On the prophetic anarchy of Dorothy Day

Day’s “politics” is as a politics of anti-centralization that opposes the Leviathan of the outsized, modern centralized State and the bureaucratic apparatus that imposes itself with ever greater force upon all of us.

Dorothy Day, co-founder of the Catholic Worker Movement and its newspaper, The Catholic Worker, is depicted in a stained-glass window at Our Lady of Lourdes Church in the Staten Island borough of New York. (CNS photo/Gregory A. Shemitz)

The bigger the unit you deal with, the hollower, the more brutal, the more mendacious is the life displayed. So I am … against all big successes and big results; and in favor of the eternal forces of truth which always work in the individual in an immediately unsuccessful way, underdogs always, till history comes, after they are long dead, and puts them on the top. – William James (The Letters of William James, vol. 2, Atlantic Monthly Press, 1920, p. 90)

I do not normally write on political matters since political theory is out of my wheelhouse and the various issues involved often incite more heat than light. Nevertheless, the international political, economic, and cultural crises created by the ongoing fallout from the COVID pandemic, mass immigration and the social unrest this creates, and now war again in Europe, have prompted in my mind a scattershot flow of ideas related to Dorothy Day’s political views.

I think they are worthy of discussion because I think her ideas are more relevant today than they were even in her own time. Chief among those ideas is the well-known fact that Dorothy was, by her own description, an “anarchist”. The problem, however, is that the term “anarchist” can mean a hundred different things to a hundred different people and often conjures up an image of lawlessness and libertarian antinomianism. However, this is not what Dorothy Day meant as I hope to show in what follows.

The best way to describe Dorothy’s “politics” is as a politics of anti-centralization that opposes the Leviathan of the outsized, modern centralized State and the bureaucratic apparatus that imposes itself with ever greater force upon all of us. Her anarchism is therefore related to the philosophical personalism of folks such as Nikolai Berdyaev and Emmanuel Mounier. Those men, among others, were already warning, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, that the increasing economic and cultural complexity of modern nations creates a social logic that leads to an increasing centralization of power in an anonymous, bureaucratized, and impersonal State.

This State then claims for itself a hegemony of authority, which leads by another logical necessity to the destruction of all other mediating authorities as well as all localist understandings of social organization. It is precisely the claim to hegemonic authority that most characterizes the modern Liberal State, which masks its inherent totalitarianism under the rhetoric of “freedom.” Seen in this light, the Catholic principle of subsidiarity is not properly invoked when all we are talking about is that same State “granting” a sphere of “free operation” for more local entities. In such a case, no natural authority outside of the State is acknowledged, and only the State gets to define its own self-limitations, which is not what subsidiarity means.

True subsidiarity, as Dorothy understood, requires the recognition that there are competencies and forms of natural authority, rooted in divine and natural law, that are aboriginally and constitutively prior to the State. Here is how Dorothy described it in an essay she penned in the December 1949 edition of the Catholic Worker paper:

The word anarchist is deliberately and repeatedly used in order to awaken our readers to the necessity of combating the ‘all-encroaching State,’ … and to shock serious students into looking into the possibility of another society, an order made up of associations, guilds, unions, communes, parishes – voluntary associations of men, on regional vs. national lines, where there is a possibility of liberty and responsibility for all men.

Dorothy Day’s vision is now abundantly vindicated by the exponential increase in the power of the modern State, which has equipped itself with the toys of technocracy and aligned itself with the emerging surveillance capitalism of Big Tech. But she would not have been surprised. The Hobbesian State is big enough and powerful enough to protect my State-granted “rights,” but it is also, therefore, big enough and powerful enough to take them away.

Furthermore, and in light of Dorothy Day’s critique, ask yourself why our choices for President are so uniformly uninspiring? Did you ever stop to wonder why, in a nation of 350 million people, that Biden or Trump were the choices proposed to us? The answer to that question is that sock puppets always look the same.

