Spinning in Her Grave: Of Dorothy Day, the Catholic Worker, and Gender Ideology

This letter to the New York City Catholic Worker was mailed in early September 2023. A copy was also included in the package of newspapers returned via mail at the same time. To date, I have received no reply. Given the recent release of Dignitas Infinita, I thought it was worth making the letter public at this time. 

Dear Catholic Worker friends, 

I’m returning my bulk order of NYCW newspapers for the current issue as well as the previous one. I had intended to send back the latter much sooner, but I didn’t get around to composing an accompanying letter of explanation, and it seemed necessary to include one. When the new bulk order arrived a few days ago, I decided I needed to sit down and get this done, so here it is.

You’ll see from your records that I’ve been getting a bulk order of the NYCW for many, many years. Year after year, I’ve been dutifully putting them out in the literature racks at my parish, South Bend’s St. Matthew Cathedral, in hopes that my fellow parishioners would pick them up, read them, and develop an interest in the Catholic Worker shtick.

In truth, I’d stopped reading them myself long ago, but I trusted that the New York CW community would never publish anything that would directly fly in the face of Catholic teaching. I mean, I knew there would be some squishy stuff from time to time, and maybe even some edgy propositions, but I had no fear that Dorothy Day’s flagship newspaper would promote outright heterodoxy or heresy.

I was wrong. The “Declaration of a Catholic Commitment to Trans-Affirmation” you included in your January/February 2023 issue is beyond squishy and edgy, which is why I’m returning these papers to you and asking that you cancel my bulk subscription. Since I don’t read the CW anymore, I missed that statement last winter, and it only came to my attention when I came across Larry Chapp’s piece in the National Catholic Register, "Whither the Catholic Worker Movement?" As I skimmed through it, this line jumped out at me: “…a full-throated endorsement of modern transgender ideology.” That caused me to slow down, read the whole piece thoroughly, and then go track down a copy of the Jan/Feb ’23 CW to verify Chapp’s assertions.

Regrettably, everything Larry wrote was true, and I became disoriented and distraught. When I recovered from the shock, I immediately went to St. Matt’s and removed all NYCWs from the literature racks, including stray copies of the issue in question. Plus, I let the pastor know about the situation, and I apologized for any confusion or scandal that I might’ve inadvertently engendered by stocking the church’s literature racks with that particular issue and giving parishioners the false impression that the parish endorsed (or at least condoned) your dangerous, anti-human, and, frankly, anti-Catholic viewpoint.

Anti-Catholic? You know the Church’s teaching as well as I do, and you know that the LGBTQ+ ideology reflected in that Declaration is inconsistent with Catholic anthropology and morality, including morally responsible stewardship of creation. Pope Francis writes about “human ecology” in Laudato Si, and notes that “acceptance of our bodies as God’s gift is vital for welcoming and accepting the entire world as a gift from the Father and our common home.” He goes on to specify that “valuing one’s own body in its femininity or masculinity is necessary if I am going to be able to recognize myself in an encounter with someone who is different. In this way we can joyfully accept the specific gifts of another man or woman, the work of God the Creator, and find mutual enrichment.”

Even aside from all that, your embrace of so-called “gender-affirming care” is particularly egregious since it involves medical and surgical interventions that do not restore or promote health, but seriously undermine it – especially in the young. Of course, you’re free to subscribe to or promote whatever worldview or associated practices you choose, but to do so under the banner “Catholic” is, at the very least, disingenuous and misleading.

The whole situation makes me so sad, so sad, for Dorothy Day and the whole Catholic Worker “thing” was the crucible of my Catholic conversion. As noted above, I always knew that the CW would gravitate to the left side of any issue – theological, political, cultural – but I naively assumed that the NY CW community would stay true to its Catholic roots out of deference to Dorothy, if nothing else. Surely you can see that there are plenty of us in the Catholic Worker diaspora that see your promoting that Declaration as a bewildering betrayal. You can see that, right?

I’d love to hear back from you and even enter into dialogue with you about this matter. And I would be happy if you’d consider publishing this letter in the NYCW paper. I could be wrong, but I’ll bet you’d be surprised how many likeminded readers would be prompted to send in their own letters of protest.

Truly, and I mean this without the least hint of sarcasm or cynicism, God bless you. I trust you’re following your consciences with sincerity, but I urge you to seek additional formation of conscience in line with Catholic teaching with regards to this very controversial moral arena.

PEACE,

Rick Becker
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Catholic Higher Education and the Pursuit of Holiness

“Why do we educate our daughters? Briefly we educate them for exactly the reason for which

God made them: to know, to love, to serve, to glorify Him now and forever.” 

 ~ Sr. M. Madeleva Wolff, CSC

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Jim Eder (1940-2023): Conjurer of Community

“Heaven is a banquet and life is a banquet, too, even with a crust,

where there is companionship.”

