All the Way to Heaven is Heaven

by Dorothy Day

About a month ago, Douglas Hyde, one of the editors of the London Daily Worker, became a Catholic. In an article in the Catholic Herald of England, he wrote:

"In 1943, I libeled, in the course of my work on The Daily Worker, a Catholic paper, the Weekly Review, and a number of its contributors. In preparation for an anticipated court case, which in fact, was never heard, I read through the paper's files for the preceding year and studied each issue as it appeared.

"I had accused it of providing a platform for Fascists at a moment when Fascist bombs were raining down on Britain. I came in time to realize that not only had I libeled it in law but also in fact.

"For years my cultural interests had been in the middle ages. My favorite music was also pre-Purcell, in architecture my interest was in Norman and Gothic, in literature my favorites were Chaucer and Langland. We had a family joke which we made each year when holidays were discussed. "Let's go on a trip to the thirteenth century."

"And these were the interests of the people behind the Weekly Review. I came to look forward to the days when it appeared on my desk. A natural development was that I became increasingly interested in the writings of Chesterton and Belloc....

"A good Communist must never permit himself to think outside his Communism. I had done so and the consequences were bound to be fatal to my Communism.

"That, as it were, is the mechanics of my introduction to Catholicism."

Not long ago at a mass meeting of the workers in a Finnish factory when the question was asked which they would prefer, Communism or Capitalism, they shouted, "Neither."

Fr. Parsons in his letter in our anniversary issue said that he loved us best when we were fighting for something, so let us begin this new series of articles, similar to THE CHURCH AND WORK. We will probably slash out now and again in the fray of battle, at Fr. Higgins, for instance, who makes fun of the Distributists, and at the ACTU, the members of which are our very good friends. (We are just trying to improve their vision.) And at those who say that it is too late for anything but love, and on the one hand, just read St. John of the Cross and seek for perfection; or on the other hand just make your Easter duty and be ordinary good Catholics. The Pope and the Bishops say that secularism is the curse of our time. We cannot separate soul and body. We cannot separate the week from Sunday. A man's work, whereby he eats, is important.

In other words, it is never too late to begin. It is never too late to turn over a new leaf. In spite of the atom bomb, the jet plane, the conflict with Russia, ten just men may still save the city.

Maybe if we keep on writing and talking, there will be other conversions like Mr. Hyde's. It was reading an article that got Fr. Damien his leper at Molokai. It was reading that converted St. Augustine. So we will keep on writing.

And talking, too. They always said in England that the Distributists did nothing but talk. But one needs to talk to convey ideas. St. Paul talked so much and so long that in the crowded room one young lad, sitting on the window sill, fell out of the window and was killed, like a woman down the street from us, last week. Only she was not listening to the word of God, but washing windows on a Sunday morning. And it was sad that there was no St. Paul to bring her to life. Her life finished there. But we are still alive, though we live in a city of ten million and one can scarcely call it life, and the papers every day carry news of new weapons of death.

However, we are still here. We are still marrying and having children, and having to feed them and house them and clothe them. We don't want them to grow up and say, "This city is such hell, that perhaps war will be preferable. This working in a laundry, a brass factory, the kitchen of a restaurant, is hell on earth. At least, war will teach me new trades, which the public school system has failed to do. This coming home at night to a four-room, or a two room tenement flat and a wife and three children with whooping cough (there are usually not more than three children in the city ) is also hell. And what can be done about it? We are taught to suffer, to embrace the cross. On the other hand, St. Catherine said, "All the way to heaven is heaven, because He said I am the Way." And He was a carpenter and wandered the roadsides of Palestine and lived in the fields and plucked the grain to eat on a Sunday as he wandered with His disciples.

This morning as I went to Mass my eyes stung from the fumes of the cars on Canal street. I crossed a vacant lot, a parking lot filled with cinders and broken glass and longed for an ailanthus tree to break the prison-gray walls and ground all around. Last night all of us from Mott street were at a meeting at Friendship House to hear Leslie Green, Distributist, and the talk was good and stimulating so that in spite of the noise, the fumes, the apathy which the city brings, I was impelled this morning to begin this series. My son-in-law, David Hennessy, of Berkeley Springs, West Virginia, who has a toehold on the land, has also been deluging me with pamphlets. He has one of the best libraries in the country on the subject, and deals with the books and pamphlets which discuss Distributism. He will help with this series, and send literature to those who ask for it. The address is given in an ad in this issue.

He has one of many toeholds on the land. We could list perhaps fifty among our friends and if we went through our files, we could find many more. These toeholds have meant, however, that the young, married couples had a little stake to start with. They had, or could borrow a bit of money to make a down payment on a farm. Their families could give them a start if it was only a few hundred dollars. (There was an ad in the New York Times yesterday of a farm for sale for $1,200, three hundred down and $25 a month.) Even with the bit of money, however, faith, vision, some knowledge of farming or a craft, are needed. People need to prepare themselves. Parents need to prepare their children.

On the one hand there are already some toeholds on the land; there are those farmers already there who have the right philosophy; there is still time, since we have not yet a socialist government or nationalization of the land. We have some government control, but not much yet. Not compared to what there may be soon.

On the other hand, there are such stories as that in the last issue of Commonweal about the de Gorgio strike in the long central valley of California, of 58,000 acres owned by one family, of 2,000 employees, of horrible living conditions, poor wages, forced idleness "times of repose" between crops, when machines are cared for but not men, women and children. "The Grapes of Wrath" pattern is here, is becoming an accepted pattern. Assembly line production in the factory, and mass production on the land are part of a social order accepted by the great mass of our Catholics, priests and people. Even when they admit it is bad, they say, "What can we do?" And the result is palliatives, taking care of the wrecks of the social order, rather than changing it so that there would not be quite so many broken homes, orphaned children, delinquents, industrial accidents, so much destitution in general.

Palliatives, when what we need is a revolution, beginning now. Each one of us can help start it. It is no use talking about how bored we are with the word. Let us not be escapists but admit that it is upon us. We are going to have it imposed upon us, or we're going to make our own.

If we don't do something about it, the world may well say, "Why bring children into the world, the world being what it is?" We bring them into it and start giving them a vision of an integrated life so that they too can start fighting.

This fighting for a cause is part of the zest of life. Fr. Damasus said once at one of our retreats, that people seemed to have lost that zest for life, that appreciation of the value of life, the gift of life. It is a fundamental thing. Helene Isvolsky in a lecture on Dostoevsky at the Catholic Worker house, last month, said that he was marked by that love for life. He had almost been shot once. He had been lined up with other prisoners and all but lost his life. From then on he had such a love for life that it glowed forth in all his writings. It is what marks the writings of Thomas Wolfe, whose life was torrential, whose writing was a Niagara.

But how can one have a zest for life under such conditions as those we live in at 115Mott street? How can that laundry worker down the street, working in his steamy hell of a basement all day, wake each morning to a zest for life?

In the city very often one lives in one's writing. Writing is not an overflow of life, a result of living intensely. To live in Newburgh, on the farm, to be arranging retreats, to be making bread and butter, taking care of and feeding some children there, washing and carding wool, gathering herbs and salads and flowers--all these things are so good and beautiful that one does not want to take time to write except that one has to share them, and not just the knowledge of them, but how to start to achieve them.

The whole retreat movement is to teach people to "meditate in their hearts," to start to think of these things, to make a beginning, to go out and start to love God in all the little things of every day, to so make one's life and one's children's life a sample of heaven, a beginning of heaven

The retreats are to build up a desire, a knowledge of what to desire. "Make me desire to walk in the way of Thy commandments." Daniel was a man of "desires." Our Lord is called "the desire of the everlasting hills."

Yes, we must write of these things, of the love of God and the love of His creatures, man and beast, and plant and stone.

"You make it sound too nice," my daughter once said to me, "when I was writing of life on the land, and voluntary and involuntary poverty which means in specific instances the doing without water, heat, washing machines, cars, electricity and many other things, even for a time the company of our fellows, in order to make a start.

And others have said the same thing, who are making a start on the land. And I know well what they mean. One must keep on trying to do it oneself, and one must keep on trying to help others to get these ideas respected.

At Grailville, Ohio, there is not only the big school where there is electricity, modern plumbing, a certain amount of machinery that makes the work go easier and gives time for studies; but there is also a sample farm, twelve acres, with no electricity, no modern plumbing, no hot water, where the washing is done outside over tubs and an open fire, and yet there, too, the life is most beautiful, and a foretaste of heaven. There one can see how all things show forth the glory of God, and how "All the way to heaven is heaven,"

Artists and writers, as I have often said, go in for voluntary poverty in order to "live their own lives and do the work they want to do." I know many a Hollywood writer who thought they were going out there to earn enough to leave to buy a little farm and settle down and do some really good writing. But the fleshpots of Egypt held them. And I knew many a Communist who had his little place in the country, private ownership too, and not just a rented place, a vacation place.

Property is proper to man. Man is born to work by the sweat of his brow, and he needs the tools, the land to work with.

This article is but an introduction to a series of articles on what has been written and thought about Distributism.

The principles of Distributism have been more or less implicit in much that we have written for a long time. We have advised our readers to begin with four books, Chesterton's What's Wrong With the World, The Outline of Sanity, and Belloc's The Servile State and The Restoration of Property.

These are the books which Douglas Hyde must have read which gave him the third point of view, neither industrial capitalist or communist.

In a brief pamphlet by S. Sagar, made up of a collection of articles which ran in The Weekly Review, distributism is described as follows:

To live, man needs land (on which to have shelter, to cultivate food, to have a shop for his tools) and capital, which may be those tools, or seeds, or materials.

"Further, he must have some arrangement about the control of these two things. Some arrangement there must obviously be, and to make such an arrangement is one of the reasons why man forms communities." -- Men being what they are, every society must make laws to govern the control of land and capital.

