DO WE NEED THE EUCHARIST OR THE CHURCH? [page 3 of 3]
Personalism, Personally Serving Dorothy Day helps us with our concept of spirituality. She and Peter
Maurin helped invent personalism and made it the hallmark of the Catholic
Worker movement as a concept core to its being. This idea came also from
Emmanuel Mounier, a French thinker who insisted on the primacy of the spiritual
in all social action and transformation. Making the choice to follow Jesus and what he asks of us in the Gospels--and
for the Catholic Worker movement, particularly the Beatitudes and the Lord's
words about the Last Judgement and the least of the brethren--is, according
to Dorothy Day, a free choice, a matter of love, which makes it voluntary,
not compelled by fear or force. In this sense Dorothy Day was pro choice-committed
to choosing the good each day. This is a personal decision, to change our hearts, to respond personally
to the call of Jesus, to give up all and follow Him and to love as He asks
us to in the Sermon on the Mount. And the living out of this personal decision
in the Catholic Worker expresses itself in the spiritual and corporal works
of mercy, with a commitment to serve the poor at a personal sacrifice, not
relying on the state or other institutions to do this. Day and Maurin taught us that Gospel personalism meant making "Christian
love" the foundation of social existence. True love required, for them,
first of all, taking responsibility for one's self, then "love in action"
in service to one's immediate neighbors and then transforming society at
large through the power of this love. It also implied a commitment to satisfying
and socially useful labor, a rejection of all forms of violence and coercion,
and a personal detachment from material goods through the practice of "voluntary
poverty." (Mel Piehl, Breaking Bread, Temple University Press, 1982,
p. 97.) This personalist commitment and way of life is in direct opposition to the me-first movements and some of the spirituality movements today. Why choose obedience to the Church Many people can understand and appreciate Dorothy Day's work with the
poor, her work for peace and nonviolence, her leadership in working for
social justice. But they wonder about her orthodoxy and commitment to the
Catholic Church. The basis of Dorothy Day's orthodox Catholicism lay in the Church's custody
of the sacraments, as well as her strong identification with the lives of
the saints. The Church had credibility for her because it traced its roots
back to the Apostles and thus provided the sacraments, established by Christ. For Dorothy Day the Eucharist, and the material substances of bread and
wine transformed in the Mass, in particular were the foundation of spiritual
life, connecting the spiritual and material. Dorothy appreciated and celebrated
the immanence of God - God with us, dwelling with us in the sacraments and
sacramental presence of the Church and in His people. She had begun attending daily Mass before starting the Catholic Worker and she continued the practice throughout her life. Problems of Institutionalism There are many today who spend much of their energy criticizing the Pope,
bishops and priests--either from the point of view of the right or the left.
Is there any hope for the institutional church? Should we stay with it?
Some say, "No," and sadly walk away. We are amazed at the number of conservatives who don't go to Mass. We
already know that many of our liberal friends gave up long ago or go only
occasionally if there is a beautiful liturgy somewhere. Dorothy Day was very aware of the shortcomings of the human beings who
make up the Church. She put it this way: With Pope Paul VI, Day knew that the Church was always in need of reform.
But she did not believe in wasting a lot of time in blaming lack of success
on the Church. Day held to the view that Catholic religious owed obedience to their
superiors and that lay persons should concentrate on positive social action
rather than on attacking the Church and its leaders. When a group of activist
Catholics in Los Angeles wrote her complaining of opposition from the hierarchy
there, she replied: "We must follow where the spirit leads. So go ahead, and don't look
for support or approval. And don't always be looking for blame, either,
or see opposition where perhaps there is none. It is judging the motives
of others. Excuse my didactic tone, but I do have long experience. I beg
you to save your energies to fight the gigantic injustices of our times,
and not the Church in the shape of its Cardinal Archbishop there. It is
a temptation of the devil to divert our energies, discourage us, sadden
us, and neutralize all we would like to do." (Breaking Bread, p.92) Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin gave their freely chosen obedience to the
authority of the Catholic Church in the areas of faith and doctrine. But
they took upon themselves and the Catholic Worker movement personal responsibility
as lay Catholics to live out the Gospels, particularly emphasizing the beatitudes
and Matthew 25:31 ff. They studied and prayed to know how to do this. While some may feel that the way to call the Church to more commitment
to social justice and peace is to provoke confrontations and harshly criticize
the Church, the Catholic Worker chose another way. Mel Piehl, writing in A Revolution of the Heart, puts it this way: "In effect the Catholic Worker attempted to change the church not
by using the methods of politics, but by holding up from within the Christian
community a working model of what the community professes itself to be.