~ Dorothy Day

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Servant of God Dorothy Day: A Personal Witness

 

"Don't call me a saint, I don't want to be dismissed that easily." 

 ~ Dorothy Day

"Once you get to know her, she's just like any other crabby old lady." 

 ~ Stanley Vishnewski

Even so, many thanks, Dorothy. Pray for me. 

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A Reading List for a Eucharistic Life

Last June, I had the distinct privilege of sharing my testimony at a Notre Dame symposium put on by the McGrath Institute for Church Life’s Center for Liturgy. The symposium’s overall theme was “The Eucharistic Life,” and at week’s end I had the chance to relate my own spiritual story according to a Eucharistic vision. I was grateful to Dr. Tim O’Malley for the invitation, to his staff who helped me with the many details, and to the symposium participants who listened attentively to my remarks – not to mention my ums and ahs, my rambling digressions and my sobs. I don’t often get the chance to talk so freely in public about my faith history and conversion to Catholicism – my favorite, my most favorite tale to tell – and I relished the opportunity to do so at such a receptive gathering.

Then, a week or so ago, I received a follow-up email from Carolyn, the Center for Liturgy’s Program Director. “We are assembling a list of resources for our participants,” she wrote, “so if you could, send along your top 3 recommendations for indispensable books/articles that have meant a great deal to you in your study and formation that you feel our participants should know about and read.” Thankfully, mercifully, Carolyn tacked on this addendum: “Feel free to send more than 3 if you like.”

It was like an unexpected, delayed bonus on top of the honor of actually sharing at the event. As a frequent bookstore habitué (and former bookstore clerk), recommending books is second only to actually reading them in my way of seeing things, so Carolyn didn’t have to prod me for a response – especially since she lifted the numerical restriction.

“I've been mulling over your request quite a bit,” I wrote back after a couple days. “Here's the list I came up with.” I’ve cut-and-pasted the list below, and I’ve included some brief annotations [in brackets] as to why I think each item is relevant to a Eucharistic way of life.
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1. Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness (1952) and, her follow-up companion volume, Loaves and Fishes (1963).
   [As I’ve noted elsewhere, I didn’t become a Catholic because of Servant of God Dorothy Day, but I don’t think I would’ve become a Catholic without her. It’s also true that her love of the Mass and the Eucharist, and how she very intentionally allowed the Eucharist to thoroughly permeate everything she thought and did and attempted, was a powerful witness. Even before I joined the Church, she was my hero bar none. After I joined the Church, she was my mentor through her writing. I still want to be like her when I grow up.]
2. J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings (1937-1949).
   [Although my brother tried to get me to read LOTR and The Hobbit back in the 1970s when they were hot off the press, I couldn’t be bothered (!). After becoming a Catholic, I finally got around to Tolkien’s astounding epic, and it was like a spiritual epiphany. It's like a roadmap of the spiritual life, and a sacramental sensibility hovers over the entire corpus. Dr. O’Malley's recent piece for OSV on Tolkien’s elvish waybread as an image of Eucharistic sustenance captures what I'm getting at superbly.]
3. Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory (1940).
   [I was in Chicago living in an urban studies center on the South Side, and just piecing together the whole mystique of Catholic Worker-ism and Catholicism when I stumbled across this novel about a delinquent priest ministering to a persecuted Mexican Church in the 1930s. It clicked, and Greene's gripping narrative about the lengths people will go to – the lengths they in fact actually went to – to receive the Eucharist permanently framed my sacramental identity.]
   
4. Myles Connolly, Mr. Blue (1928) – especially Mr. Blue's movie pitch in the middle.
   [That "elevator pitch" about halfway into this short novel is almost like a mini-novelette unto itself. It, too, is a powerful picture of the centrality of the Eucharist to the Christian project, not only for the sanctification of individual believers, but for the salvation of the whole world.]
5. Walter Miller, A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959).
   [This monastic sci-fi masterpiece is hard to describe, and it's even harder to put into words why it's so unsettling and alluring. At the heart of it is a continuity of ancient tradition and community that revolves around liturgy and prayer, and so, like Dorothy's autobiographical writings, I think Canticle modeled for me an all-encompassing Eucharistic worldview that I couldn't resist.]
6. C.S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (1952) – particularly the beginning about the children falling into the painting.
[I zoomed through Lewis's Narnia Chronicles when I was a 7th-grader, and I've come back to them periodically – and not just to read them to my own kids, but for my own pleasure and edification. Dawn Treader in particular has stood out in my memory over the years for its thread of adventurous journeying that has its genesis in a metaphysical accident. A group of children are gazing at a painting of a ship at sea, and the painting comes alive – and the children clumsily tumble down beyond the picture frame and into the painted scene. As an Evangelical, I came to interpret this imagery in terms of Christians inhabiting the Biblical literature. As a Catholic, I've come to further embrace that opening sequence as a potent metaphor for how we can be drawn into and come to inhabit the liturgy itself. In other words, the real adventure of Christianity is at the altar, the fount, and the kneeler. When we inhabit a sacramental universe, then anything can happen.]