The principle from which the law can start is "that all its subjects should exercise control of Land and Capital by means of direct family ownership of these things. This, of course, is the principle from which, until yesterday, our own law started. It was the theory of capitalism under which all were free to own, none compelled by law to labor." (Popular magazines like Time and the Saturday Evening Post are filled with illustrations of these principles, which all men admit are good, but unfortunately the stories told are not true. It is the reason why great trusts like the Standard Oil and General Motors have public relations men, why there is a propaganda machine for big business, to convert the public to the belief that capitalism really is based on good principles, distributists' principles, really is working out for the benefit of all, so that men have homes and farms and tools and pride in the job.) "Unfortunately, in practice, under capitalism the many had not opportunity of obtaining land and capital in any useful amount and were compelled by physical necessity to labor for the fortunate few who possessed these things. But the theory was all right. Distributists want to save the theory by bringing the practice in conformity with it....

"Distributists want to distribute control as widely as possible by means of a direct family ownership of Land and Capital. This, of course, means cooperation among these personal owners and involves modifications, complexities and compromises which will be taken up later.

"THE AIM OF DISTRIBUTISM IS FAMILY OWNERSHIP OF LAND, WORKSHOPS, STORES, TRANSPORT, TRADES, PROFESSIONS, AND SO ON.

"Family ownership in the means of production so widely distributed as to be the mark of the economic life of the community--this is the Distributist's desire. It is also the world's desire.... The vast majority of men who argue against Distributism do so not on the grounds that it is undesirable but on the grounds that it is impossible. We say that it must be attempted, and we must continue to emphasize the results of not attempting it."

In the next issue of the paper we will continue with a number of articles dealing with these problems.

Catholic Worker

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The Way Of Love/1

by Bill Kauffman

The title "Dorothy Day and the American Right" promises a merciful brevity, along the lines of "Commandments We Have Kept" by the Kennedy brothers. After all, the founder of the Catholic Worker movement and editor of its newspaper lived among the poor, refused to participate in air-raid drills, and preferred Cesar Chavez to Bebe Rebozo.

But there is more to the "right" than a dollar bill stretching from the DuPonts to Ronald Reagan, just as the "left" is something greater than the bureau-building and bomb-dropping of Roosevelts and Kennedys. Maybe, just maybe, Dorothy Day had a home, if partially furnished and seldom occupied, on the American right.

The Catholic reactionary John Lukacs, after attending the lavish twenty-fifth anniversary bash for National Review in December 1980, held in the Plaza Hotel, hellward of the Catholic Worker House on Mott Street, wrote:

During the introduction of the celebrities a shower of applause greeted Henry Kissinger. I was sufficiently irritated to ejaculate a fairly loud Boo! ... A day or so before that evening Dorothy Day had died. She was the founder and saintly heroine of the Catholic Worker movement. During that glamorous evening I thought: who was a truer conservative, Dorothy Day or Henry Kissinger? Surely it was Dorothy Day, whose respect for what was old and valid, whose dedication to the plain decencies and duties of human life rested on the traditions of two millennia of Christianity, and who was a radical only in the truthful sense of attempting to get to the roots of the human predicament. Despite its pro-Catholic tendency, and despite its commendable custom of commemorating the passing of worthy people even when some of these did not belong to the conservatives, National Review paid neither respect nor attention to the passing of Dorothy Day, while around the same time it published a respectful R.I.P. column in honor of Oswald Mosley, the onetime leader of the British Fascist Party.

National Review, dreadnought of postwar American conservatism, occasionally aimed its scattershot at Day. Founder William F. Buckley, Jr. referred casually to "the grotesqueries that go into making up the Catholic Worker movement"; of Miss Day, he chided "the slovenly, reckless, intellectually chaotic, anti-Catholic doctrines of this goodhearted woman--who, did she have her way in shaping national policy, would test the promise of Christ Himself, that the gates of Hell shall not prevail against us."

The grotesqueries he does not bother to itemize; nor does Buckley explain just what was "anti-Catholic" about a woman who told a friend, "The hierarchy permits a priest to say Mass in our chapel. They have given us the most precious thing of all--the Blessed Sacrament. If the Chancery ordered me to stop publishing The Catholic Worker tomorrow, I would."

If Buckley and Kissinger were the sum of the American right, mine would be a very brief article indeed. But there is another American right--or is it a left, for praise be the ambidextrous--in which Miss Day fits quite nicely. Indeed, I think she is more at home with these people than she ever was with Manhattan socialists. They are the Agrarians, the Distributists, the heirs to the Jeffersonian tradition. The keener of them--particularly the Catholics--understood their kinship with Day. Allen Tate, the Southern man of letters and contributor to the 1930 Southern Agrarian manifesto, I'll Take My Stand, wrote his fellow Dixie poet Donald Davidson in 1936:

I also enclose a copy of a remarkable monthly paper, The Catholic Worker. The editor, Dorothy Day, has been here, and is greatly excited by our whole program. Just three months ago she discovered I'll Take My Stand, and has been commenting on it editorially. She is ready to hammer away in behalf of the new book. Listen to this: The Catholic Worker now has a paid circulation of 100,000! [Tate neglects to say that the price is a penny a copy] ... She offers her entire mailing list to Houghton-Mifflin; I've just written to Linscott about it. Miss Day may come by Nashville with us if the conference falls next weekend. She has been speaking all over the country in Catholic schools and colleges. A very remarkable woman. Terrific energy, much practical sense, and a fanatical devotion to the cause of the land!

The program that so excited Miss Day was summarized in the statement of principles drawn up at the Nashville meeting of Southern Agrarians and Distributists. Mocked as reactionary for their unwillingness to accept bigness as an inevitable condition, the conferees declared (inter alia):

--The condition of individual freedom and security is the wide distribution of active ownership of land and productive property.

--Population should be decentralized as well as ownership.

--Agriculture should be given its rightful recognition as the prime factor in a secure culture.

Though Day was absent from Nashville, she was to speak the language of the Southern Agrarians, without the drawl, many times over the years. "To Christ--To the Land!" Day exclaimed in the January 1936 issue. "The Catholic Worker is opposed to the wage system but not for the same reason that the Communist is. We are opposed to it, because the more wage earners there are the less owners there are ... how will they become owners if they do not get back to the land."

Widespread ownership was the basic tenet of the Agrarians' Catholic cousins, the Distributists. The Catholic Worker published all the major Distributists of the age, among them Chesterton and Belloc, Vincent McNabb, Father Luigi Ligutti, and the Jesuit John C. Rawe (a Nebraska-born "Catholic version of William Jennings Bryan"). On numberless occasions Dorothy Day called herself a Distributist. Thus her gripe with the New Deal: "Security for the worker, not ownership," was its false promise; she despaired in 1945 that "Catholics throughout the country are again accepting `the lesser of two evils'.... They fail to see the body of Catholic social teaching of such men as Fr. Vincent McNabb, G.K. Chesterton, Belloc, Eric Gill and other Distributists ... and lose all sight of The Little Way."

Dorothy Day kept to the little way, and that is why we honor her. She understood that if small is not always beautiful, at least it is always human.

The Catholic Worker position on economics was expressed quite clearly:

[W]e favor the establishment of a Distributist economy wherein those who have a vocation to the land will work on the farms surrounding the village and those who have other vocations will work in the village itself. In this way we will have a decentralized economy which will dispense with the State as we know it today and will be federationist in character.... We believe in worker ownership of the means of production and distribution as distinguished from nationalization. This to be accomplished by decentralized cooperatives and the elimination of a distinct employer class.

The American name for this is Jeffersonianism, and the failure of Distributism to attract much of a stateside following outside of those Mencken derided as "typewriter agrarians" owes in part to its Chesterbellocian tincture. "Gothic Catholicism" never could play in Peoria.

Nor could it stand upon the Republican platform. Garry Wills recalls this exchange during his first visit with William F. Buckley, Jr.: "`Are you a conservative, then?' [Buckley asked]. I answered that I did not know. Are Distributists conservative? `Philip Burnham tells me they are not.' It was an exchange with the seeds of much later misunderstanding."

Were the Distributists conservative? Was Day conservative? Depends. Herbert Agar, the Kentucky Agrarian and movement theorist, wrote in the American Review (April 1934), "For seventy years, a `conservative' has meant a supporter of Big Business, of the politics of plutocracy," yet "the root of a real conservative policy for the United States must be redistribution of property." Ownership--whether of land, a crossroads store, a machine shop--must be made "the normal thing."

"Property is proper to man," insisted Dorothy Day, though she and the Distributists--and much of the old American right--meant by property something rather more substantial than paper shares in a Rockefellerian octopus. "Ownership and control are property," declared Allen Tate, making a distinction between a family farm--or family firm--and a joint-stock corporation, the artificial spawn of the state.

Like Tate and the Southern Agrarians, Day was no collectivist, eager to herd the fellaheen onto manury unromantic Blithedales. "The Communists," she said, sought to build "a sense of the sacredness and holiness and the dignity of the machine and of work, in order to content the proletariat with their property-less state." So why, she asked, "do we talk of fighting communism, which we are supposed to oppose because it does away with private property? We have done that very well ourselves in this country." The solution: "We must emphasize the holiness of work, and we must emphasize the sacramental quality of property too." ("An anti-religious agrarian is a contradiction in terms," according to Donald Davidson.)

Day described the Catholic Worker program as being "for ownership by the workers of the means of production, the abolition of the assembly line, decentralized factories, the restoration of crafts and the ownership of property," and these were to be achieved by libertarian means, through the repeal of state-granted privileges and a flowering of old-fashioned American voluntarism.

During the heyday of modern American liberalism, the 1930s, when Big Brother supposedly wore his friendliest phiz, Day and the Catholic Workers said no. They bore a certain resemblance to those old progressives (retroprogressives)--Senators Burton K. Wheeler, Gerald Nye, and Hiram Johnson--who turned against FDR for what they saw as the bureaucratic, militaristic, centralizing thrust of his New Deal. The antithetical tendencies of the Catholic Worker and the 1930s American left were juxtaposed in the November 1936 issue of the Catholic Worker. under the heading "Catholic Worker Opposition to Projected Farm-Labor Party.," the box read:

Farm-Labor Party stands for: Progress Industrialism Machine Caesarism (bureaucracy) Socialism Organizations.

Catholic Worker stands for: Tradition Ruralism Handicrafts Personalism Communitarianism Organisms.

And never the twain shall meet.