By freely practicing values learned within the church itself, without committing
the church to a particular position that might be mistaken, the Catholic
Worker has tried to move the Christian community by inspiration and example
rather than by direct confrontation." (p. 208). Dorothy and Peter critiqued the Church by their lives. People concerned about social justice sometimes question the Catholic
Worker's commitment to the Works of Mercy and call it band-aid work. They
have said over the years: Change the structures! Don't stop to try to help
the poor person. We have heard this many times at Casa Juan Diego. But the Catholic Worker has taken the unusual position of trying to do
both--with a dual emphasis on social change and the works of mercy, trying
to bring the "highest spiritual and ethical values of Christianity
into public life..., proclaiming the supreme social relevance of the morally
heroic evangelical (Gospel) counsels of perfection." The Catholic Workers' hope is changing hearts and bringing Christians
to struggle to live the radical teachings on love in the Sermon on the Mount. According to Patrick Coy in A Revolution of the Heart, "The personalist
philosophy offered by Day and Maurin did not expect change through and in
social institutions, but rather looked for the creative changes in individuals
as they elevated the Christian precept of active love to a place of practiced
primacy in their daily lives (p. 159). Day and Maurin tried to balance the incarnational (the Lord present within)
with the eschatological (the risen Lord that is to come to us in death and
at the end of time). Dorothy Day's and Peter Maurin's spirituality had a kinship and much
inspiration from some of the great people who had gone before them in the
almost 2,000 year history of the Church. The example of women and men like
some of the Western mystics, Saint Teresa of Avila, St. John of the Cross,
Julian of Norwich, St. Therese of Liseux, and many others who tried to live
with their faith and love of God at the center of their existence, helped
to bring the Catholic Worker to both contemplation and action. Dorothy Day loved literature and read widely and was considered an intellectual;
she also followed the model of the saints whose illumination came from asceticism
and prayer. Dorothy said of these great models, "They are the heart
of Catholicism; they are its mystical core. After I had found them and studied
them, I would not have left the Church under any persuasion." These great people of faith included St. Francis of Assisi, who lived
out his faith in a very creative way, which revolutionized the Church of
his time. And Francis was not a priest. Francis did not put his hope in politics, did not work with politicians
or committees or any organized group of dissidents, but was instrumental
in effecting the downfall of an undesirable social system. In an article in the New York Catholic Worker in 1953, Robert Ludlow
wrote about the way of St. Francis as he developed his idea of the Third
Order, which was for lay people as well as clergy: "Francis struck at the iniquity of it (the undesirable social system)
especially with two provisions of the rule of the Third Order. One was the
provision that Tertiaries must not bear arms, the others was that Tertiaries
must bind themselves with no oath, except where duly constituted authority
rightfully required it. And it must be remembered that literally thousands
of lay people joined the Third Order, so much so that feudal lords were
beside themselves with wrath and appealed to Rome to stop this madness.
This madness which deprived them of serfs because the Third Order members
refused to bear arms or to take oaths of fealty to the Lords." The sixteenth rule of the Third Order is "They are not to take up
lethal weapons, or bear them about, against anybody." Believing that the Lord was present in our brothers and sisters, St.
Francis felt that to kill someone was like committing suicide. Apparently,
a canonized saint can get away with talking this way. Can we imagine the revolution it would cause should this rule be enforced
among members of the Third Order today, so that they would all, as a matter
of course, become conscientious objectors?" The attitude of St. Francis toward violence (he ignored the Crusades
and went on his own unarmed to visit the Sultan), towards repression, is
so much in advance of his times..., but for him was merely a reiteration
of what was contained in the message of Christ. Frances did not stop to argue theories about just and unjust wars, he
simply stated that should people (clerical or laity) with to follow the
path he laid down they simply did not bear arms." St. Francis did not respond to the mediocrity and corruption of the Church
by breaking with the Church, as did the reformers several centuries later,
but stayed with church structures to bring them to their proper function. His commitment to peace and nonviolence, coming from the Gospels, strongly
influenced the Catholic Worker, as did his commitment to voluntary poverty,
another tenet of the Catholic Worker. The Catholic Worker, like St. Francis,
did not so much oppose certain philosophical theories or ways the Church
was currently responding to social problems, but their lives showed a new,
creative way of expressing the Christian vision. We can be grateful that the Bishops' pastoral letter on peace has affirmed
pacifism and conscientious objection as a valid response to Catholic theology.
The bishops credit Dorothy Day in the development of their pastoral. Robert Ludlow of the Catholic Worker raised some good questions and pointed
us in the right direction in that article on St. Francis. If the movements of the right and of the left are shallow, if they are
too narrow to satisfy, if politics and political systems have demonstrated
their uselessness in creating a just society, if all of these have demonstrated
their own kinds of tyranny, is it not perhaps that we have yet to explore
whole areas of thought and being? If we have debased God to the point where what we call God is a chimera
unworthy of the worship of free men and women, and if, because we know not
what to worship, we worship the state or the race or our own compulsions,
and if, in all these things we have found no happiness, and if we then realize
that Dorothy Day, Peter Maurin, St. Francis and so many other creative great
people of the faith were profoundly happy, perhaps we, too, can be challenged
to bring new life and creative approaches to the Church, new visions of
ways to bring about the reign of God. With the strength and grace of the Eucharist where we come to the Church
to be transformed little by little, leaving aside our old self to be a new
person in the risen Lord, in each of our hearts can grow the personalist
revolution. Our hearts of stone can be replaced by new hearts, but according
to the Scriptures, in the community of the Church. As Dorothy Day said, "We cannot love God unless we love each other,
and to love we must know each other. We know Him in the breaking of the
bread, and we know each other in the breaking of bread, and we are not alone
anymore."
Houston Catholic Worker, Vol. XIII, No. 2, October 1993  |
