Dorothy Day, the Catholic

To those who have little grasp of history, or who get their history from disreputable sources, it might seem odd for such a powerful advocate for social justice--even, arguably, for socialism--should find so comfortable a home in the Catholic Church. Dorothy Day complicates this picture by being an adult convert, removing the convenient "she was born into it" rationalization from those who see the Catholic Church as an agent for repression of the marginalized and a bastion of conservative values. Yet as those who float left politically find a friend of women and homosexuals in the Episcopal churches, the poor have traditionally found their home in the Roman Catholic Church. (In fact, it is entirely within the realm of defensible argument to suggest that the progressive nature of the Episcopal church is tied intimately to its affluence and that the conservative values of Catholics are popular values.) It should therefore surprise no one that Dorothy Day should be both an ardent Catholic and a dedicated advocate for the poor, the oppressed, and the stigmatized. The next entry will deal with the latter aspect of her life, but for now consider two quotes that show the deep Catholic influence on Day's thought, first on the value of tradition (the great enemy of progressive philosophy) and then with respect to church.

Tradition! We scarcely know the word any more. We are afraid to be either proud of our ancestors or ashamed of them. We scorn nobility in name and in fact. We cling to a bourgeois mediocrity which would make it appear we are all Americans, made in the image and likeness of George Washington, all a pattern, all prospering if we are good, and going down in the world if we are bad. These are attitude the Irish, the Italian, the Lithuanian, the Slovak and all races begin to acquire in school. So they change their names, forget their birthplace, their language, and no longer listen to their mothers when they say, “When I was a little girl in Russia, or Hungary, or Sicily.” They lose their cult and their culture and their skills, and leave their faith and folk songs and costumes and handcrafts, and try to be something which they call “an American.”

I had heard many say that they wanted to worship God in their own way and did not need a Church in which to praise Him, nor a body of people with whom to associate themselves. But I did not agree to this. My very experience as a radical, my whole make-up, led me to want to associate myself with others, with the masses, in loving and praising God.

Genovese on the Difference Between North and South

Here are an interesting pair of quotes from Eugene Genovese on the historic and enduring differences between the culture of the American North and the American South. They probably each warrant entries of their own with attendant commentary, but--as is the case with other great thinkers, like David Bentley Hart--I find that Genovese's thought is often more compelling when allowed to simply speak in an annotative void:

There nonetheless remains a fundamental difference between northern and southern versions of religious tolerance. In the North people are wont to say, “You worship God in your way, and we’ll worship him in ours.” This delightful formulation says, in effect, that since religion is of little consequence anyway, why argue? In contrast, the southern version, well expressed in an old joke, says: “You worship God in your way, and we’ll worship him in His.” From the early days of the Republic, when the Baptists led the fight for religious freedom and the separation of church and state, white southerners have done rather well in living together with mutual respect and tolerance for each other’s religious views. Always reminding themselves of human frailty, they are perfectly tolerant of some damned fool’s right to choose eternal damnation. But they are not about to pretend that they regard another’s religion as intrinsically equal to their own.

“Prejudice,” like “discrimination” and “tradition,” is a positive word in the southern lexicon, much as it is a dirty word in the liberal lexicon that prevails in academia…It rests upon a belief in an omnipotent God who necessarily can only be approached through a faith that requires community-grounded prejudices and apparently nonscientific modes of discrimination. This viewpoint warns against the unforeseen and often destructive results of social experiments that derive from an appeal to abstract reason—in effect, to ideological constructs. We might recall, for example, that “reason” in the guise of the most advanced scientific thought contributed to the pernicious triumph of racist thought in the nineteenth century. The religiously orthodox Old South, in contradistinction to the religiously liberal Northeast, stood on its prejudice in favor of a literal reading of the Bible’s account of the monogenesis of the human race and rejected scientific racism. Generally, this view of prejudice says that a community’s historically developed sense of right and wrong should be permitted to defy the latest fashions in reasoned speculation until they are empirically established.