An anarchistic distrust of the state, even in its putatively benevolent role as giver of alms, pervaded the Catholic Workers, as it did the 1930s right. But then as the late Karl Hess, one-time Barry Goldwater speechwriter turned Wobbly homesteader, wrote, the American right had been "individualistic, isolationist, decentralist--even anarchistic," until the Cold War reconciled conservatives to the leviathan state.

The 1930s dissenters--the old-fashioned liberals now maligned as conservatives; the unreconstructed libertarians; the cornbelt radicals--proposed cooperatives and revitalized village economies as the alternative to government welfare. The Catholic Workers agreed. The holy fool Peter Maurin, Day's French peasant comrade, asserted that "he who is a pensioner of the state is a slave of the state." Day, in her memoir The Long Loneliness, complained:

The state had entered to solve [unemployment] by dole and work relief, by setting up so many bureaus that we were swamped with initials.... Labor was aiding in the creation of the Welfare State, the Servile State, instead of aiming for the ownership of the means of production and acceptance of the responsibility that it entailed.

"Bigness itself in organization precludes real liberty," wrote Henry Clay Evans, Jr. in the American Review, a Distributist journal. The home--the family--was the right size for most undertakings. And so the home must be made productive once more. In the April 1945 Catholic Worker, Janet Kalven of the Graiiville Agricultural School for Women in Loveland, Ohio called for "an education that will give young women a vision of the family as the vital cell of the social organism, and that will inspire them with the great ambitions of being queens in the home." By which she did not mean a sequacious helpmeet to the Man of the House, picking up his dirty underwear and serving him Budweisers during commercials, but rather a partner in the management of a "small, diversified family firm," who is skilled in everything "from bread-making to beekeeping." For "the homestead is on a human scale"--the only scale that can really measure a person's weight.

The Agrarians and Distributists dreamed of a (voluntary, of course) dispersion of the population, and Day, despite her residence in what most decentralists regarded then and regard now as the locus of evil, agreed: "If the city is the occasion of sin, as Father Vincent McNabb points out, should not families, men and women, begin to aim at an exodus, a new migration, a going out from Egypt with its flesh pots?" asked Day in September 1946. This revulsion against urbanism seems odd in a woman whose base was Manhattan, symbol of congestion, of concentration, of cosmopolitanism rampant. Yet she wrote of the fumes from cars stinging her eyes as she walked to Mass, of the "prison-gray walls" and parking lots of broken glass. "We only know that it is not human to live in a city of ten million. It is not only not human, it is not possible." The Southern Agrarians would not demur.

World War II destroyed agrarianism as an active force in American intellectnal life--just as it fortified the urban citadels of power and money. Foes of America's involvement in the war, heirs to the non-interventionist legacy of George Washington, were slandered--most notably Charles Lindbergh, whom the Catholic Worker defended against the smears of the White House.

Despite Day's disavowal of the "isolationist" label, the Catholic Worker of 1939-1941spoke the diction of the American antiwar movement, which, because it was anti-FDR, was deemed "right-wing." Sentences like "We should like to know in just what measure the British Foreign Office is dictating the foreign policy of the United States!" could have come straight from the pages of Colonel McCormick's Chicago Tribune. So could the objection to the "English and Communist Propaganda" of the New York papers, and the reverence toward the traditional "neutrality of the United States" and the keeping of "our country aloof from the European war."

Bill Kaufman is the author of Look Homeward, America.

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Dorothy Day and Distributism

by Dale Ahlquist

One trait that the Catholic Workers share with most everybody else is that they often quote G.K. Chesterton. But what sets them apart is that they also take his ideas on Distributism seriously.

As Mark and Louise Zwick show in their book on the Catholic Worker Movement (see Review on page XX), Peter Maurin and Dorothy Day founded the work in 1933, realizing that with unemployment reaching 25 percent “there had to be an alternative to the economic system that had left the social order in such disarray.” In tracing the rise of capitalism, the Zwicks argue that there is a connection between the Calvinistic doctrine of predestination and the deterministic “invisible hand of the market” that gave justification to the idea that being poor is just your own fault. Although it didn’t stop capitalists from working hard to get rich, it strangely prevented them from being charitable to the poor since the scheme of salvation downplayed good works. This mentality has served to create quite a distance between the rich and the poor in America. The solution to the problem involves not only a devotion to the works of mercy, but helping the poor become self-sufficient. Distributists are the only social theorists who seem to understand this. Economics must not be more important than people. “Profits do not have rights, but workers do.” Conversely, the opposite danger from the spread of cancerous corporations is the gargantuan growth of government. In The Catholic Worker paper Dorothy Day tried “to awaken our readers to the necessity of combating the ‘all-encroaching state.’”

The only way to combat both the forces of the big business and big government is with a society of owners, families who own their own property, workers who own their own businesses. Worker ownership is not only more respectful of the dignity of the person, but it produces goods of greater quality.

In spite of the connection between Calvinism and Capitalism, the Distributist solution is not something that must be explained only to Protestants. Most Catholics, especially in America, don’t get it either. They have bought into Capitalism. In 1948 Dorothy Day wrote in the Catholic Worker:

“If the priesthood studied distributism as a long-term movement and did not play two ends against the middle by endorsing the present capitalistic system, we would be ready for what the future would bring.”

This is prophetic. If a Distributist solution had been embraced in large numbers, starting with Catholics in the transitional years following World War II, we could have prevented “the military-industrial complex” that developed instead, with huge corporations serving as government contractors and lobbying for more and more military buildup with the bureaucratic buildup that inevitably accompanies it. In order for the big corporations to compete for the huge contracts they would need cheap labor, cheap parts. The result was low wages, outsourcing, loss of domestic manufacturing, loss of jobs. America does not make anything anymore. It just orders it. Wage slaves live in stacks. Ownership is only a vague dream.

Dorothy Day often quoted Chesterton and praised him as much: “To us who daily suffer the ugly reality of industrial capitalism and its fruits, the… words of Chesterton ring strong.” She also invoked St. Thomas Aquinas as a defender of property, that “a certain amount of goods was necessary to lead a good life.” In other words, that property had to do with what was proper or appropriate to a man.

What prevents the proper distribution of property are “structures of sin.” What is going to change these structures of sin is going to have be something both physical and spiritual. It is not going to happen merely by materialistic means. It is not going to be forced onto a populace from above. It must come from conversion, from a change of heart, from people themselves who not only care about their families, but about their neighbors’ families.

Dorothy did not only write about Distributism, she did Distributism. She helped people become self-sufficient. She started farms. She focused on the wonder of everyday life. She did things for herself rather than hiring others to do them. While she admitted that Distributism had an agrarian emphasis, she said that does not mean that everyone must become a farmer. There must also be an urban emphasis on widespread ownership and self-sufficiency. “We are not going to leave the city to the Communists.”

Dorothy Day said on several occasions that Distributism is not dead. The idea of a local economy is not dead. The evidence that it is not dead, she said, is that people are always burying it.

©Gilbert! Magazine (The Distributist)
Reprinted with Permission

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Hilaire Belloc

by Dorothy Day

"May the Angels Lead Thee Into Paradise"

At a time when life is cheap and casualty lists have mounted again in Korea, it is good to contemplate the long and full life of this great writer who died last month in his home in England. He visited us in 1937 when the Catholic Worker office was on Mott street and talked briefly to our Friday night meeting, and we remembered him with awe as a Johnstonian figure with a long life of fruitful and pleasurable literary activity behind him, a life of walking trips and pilgrimages, of long conversational evenings in coffeehouses, of travel in Europe and America. It was said that he walked across the United States to propose to his wife, a California girl. He was not an Englishman, though he lived his life in England. He was born of a French father and an Irish mother in Paris and he married an American. He had five children. His oldest son was killed in the first World War and his youngest in the second. There is another son living in Canada, and two daughters, one of whom, Eleanor, also visited us in New York and has been a dear correspondent since. Belloc himself served as an ambulance driver in the first world war.

We have more than often spoken of his two books, "The Servile State," and "The Restoration of Property," than other of his hundred or so books. But his "Path to Rome," to our mind was his greatest, the story of a pilgrimage made on foot to St. Peter's. His verses and sonnets, his essays on everything under the sun, show always his great zest and joy in life. He was the forerunner of our Ogden Nash, and his nonsense verse reminded one of Lewis Carrol. His interests took in the whole of life, and if we differed from him politically there were fundamental agreements that overcome any such differences. He was an apostle to this world, recognizing the importance and beauty of this 1ife, here and now, today and tomorrow; he was the layman always, dealing with the things of the lay world, and while he saw how wrong things were in man's world; he saw also how very good things were in God's world, and his gratitude to God was shown in his happiness and zest.

May he rest in peace.

Dorothy Day Library on the Web at http://www.catholicworker.org/dorothyday/

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Economic Personalism Is A Fraud: The Solution to Capitalism

by Louise and Mark Zwick

You don't have to be a genius to realize the failure of Marxism. Even before 1989 one could have realized that Marxist regimes were not built on Marxist ideologies and theory, but were built on the rather strange foundation of tens of millions of bodies of the proletariat who disagreed with the regime.

The foundation of the Marxist governments of Russia and China was two cemeteries.

Dorothy Day left the left. She realized as a young woman that the world's economic problems were not solved by socialism and Communism. She resigned from the left because of its lack of profundity after her World War I experience with socialists. (See Anne Klejment and Nancy Roberts, eds., American Catholic Pacifism, Praeger, 1996). Several years later, at the age of 30, she became Catholic, only to discover the papal encyclicals and personalism. Dorothy Day was influenced by great thinkers like Peter Maurin, Father Virgil Michel, O.S.B., Emmanuel Mounier, Leo XIII and Pius XI.

Early editions of The Catholic Worker are full of references to the popes and their writings.

Dorothy was neither a socialist nor a capitalist. She was a Christian personalist like the present pope. Dorothy made clear her goal in starting the newspaper in its first editorial: "In an attempt to popularize and make known the encyclicals of the popes and the program offered by the Church for the constructing of a social order, this news sheet was started."

CAPITALIST SUCCESS

You don't have to be a genius to realize the success of the global market. Twentieth- century capitalism has evolved into a system that is brilliant at creating new capital. Truly it is wealth creation at its best.