Too cynical, you say? I recall being in London in 2008 when Obama was elected. As I was making my way around the city, folks who recognized that I was an American were openly gushing to me over Obama’s election as if there could be no doubt that I shared their enthusiasm. They slapped me on the back and high-fived me in congratulations and with manifest joy, as if we had just elected the Messiah himself. I must admit that I started to wonder if maybe this did represent something good and positive. And I did think that at the very least it was really cool that we had elected a Black president. But by 2016 what was really different about America in a positive sense after eight years of Obama? Indeed, in 2016 we were once again “gifted” with two deeply flawed candidates indicating that not only was the political culture not any better, but in reality it had gotten worse.

Obama, the great Messiah of “Si se puede!” enthusiasms, is now retired to a multi-million dollar mansion as he and his wife hobnob with the rich, the famous, and the powerful. But we should have seen it coming when, in the earliest days of his presidency, Obama put together his “economic team,” the members of which were almost exclusively drawn from the super-rich mavens of Wall Street. Presidents do not run the country. Goldman Sachs does. And so the great Messiah of 2008 is now a supremely wealthy man retiring to his fortified version of Mar-a-Lago. Si se puede, indeed.

I am not arguing here, and nor was Dorothy Day, for an “apolitical” stance that retreats into faith compounds with a fortress-like mentality of resigned futility. We cannot cede the political realm to those who have usurped it. And we cannot become like latter-day Essenes squirreled away in the Qumran fortress of our apocalyptic fantasies, awaiting the divine judgment sure to come for all of “those others.” We cannot neatly divide the political and the spiritual into two hermetically sealed separate spheres. This would be contrary to the incarnational logic embedded in the Catholic vision of reality, which lays claim to the totality of our existence and which commands and commits us to a missional engagement with the world, including the political world. We are, after all, Catholics and not Anabaptists, and therefore we cannot accept any narrative of an apolitical, pre-Constantinian pristine Church, which was then followed by the “fall” of the Church, post-Constantine, into the “corruption” of political engagement.

I have often written on that topic, and perhaps ambiguously so, which has led some of my readers to surmise that I do harbor Anabaptist tendencies. But my criticisms were directed at the corruptions inherent in any confessional State that divorces power from true authority. No such arrangements will ever work in the long run when they are not animated by the towering figure of the crucified Lord–the Lamb who was slain from all eternity. But confessional States as such are not only “allowable” in theory, but are necessary in practice since all States are inherently confessional, even the secular ones (indeed, perhaps especially the secular ones), which in their modern iteration place their confessional dogmas above all others, with corrosive effects.

But neither is this an argument in favor of strong integralisms of Church and State. “Integralism” is a broad term that can mean many different things and therefore I prefer to speak, along with D.C. Schindler, in the language of an analogical relation between Church and State rather than an integralist one. This is because one cannot “integrate” nature and grace, or Church and State, in the manner envisioned by the champions of a strong integralism, without falsifying the inner essence of both. Both Church and State are concerned with the proper ordering of all of reality, but do so analogously from within different missions and teleologies, rather than univocally and competitively. Space does not allow me to elaborate on this further, so all I will say here is that the normal, historical construal of “integralism,” in my view, is not the answer.

I do not have any prescriptive proposals or any answer to the thorny questions of how to negotiate all of this. And it would be both false and anachronistic to label Dorothy Day as a post-Liberal thinker with a clear political theory in place. Hers was a prophetic response to concrete evils and she engaged in concrete counter-actions of care for the poor. She saw such actions as grounded quite simply in the Gospel–especially the Sermon on the Mount–and believed passionately that if all Christians lived the Gospel radically that a more just form of “politics” would emerge from that effort. Electoral politics, though important, are downstream from culture, and if we change that culture, one brick at a time, we can also alter the course of our political order.

I am reminded here of the words of Joseph Ratzinger in Introduction to Christianity on the role played by simple monotheistic faith in the dethroning of the hegemony of worldly power as the key component in the political order. He states:

… the profession “There is only one God” is, precisely because it has itself no political aims, a program of decisive political importance: through the absoluteness that it lends the individual from his God, and through the relativization to which it relegates all political communities in comparison with the unity of the God who embraces them all, it forms the only definitive protection against the power of the collective and at the same time implies the complete abolition of any idea of exclusiveness in humanity as a whole.

