THE LONG LONELINESS: LOVE OVERFLOWS: Dorothy Day on execution of Sacco + Vanzetti, leaving her anarchist common law husband + radical movement, conversion

The day they [Sacco and Vanzetti] died, the papers had headlines as large as those which proclaimed the outbreak of war.  All the nation mourned.  All the nation, I mean, that is made up of the poor, the worker, the trade unionist – those who felt most keenly the sense of solidarity – that very sense of solidarity which made me gradually understand the doctrine of the Mystical Body of Christ whereby we are the members one of another.

Forster [her common law husband] was stricken over the tragedy.  He had always been more an anarchist than anything else in his philosophy, and so was closer to these two men than to Communist friends.  He did not eat for days.  He sat around the house in a stupor of misery, sickened by the cruelty of life and men.  He had always taken refuge in nature as being more kindly, more beautiful and peaceful than the world of men.  Now he could not even escape through nature, as he tried to escape so many problems in life.

During the time he was home he spent days and even nights out in his boat fishing, so that for weeks I saw little of him.  He stupefied himself in his passion for the water, sitting out on the bay in his boat.  When he began to recover he submerged himself in maritime biology, collecting, reading only scientific books, and paying no attention to what went on around him.  Only the baby interested him.  She was his delight.  Which made it, of course, the harder to contemplate the cruel blow I was going to strike him when I became a Catholic.  We both suffered in body as well as in soul and mind.  He would not talk about the faith and relapsed into a complete silence if I tried to bring up the subject.  The point of my bringing it up was that I could not become a Catholic and continue living with him, because he was averse to any ceremony before officials of either Church or state.  He was an anarchist and an atheist, and he did not intend to be a liar or a hypocrite.  He was a creature of utter sincerity, and however illogical and bad-tempered about it all, I loved him.  It was killing me to think of leaving him.

Fall nights we read a great deal.  Sometimes he went out to dig bait if there were a low tide and the moon was up.  He stayed out late on the pier fishing, and came in smelling of seaweed and salt air; getting into bed, cold with the chill November air, he held me close to him in silence.  I loved him in every way, as a wife, as a mother even.  I loved him for all he knew and pitied him for all he didn’t know.  I loved him for the odds and ends I had to fish out of his sweater pockets and for the sand and shells he brought in with his fishing.  I loved his lean cold body as he got into bed smelling of the sea, and I loved his integrity and stubborn pride.

It ended by my being ill the next summer.  I became so oppressed I could not breath and I awoke in the night choking.  I was weak and listless and one doctor told me my trouble was probably thyroid.  I went to the Cornell clinic for a metabolism test and they said my condition was a nervous one.  By winter the tension had become so great than an explosion occurred and we separated again.  When he returned, as he always had, I would not let him in the house; my heart was breaking with my own determination to make an end, once and for all, to the torture we were undergoing.

The next day I went to Tottenville alone, leaving [baby] Tamar with my sister, and there with Sister Aloysia as my godparent, I too was baptised conditionally, since I had already been baptized in the Episcopal Church.  I made my first confession right afterward, and looked forward the next morning to receiving communion.

I had no particular joy in partaking of these three sacraments, Baptism, Penance and Holy Eucharist.  I proceeded about my own active participation in them grimly, coldly, making acts of faith, and certainly with no consolation whatever.  One part of my mind stood at one side and kept saying, “What are you doing?  Are you sure of yourself?  What kind of an affectation is this?  What act is this you are going through?  Are you trying to induce emotion, induce faith, partake of an opiate, the opiate of the people?”  I felt like a hypocrite if I got down on my knees, and shuddered at the thought of anyone seeing me.

At my first communion I went up to the communion rail at the Sanctus [Holy] bell instead of at the Domine, non sum dignus [Lord, I am not worthy], and had to kneel there all alone through the consecration, through the Pater Noster [Our Father], through the Agnus Dei [Lamb of God] – and I had thought I knew the Mass so well!  But I felt it fitting that I be humiliated by this ignorance, by the precipitance.