With the global market we have seen the global gross national product grow by 40%, even in the '70's and '80's.

ACHILLES HEEL

This pattern of great wealth creation, accompanied by great want, has long been the Achilles heel of modern capitalism.

The United Nations Development Program found that in 1996 the assets of the world's 358 billionaires exceeded the combined incomes of countries with 45% of the world's people (358 people would not fill St. Anne's Church in Houston in one sitting).

The U.N. declared that "Development that perpetuates today's inequalities is neither sustainable nor worth sustaining."

Unfortunately, the gap is accelerating. It is much worse. Houston Chronicle, "Outlook" section, Sept. 27, 1998)

CAPITALIST DOCTRINE AND THE CENTER FOR ECONOMIC PERSONALISM

Encouraged by this success, capitalists have shown an interest in a theology of wealth creation and have targeted students, seminarians, religious and professional leaders, paying their way to seminars and buying books for them, to form them in better understanding the free market economy and to encourage them to promote its growth.

Under the leadership of Father Robert Sirico, a center called the Acton Institute has been founded to guide people in the way of this new theology. More recently, the Acton Institute has developed what they call a Center for "Economic Personalism." While Fr. Sirico may be well-intentioned in trying to do good as a priest, he comes down on the side of those only interested in personal gain and profit. When his groups emphasizes liberty and creativity for capitalists, what they are defending turns out to be liberty and creativity only for a few.

Lord Acton, after whom the center was named, was the leader in the last century under the direction of Father Iguaz Von Dollinger in attacking the church's definition of infallibility in 1870, even after the decree was issued. Father Dollinger, his mentor, was excommunicated. Lord Acton felt that the Roman Pontiff can and ought to "reconcile himself to and agree with progress, liberalism (including economic liberalism i.e., laissez-faire capitalism) and modern civilization." (Syllabus of Errors) Lord Acton despised Pius IX and the Vatican and barely remained in the Church.

Lord Acton coined the famous phrase, "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." He was prophetic in his description of the global economy.

NEGLECT OF PAPAL TEACHING

It appears that the people at the Acton Institute have the same attitude towards the Vatican teaching as Lord Acton. They neglect completely the papal teaching on economics, except out-of-context references to Centesimus Annus. They quote the popes in their condemnation of socialism but omit their call for solidarity with the poor and for justice.

We are especially appalled, rather outraged, that they use the words "economic personalism," which for them really means individualism like the rugged individualism of the American frontier. What they describe is not the personalism of Emmanuel Mounier and Peter Maurin, which concentrates on respect for all persons and their vocations in life..

Fr. Sirico spent a semester at the London School of Economics. He recommends further dialogue between Personalism and free market economics, the Austrian, Chicago and Virginian schools (the authors attended the University of Chicago and know the Chicago school and Milton Friedman, a hero of Fr. Sirico).

CALVINIST ECONOMICS

The Acton Institute and the Center for Economic Personalism rely heavily on the teachings of John Calvin, who emphasized that the outward appearance of material comfort signified God's grace and approval. In Calvin's teaching and preaching, the poor were thought to be visibly damned.

Ads placed in both Catholic and Protestant journals feature the Acton Institute programs as a celebration of the legacy of Leo XIII and Abraham Kuyper, a neo-Calvinist, presenting the themes as "100 years of Christian social thought."

Unfortunately, their programs have precious little to do with the legacy of Pope Leo XIII, and are rather a distortion of it.

Fr. Sirico, endorsing this thinking, advertising the programs as a synthesis of Calvinist and Catholic thought, doesn't sound like he belongs to the same church as the Pope, who speaks so strongly about solidarity and the terrible gap between rich and poor and even suggested when he last visited Poland that some capitalists came close to excommunication because of the terrible injustices.

INTOLERABLE CONTRAST

On September 27, 1998, John Paul II, recalling the day's liturgical celebration of St. Vincent de Paul, drew our attention to "one of the great challenges which confronts our conscience, the truly intolerable contrast between that portion of mankind which enjoys every advantage of economic well-being and scientific progress and the enormous masses of those who live in conditions of extreme need."

The Holy Father added that, "in the strident contrast between the indifferent rich and the poor who need everything, God is on the side of the latter. It is not licit to resign ourselves to the immoral spectacle of a world in which there are still those who die of hunger, who do not have a home, who lack even the most basic education, who do not have the necessary help when they are ill, who cannot find work."

THE CEMETERY AGAIN: ECONOMIC PERSONALISM IS A FRAUD!

You don't have to be a genius to realize that the global economy (international free market) now solidly in control and flourishing, has been built on the bodies of Third World people who have worked for practically nothing to fill the coffers of First World companies. We meet these people every day at Casa Juan Diego. (See the Houston Catholic Worker, January 1998, "The Neediest and the Greediest," e.g., Wal-Mart, Disney, Nike, the May Company (Foley's), K-Mart, J.C. Penney, etc.)

The foundation of the tremendous success of these companies is slave wages.

Again, we have a very healthy economy built on a cemetery filled with poor workers who have died not with a bullet to the head or a firing squad but death from malnutrition, overwork, slave wages, poisoned water, inadequate housing or trying labor union organizing.

The global market has re-invented serfdom. Economic structures that should facilitate a better life and a better environment have facilitated slavery. A recent column in the Business section of the Houston Chronicle on the renewed need for labor unions exposed local chicken factories where workers must wear adult diapers because they are not allowed time off to go to the bathroom.

The devil of the industrial revolution of the 19th century has returned with seven more, worse than the first.

SUCCESS OF THE GLOBAL ECONOMY

Twentieth century capitalism has evolved into a system that is brilliant in creating wealthy capitalists, but very poor at expanding the number of capitalists. Even in the United States, where the economy is thriving, the net worth of the top one percent is now greater than that of the bottom 90 percent.

It is incredibly ironic that global free-market advocates would call their ideas economic personalism when, as William Greider reminds us, "In the global marketplace defined as free trade, everyone is free, it seems, but the people. Multinational enterprise can come and go from one market to the next, investors may insist upon terms for the use of their capital, governments may demand concessions in exchange for commercial opportunities. These contractual rights do not extend to the citizens, however" (William Greider, One World, Ready or Not: The Manic Logic of Global Capitalism, Simon and Schuster, 1997, p. 388).

When Fr. Sirico says that "Economic prosperity through free trade is the most effective distributor of wealth and power," ("The Public Square," First Things 75 (Aug./Sept. 1997) perhaps this terrible disparity is what he means.

HOW CAN THIS BE?

Emmanuel Mounier, father of modern Christian personalism, would be shocked by the falsity of the concept of economic personalism as expressed by the Acton Institute. Any personalism espoused by the Acton Institute is, by their description, a definition of individualism instead of personalism. Individualism is what Mounier called "personalism's dearest enemy." (Emmanuel Mounier, Personalism, Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 1952,)

Mounier understood the problem of neoconservatives who have never had to live in poverty or never had any contact with the poor: "Intellectuals unaccustomed to the crudity of certain realities, men of too great lesiure who do not understand the force of material constraints… forget that the initiatives of individual are embodied in institutions, both their short-comings and their determinisms, that new objects call for new knowledge. Such institutions, be they good or bad, always contain a menace of oppression for the person."

MOUNIER'S PERSONALISM

Mounier's blueprint for a personalist economy asks everyone to lay aside greed and materialism. It is in harmony with the Beatitudes:

"On the plane of individual ethics we believe that a certain kind of poverty is the ideal economic rule of personal life. But by poverty in this sense we do not mean an indiscreet asceticism or a shameful miserliness. We refer rather to a contempt for the material attachments that enslave, a desire for simplicity, a state of adaptability and freedom, which does not exclude magnificence or generosity, nor even some striving for riches, providing such endeavours are not avaricious.." (The Personalist Manifesto, Longmans, Green and Co., 1938p. 192).

Mounier felt that the biggest problem of modern capitalism has been proclaiming the primacy of economics over history, over the life of the people, over community, over living out one's faith and one's values. The "extreme importance attaching today to the economic problem among human preoccupation is a sign of social disease."

We can readily understand what Mounier means by the primacy of the economic when we think of the tremendous pressure brought upon people to buy and posssess things, live a certain life style and always reach for the highest level of comfort. Social consideration and display are priorities. Even among church people we must let the economic factor dominate or be considered odd. No one in the U.S. is unaware of what putting the primacy of economics in the medical field has done to the availability of good medical care to all.

CONTEMPT FOR WORKERS

You don't have to be a genius to realize the attitude of First World companies towards their Third World workers. It is clear by the amount of money paid to them-a few cents an hour.

We were very saddened recently when we heard a prominent theologian say that his brother who lives in Latin America says that it's great that the multinationals give jobs to these people, jobs they wouldn't otherwise have. The slave wages paid in Third World countries are even slave wages among slaves. To say that no other jobs exist except maquiladoras is to admit that the "structural adjustment" programs required by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank at the behest of the richer nations have created such economies in poor countries and are a complete failure.

Mounier felt that the system of factories "is based on contempt, conscious or implicit, of the laborer." He reminds us how this was expressed by one businessman, Taylor: "We don't ask you to think. There are others who have been paid to do that." The economics of the business world "tries completely to ignore the person and to organize itself for a single quantative and impersonal goal: profit."

According to Mounier, "profit recognizes no human criterion and no limits. If it does accept a criterion, it is that of the bourgeois values of comfort, social consideration and display, and it remains indifferent equally to economic well-being as such and to the good of the person it contacts." (p.180).

Mounier echoed the teachings of the popes on the primacy of labor over capital. He emphasized that profits do not have rights, but workers do. For many workers the invisible hand of the market had a knife in it.

JP II'S GREAT TRILOGY

Writing in the New Oxford Review in September 1998, and quoting Laborem Exercens, Rupert Ederer expresses these same concerns, pointing out that for Pope John Paul II, "the payment of the just wage is 'the concrete means of verifying the justice of the whole socioeconomic system….'" Ederer contends that "that proposition strikes at the very heart of liberal capitalism, in which labor is just a disposable commodity that is left to the mercy of the 'free market.'"