Seen in this light, we must always remember that “politics” is a broader category than mere “electoral processes” and when those processes, legitimate in themselves (Dorothy was not anti-democracy), become degraded and corrupted in non-recoverable and terminal ways due to their near-total cooptation by wealth, power, and an ideology of secular domination, then perhaps a different kind of “politics” is called for. This was the main point of Dorothy’s anarchism which saw in the modern, centralized State, and its alliance with a rapacious Capitalism and its policing arm in militarism and the national security surveillance State, a deep assault on human dignity. And it is also no good to resort to a regime of sacral domination since this entails, more often than not, the same confusion of authority with power and the apparatus of coercion that goes with it.

Tyranny rises in exact proportion to the loss of real community and real culture. The COVID pandemic, the war in Ukraine, the rise of racial tensions here at home, the surge of desperate immigrants fleeing conditions in their own countries that our country helped to create, and the rise of an even scarier militarism (now extending into space), cry out for the anti-politics politics of the Lord Jesus Christ and his Kingdom, which is not of this world, but is, paradoxically, for this world. Now is the time of an expectant preparation for the inbreaking of that Kingdom in the form of the divine love displayed in the events of the paschal mystery.

There is no political issue stronger than the tissue of this love. Therefore, in order for that to happen let our prayer be: “He has cast down the mighty from their thrones and he has lifted up the lowly.”


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About Larry Chapp 68 Articles
Dr. Larry Chapp is a retired professor of theology. He taught for twenty years at DeSales University near Allentown, Pennsylvania. He now owns and manages, with his wife, the Dorothy Day Catholic Worker Farm in Harveys Lake, Pennsylvania. Dr. Chapp received his doctorate from Fordham University in 1994 with a specialization in the theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar. He can be visited online at "Gaudium et Spes 22".

75 Comments

  1. 1. “…the rise of racial tensions here at home…” It’s my sincere belief that there are no rising racial tensions in our country. This is a meme manufactured by highly centralized power structures designed to keep people distracted from recognizing the real enemy in order to better control masses of people. The meme is promulgated by Big Media and Big Technology which are now synonymous with Centralized Power Structures in Washington.

    2. I am no longer Republican or Democrat. I am no longer Conservative or Liberal. I am a convicted Subsidiaricist. I believe local structures are the only viable means of self-governance. Super-hegemonic power structures predictably rise and fall. That’s not the problem. The problem is that when they rise, they deprive men of their freedom and when they fall (as they are now in the process of doing), they take the common man with them. And when they fall, the former “leaders” take their refuge behind curtains at their walled mansions and islands like Martha’s Vineyard and leave behind the discarded remnants of mankind whom they used to build their power structures. I have to believe that there’s a special place in hell for the empire builders.

  2. I certainly experienced buyer’s regret after supporting Jimmy Carter many years ago but he never did the Mar a Lago thing after the White House. Even after surgery for brain cancer he was back teaching his Sunday school class in his little town in South GA.
    I don’t agree with him on a host of things but I do respect him. And his autobiography is a great read.

    • Yes. He,like Harry Truman, was a humble human who didn’t claim to know everything, made mistakes, and was not afraid to admit it.

  3. Equating Biden and Trump revealed a lazy opinion as Biden a self-professed Catholic sold out to the Communists, just as Francis has.
    Trump gave us just enough Catholics to finally overturn the death sentences of Roe at the Federal level.
    Biden and his party sell body parts from aborted babies to grease their political power and is not excommunicated.

    Sorry, but Bathalsar spawned many Bidens: I’ll take Padre Pio.

    • I don’t think either Biden or Trump present moral options which are compatible with the Catholic faith. We must admit that Hitler did many good things for the German economy and public morale, but was an evil person and did much evil in the end. We must not let that happen again on our watch.

  4. Thanks Larry. As I read, I kept seeing the faces of St. Teresa of Kolkata and Fr. Benedict Groeschel, who helped both Mother and Dorothy Day.

