? What injustices and conflicts will be provoked by the race for energy sources? And what will be the reaction of those who are excluded from this race? These are questions that show how respect for nature is closely linked to the need to establish, between individuals and between nations, relationships that are attentive to the dignity of the person and capable of satisfying his or her authentic needs. The destruction of the environment, its improper or selfish use, and the violent hoarding of the earth’s resources cause grievances, conflicts and wars, precisely because they are the consequences of an inhumane concept of development. Indeed, if development were limited to the technical-economic aspect, obscuring the moral-religious dimension, it would not be an integral human development, but a one-sided distortion which would end up by unleashing man’s destructive capacities.

Our brother HAH Bartholomew I, the “Green Patriarch”, has a page “Ecological Activities” on his website. During a recent meeting of officers of the World Council of Churches, he “referred to the ecological initiatives and activities of the Ecumenical Patriarchate and to his recent trip to Brazil within the framework of the 6th International Inter-religious Ecological Symposium, which had as its theme the protection of the Amazon river”.

Here is the official website of the recent historic meeting of the two brothers mentioned above.

Perhaps inspired by The Onion’s “I Think We Should Start Talking About Starting A Band”, the Globe reports “Bishops call for change on Iraq policy”:

The bishops, who have consistently expressed moral concerns about the war, did not call for immediate withdrawal, saying the United States now has “moral responsibilities to help Iraqis to secure and rebuild their country.” But the bishops said the “terrible toll” in Iraqi and American lives now requires a discussion driven by “moral urgency, substantive dialogue, and new directions.”

There appears to be some sort of typo: the first sentence should begin: “The bishops, who have consistently and extremely quietly expressed moral concerns about the war . . . .”
Read the rest of this entry »

Got this through the grapevine: A letter by the Justice, Peace and Creation Team of the World Council of Churches to persons responsible for or engaged with the witness of their churches regarding environmental concerns:

Dear colleagues and friends, sisters and brothers in Christ,

Let me share with you a decision taken by the recent Session of the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church on 27 December 2005:

The Holy Synod in its session chaired by His Holiness the Patriarch
Considered the upcoming 20th anniversary (26 April 2006) of the Chernobyl disaster.
Resolved

1. Remembering the mournful date, to consider it important to pay honours to the victims of the Chernobyl disaster and to those who sacrificed their lives to relief its consequences, and to invite society to help the surviving victims and veterans of Chernobyl.
2. To conduct ‘prayers of fervent supplication for the deceased relief workers and victims of the accident, for the health of the surviving workers who relieved the consequences and for those who suffered from the accident’ in all Russian Orthodox churches on St Thomas Sunday, April 30 – the first Sunday after April 26.

Read the rest of this entry »

Just a quick note to say that His Holiness Benedict XVI’s new encyclical Deus Caritas Est is out.

It is the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity here in these isles. On Sunday 22nd January 2006, we had a service of artoklasia (αρτοκλασία, breaking of bread) at the Orthodox Church of the Holy Trinity and the Annunciation. Read the rest of this entry »

A happy Christmas to all readers and contributors.

Here is a small collection of homilies and messages from our brothers and sisters.

• Urbi et orbi
• Christmas message to the Commonwealth
• Sermon in Canterbury Cathedral
• Address from the Moderator of the General Assembly