In a summary of Catholic social teaching of the last 100 years, Ederer emphasizes the great trilogy by John Paul II: Laborem Exercens (1981), Solicitudo Rei Socialis (1987) and Centesimus Annus (1991), stating that these three writings alone would be enough to earn him the title Doctor of the Church and that they "contain whatever critique is needed for confronting the dire consequences of our present return to Victorian capitalism and they offer us the moral principles according to which a saner social order can be constructed.

EMMANUEL MOUNIER AND JEFF GATES

It is very interesting to read The Personalist Manifesto, published in the 1930's, (brought to the United States by Peter Maurin, who persuaded the monks at St. John's Abbey to translate it), and find how exactly pertinent it is to today.

It is also fascinating to read Jeff Gates' The Ownership Solution (Addison Wesley, 1998), and discover so many of the same ideas-a writer today expressing Mounier's ideas about capital. Based on a decade of experience in developing worker ownership in ESOP's (Employee Stock Ownership Plans), advising companies and advising governments in twenty-five countries on involving workers in ownership, Gates' book is one of the best practical interpretations of modern papal social teaching.

WHAT IS OUR REAL RELIGION?

When Gates writes, "We are all now buffeted by a global economy in which key actors are encouraged, even mandated, to maximize financial returns in a worldwide auction of sorts in which financial values have become a substitute for the values of ethics, religion and community," and that "Money, not man, is fast becoming the measure of the common good" (The Ownership Solution, p. xxi.), he sounds very like Mounier.

When Gates names as worship, a "secular sanctification of market forces" the attitude people worldwide are developing toward financial returns, he reminds us again of Mounier, who understood that it was the lack of a "philosophy of life" which allowed people to accept the primacy of economics over all else. Mounier insisted that "the problem of economics cannot be solved independently of the political and the spiritual problems, to which it is intrinsi-cally subordinate" (p. 165).

INSTITUTIONS IN CONTROL, NOT PEOPLE

There has been a major change in capitalistic ownership, another facet of the growing concentration of wealth. "Almost half (47.4 percent) of all outstanding shares of U.S. corporations are now held by institutions. America's institutional insurance investors-pension funds, mutual funds, insurance companies, banks, foundations and university endowments held $11,100,00,000,000 ($11.1 trillion) in assets as of 1 July 1996."

As Gates points out, "Money management focused on maximizing financial returns is now new. What is new is the vast scale and the skyrocketing growth of contemporary 'disconnected' capital'"-money and investments totally unconnected to persons. (The Ownership Solution, p.2)

HOW COULD ALL THIS HAPPEN?

How could we, a people committed to opportunity for all, allow such terrible disparities between rich and poor to develop?

Gates' analysis is similar to Mounier's: capitalism as we know it has a very poor feedback system. The market is only interested in money. Its figures do not relate to human concerns.

MARIE ANTOINETTE CAPITALISM

Free market advocates try to give the impression that their system is open to all. Gates describes the reality for the person who does not already have large quantities of capital: "Policymakers routinely claim that capitalism is an 'open' system because anyone can purchase shares. It's a free market-anyone (i.e., anyone with money) can buy those new equities.

"Expecting a broad base of wage earners to buy their way into significant ownership (i.e., from their already stretched paychecks) is what I call 'Marie Antoniette Capitalism,' only instead of urging 'Let them eat cake,' the modern refrain is 'Let them buy shares.'" (The Ownership Solution, p. 23)



©Houston Catholic Worker, Vol. XVIII, No. 6, November 1998.

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Catholic Action - An Alternate View

by John Sharpe

In a recent article featured in The Remnant, Mr. Anger and a colleague have maintained that there is, circulating within some traditional Catholic circles, a false conception of Catholic Action. Insofar as part of Mr. Anger's thesis is substantiated by a hidden criticism of my organization, the Legion of St. Louis, I feel compelled to respond.

Mr. Anger covers a lot of ground in his article, but there are some common themes which we can identify in his critique. I wish to look in detail at three themes which are central to Mr. Anger's position.

Criticism 1: Catholics who like to speak of "action" and are energetic in proposing that Catholics focus on the Social Doctrine of the Church suffer from one or all of the following: the lack of a spiritual foundation for their activities, an insufficient emphasis on the supernatural, a failure to recognize that charity is the root of action, etc.

Insofar as any Catholic lacks charity, or lacks concern for his spiritual life, or tends to have confidence in his own merits and abilities without recognizing that those come solely from God, he is to be criticized. But the essence of Mr. Anger's thesis, generally, seems to be that Catholics who talk routinely about Social Action are obviously guilty of — or unintentionally suffer from — those defects. I submit to the reader that to assume so is flawed and inappropriate for a Catholic. This for several reasons:

(1) Judge not lest ye be judged. Mr. Anger's assumption is fundamentally judgmental: it passes judgment on the intentions of fellow Catholics, implying a judgment on the intentions of those who prefer to discuss action and are interested in finding an answer to the question, "What is to be done?" Mr. Anger's critique does not proceed according to this logic: "Mr. Jones never says his Rosary, he lets his children watch rated-R movies, he ignores the lives of the Saints, and constantly discusses armed insurrection." I would concede that such a hypothetical gentleman should be blamed; I wouldn't however concede that it should be the routine business of Catholics to seek out opportunities to pass judgments on our fellow Catholics' spiritual and personal lives. Rather Mr. Anger's line of argument seems to be that because some Catholics think that the problem — how can committed, convinced, sincere traditional Catholics affect their society and their temporal surroundings — is deserving of consideration, and because those Catholics are fond of pointing out how hard it is to save one's soul in a wholly anti-Catholic environment, they are by necessity lacking a Catholic conscience, and do not themselves possess a robust spiritual life. To so assume is unfair, unwarranted, and illogical.

The result of Mr. Anger's position would be to put all active-minded Catholic laymen in the position of having to broadcast, at every turn, how holy they are, how they remember that no action can succeed without a solid spiritual life, etc., etc. Such a mindset, applied to every other walk of life, would lead to absurdity. Can I go to work every day, in order to feed my family, without being accused of "activism" because I don't leave my families empty stomachs solely in God's hands? In order to avoid the accusation of "naturalism" or an ignorance of the supernatural, do I have to announce, on my way into my office or workshop, that "I FULLY RECOGNIZE THAT MY WORKS AND ABILITIES ARE COMPLETELY GIFTS OF GOD, AND THAT I WOULD ACHIEVE NOTHING WERE I NOT FILLED WITH CHARITY!" Such a notion is ridiculous, and it is also ridiculous to accuse those who prefer to take some action to stem the tide of our eroding civilization, of being essentially opposed to the working of God's supernatural Grace and Providence, simply because the action they propose is, in fact, active!

Jean Ousset points out, in a passage (which does not lend itself to criticism of these fabled "activists," and is therefore rarely cited) of his book Action, that God respects the causality of the world, and that He normally works not miracles but rather allows events to unfold according to the processes of history and time and human relations which He has established — a notion that demands that if we want results, after we have said our prayers, we must act.

Things have indeed gone so far that if the Revolution were to triumph tomorrow, its triumph would be merited. For two hundred and fifty years (reckoned from the foundation of Freemasonry in 1717) the Revolution's waves of assaults have followed one after another, tirelessly renewed, ever more ingenious, shrewd and efficacious. It can therefore be truly said that the Revolution has merited its conquest of the world. Its cadres have known how to fight and how to persist; how to expend their efforts obstinately — and also how to open their purses when necessary...

Far from manifesting a lack of divine justice, the constant progress of Subversion shows how God respects the causality of the world He has made, by not denying the normal fruit of their labours even to the impious. For if it is true, as Psalm III declares, that "the desire of sinners shall perish," it does not follow that their inescapable divine chastisement should be to the advantage of that army which has not fought, of those "Sons of Light" who have not shone, of the "good people" (as they think themselves) about whom Pius X has not hesitated to say that through their idleness and cowardice they are, more than all others, the sinews of Satan's reign.

While Mr. Anger accuses the Catholic "activists" of forgetting supernatural charity, of turning Catholic Action into an "alternative radicalism" which operates solely on the natural and political planes, I would point out to him that a completely different interpretation of the same facts is possible, and more rational. In his magnum opus, Fr. Denis Fahey quotes a famous passage from Cardinal Journet; this passage explains both the beginning and the end of the motivation behind our discussion of action for the restoration of Christendom:

When the organization of the world is out of harmony with the supernatural end of man, scarcely anybody except the saints and martyrs can avoid mortal sin and abide in charity. But when the organization of the world is adjusted to the demands of the Divine Life of souls, then thousands of Christians can live and die in the love of God. They are strong enough to accomplish their duty in the company of others and to perform acts of heroic virtue at certain exceptional moments, but they would have been too weak to breast the frightful anti-supernatural current of a perverted naturalistic world. Charity, then, urges us to strive for the restoration of a Christian temporal order (emphasis mine).

(2) Action vs. prayer. Mr. Anger's position seems to be based upon a presumed dichotomy between action and contemplation. The assumption seems to be that to discuss action is to devalue prayer. That to suggest action is to discourage prayer. That to emphasize the need for action is to implicitly de-emphasize the need for prayer. Such an implication is also illogical, unfair, and unprovable.

Many of my friends and colleagues, who are fond of discussing a Catholic's role in the social order, routinely refer to the fact that a life of grace and spirituality should flower into action, that contemplation should lead to a practical application of the truth that one possesses. My position, and the position of those who I know who advocate Catholic Action, is the following: to suggest otherwise — to maintain that discussions of action are inherently anti-spiritual, and to conceive of a robust and healthy Faith which is not displayed and incarnated in action in the physical, temporal, socio-political world of daily life — is to condemn Catholics to a religious schizophrenia: it is to demand that Catholics make a special effort to avoid discussions of applying their Faith to the temporal order. Such an implication is, obviously, unhistorical and contrary to the teaching of the Church and the constant practice of Her faithful.1

(3) The operation of charity. Mr. Anger's position is perhaps a root of his misuse of the little word "by." He says, in the first paragraph of his article, that works of Catholic Action in the temporal order are accomplished by supernatural charity. The Thomistic position, the common-sense position, is, of course, that all actions properly performed by a Catholic are motivated and informed by charity, insofar as all actions are supposed to conduce ultimately to man's achievement of his last end, which is the Vision of God (Summa Theologica, II, ii, Q 23, Art. 7). So any time I perform any action which is moral, the action approaches perfection insofar as it is a means to my ultimate end, which is the attainment of Heaven. Thus my actions are inspired by, or motivated by, or, as St. Thomas puts it (II, ii, Q. 23, Art. 8) informed by charity; for this reason does he call charity the form of the virtues. But by suggesting that the works of Catholic Action are accomplished by supernatural charity, implying almost that charity itself is an action, Mr. Anger seems to suggest that works which are directly supernatural or have a strictly supernatural aim (such as prayer, fasting, sacrifice, etc., which have as their direct aim the sanctification of souls, rather than temporal activity which pursues man's last end indirectly) are the real or essential works of Catholic Action. Thus those who emphasize that Catholic Action is composed, principally, of social or temporal activities are somehow wrong and guilty of putting the cart before the horse.