  5. I remember Fr. Benedict Groeschel telling an awesome, funny story about the great Dorothy Day. Shortly after his ordination in about 1960, Dorothy burst into the Catholic Worker in NYC and yelled: “Where is that Fr. Benedict!” He sheepishly said: “Here I am Dorothy.” Then she closed in and lit into him: “Stop going around Manhattan marrying cohabiting couples! It’s not right and isn’t helping them!” Etc. After she finally stopped, Fr. Benedict said with his usual grin: “Dorothy, I don’t do that. You must have mistaken me with another Fr. Benedict.” He said she paused, shrugged her shoulders and loudly grumbled: “Well, alright. Then don’t start!”

  6. A very timely and relevant presentation. The crux of the matter is well stated when you state “ I do not have any prescriptive proposals or any answer to the thorny question of how to navigate all of this”. , but perhaps Dorthy lived the answer. Her solution was more about living than saying. She walked the walk more than talking the talk. The answer is brokeness and humility. While she was searching for answers she was accepting and serving in her most imperfect way. She Challenged people by her dedication, not her didactic. She became the leaven in the lump the salt in the wound, the light in the darkness. She represented a lighthouse to a confused world, a warning of dangerous rocks ahead.

  7. A few years back, “America” published an article claiming that Dorothy Day was a communist . . . of which the author of the article approved. My friend, Geoff Gneuhs, who was chaplain of the New York Catholic Worker and a friend of Dorothy Day, wrote a letter to “America” presenting Day’s real position . . . which “America” carefully ignored. Geoff asked me to publish his letter on my blog, “The Just Third Way,” which I did in two parts, sending the links to America and a number of other Catholic publications . . . all of which ignored them:

    https://just3rdway.blogspot.com/2019/08/dorothy-day-catholicism-and-communism.html

    https://just3rdway.blogspot.com/2019/08/dorothy-day-catholicism-and-communism_15.html

    In a further attempt to set the record straight, my co-author, Dawn Brohawn, and I gave a summary of Day’s true position (and that of G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc) in our book, “The Greater Reset”, which is currently on sale this month from TAN Books for $5 a copy, any quantity; this is the first edition; the second edition will carry the imprimatur of His Excellency, Bishop Michael F. Burbidge of Arlington, Virginia (the Censor Librorum did not complete his work by the deadline):

    https://tanbooks.com/contemporary-issues/social-issues/the-greater-reset-reclaiming-human-sovereignty-under-natural-law/

    • Oh boy oh boy! Yet another version of the “Third Way,” this time presumptuously labeled as the “Just Third Way.”

      Without fail, every manifestation of the “third way” opens up a Pandora’s Box of government intervention, but advocates of this “just third way” will undoubtedly echo their predecessors by claiming that ‘our version can and will control the government leviathan, and it will also assure people that their individual liberties will be protected, even though the government will have to oversee some kinds of distribution and/or redistribution of property, but such will be done justly, of course.’

      However, no matter how they are promoted or defended by references to philosophy or theology, all “third way” ideologies call for government intervention that inevitably reduce private ownership rights, and that eventually leads to more and more socialism.

      Indeed, well-meaning but misguided advocates of a “third way” always delude themselves into believing that when it comes to their preferred version of combining various elements of capitalism with socialism, a woman can indeed get just a little bit pregnant.

      • Thank you for your interesting comments, Dr. Truth. I’m sure that if you had actually read anything about the Just Third Way they’d be even more interesting.

        If anyone is interested in finding out the truth (sorry) about the Just Third Way, just follow the link, http://www.cesj.org, and note that “the four pillars of a just market economy” call for 1) A limited economic role for the state, 2) free and open markets, 3) restoration of private property, and 4) Widespread ownership of capital. This last is not by redistribution, but by opening up access to the opportunity and means to participate in the formation of new capital, of which approximately $4 trillion is added to the U.S. economy each year. This, as Louis O. Kelso explained, expanding on the findings of Dr. Harold G. Moulton in “The Formation of Capital” (1935), can be accomplished through the expansion of commercial bank credit by accepting bills of exchange for productive purposes instead of for the purchase of government debt or speculative securities, and by collateralizing acquisition loans with capital credit insurance and reinsurance instead of existing wealth, which is already owned by the private sector elite and the government.

