You’re welcome, Mrs. Don-o. Anyone could call Dorothy Day a fool, but one wonders if she can be called a fool for Christ. As for Day being set “against the man with the gun,” she praised bloody dictators such as Castro, stating that although she could not “condone” the means that brought about his victory, she endorsed his “social advances” (”Catholic Worker” [CW], September-December 1962). She had similar praise for Ho Chi Minh and declared, “If we had had the privilege of giving hospitality to a Ho Chi Minh, with what respect and interest we would have served him, as a man of vision, as a patriot, a rebel against foreign invaders” (CW, January 1970).
One wonders how accurately Day “instructed the ignorant”—one of the spiritual works of mercy—when she insisted:
Mao-tse-Tung. . . . Karl Marx . . . .Lenin . . . . These men were animated by the love of brother and this we must believe though their ends meant the seizure of power, and the building of mighty armies, the compulsion of concentration camps, the forced labor and torture and killing of tens of thousands, even millions. (CW, May 1951)
Day seems to have cultivated the ability—mentioned in Matthew 23:24—to strain at gnats and swallow camels.
Aren't many sins, even the most hellbent, motivated by disordered love?
I'd say she diagnosed their disorder rightly.
As for her naive assessments of other dictators, I would guess she's taking the press (like the NYT?) at face-value about their motivations and achievements. She did not, for all her speak-no-evil and hospitable talk, align with them. The vast bulk of her writings (and I've read almost everything she wrote that's in print) show that her means, ends, and methods, her theory and practice are all the same: the Gospels, the Works of Mercy.
She was totally out-of-sync even with plain old mid-century Liberalism, let alone Communism as an ideology and a program: to that, she was the polar opposite. She was a voluntarist (while the Left is all about coercion); a total stubborn minimalist when it comes to government (while the Left is all about the State); a Personalist (the only true alternative to the perverse individualist/collectivist incoherence of the protest movements of her day and ours.)
This was a woman who gave her most respectful attention to the Prophets of Israel and the Fathers of the Church, and who spent the days of her life in toil and in love for Jesus Christ Our Lord.
That does not make her infallible. Can I defend her every political jot and tittle? Of course not. Her naivete about Ho Chi Minh and Castro are wince-worthy, and --- if read stripped of all context--- scandalous. But why strip out 20,000 days of context? To highlight 4 or 5 offhand lines totally unrelated to her life's work and her life's love? What a distortion! It's like faulting John the Baptist because he didn't expose the Roman Empire's crimes and merely told occupying troops to be content with their pay.
Politics per se never defined Day: neither her ideals nor her program.
I still say, I'm willing to wait for the miracles. That will be the verdict that counts.
I may join you on some other topic. On this one, Finis.