This error is a significant one. Not only does it provide the basis for his implication that those who talk of action are anti-spiritual and misconstrue Catholic Action, but it seems to miss the entire point of the Church's Social doctrine, which we will review in brief.

Catholics like myself who are concerned with what Catholic laymen can do to salvage and restore the temporal order are motivated by a desire to help the temporal order serve the purpose for which it was ordained. Few of us are called to the cloistered religious life; most of us work out our salvation in the world, and our chances of attaining Heaven are affected greatly by what kind of world it is. This is Cardinal Journet's point. It is also Pius XI's point when he says that "...it is not rash by any means to say that the whole scheme of social and economic life is now such as to put in the way of vast numbers of mankind most serious obstacles which prevent them from caring for the one thing necessary; namely, their eternal salvation" (Quadragesimo Anno, 130). This follows from the fact that the temporal order was ordained by God as the milieu, ambience, or forum in which the majority of men are to work out their salvation. The Social Reign of Christ and the indirect authority of the Church over temporal affairs are based wholly upon this idea. St. Thomas lays out the fundamentals as follows:

Since the beatitude of heaven is the end of that virtuous life which we live at present, it pertains to the king's office to promote the good life of the multitude in such a way as to make it suitable for the attainment of heavenly happiness, that is to say he should command those things which lead to the happiness of Heaven and, as far as possible, forbid the contrary (On Kingship, 115).

This was repeated some 600 years later by Pope Leo XIII:

...civil society, established for the common welfare, should not only safeguard the well-being of the community, but have also at heart the interests of its individual members, in such mode as not in any way to hinder, but in every manner to render as easy as may be, the possession of that highest and unchangeable good for which all should seek.2

Therefore, the preoccupation that some Catholics have (myself included) regarding the nature and makeup of the social order is wholly rational and defensible. And to propose to remedy the situation by an efficacious application of the Church's Social Doctrine, through the concerted efforts of men correctly formed with the Church's Teaching on politics, economics, and society, seems not anti-supernatural, but rather overwhelmingly supernatural, since it implies a willingness to labor and to sacrifice so that all of us may more securely proceed to our eternal destiny. Such, at any rate, is the teaching of the Church.

(4) The two swords. Lastly, Mr. Anger's suggestion that the "activists" are necessarily anti- (or insufficiently) supernatural or spiritual seems to violate a principle which he expresses elsewhere in his article: the necessity of distinguishing between the spiritual and temporal powers. Those who take it upon themselves to discuss with other laymen the need for study and action in the area of the Social Doctrine are rightly reminded that they should nourish and encourage robust spiritual lives; consciousness of that spiritual duty, however, does not make them retreat-masters. The avoidance of dishing out volumes spiritual advice by those who propose social and cultural action seems to me to be a sign of wisdom: an understanding that there is a whole class of individuals more properly equipped and divinely appointed to do just that: the clerics. Failure to lecture one's fellow laymen on the spiritual life — barring the admitted usefulness of casual and informal discussions, periodic "reminders," and clear statements of understanding that the spiritual life is essential — can hardly be a smoking gun which reveals a hidden desire to spread a heretical activism and encourage ignorance of the spiritual life. It is, rather, a display of a proper respect for the division of the two powers, temporal and spiritual, and a wholly appropriate humility in not nit-picking the details of a fellow layman's personal habits by which he strives to save his soul.

To summarize: it is logical to contemplate the use of temporal means to achieve a temporal end. If we are hungry, we eat, not pray. We pray before we eat, just like we should pray before going into a battle of any kind (intellectual, physical, etc.). But to suggest that going into battle is anti-spiritual or anti-supernatural because it is not only supernatural is as ridiculous as suggesting that eating is anti-supernatural because it is not wholly spiritual. One may be permitted to wonder what degree of spirituality need be on display to satisfy the critics that Catholics interested in action do not therefore despise prayer ("O God, I give thee thanks that I am not as the rest of men..." St. Luke, xviii:2).

Criticism 2. People who demand that Catholics rouse themselves to action are simply seeking an "alternative radicalism" and an outlet for shady or inappropriate political activities, motivated by an "anti-government" spirit.

Under this criticism come two points which should be tackled separately: (1) the "activists" criticize the modern world too much, and dwell to heavily on its evils (which are always present in every era anyway), and thus they (2) tend to develop an anti-government mentality.

(1) The evils of the modern world. It seems rather meaningless to suggest that there is evil in every era of history, due to original sin, and that we therefore shouldn't get excited about it. Firstly, this omits the crucial point, which as we noted above is the essence of the Church's Social Doctrine, that the shape of society has a large bearing on man's ability to concern himself with saving his soul. Insofar as evil has always been in the world, since the Fall, it is not correct (by any means) to say that the social order has always, to more or less the same degree, condoned and permitted this evil. Leo XIII taught quite the contrary:

There was once a time when States were governed by the philosophy of the Gospel. Then it was that the power and divine virtue of Christian wisdom had diffused itself throughout the laws, institutions, and morals of the people, permeating all ranks and relations of civil society. Then, too, the religion instituted by Jesus Christ, established firmly in befitting dignity, flourished everywhere, by the favor of princes and the legitimate protection of magistrates; and Church and State were happily united in concord and friendly interchange of good offices. The State, constituted in this wise, bore fruits important beyond all expectation, whose remembrance is still, and always will be, in renown, witnessed to as they are by countless proofs which can never be blotted out or ever obscured by any craft of any enemies.3

Now, we may be able to debate, amicably and constructively, what means are best instituted to restore society to such a condition, but to suggest that the Social Doctrine is not in more vital need of implementation today then in times past is to state an untruth. Yes, Archbishop Levebvre did remind us we can err in the pursuit of virtue; and those errors should be avoided like every other error. But this same Archbishop wrote an entire book lamenting the social and public dethronement of Christ the King, in which he said that "Our Lord wants souls to be saved, doubtless indirectly, but effectively, through a Christian civil society, fully submissive to the Gospel, which lends itself to His redeeming design, which will be the temporal instrument for this." 4 No doubt Cardinal Pie, the 19th-century Bishop of Poitiers and anti-liberal crusader, who called the dethronement of Christ a crime against which "we should never cease to protest," would have objected to the notion that we should tone-down our objection to the modern world's apostasy and its essential incompatibility with the Faith.

I am all in favor of keeping our denunciations rational, balanced, and tactful. But I know of no advocate of an "active" (as opposed to one strictly "spiritual") Catholic Action that would object to those limitations. Perhaps where I differ with Mr. Anger is in my assessment that still today, within the ranks of traditional Catholicism, I am apt to run into any number of people who seem to think that having a Mass to attend, food to eat, and a "9 to 5" job, means that, all in all, things are great. Not that those aren't things to be grateful for. By all means they are. But such a mentality — with which it is certainly possible to use the Faith and the sacraments to struggle towards Heaven — tends to encourage a Catholic schizophrenia which separates the religious and personal life that one can eke out at home, from the public and social life that one is forced to live outside it. We "activists" are accused of wanting to isolate ourselves from society, of wanting to adopt a "survivalist" mentality, and yet I can imagine no mindset which is better calculated to produce disembodied Catholics, which are cut off from the realities of the world, than that which insists on a naïve "focus on the positive" kind of attitude. Because almost every aspect of society with which we come into contact on a day to day basis is radically out of order in light of the Divine Plan, and is almost incomprehensible to a Catholic absent a serious study of both "what's wrong with the world" and what would make it right. I can imagine no better way to fail in preparing our children to eventually face, understand, and react to the realities of a world outside the Catholic home which is anti-Catholic, perverse, and radically incompatible with the Christian notion of society, than to discourage a critical and honest assessment of our modern society.

Too extreme? Leo XIII called the rejection of Christ after having known Him, a crime that was both "foul" and "insane" (Tametsi, 3). The depravity of a world that had as a whole rejected Christ was even in his day well known by Catholics, though he didn't hesitate to say that the fact was "not sufficiently realized or thought about" (3). Nor did he hesitate to paint modern governments as "deceitful imitations" of government when they ignored God while managing affairs of state:

If, then, a political government strives after external advantages only, and the achievement of a cultured and prosperous life; if, in administering public affairs, it is wont to put God aside, and show no solicitude for the upholding of moral law, it deflects woefully from its right course and from the injunctions of nature; nor should it be accounted as a society or a community of men, but only as the deceitful imitation or appearance of a society (Sapientia Christianae (1890), 2).

Within traditional Catholic circles, one can find apologists for Austrian (read liberal) economics, enemies of the widespread distribution of property, apologists for the U.S. government's lawless "war on terror," and a host of others who, no doubt with the best of intentions, defend positions, behaviors, and aspects of the modern world which are indefensible when judged against, to use Ousset's phrase, the natural and Christian law. All of these things are not only contrary to the temporal common good of modern nations, but they also militate against the spirit which should prevail within society — that spirit which, as we have noted, is supposed to be a help toward salvation. Modern capitalism tells the citizen that the purpose of life is profit; it ensures that man remains a perpetual employee, rather than helping him to become an owner, which would allow him to flourish not as a robot but as a laborer imbued with the Catholic spirit of work. The foreign policy of the most powerful government in the world is without scruple in its willingness to kill and maim to maintain that system along with the corresponding liberal ideology. Is it really heretical "naturalism" or "activism" which leads some Catholics to denounce vigorously the social manifestation of intellectual errors which contravene the natural law and oppose the tenets of the Faith — errors which Pius XI referred to as "social and juridical modernism," and which he condemned "no less decidedly" than religious modernism?

