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.
Mrs. Don-o, Unlike you, I fault Dorothy Day for asserting that such acts of destruction and violence are motivated by any kind of “love”—lust for power, hatred for other human beings would be more appropriate designations. This claim puts Day’s practice of propaganda before her recognition of reality. Similarly, “pacifist” Day wrote of the guerrilla Colombian priest Camilo Torres and of Castro’s henchman Che Guevara:
The attraction is strong, because both men literally laid down their lives for their brothers. “Greater love hath no man than this.”
“Let me say, at the risk of seeming ridiculous, that the true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love.” Che Guevara wrote this, and he is quoted by Chicano youth in “El Grito Del Norte.” (”Catholic Worker,” [CW], May 1970)
Day also declared: “During the Franco-Prussian war, Bernadette considered the Prussians the servants of God. . . . How many Christians think of Hitler or Stalin in this way, as ‘the servant of God’” (”Our Stand,” CW, June 1940).
If you have “read almost everything she wrote that’s in print,” how can you claim that Day making Castro a hero was merely a response to the “New York Times”?
After Pope John XXIII excommunicated Castro in January 1962, Day showed her “respect” for the Holy Father by visiting Cuba later in the year and then writing several articles (CW,September-December 1962) in which she could not “condone” Castro’s bloody means, but had to praise the “social advances” that resulted. She also claimed that the clergy exiled from Cuba left voluntarily, and were not expelled by Castro.
As for Day not “aligning” herself with such dictators, this is disproven by her frequent praise in the CW for Mao, Ho Chi Minh, Castro, and Lenin. Dr. Carol Byrne’s 2010 “The Catholic Worker Movement (1933-1980): A Critical Analysis” is essential reading and documents these claims, and the complete Supplementary Notes for her book are available at “Dorothy Day Another Way.”
Such accolades and Day’s praise of prominent US Communists Anna Louise Strong, Mike Gold, Rayna Prohme, and Gurley Flynn are in stark contrast to her criticism of the ex-Communist Louis Budenz. In addition Day was an invited observer at the Communist Party USA Convention (CW, March 1957). She also sympathized greatly with the Party’s trials, as the following “message” she sent to the Communist newspaper “The Daily Worker,” shows:
We at the Catholic Worker express our sympathy to The Daily Worker in the eviction they have suffered even though their beliefs are contrary to our own. Freedom of the press is a concept fundamental to Jeffersonians and libertarians and freedom in general is essentially a religious concept. The Smith Act itself shows that our country is so superficially religious that it is not willing to take the risk and consequences of a faith in freedom and man’s use of it. (In a lighter vein), if we only had the space and could be truly charitable and hospitable we would offer the use of our offices and even of our mailing list, since the bureaucrats have confiscated yours, and we are sure that we would risk nothing in such a gesture but achieve a healthful clarification of thought. Yours for a green and peaceful revolution.
The editors The Catholic Worker. D.D.
P.S. Seriously speaking, since it has been called to our attention that the faithful are forbidden to read Marxist writings, we withdraw our facetious offer of our mailing list. (”The Daily Worker Case,” CW, April 1956)
Day certainly had a strange “theory and practice” of “the Gospels, the Works of Mercy.” May we be preserved from the “sanctity” of Dorothy Day.