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The Pacifist Witness of Dorothy Day Coleman Fannin Mentor ABSTRACT Solidarity, Compassion, Truth: The Pacifist Witness of Dorothy Day Coleman Fannin Mentor: Barry A. Harvey, Ph.D. The truth of the gospel requires witnesses, and the pacifist witness of Dorothy Day embodies the peaceable character of a church that, in the words of Stanley Hauerwas, “is not some ideal but an undeniable reality.” In this thesis I provide a thick description of Day’s pacifism and order this description theologically in terms of witness. I argue that her witness is rooted in three distinct yet interrelated principles: solidarity with the poor and the enemy through exploring the doctrine of the mystical body of Christ, compassion for the suffering through practicing voluntary poverty and the works of mercy, and a commitment to truth through challenging the logic of modern warfare and the Catholic Church’s failure to live up to its own doctrine. I also argue that Day’s witness is inexplicable apart from her orthodox Catholicism and her life among the poor at the Catholic Worker. Copyright © 2006 by Coleman Fannin All rights reserved TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS iv CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION 1 Character and Practice 4 CHAPTER TWO: SOLIDARITY 12 Identification with the Masses 12 Transforming the Social Order 21 Natural and Supernatural 27 CHAPTER THREE: COMPASSION 42 The Personalist Center 42 Obedience and the Little Way 53 Disarmament of the Heart 61 CHAPTER FOUR: TRUTH 76 Clarification of Thought 77 Challenging Her Church 83 Perseverance of a Saint 95 CHAPTER FIVE: WITNESS 111 The Church, the State, and the Sword 112 Incarnational Ethics 120 Beyond Liberal and Conservative 132 BIBLIOGRAPHY 152 iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I am grateful to the administration, faculty, and students of Baylor University’s George W. Truett Theological Seminary and Department of Religion for supporting (financially and otherwise) a young man who knew very little theology a mere six years ago. They took me in and opened my eyes to intellectual and spiritual challenges more vast and inspiring than I could have imagined. I also thank the members of Calvary Baptist Church in Waco, who taught me that theology is not separate from a body of believers struggling to embody the gospel of Jesus Christ in a fallen and hurting world. Finally, I owe more than I can express to Dorothy Day and her living legacy, the Catholic Worker. I am a visitor to this family and can only express my conviction that encountering it has changed me profoundly. Anything I understand is due to the clarity of Day’s witness; any mistakes are mine alone. iv CHAPTER ONE Introduction Stanley Hauerwas praises Dorothy Day, co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement, at the conclusion of two of his recent books, including With the Grain of the Universe, the text of his Gifford Lectures. Given that Hauerwas is a Protestant, a tenured professor, and a prominent theologian, while Day was a Catholic, never held an academic position, and never published a work of formal theology, why would he mention her so prominently? The answer must include the fact that she was an outspoken pacifist. More precise, however, he believes that the whole of her life is a credible witness to the gospel of Jesus Christ, at the heart of which is a commitment to pacifism. According to Hauerwas, the truth of the Christian message and its intellectual recovery by Karl Barth (the subject of his lectures) would languish without witnesses, and John Howard Yoder and John Paul II are primary examples because they “represent the recovery of the politics necessary for us to understand why witness is not simply something Christians ‘do’ but is at the heart of understanding how that to which Christians witness is true. If lives like theirs did not exist, then my argument could not help but appear as just another ‘idealism.’” Hauerwas acknowledges that Yoder and John Paul (and Barth) are in some ways “strange bedfellows” but contends that their shared convictions are embodied in the practice of Day and the Catholic Worker: “Because Dorothy Day existed, we can know that the church to which John Paul II and John Howard Yoder witness is not some ideal 1 2 but an undeniable reality. Moreover, such a church must exist if indeed the cross and not the sword reveals to us the very grain of the universe.” 1 Although there have been many Christian pacifists, Day’s witness is particularly compelling because she converted as an adult and because her faith was forged in the poverty of the Bowery in New York City, where she and Peter Maurin opened the first Catholic Worker house in 1933. Hers was not the naïve, liberal pacifism dismissed by Reinhold Niebuhr and others at the dawn of the Second World War. Instead, the war, the nuclear arms race, and Vietnam only strengthened her resolve to speak about the inherent problems of modern warfare, and the Catholic Worker newspaper became an influential voice within and beyond the Catholic Church. There had been no pacifist movement in the Church for centuries and its theologians were still mired in debate about just war theory, but as Jim Forest says, “Perhaps more than any Catholic since St. Francis, Dorothy Day began a process with her church that put Jesus, rather than the theologians of the just war, at the center of the church’s social teaching.” 