I speak of the misery of leaving one love.  But there was another love too, the life I had led in the radical movement.  That very winter I was writing a series of articles, interviews with the workers, with the unemployed.  I was working with the Anti-Imperialist League, a Communist affiliate, that was bringing aid and comfort to the enemy, General Sandino’s forces in Nicaragua.  I was just as much against capitalism and imperialism as ever, and here I was going over to the opposition, because of course the Church was lined up with property, with the wealthy, with the state, with capitalism, with all the forces of reaction.  This I had been taught to think and this I still think to a great extent.  ”Too often,” Cardinal Mundelein said, “has the Church lined up on the wrong side.”  ”Christianity,” Bakunin said, “is precisely the religion par excellence, because it exibits, and manifests, to the fullest extent, the very nature and essence of every religious system, which is the impoverishment, enslavement, and annihilation of humanity for the benefit of divinity.”

I certainly believed this, but I wanted to be poor, chaste and obedient.  I wanted to die in order to live, to put off the old man and put on Christ.  I loved, in other words, and like all women in love, I wanted to be united to my love.  Why should not Forster be jealous?  Any man who did not participate in this love would, of course, realize my infidelity, my adultery.  In the eyes of God, any turning toward creatures to the exclusion of Him is adultery and so it is termed over and over again in Scripture.

I loved the Church for Christ made visible.  Not for itself, because it was so often a scandal to me.  Romano Guardini said the Church is the Cross on which Christ was crucified, one could not separate Christ from his Cross, and one must live in a state of permanent dissatisfaction with the Church.

The scandal of businesslike priests, of collective wealth, the lack of a sense of responsibility for the poor, the worker, the Negro, the Mexican, the Filipino, and even the oppression of these, and the consenting to the oppression of them by our industrialist-capitalist order – these made me feel often that priests were more like Cain than Abel.  ”Am I my brother’s keeper?” they seemed to say in respect to the social order.  There was plenty of charity but too little justice.  And yet the priests were the dispensers of the Sacraments, bringing Christ to men, all enabling us to put on Christ and to achieve more nearly in the world a sense of peace and unity.  ”The worst enemies would be those of our own household,” Christ had warned us.

We could not root out the tares without rooting out the wheat also.  With all the knowledge I have gained these twenty-one years I have been a Catholic, I could write many a story of priests who were poor, chaste and obedient, who gave their lives daily for their fellows, but I am writing of how I felt at the time of my baptism.

Not long afterward a priest wanted me to write a story of my conversion, telling how the social teaching of the Church had led me to embrace Catholicism.  But I knew nothing of the social teaching of the Church at that time.  I had never heard of the encyclicals.  I felt that the Church was the Church of the poor, that St. Patrick’s had been built from the pennies of servant girls, that it cared for the emigrant, it established hospitals, orphanages, day nurseries, houses of the Good Shepherd, homes for the aged, but at the same time, I felt that it did not set its face against a social order which made so much charity in the present sense of the word necessary.  I felt that charity was a word to choke over.  Who wanted charity?  And it was not just human pride but a strong sense of man’s dignity and worth, and what was due to him in justice, that made me resent, rather than feel proud of so mighty a sum total of Catholic institutions.  Besides, more and more they were taking help from the state, and in taking from the state, they had to render to the state.  They came under the head of Community Chest and discriminatory charity, centralizing and departmentalizing, involving themselves with bureaus, building, red tape, legislation, at the expense of human values.  By “they,” I suppose one always means the bishops, but as Harry Bridges once pointed out to me, “they” also are victims of the system.

It was an age-old battle, the war of the classes, that stirred in me when I thought of the Sacco-Vanzetti case in Boston.  Where were the Catholic voices crying out for these men?  How I longed to make a synthesis reconciling body and soul, this world and the next, the teachings of Prince Peter Kropotkin and Prince Demetrius Gallitzin, who had become a missionary priest in rural Pennsylvania.

Where had been the priests to go out to such men as Francisco Ferrer in Spain, pursuing them as the Good Shepherd did His lost sheep, leaving the ninety and nine of their good parishioners, to seek out that which was lost, bind up that which was bruised.  No wonder there was such a strong conflict going on in my mind and heart.

 

[Excerpted from: The Long Loneliness (The Autobiography of the Legendary Catholic Social Activist Dorothy Day), first published in 1952 with beautiful illustrations by Quaker artist Fritz Eichenberg, and available in a paperback edition at the Oak Bay Branch of the Greater Victoria Public Library.]  

 

CCC – LA ROSA TRANSCULTURAL PEACE PROPAGANDA 2009