        No redistribution except of opportunity and access to the means, Dr. Truth, unless you think that purchasing capital at a fair market price on credit and paying for it with the future profits of the capital itself is “redistribution” . . . in which case, the rich and the corporations have been receiving “redistributed” wealth for centuries. Of course, I assume you know the difference between a mortgage (“past savings”) and a bill of exchange (“future savings”), which, as Dr. Benjamin Anderson and others have noted, is the first principle of finance — and thus the difference between a free and uncoerced purchase and redistribution, compensated or uncompensated.

        • Thanks for the predicted kind of response, Michael Greaney, as well as for the false accusation since I actually read through your misguided website prior to writing my comments. And since you decided to throw in a personal dig with no basis in objective truth, here’s a back at you: if you actually understood how Latin grammar works, you would have demonstrated more intelligence in recognizing that the form “Doctor Veritatis” means Doctor of Truth, and not Doctor Truth as those with lesser intellectual lights carelessly assume. Isn’t this game fun?

          Now, the claims you make are indeed quite similar to the ones made by previous advocates of the so-called “third way,” and putting “just” in front of “third way” changes nothing. Despite your claims to the contrary, your so-called version of the “third way” still calls for government intervention that will take away some of the freedoms of others while pretending that such is a “just” approach…to “better spread things out.”

          In the points you specifically emphasize in your response to my previous comments, numbers 3 and 4 will require some kinds of forced redistribution and/or restrictions on some ownership or freedoms of some people as the new system is implemented to forcibly achieve the ideal of what will actually turn out to be an unjust “third way.” Numbers 3 and 4 cannot be achieved without the implementation of some government compulsion.

          But let’s also get to a more fundamental nitty gritty:

          Why advocate a so-called third way of any kind,…and why the proud proclamation that your version is a “just” third way? Lots of presumption in the characterization of your version.

          Indeed, why not a simple advocacy of capitalism wherein any objective illegalities are to be vigorously prosecuted while the people enjoy maximum freedom to exercise their ownership rights and accumulate more and more property if they choose to do so by honest means, and they are successful in the market…even if this does not bring about or sustain a “widespread ownership of capital” as INSISTED upon by the proponents of the so-called “just third way”?

        • Thanks for the predicted kind of response, Michael Greaney, as well as for the false accusation since I actually read through your misguided website prior to writing my comments. And since you decided to throw in a personal dig with no basis in objective truth, here’s a back at you: if you actually understood how Latin grammar works, you would have demonstrated more intelligence in recognizing that the form “Doctor Veritatis” means Doctor of Truth, and not Doctor Truth as those with lesser intellectual lights carelessly assume. Isn’t this game fun?

          Now, the claims you make are indeed quite similar to the ones made by previous advocates of the so-called “third way,” and putting “just” in front of “third way” changes nothing. Despite your claims to the contrary, your so-called version of the “third way” still calls for government intervention that will take away some of the freedoms of others while pretending that such is a “just” approach…to “better spread things out.”

          In the points you specifically emphasize in your response to my previous comments, numbers 3 and 4 will require some kinds of forced redistribution and/or restrictions on some ownership or freedoms of some people as the new system is implemented to forcibly achieve the ideal of what will actually turn out to be an unjust “third way.” Numbers 3 and 4 cannot be achieved without the implementation of some government compulsion.

          But let’s also get to a more fundamental nitty gritty:

          Why advocate a so-called third way of any kind,…and why the proud proclamation that your version is a “just” third way? Lots of presumption in the characterization of your version.

          Indeed, why not a simple advocacy of capitalism wherein any objective illegalities are to be vigorously prosecuted while the people enjoy maximum freedom to exercise their ownership rights and accumulate more and more property if they choose to do so by honest means, and they are successful in the market…even if this does not bring about or sustain a “widespread ownership of capital” as INSISTED upon by the proponents of the so-called “just third way”?

