"Catholics Come Home" and Dorothy Day

The ad campaign put on by Catholics Come Home has had a deep effect on me.  In spite of the glossy, very up to date presentation I know that there will be those who think the spots too traditional.  I mean, on one of them every other shot is either of the Eucharist elevated during the celebration of the Mass or at Exposition.  One even has a shot of a woman praying the Rosary (egad!). What's this with all the clips of the Pope?  John XXIII, he's OK, but JP II and Papa Ratzi? Come on!  The ads do talk about the Church's social outreach, but more to the point is a personal encounter with Christ, coming to terms with sin in our lives and turning back to God (in short, repentance).  How pre-Vatican II can you get?  I have not read anything like this yet, but bet on certain "progressive" Catholic periodicals and commentators spinning these and other objections in the weeks and months to come.

And in the end, that's all it would be, spin.  For too long we have put a barrier between orthodoxy (right belief) and and orthopraxis (right practice), as if the two don't depend on one another.  But at the risk of sounding "conservative," I would argue orthopraxis depends more on orthodoxy than the other way around.  What we believe guides our actions, and if we are shaky about our core beliefs we can be too easily led down paths contrary to true Gospel values in the name of social justice.

There are few more polarizing figures in Catholic life than Dorothy Day.  Thirty one years after her death the mention of her name can still evoke a wide range of reactions, negative as well as positive, in spite of the Church's recognition of her as a Servant of God (the first step toward canonization).  What I think both critics and supporters overlook about her quite often is her conversion story.  She did not become a Catholic so she could advocate for peace and social justice, she was doing that already.  Day went to jail protesting U.S. participation in World War I and wrote for radical journals long before entering the Catholic Church in 1927.  She became a Catholic because she came to see that a life without God had led her down a dark path that included adultery and abortion.  Both these sins had left her spiritually empty and lost, and in choosing to keep her subsequent baby, fathered by her common law husband, she was determined to do things differently.  She was going to baptize the child, and she and the father would have to get married if they were going to stay together.  He would not agree to this, and so Dorothy Day lived as a chaste celibate the rest of her life.

For a while she attended Mass regularly at Mary Help of Christians Church on 12th Street in Manhattan, at the time a Salesian parish. She also came to Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament and went to confession there regularly (she writes a beautiful account of this in one of her books, describing MHCs as the model of what a parish should be). Yes, she was a critic of capitalism, she went to jail protesting wars and the hydrogen bomb (well into old age), and advocated for the poor.  She also lived a personal poverty rivaled only by Francis of Assisi and Mother Theresa.  In the midst of all this action she had a strong devotion to the Eucharist, lived a life of sexual purity and expected anyone living or working at one of her houses of hospitality to do the same (those who knew her say she was uncompromising on that point).  For her there was no separation between what she believed and what she did, and I have a sneaking suspicion that she put her core beliefs ahead of her "praxis," at least on one occasion.

Day famously turned down a lucrative grant from the Ford Foundation, citing reasons of poverty.  I do wonder about that sometimes.  Day may have lived in some ways like a nun, but she was a journalist by trade, living in the midst of the world.  My guess is that she knew that the Ford Foundation funded all sorts of organizations and projects, not all of them in agreement with Catholic teaching, including some involved with eugenics and population control.   It's only a guess, but my hunch is she cared about where the money was coming from and who her associates would be, not simply that she received funds.  She was not going to sell her soul for money, even if it was going to fund the correct praxis.  I wonder if some Catholic outreach programs today share that attitude.

Social Justice is not a dirty phrase.  But neither is it the totality of the Church's mission.  We can do works of justice without being disciples of Christ; many nonbelievers, including some atheists, do.  We should cooperate with these like minded people when we can.  But the core of the Christian life is a personal encounter with Jesus Christ, and the turning away from personal sin that any lasting and deep relationship with the Lord demands.  I pray that the Catholics Come Home initiative, and others like it, touch many hearts, bringing those lost and wandering back into the fold.  Then, by this "re-evangelization," true justice and peace can be worked for by the Spirit's guidance.