Plus, three movies – all of which were books first (or at least a play in the case of Wit), but I like the movie adaptations a lot:

1. Babette's Feast (1987)
   [This quiet, unassuming film is based on a short story by Isak Dinesen. On the surface, it's a romantic tale of serendipity, sacrifice, and love. Look deeper, and you'll see Christ and his Church, kenosis and metanoia, and a profound ecclesial longing for heaven. Moreover, you'll see a Eucharistic feast like no other.]
2. The NeverEnding Story (1984)
   [Maybe this is a stretch, but this fantasy film (based on Michael Ende's novel) fleshes out what Lewis was getting at in those first pages of Dawn Treader. The movie's hero, Bastian, is alienated and lonely and put upon at school, and he finds solace and escape in a beguiling storybook that increasingly occupies his consciousness. In time, Bastian is swept up into the story he is reading, and he takes on a critical role in the unfolding plot. "Real" world and the world of the page fuse for Bastian, and what had been an entertaining diversion soon swamps all other temporal concerns. Again, it's an image of inhabiting that I associated with a life centered on liturgy and sacrament.]
3. Wit (2001)
[I've been showing this HBO production of Margaret Edson's play to my nursing students for eons. Emma Thompson is superb in the role of Vivian Bearing, an English scholar who is dying of cancer. To me, its frequent biblical, hagiographic, liturgical, and sacramental allusions are palpable and illuminating. Every time I screen it for my students, I see something new – every time, really! It's a remarkable play, and this film version is astonishing. And the Eucharistic epiphany – a moment of breathtaking nuance and grace – is unforgettable.]

Come to think of it, I recall that Disney's version of Beauty and the Beast – the animated one from 1991, not the live action one from last year – had some powerful Eucharistic undertones. [Selfless love, transformative grace, death into life, and more.] Oh, and Diary of a Country Priest (1936) by Georges Bernanos is highly recommended, as is the old film version from 1954. [Both convey that same idea I found so compelling in Dorothy Day and Miller's Canticle: That a Eucharistic life is one that is shot full of Christ, and there's no out of the way corner or nook of our experience that escapes his expansive, crucified presence. "Does it matter?" the protagonist confesses at the very end. "Grace is everywhere...."]

Dom Hubert van Zeller is uniformly wonderful. Anything by him is recommended. [It's true. I've never encountered anything by Van Zeller that I didn't find captivating, instructive, and beneficial. And, as a Benedictine, even when he's not writing about the liturgy and the Eucharist explicitly, he seems to lean on their ubiquity, always in the ether informing and pervading everything else. That's my goal, too. I'm working on it.]
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In Gratitude for a Fresh Glimpse at Dorothy Day

Joe:

I can't recall if I sent you a thank-you note for that book, but I'm finally reading through it, and I'm grateful you sent it along.

You mentioned that the author is a friend of yours. If you're in touch with him, please tell him that he has succeeded in coaxing the dying embers of my Catholic Worker enthusiasms back into flame.

I didn't become a Catholic because of Dorothy Day, but I don't think I would've become a Catholic without her – and Peter...and the whole messy Catholic Worker schtick. 

Deo gratias.

– Rick
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Decades ago, in Eugene, Oregon, I read Dorothy Day's autobiography and decided to move to "the city" to find out about this Catholic Worker thing she started. Before I left, I forked over to Harper & Row for a whole box of Long Loneliness paperbacks, and I handed them out to family and friends and strangers. I urgently wanted others to meet this extraordinary woman – to see Jesus through her eyes, to meet him again, as I had, with her help.

Years ago, here in South Bend, I asked the New York Catholic Worker community to sign me up for a bulk subscription to their newspaper. Ever since, every month or two, I get a tight roll of 50 copies in the mail. I spread them out on a table, weigh them down with encyclopedias to flatten them, and then place them in the vestibule and exits at my church. It's not quite the same as passing out copies of Dorothy's autobiography. Still, there's always the possibility that somebody will, out of curiosity, pick up one of the newspapers and discover the Catholic Worker for the first time – and, indirectly, discover Dorothy.