        • Thanks for the predicted kind of response, Michael Greaney, as well as for the false accusation since I actually read through your misguided website prior to writing my comments. And since you decided to throw in a personal dig with no basis in objective truth, here’s a back at you: if you actually understood how Latin grammar works, you would have demonstrated more intelligence in recognizing that the form “Doctor Veritatis” means Doctor of Truth, and not Doctor Truth as those with lesser intellectual lights carelessly assume. Isn’t this game fun?

          Now, the claims you make are indeed quite similar to the ones made by previous advocates of the so-called “third way,” and putting “just” in front of “third way” changes nothing. Despite your claims to the contrary, your so-called version of the “third way” still calls for government intervention that will take away some of the freedoms of others while pretending that such is a “just” approach…to “better spread things out.”

          In the points you specifically emphasize in your response to my previous comments, numbers 3 and 4 will require some kinds of forced redistribution and/or restrictions on some ownership or freedoms of some people as the new system is implemented to forcibly achieve the ideal of what will actually turn out to be an unjust “third way.” Numbers 3 and 4 cannot be achieved without the implementation of some government compulsion.

          But let’s also get to a more fundamental nitty gritty:

          Why advocate a so-called third way of any kind,…and why the proud proclamation that your version is a “just” third way? Lots of presumption in the characterization of your version.

          Indeed, why not a simple advocacy of capitalism wherein any objective illegalities are to be vigorously prosecuted while the people enjoy maximum freedom to exercise their ownership rights and accumulate more and more property if they choose to do so by honest means, and they are successful in the market…even if this does not bring about or sustain a “widespread ownership of capital” as INSISTED upon by the proponents of the so-called “just third way”?

          • Why this: ” if you actually understood how Latin grammar works, you would have demonstrated more intelligence in recognizing that the form “Doctor Veritatis” means Doctor of Truth, and not Doctor Truth as those with lesser intellectual lights carelessly assume. Isn’t this game fun?” Not everyone has studied/learned Latin. Nothing to do with intelligence. Why you equate a lack of knowledge on one particular subject with a lack of intelligence is mean spirited.

        • Thanks for the compliment and solid reflection, good Deacon Peitler. Allow me to address Mora here since CWR has cut off a direct response to her misguided critique of yours truly.

          Mora: You missed the whole tongue-in-cheek and tit-for-tat aspect of what I wrote directly to Michael Greaney based on how he addressed me in first lying about what I had done, and then basically dismissing my points as being uninformed based on his cheap shot lie. My comments about Latin were not meant for you or anyone else with the exception of those who appreciate not letting anyone unfairly attempt to bully people in a combox as appears to be a tactic used quite a bit by Mr. Greaney as evidenced by others commenting on how Mr. Greaney deals with their legitimate objections to his points of view. Indeed, check out some of his exchanges with other readers of CWR to see who the real mean spirited person is throughout the discussions in this particular combox, and then if you feel up to it, do the right thing.

  8. “Obama, the great Messiah of “Si se puede!” enthusiasms, is now retired to a multi-million dollar mansion”

    The MEDIAN listing price of a home in Edina, Minnesota, a Minneapolis suburb was $700,000 in 2022. Multi-million dollar mansions ain’t what they used to be.

  9. I have enjoyed a number of articles by Larry Chapp on CWR. However, whatever the overall merits of this article, and acknowledging that every candidate has some flaws, I must take exception to his indicated moral/political equivalence of being “gifted with two deeply flawed candidates” in 2016.

    Also, your reference to Biden and Trump being sock puppets that look the same. If you cannot see the significant difference between Clinton and Trump and Biden and Trump, I don’t know what to say.

    Finally, I do not agree with your statement that the word “anarchist can mean a hundred different things”. To take a word that has a very standard definition (according to the dictionary) and try to give it a different meaning can cause a great deal of confusion and misunderstanding.

    • Yes! Anarchy has very specific meanings, having to do with a rejection of order in general and of any kind of hierarchy in the political sphere. And neither sense of the word is compatible with Catholicism.