2 Day both followed the Church’s practices and challenged it with the implications and radical possibilities of its teaching. 3 Her enduring witness was significant in a clear shift from univocal reliance on 1Stanley Hauerwas, With the Grain of the Universe: The Church’s Witness and Natural Theology (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Brazos Press, 2001), 217, 230. In Performing the Faith: Bonhoeffer and the Practice of Nonviolence (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Brazos Press, 2004), Hauerwas notes the connection between Day’s pacifism and the economics of a movement sustained by begging : “That the Worker is so constituted no doubt helps explain why Dorothy Day saw no tension between what might be thought to be her quite conservative Catholic piety and theology and her radical politics.” He closes the book with a remarkable statement: “I should like to think I have in some small ways tried to say in my work what Dorothy Day lived” (241). 2Jim Forest, “Opening Heart and Home,” Sojourners, July 2004, 32. 3By “radical” I mean both favoring changes in current practices and arising from or returning to a source—in this case, the teachings of the Church. Michael J. Baxter says that the Worker is radical in two senses: it “addresses the roots of social reconstruction by grounding it in the person and work of Christ” and “refuses to conform to the order—or disorder—imposed by the modern nation-state.” The second is 3 just war theory to allowance for, even encouragement of, pacifism and nonviolent action that has included both the Second Vatican Council and the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops formally voicing support for conscientious objection. 4 The above testifies to the accuracy of Hauerwas’ claims about the validity and power of Day’s witness and the centrality of pacifism to its character. Although fruitful work has been done on this latter element—most notably in American Catholic Pacifism, edited by Anne Klejment and Nancy Roberts—there remains a need for a comprehensive examination that attends to specifically theological concerns. Therefore, my purpose in this thesis is to provide a thick description of Day’s pacifism and to order this description theologically in terms of witness. Utilizing a categorization developed by Tom Cornell, I will argue that Day’s pacifism is rooted in three distinct yet interrelated principles: solidarity with the poor and the enemy through exploring the doctrine of the mystical body of Christ, compassion for the suffering through practicing voluntary poverty and the works of mercy, and a commitment to truth through challenging the logic of modern warfare and the Catholic Church’s failure to live up to its own doctrine. 5 I will discuss these principles at length in the next three chapters by tracing the development of their diverse sources, including socialist identification with “the masses,” personalist crucial because it reads “‘public theology’ as ideology, that is, as a constellation of ideas that legitimate the dominant power relations of capitalist order by depicting particular forms of social and political life as natural or universal” (“‘Blowing the Dynamite of the Church’: Catholic Radicalism from a Catholic Radicalist Perspective,” in Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker Movement: Centenary Essays, ed. William Thorn, Phillip Runkel, and Susan Mountin (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2001), 92). 4See Second Vatican Council, Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World Gaudium et Spes, 7 December 1965; United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, “Declaration on Conscientious Objection and Selective Conscientious Objection,” 21 October 1971. 5Thomas C. Cornell, “The Roots of Dorothy Day’s Pacifism: Solidarity, Compassion and a Stubborn Hold on Truth,” Houston Catholic Worker, September-October 1997. 4 philosophy, Catholic social teaching, and Scriptural exegesis. In particular, I will examine Day’s writings (she published four books and hundreds of articles in the Catholic Worker and other periodicals) in order to draw out the connections between these principles. Finally, in chapter five I will bring Alasdair MacIntyre’s analysis of tradition and the work of other Christian thinkers on the theology of violence to bear on Day’s pacifist witness in order to show that this witness is the type of living argument necessary for Christians to comprehend and engage the modern world. Character and Practice Central to my argument is the contention that Day’s witness is inexplicable apart from her orthodox Catholicism and her life among the poor.
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