However, Terrence Wright's new book, the one Joe sent me, has brought me up short. I read it eagerly, and I'm looking forward to reading it again. Far from nostalgia, it makes Dorothy's complex legacy and the rollicking CW ethos come alive, succinctly and compellingly. And, for me, it was a powerful reminder of why I've been pushing The Long Loneliness and the newspaper all these years: Because Dorothy Day knew Jesus, and she hoped the Catholic Worker – through the works of mercy and peacemaking and clarification of thought – would help others to know him and make him known.

So, stand by, Ignatius Press. Once I scrounge together the cash, I'll be contacting you for a boxful of Wright, and I'll get back into the book-pushing business.
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The Once and Future Franciscan

Francis and I go way back, but I’m just now getting to know him.

When I joined the Church 30 years ago, a Catholic co-worker gave me a St. Francis medal along with a prayer card – “Lord, make me an instrument of your peace….” I’m afraid I lost track of that medal, but the prayer, representative of the Franciscan tradition, is tattooed on my consciousness. It’s my thanksgiving and renewal of self-dedication whenever I receive Holy Communion, and since daily Mass has been my habit since becoming a Catholic, I’ve probably said the Peace Prayer thousands of times – in fact, I know I’ve said it thousands of times. Similarly, the life of St. Francis and his legacy have long informed my ongoing efforts to live the Faith, and I even ended up studying theology at a Franciscan University.

Clearly, then, a Franciscan stream of inspiration has been important in my life, but there was another that came first. My sponsor when I became a Catholic was a man deeply influenced and formed by the Benedictine tradition. Jim's love for St. Benedict naturally rubbed off on me, and I’ve always gravitated to monastic traditions of prayer and spirituality. In fact, in keeping with the centrality of the Divine Office to Benedictine life, I learned to pray Lauds and Vespers before I ever learned to pray the Rosary.

Both influences, Benedictine and Franciscan, relate to the reason I went to Chicago in the first place: Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker movement she helped to establish. Like my sponsor (himself a former Catholic Worker), Dorothy embraced Benedictine spirituality, and in time became a Benedictine Oblate – the monastic equivalent of Franciscan Tertiary. The Worker movement itself, however, was especially identified with St. Francis of Assisi, particularly in terms of his devotion to Lady Poverty, to peacemaking, and to celebrating God’s creation.

In my case, that Benedictine/Franciscan overlap is finally reaching an equilibrium as I pursue Franciscan Third Order formation. Since my Catholic conversion, I’ve maintained my love of things monastic, but I’ve never been in the right place or frame of mind long enough to associate myself with a monastery or enter an Oblate’s formation program. And since coming to the South Bend/Mishawaka area 20 years ago, I’ve developed a great affection for the Sisters of St. Francis on “The Mount” – for their apostolate of prayer along with their work in education and healthcare – yet it never occurred to me that they might become my spiritual home.

Prompted by my confessor, I finally contacted Sr. Agnes Marie, the community's liaison to the Secular Franciscan Fraternity, and I’ve begun my first Franciscan baby steps – but still carrying a Benedictine torch. In a formation session recently, Sr. Agnes Marie, said something that made everything click just right. She’d been relating some of the controversies surrounding Thomas of Celano’s hagiographical writings about St. Francis, and how those works might not have survived if the Benedictines hadn’t preserved them. I remembered, too, that the Benedictines also granted Francis the use of the Portiuncula church in perpetuity, and that Benedictine sisters gave shelter to St. Clare and her earliest followers.

The Benedictines, in other words, have long been involved in preserving and promoting the way of St. Francis, and it seems that such was the case with me. I’m grateful that, after all these years, I’ve made my way back to the spirituality of Assisi, and I’m happy to be reminded that it needn’t mean leaving St. Benedict behind. In fact, the two saints (and their spiritual descendants) seem very much at home with each other.
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A version of this reflection appeared on Catholic Exchange. It was originally published in the June 2016 edition of Pace e Bene, the newsletter of the ImmaculateConception Fraternity of Secular Franciscans, Mishawaka, IN.

One Book

"I read through Dorothy’s autobiography like a starving man tucking into a feast, and I well remember sitting in the Fishbowl at the University of Oregon when I turned the last page. 'I’ll never be the same,' I said out loud, and I was right."

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From "Ecumenism, Conversion, and the Catholic Worker: Dorothy Day's Appeal to Evangelicals," Dorothy Day and the Church: Past, Present, & Future, eds. Lance Richey and Adam DeVille (Solidarity Hall, 2016). 

Let’s Get Radical: Has the Catholic Worker Movement Betrayed Its Founders?

Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin

Liberals are too liberal to be radicals. To be a radical is to go to the roots. Liberals don’t go to the roots; they only scratch the surface. The only way to go to the roots is to bring religion into education, into politics, into business.

To bring religion into the profane is the best way to take profanity out of the profane. To take profanity out of the profane is to bring sanity into the profane. Because we aim to do just that we like to be called radicals.

~ Peter Maurin

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