A fascinating aspect of American culture is our willingness to debate dead people. To be more specific, the intentions and accomplishments of those public figures that have passed away are a surefire means of starting debate. The clearest example of this is the debate over the Founding Fathers, which are viewed as pious men who wished to found a Christian nation or as Deists who wished for no religious influence in the new American republic, depending on who one listens to. Similar debates have taken place over Abraham Lincoln, especially during the wars of the last decade when proponents of war were mentioning Lincoln’s actions that would violate civil liberty laws in most situations while opponents of war noted Lincoln’s quotes and actions to not show malice toward one’s enemy.
The latest historical figure to enter this posthumous debate of intentions is Dorothy Day, the political activist and founder of the Catholic Worker Movement. What is of particular interest recently is that Day, who was not only active in pacifist and worker’s rights movements but, before her conversion to Catholicism, lived a life that included two common law marriages and an abortion. It is this social activism and especially the abortion that have led many in the popular media to uphold Day, and her possible canonization, as a representation of the church “changing with the times” in that the Church is even considering the canonization of this supposedly marginal or lapsed Catholic. In a recent article on cnn.com Stephen Prothero, who is a professor of American Religion at Boston University, raised the question of if Catholics could embrace a person as a saint who had committed the “original sin” of contemporary Catholicism. You can read the article here:
This question raised by Prothero has a number of issues. Aside from the obvious fact that the “original sin” of contemporary or any other Catholicism is not abortion but original sin (one would think that a person who holds a PhD. In religion from Harvard would know such a thing), if one were to erase from the list of saints everyone who had ever sinned, then according to Catholic beliefs the only saint remaining would be the Virgin Mary. Of course Dorothy Day was a sinner. Her story is not unlike St. Augustine, who lived a similarly promiscuous life before his conversion to Catholic Christianity (Prothero even mentions this in his article). What is more telling is not that Dorothy Day had an abortion but her reaction to the abortion after her conversion to Catholicism. In a 1974 Day identified birth control and abortion as genocide similar to that which happened during the Holocaust. This is a statement that even many of the most conservative Catholics would shy away from.
Stephen Prothero’s troubling question has an even more troubling answer. He feels that American Catholics would embrace Dorothy Day as a saint, not because of her actions as a Servant of God (as the Catholic Church recognizes her as being) but because of poll data that shows that a majority of American Catholics to not fully agree with the Church’s teaching on abortion. Prothero calls this “diverging from the party line,” a statement that belittles the Catholic Church’s teaching on life issues into a political platform. If it were such then the platform would likely be altered at the whims of polling data, but the Catholic Church’s teachings aren’t decided by polls and one isn’t elected a saint (once again, a guy with a PhD. from Harvard should know this). This argument also ignores the fact that many people who have had abortions or who were initially pro-choice advocates such as Norma McCorvey of the Roe v. Wade case have gone on to become pro-life advocates who are likewise embraced by Catholic pro-life advocates. Anyway this argument makes no sense. If, according to Prothero, a majority of American Catholics see little or no issue with abortion and feel it should be legal in most if not all cases, then why would they embrace a saint who saw abortion and birth control as genocide?
On the other side of the coin, Phil Lawler of CatholicCulture.org wrote a rebuttal of sorts to Prothero’s article. You can read it here:
Lawler’s article largely concentrates on sin, but then said that Dorothy Day would agree with the Church’s opposition on homosexual acts. Now, I haven’t seen every single thing that Dorothy Day has written or said but I have never seen anything where she openly opposed homosexual acts in the strong manner that she condemned abortion and birth control. She may have made such a statement (if you know of one please send it to me, with citation) and I don’t doubt that her stance on homosexual acts is that different from the Church’s, but I have never seen anything that would make Day’s stance similar to that of a modern conservative anti-gay marriage activist.
There is one thing strangely absent from Lawler’s article, however. While Lawler acknowledges that Dorothy Day was a controversial figure throughout her life and he correctly identifies her as one who “comforts the afflicted and afflicts the comfortable,” he does not say why Day was so controversial. While he acknowledges her as a fiery pacifist and an advocate for the poor, how fiery she was and who among the poor she was advocating is omitted. Day was an early and unwaveringly vehement opponent of the Vietnam War, so much so that counterculture leader Abbie Hoffman went as far as to call Day the “first hippie.” Her advocacy for the poor is, of course, best represented in her founding of the communal living-style Catholic Worker movement. Therefore while Day was pro-life, her most public work would have been in direct opposition to the worldview of modern American conservatism.
So if Dorothy Day isn’t one who can be embraced by lapsed or cafeteria Catholics or politically conservative American Catholics, then who can embrace her example and work on Earth? The answer, in short, is Catholics. Catholics of all stripes. Catholics who are lapsed and Catholics who attend daily mass. Catholics who are Democrat, Republican, and everything in between. Dorothy Day’s example is one with widespread appeal, and her tireless work as an advocate for the workers, pacifism, and the unborn shows that she was not interested in appeasing any one side, so therefore all of us Catholics and really all of us Christians in our modern American lives can look to Dorothy Day and wonder what is truly lacking in our own lives.
The debate over the posthumous legacy of Dorothy Day will continue as the question of her sainthood is discussed, a process that will likely be decades considering her case is in the very early stages and she has yet to even be beatified. As this debate goes on there will undoubtedly be further molding of Day’s legacy to fit one’s own platform. I must say that I might be guilty of this as well, as I see myself as a Catholic who is pro-life but economically Liberal and I like to view Dorothy Day as much in the same fashion. What does stand in opposition to this posthumous legacy debate, however, is the process for canonization in and of itself, ironically because of what happens after one who is being reviewed for canonization has passed away. There will be the need for confirmed miracles attested to Dorothy Day (Lawler mentions this in his article, Prothero does not, although I presume he knows it, since, you know, he has a PhD. from Harvard). If this happens and Dorothy Day is elevated to sainthood, then she will be a saint that all can celebrate and venerate. While Day’s legacy can be debated and altered, what will stand the test of time is her work as a servant of God.
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