The anti-liberal crusaders of the late 19th-century didn't seem to have many scruples about denouncing error in the most vigorous of terms — and it is well-known that many of the chief errors of those days were in fact the same socio-political misconceptions that we moderns suffer from. Here is one representative voice:

There is then no sin against charity in calling evil evil, its authors, abettors and disciples bad; all its acts, words and writings iniquitous, wicked, malicious...

If the propagation of good and the necessity of combating evil require the employment of terms somewhat harsh against error and its supporters, this usage is certainly not against charity. This is a corollary or consequence of the principle we have just demonstrated. We must render evil odious and detestable. We cannot attain this result without pointing out the dangers of evil, without showing how and why it is odious, detestable and contemptible. Christian oratory of all ages has ever employed the most vigorous and emphatic rhetoric in the arsenal of human speech against impiety. In the writings of the great athletes of Christianity the usage of irony, imprecation, execration and of the most crushing epithets is continual. Hence the only law is the opportunity and the truth.

But there is another justification for such an usage. Popular propagation and apologetics cannot preserve elegant and constrained academic forms. In order to convince the people we must speak to their heart and their imagination which can only be touched by ardent, brilliant, and impassioned language. To be impassioned is not to be reprehensible, when our heat is the holy ardor of truth.

...St. John the Baptist calls the Pharisees "race of vipers," Jesus Christ, our Divine Savior, hurls at them the epithets "hypocrites, whitened sepulchers, a perverse and adulterous generation" without thinking for this reason that He sullies the sanctity of His benevolent speech. St. Paul criticizes the schismatic Cretins (110) as "always liars, evil beasts, slothful bellies." The same apostle calls Elymas the magician "seducer, full of guile and deceit, child of the Devil, enemy of all justice."

...What shall we say of St. John Chrysostom? His famous invective against Eutropius is not comparable, in its personal (111) and aggressive character, to the cruel invectives of Cicero against Catiline and against Verres! The gentle St. Bernard did not honey his words when he attacked the enemies of the faith. Addressing Arnold of Brescia, the great Liberal agitator of his times, he calls him in all his letters "seducer, vase of injuries, scorpion, cruel wolf."

The pacific St. Thomas of Aquinas forgets the calm of his cold syllogisms when he hurls his violent apostrophe against William of St. Amour and his disciples: "Enemies of God," he cries out, "ministers of the Devil, members of AntiChrist, ignorami, perverts, reprobates!" Never did the illustrious Louis Veuillot speak so boldly.

Thus speaks the eminent Fr. Felix Sarda y Salvany, in Liberalism is a Sin, Chapter 20.

(2) The "anti-government" spirit. From the willingness of certain Catholics to remind their fellows of the evils of modern society, and of how and where that society fails to live up to what the Church demands, supposedly follows a spirit of disobedience and lawlessness toward lawful authority: the dreaded "anti-government" spirit.

Evidence of this spirit is apparently found in the desire of some Catholics to isolate themselves from the mainstream, to more easily preserve their Faith and minimize the influence of anti-Catholic society. Fr. Sarda seems to think that this is not a bad idea: "The first thing to do in an infected country is to isolate oneself, and if this is not possible, take all sanitary precautions against the deadly germ. Spiritual health is always endangered whenever we come into contact with Liberalism, and infection is almost certain if we neglect those precautions which prudence suggests" (Chapter 17, Liberalism is a Sin). In this country of allegedly un-precedented personal freedoms, is it not licit and wholly allowable under positive law to buy a plot of land away from the immorality, the smog, and the cable TV of the modern suburbs? Are we to expect that the Amish will be massacred or rounded up for their refusal to play the "suburban" game? And if they were, would it be their own fault for not capitulating to WalMart and rock music? Such a "Flee to the Fields" may not be an approach that suits everyone, but insofar as everyone from Richard Weaver to Mgr. Williamson to Archbishop Levebvre to Fr. Fahey to Fr. Vincent McNabb and more have praised initiatives, either speculative or practical, to return the modern family to the land, what grounds is there for suspecting of subversion and rebellion the men who contemplate this as a possible course of action? Such a suspicion, I submit, is unfair, unfounded, and untenable.

A final point under this heading would be that the government in this country, as in so many others, falls so short of the ideal on even the natural order, let alone the supernatural, that some degree of "angst," "distrust," "dissatisfaction," and "suspicion" would seem to be wholly justified. It is natural for a man, who is vir — a real man insofar as he is virtuous, to be aroused to anger at the sight of injustice. Such anger in no way implies a refusal to obey legitimate authority, or a lack of prudence in cooperating with that authority even when it is illegitimate. As Cardinal Ottaviani pointed out, the liveliness of Christians is best measured by the intensity of their reaction to injustice:

The frequency and power of crime have blunted Christian sensibility, even alas! among Christians. Not only as men, but as Christians, they do not react, do not leap to their feet. How can they feel themselves to be Christians if they are insensitive to the wounds which are being inflicted on Christianity. Life shows its existence by the sensation of pain, by the vivacity (an expressive word) by which it reacts to a wound, by the promptness and vigor of the reaction. In the midst of rottenness and decomposition there is no reaction (quoted by Ousset in Action).

To demand that Catholics turn off their natural and healthy instincts to oppose and abhor injustice when they see it, their desire to root out corruption and abuse from the civil order, and to replace it — lawfully and legitimately — with justice, mercy, and competence is to once again condemn them to a fantasy land of the utopian Catholic home full of a potential army of recruits for Catholic Action who are potentially doomed to entering the public sphere without a coherent vision both of what they want, and of what they don't want.

Criticism 3: Catholic Action is not political.

The last of Mr. Anger's major objections to an "active" Catholic Action seems to be based on the notion that Catholic Action should not seek to achieve its aims based on temporal, political activity, but on a supernatural or spiritual activity. This criticism is not altogether clear, however, for it is never stated quite as simply as we have summarized it. There are several possible interpretations, all of which warrant responses.

(1) A lack of supernatural perspective? If his complaint is that the active-minded men who are attracted to Catholic Action for its potential to engage and transform the social order tend to see things with a strictly temporal or natural — as opposed to spiritual or supernatural — viewpoint, then the answer is that if this were true, it is a valid point; but I don't think that it is true. All serious Catholics know that life is a mysterious mixture of Divine Providence and free will, and that Divine Providence will not magically drop into our laps what we might have accomplished through His power by using our free wills. Sr. Lucia knew that: "Prayer does not dispense from action." St. Pius X knew it, for he deplored the "cowardice and weakness of good men." 5 Jean Ousset knew it. Serious Catholics know, furthermore, as a matter of Faith, that whenever they do a good work, it is Christ that works through them, and God is responsible for having accomplished it. To accuse a Catholic of not believing that is to accuse him of heresy. That's an accusation which is not to be made lightly, and in this case I think it's an accusation that doesn't stick.

(2) Action in the temporal order. If the complaint is, rather, that some men believe that Catholic Action is essentially concerned with the implementation of the Social Doctrine of the Church in society through action in the temporal order, then I would personally plead guilty — maintaining meanwhile that such a charge is really no charge at all. For while in a general way Catholic Action "does not exclude anything, in any manner, direct or indirect, which pertains to the divine mission of the Church," 6 it is more accurate to define Catholic Action as St. Pius X himself has defined it:

...you clearly see, Venerable Brethren, the services rendered to the Church by those chosen bands of Catholics who aim to unite all their forces in combating anti Christian civilization by every just and lawful means. They use every means in repairing the serious disorders caused by it. They seek to restore Jesus Christ to the family, the school and society by re-establishing the principle that human authority represents the authority of God. They take to heart the interests of the people, especially those of the working and agricultural classes, not only by inculcating in the hearts of everybody a true religious spirit (the only true fount of consolation among the troubles of this life) but also by endeavoring to dry their tears, to alleviate their sufferings, and to improve their economic condition by wise measures. They strive, in a word, to make public laws conformable to justice and amend or suppress those which are not so. Finally, they defend and support in a true Catholic spirit the rights of God in all things and the no less sacred rights of the Church.

All these works, sustained and promoted chiefly by lay Catholics and whose form varies according to the needs of each country, constitute what is generally known by a distinctive and surely a very noble name: "Catholic Action," or the "Action of Catholics." 7

It should be obvious from the above that Catholic Action refers, in its specific sense, to the activities of the laity to shape society according to the dictates of the Faith — to the restoration of "Christian civilization in each and every one of the elements composing it;" 8 to making "public laws conformable to justice and amend[ing] or suppress[ing] those which are not so;" to "combating anti-Christian civilization by every just and lawful means."

A modern, orthodox cleric has defended this interpretation. In a conference on "Supplied Jurisdiction and Traditional Priests," 9 Mgr. Tissier de Mallerais has pointed out that works which are "a participation in the priestly ministry on the part of the laity" do not constitute "a movement of Catholic Action in the strict sense of the word." He goes on to say that "Catholic Action understood as a work of the laity in the temporal order, so as to bring about the reign of Christian social principles in the State...is this which St. Pius X strove especially to promote, and which can be called Catholic Action in the strict sense of the term" (emphasis mine).

Finally, it is worth noting in passing that Ousset's book Action, an authority on the subject of Catholic Action which Mr. Anger evidently recognizes, is essentially and only about action in the temporal order.

(3) The authority of the clergy. Related to Mr. Anger's notion of Catholic Action as an apostolate "fundamentally religious" is his reminder that the authority of the clergy over the action of the laity must not be considered as "insignificant" or "optional." True enough.

