The Radical Origins of Catholic Pacifism
by Anne Klejment
This passage is excerpted from an essay by Anne Klejment, "The Radical Origins of Catholic Pacifism: Dorothy Day and the Lyrical Left During World War I". The essay appears in a book edited by Anne Klejment and Nancy Roberts, American Catholic Pacifism: The Influence of Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker Movement, Westport, CT: Praeger (Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc.), 1996. It is reproduced with permission of the publisher. A table of contents follows.
In 1933 Dorothy Day founded the Catholic Worker movement, which advocated nonviolent social revolution, labor organization, civil rights, and peace. Responding to such situations as the Spanish Civil War and growing militarism in Italy and Germany, Dorothy Day became the spiritual leader of American Catholic pacifism. The official policy of Catholic Worker by the late 1930s reflected a seismic shift in Day's understanding of peacemaking, since she grounded her activism in Christ's ethic of love.44 To this ethic Day grafted some usable ideas from her radical past and traditional Catholic teaching, thus creating modern Catholic gospel pacifism.45
Long a reader of the Bible, Day frequently stated, "The Sermon on the Mount is our Christian manifesto."46 Jesus' command to love God, neighbor, and self required the practicing of nonviolence according to Day. No lesser standard, she believed, should guide Christian behavior. Realizing that the public equated nonviolence with passivism and appeasement, Day distinguished between true and false pacifism, the former using traditional spiritual weapons like prayer and reception of the sacraments to actively resist evil. "If we are not going to use our spiritual weapons," she conceded, "let us by all means arm and prepare."47
From the Baltimore Catechism, Day remembered that all human beings who share in God's grace are "temples of the Holy Ghost." Christ's dual nature, divine and human, as understood in the mystery of the incarnation, further suggested the radical inclusivity of Christianity. Papal and episcopal pronouncements of the thirties, and later Pius XII's encyclical Mystici Corporis (1943), provided powerful reminders of the essential actual and potential community of humankind.48 In contrast to her socialist opposition to war, and its condemnation of workers of one nation fighting workers of another, Catholic pacifism invoked the protection of the Christian law of love on everyone, "Jew, Gentile, black and white" and "our enemies as well as our friends." But at the same time that Day recognized the supremacy of the law of love, she had not forgotten the need for labor solidarity. "It is yours to say," she reminded workers, "whether the United States shall dip its hands in the blood of European workers...You can proclaim to the world that at long last the workers are refusing to be the pawns of capitalist and imperialist gain."49
Dorothy Day's gospel pacifism was enriched by her early radicalism and experiences in World War I. The path she traveled toward Catholic pacifism was shorter for her than for most of her coreligionists. While as a Catholic Day considered war a sin, "a sin against Love [sic], against life," she specified that sin could take the form of imperialism, militarism, or nationalism.50 Thus, modern Catholic pacifism spiritualized the familiar materialist analysis of the roots of war of the Progressive Era.
Day founded the Catholic Worker as a radical Catholic alternative to communism but refused to engage in baiting her old communist friends. As early as 1934 Day had insisted that communists had no monopoly on opposing imperialist wars; radical Catholics believed that imperialism violated the church's social justice teachings. "[I]t is not Christianity and freedom we [the United States during the cold war] are defending," she insisted in 1954, "but our possessions."51 While the Left depended on the social sciences and Marxist theorists to clarify the intimacy between capitalism and imperialism, Day could refer to traditional Catholic teachings about the sinfulness of materialism to make the same point. Unlike the Left, the Catholic Worker condemned class warfare, since, as Dorothy Day had said on many occasions, employers were children of God, too.52
The antimilitarism and opposition to conscription of the lyrical left carried over into the Catholic Worker. Militarism violated the law of love by threatening harm on other nations. By the 1960s the Catholic Workers noted that reliance on arms expended resources that were better used to care for the poor, a point that Pope John XXIII made in Pacem in Terris (1963). Perhaps Day's most original contribution to modern Catholic pacifism was her insistence on resisting conscription by having men refuse to register for the draft. While she enlisted the help of philosopher G. Barry O'Toole to develop a challenge to military conscription rooted in scholastic theology, she took a practical approach: "[t]o fight war we must fight conscription." Noting modern warfare's dependence upon industry, Day suggested that workers refuse to make arms and that citizens oppose war taxation.53
The lyrical left's criticism of excessive nationalism was also incorporated into Catholic pacifism. World War I peacemakers had complained that nationalism resulted in policies based on emotionalism and artificial division of humanity into armed camps, defending their rights and seeking aggrandizement of power. Catholic pacifism emphasized that nationalism was yet another barrier to viewing humankind with the eyes of God. Day had little use for nationalism, since she believed in the primacy of God's laws over those of the State.54 The kingdom of God, after all, was superior to human government, and Day believed that the law of love promoted the most inclusive vision of a genuinely Christian society. Day cautioned that "carping criticism" had no place at the Catholic Worker. Professing love for the "one country in the world where [folks] of all nations have taken refuge from oppression," she promoted community building that knew no national bounds.55 Nationalism, like imperialism and militarism, symbolized false gods to be resisted, not worshipped.
44. On the founding of the CW movement and its early history, see Mel Piehl, Breaking Bread: The Catholic Worker and the Origin of Catholic Radicalism in America (Philadelphia, 1982), 95-204.
45. From Peter Maurin, cofounder of the Catholic Worker, Day learned of papal teachings on peace. From clerical scholars John Hugo and G. Barry O'Toole, as Patrick Coy shows in "Conscription and the Catholic Conscience in World War II," American Catholic pacifism could be rooted in the rigorous application of traditional just-war theology.
46. Day, "Our Stand", Catholic Worker (June 1940).
47. [Dorothy Day], "Pacifism Is Dangerous So Is Christianity," Catholic Worker, January 1941.
48. Ibid. For Day on incarnation and human community, see [Dorothy Day], "Aims and Purposes," Catholic Worker, January 1939. Among the Catholic Worker articles on church statements on nationalism, see "Pope Pius XI on Nationalism," May 1934, "Root Nationalism Out to Assure Genuine Peace," March 1935, and "Holy Father Speaks Out on Nationalism," December 1938.
49. [Dorothy Day], "Aims"; "To the Workers," Catholic Worker, October 1939.
50. Day, Pilgrimage: Sixties, 237. On war and sin, see [Dorothy Day], "Truce of God Traditional in Europe," Catholic Worker, December 1939.
51. See "Not Pacifism", Catholic Worker, November 1934. Dorothy Day, "Theophane Venard and Ho Chi Minh," Catholic Worker, May 1954.
52. For example, Day, Union Square, 13.
53. Dorothy Day, "Fight Conscription!" Catholic Worker, September 1939. See also Day, On Pilgrimage (New York, 1948), 26, "Machinery Is All Ready for Next War," Catholic Worker, July-August 1939, and William D. Miller, comp., All Is Grace: The Spirituality of Dorothy Day (Garden City, N.Y., 1987),148.
54. Anne Klejment, "War Resistance and Property Destruction," in Coy, ed., Revolution of the Heart, 278.
55. Dorothy Day, "Our Country Passes from Undeclared to Declared War," Catholic Worker, January 1942.
American Catholic Pacifism: The Influence of Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker Movement, edited by Anne Klejment and Nancy L. Roberts, Westport, CT: Praeger, 1996.