Though there can be no doubt that misconceptions of Catholic Action will lead to misconceptions of clerical authority. Those who fail to see Catholic Action the way Mr. Anger does (in the properly "spiritual" light), will no doubt merit the criticism that they do not sufficiently respect clerical authority. That a continuum of action and authority (i.e., spiritual vs. temporal action, corresponding to direct vs. indirect authority) exists is attested to by Mgr. Tissier de Mallerais: the more strictly "spiritual" an activity is, the more directly it falls under the direct supervision and control of the hierarchy; the more "temporal" it is, the more "tenuous" is the link with the clergy.10 But it is worth noting that the definitions above, given by both St. Pius X and the Bishop, clearly indicate that Catholic Action refers to the temporal activity of the laity to implement Christian Social Principles in the State. While the statement of Ousset that Mr. Anger cites is no doubt true — that the Christian layman has "an imperative duty to follow the teaching of the spiritual power of the Church," it is no less true that, again according to Ousset, "the priest's essential task is to teach sound doctrine, not to implement it."

The point is that if laymen share Mgr. Tissier's conviction that Catholic Action strictly speaking refers to the action of laymen to implement the Church's Social Doctrine in society, they are not to be condemned. Nor should they be condemned for holding a view that logically follows from that definition: that they should be left with a degree of freedom to develop programs for the implementation of that doctrine in the temporal order, subject of course to judgment of its conformity with Christian principles. For, as Bishop Guerry pointed out in his 1961 Social Doctrine of the Church:

Christians must apply themselves, under their own responsibility, to political, economic, and social analyses and draw their conclusions with a view to action. The social teaching of the Church is not a ready-made program which has only to be applied. Christians still have to work out a program of action which, while it refers to this doctrine, will imply ideas and applications which are the complete responsibilities of the laity.11

(4) Politics vs. parties. Mr. Anger correctly states that Catholic Action does not concern itself with party politics, but he seems to downplay the fact that it is concerned with fostering the temporal common good of the State according to Christian principles; to the restoration of "Christian civilization in each and every one of the elements composing it;" to "preparing men to act as good politicians, to work for the common good according to right principles." Accomplishing such a task demands that men become active politically, though such activity does not, obviously, imply that the Church will sanction this or that political party — this is what is meant by the notion "Catholic Action is not political." Pope Pius XI says this exactly in the passage that Mr. Anger also quoted, but including the sections that he left out:

Catholic Action is on a plane above and outside any political party. It does not intend to advance the political ideas of a party nor is it a political party. Catholics have nevertheless understood that this does not mean that they should take no interest in politics, when by politics is meant the common good in opposition to individual and particular goods...Catholic Action, while not engaging in party politics, aims at preparing men to act as good politicians, to work for the common good according to right principles...Thus, consequently, not only does Catholic Action not prevent individual Catholics from engaging in political action in order to promote the common welfare, but it imposes upon them the duty of so doing, for it obliges them to intervene in politics with a more enlightened conscience and a clearer grasp of the issues at stake (emphasis mine).12

Fr. Fahey makes the same point with his usual clarity:

Catholics must endeavor to assimilate and promote the realization of Catholic political and economic doctrine: that is the province of Catholic Action. But in order to bring about the realization of Catholic political teaching, they must nearly always enter into a political party and help to direct and guide it: in that they act on their own responsibility, except, of course, the Church commands Catholics to adopt a certain attitude in a political affair, because of a morally necessary connection with the good of souls.13

***
A personal digression — the Legion of St. Louis. Under the guise of making his point that Catholic Action is not political, Mr. Anger attacks a statement which occurs in the Vision statement of my Legion of St. Louis. I respond publicly to his criticism because he has at no time initiated a private correspondence on this issue which would have given me the opportunity to respond privately.

His issue is with my use, in the Legion's Vision statement, of the phrase "prudent yet real ideological and political war," a phrase which results from allegedly "blurry thinking" and "naïveté."

(1) The Legion does not claim to be an "officially sanctioned" organization of Catholic Action, so whether or not its statement of vision is consistent with the teaching of the Church on Catholic Action in the strict sense has little to do with whether or not Catholic men are permitted to join hands with us to fight the social and intellectual fight for a healthier, more Catholic society. Ousset's observations (in Action) on that point are germane, and are no doubt known to Mr. Anger given his familiarity with that excellent work:

What then is our sphere of action as lay people? What are our rights concerning action in the temporal sphere? Have we a right to engage in it without a "mandate," without being under the direction of the clergy?

The truth is that an ecclesiastical mandate is unnecessary to allow a layman to exercise a right, still less to accomplish an elementary duty of his life as a layman, such as to marry, bring up children, practice a profession, play his part as a citizen or serve his country in a Christian fashion. It would be quite monstrous to suggest that his being a Christian should result in the restriction of a person's freedom to exercise his rights and comply with his most elementary duties as a Christian.

If the Legion is "political" in Mr. Anger's eyes, that may make it "off-limits" for Catholics with his particular vision of Catholic Action; it would remain, however, a licit vehicle through which Catholics can take action in defense of what remains of Christian society.

(2) An examination of the facts reveals, however, that the Legion is very much organized in a way consistent with the teaching of the Church on Catholic Action. As we have noted, Catholic Action strictly speaking refers to the activities of the laity in the temporal order for the implementation of Catholic Social Doctrine. The Legion is political insofar as it works for an objective intimately connected with the temporal common good of the nation: "the permeation of society with the Faith, the molding of the Social Order according to Catholic Truth, and the reestablishment of temporal authority in its proper place in submission to, not triumph over, Our Lord" (from the Vision Statement). This aim is obviously consistent with Mgr. Tissier's notion of Catholic Action as "a work of the laity in the temporal order, so as to bring about the reign of Christian social principles in the State," and it falls under the goal which Fr. Fahey called "the province of Catholic Action": "to assimilate and promote the realization of Catholic political and economic doctrine."

If Mr. Anger took the term "politics" in the statement which he quoted ("prudent yet real ideological and political war") as a reference to partisan or party struggles, he must have missed (unintentionally, no doubt) the footnote which is printed with the Vision Statement, and which references the term "political" as follows: "(1) By 'political' we mean public and social, not participation in our modern two-party farce." So "political" is a simple adjective which indicates that our combat is for the social order, for the public good. Not political insofar as political means partisan or attached to a party. Mr. Anger obviously missed that fact.

(3) Mr. Anger also objects to my use of the term "ideological," as implying anti-Catholic and Revolutionary notions. The context in which such a phrase is used should dispel any doubt, but perhaps even more relevant is the fact that we use the word in the most common way for common Catholics. Webster's says that an "ideology" is "a systematic body of concepts, esp. about human life or culture" and "the integrated assertions, theories, and aims that constitute a socio-political program." It cannot be denied that Catholics have a clear notion of the purpose of life on earth, along with a socio-political program to implement, in order to make society conform to that purpose. Thus it is that we refer to an "ideological" struggle, for our efforts are nothing other than to make the program of the Catholic Church, the complete and integral Divine Plan for Order, as Fr. Fahey called it, better known, more thoroughly understood, and more deeply appreciated by Catholics and men of good will, that it might ultimately rise over its "ideological opponents" and impart its character and tone to the organization of society.

(4) A final point. Insofar as priestly guidance is necessary, at least indirectly, for Catholics in Catholic Action, I merely point out that Mr. Anger has not the slightest idea what kind of clerical oversight the Legion possesses, and is grossly out of line in suggesting that we are "lacking priestly guidance." This is yet another hint of the tendency to be "judgmental" when it is hardly called for.

***
There are literally millions of Catholics who could today bring their Catholicism to bear on public life; that they don't do so is not a new but rather an old problem. It was a problem for the Bishop of Poitiers, who asked rhetorically, "What is the explanation of the fact that so much charity, so much activity, so much self-sacrifice are so ineffectual and produce so little fruit in regard to the amelioration of public affairs?" He answered his own question, lamenting that,

in regard to public affairs and social order, the faithful and, in too many cases, the priests of our generation have thought that even in a Christian country, a sort of neutral attitude towards the Catholic faith could be adopted, as if Our Lord Jesus Christ had never come or had disappeared from the world...

"If we have not succeeded," he continued, "in triumphing over the revolutionary spirit which makes us a spectacle for other peoples, the evil which is sapping our strength and leading us to the tomb is that while we have the faith in private we have accepted our share of national infidelity." 14

The saintly pope who so admired Cardinal Pie himself complained of "the easy-going weakness of Catholics" which was, he said, responsible for "all the vigor of Satan's reign," 15 making it likely that he would not have objected at all to the idea that Catholics "really need to know" the Social Doctrine, in spite of Mr. Anger's assumption to the contrary. At any rate, in 1945 Pius XII said that no one can ignore the Social Teachings without danger to Faith and Morals, and the French Hierarchy declared nine years later that "one of the gravest deficiencies of the present day is the underestimation or ignorance of the social teaching of the Church." 16

We would be hard pressed to say that things have improved since 1954. But things might, if, by God's grace, we not only believe our Faith and practice our Faith, but apply it, whole and entire, to the myriad of problems we see around us. I leave the reader with the entire inspiring passage (of which Mr. Anger gave us merely certain portions) from St. Pius X, in which he details the attributes and the spirit of the true Catholic crusader: a spirit necessary to overcome the numerous difficulties of a life of Catholic Action:

...one must have divine grace, and the apostle receives it only if he is united to Christ. Only when he has formed Jesus Christ in himself shall he more easily be able to restore Him to the family and society. Therefore, all who are called upon to direct or dedicate themselves to the Catholic cause, must be sound Catholics, firm in faith, solidly instructed in religious matters, truly submissive to the Church and especially to this supreme Apostolic See and the Vicar of Jesus Christ. They must be men of real piety, of manly virtue, and of a life so chaste and fearless that they will be a guiding example to all others. If they are not so formed it will be difficult to arouse others to do good and practically impossible to act with a good intention. The strength needed to persevere in continually bearing the weariness of every true apostolate will fail. The calumnies of enemies, the coldness and frightfully little cooperation of even good men, sometimes even the jealousy of friends and fellow workers (excusable, undoubtedly, on account of the weakness of human nature, but also harmful and a cause of discord, offense and quarrels) — all these will weaken the apostle who lacks divine grace. Only virtue, patient and firm and at the same time mild and tender, can remove or diminish these difficulties in such a way that the works undertaken by Catholic forces will not be compromised. The will of God, Saint Peter wrote the early Christians, is that by your good works you silence the foolish. "For such is the will of God, that by doing good you should put to silence the ignorance of foolish men."

©Seattle Catholic
December 13, 2002

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