  10. “the surge of desperate immigrants fleeing conditions in their own countries that our country helped to create,”

    Thank you for remembering that connection, Dr. Chapp. Leaving aside for the moment the reason some of the countries are referred to as “banana republics”, the present lawless and horrifically violent situations in some of these countries are in large part due to US citizens spending large amounts of money on the illegal drugs made in or shipped through them. It is dollar bills that fuels the drug gangs, pays for their murders, and de-stabilizes entire countries. It is the direct side effect of US drug use that drives people to flee their homes and arrive at our borders. And I’d say that creates a moral responsibility that will never dawn on Mr. Trump and his legions of aging fanboys and fangirls. The world is full of poor people and coming to the US cannot be the solution for most of them, but for those who flee the results of a situation our self-indulgent and morally reckless country has fueled and financed, we owe safe refuge.

    • Open borders has been very beneficial to the cartels, both human trafficking and drugs. Open borders is something that Trump was trying to bring under control while in office. Open borders advocates are very generous with other peoples’ money. When Texas and Florida started to send illegal immigrants to the doorsteps of open borders advocates they made them put their money where their mouths are. This did not set well with the open borders advocates. For the open borders advocates it is a case of do as I say, not as I do.

    • In any smuggling/trafficking operation people on both sides have to benefit or it can not succeed. It’s true that Americans buy the drugs & weapons are smuggled out of the US on a regular basis. US border town banks have been caught money laundering for cartels & cartel money has been invested in US real estate.
      While Haitian migrants are truly desperate & in danger, most folks entering illegally are just looking for a better financial opportunity & are willing to pay traffickers to smuggle them here. And that can end up being more dangerous than the situation they left at home.
      Smuggling’s a group effort & there’s blame on both sides to be sure. And a need for it on both sides also or it wouldn’t continue on & on the way it does. No one really wants to solve illegal immigration because it benefits too many people.

    • We owe people nothing actually. We aren’t to blame for another country’s culture and its attending difficulties. Open borders and lax immigration policies are an insult to tax paying, law abiding citizens.

      • You and I Athanasius aren’t to blame directly perhaps but I think we benefit from illegal migration and enrich the cartels also when we enjoy lower priced foods, restaurant meals, home and yardwork, new construction, etc.
        My son in law’s brother and his wife attempted to run a restaurant several years ago. The only people who would dependably show up were Hispanic and probably here illegally. Other local folk would work just long enough to buy drugs and then go MIA. Illegal immigrants for the most part have a work ethic. Partly because at least in our neck of the woods they have no other choice and partly because they were raised in a culture where if you don’t work you don’t eat.
        I’m old fashioned and I find I have much more in common with many of the migrants coming across the border than with some progressive Americans. They’re family oriented, take care of their elderly, work extremely hard, and for the most part are Christians. We need to find a way to bring more hard working young people here legally as our society ages.
        What’s happening on our Southern border is a kind of charade that requires cooperation on both sides.
        And just to mention, I voted twice for President Trump and I’d vote for him again should he become the GOP candidate.

        • mrscracker, There is (was?) such a thing as legal immigration.
          Furthermore, the present (past?) asylum law does not (did not?) consider poverty as a ground for asylum.
          Still furthermore, there is (was?) no such term as “illegal immigrant.” Officially, an immigrant means (meant?) legal. And “illegal” meant aliens who violated US immigration laws.
          But I suppose these days, there are no more such laws.

          • I don’t believe poverty is a reason for asylum either.
            Our immigration system is broken & there’s little incentive to fix it as long as the status quo benefits everyone. Excepting those who die trying to circumvent it or the collateral victims of drug poisoning & violence.

  11. What currently ails us is the concentration of power that bigness brings about. The lack of accountability that comes along with this concentration of power, ending with the absolute power that corrupts absolutely. The Founding Fathers created a form of governance with a division of power, a system of checks and balances, and due process to decentralize power as much as possible. This is very offensive to the governmental absolutists of the left. The establishment ruling class elites in the US are mostly into governmental rent-seeking and have become little better than oligarchs. For decades the establishment wing of the Republican party has been making empty campaign promises to the voters. Trump, for all his faults, didn’t sellout his voters when he won the presidency. He unmasked all this duplicity on the part of the establishment ruling class elite oligarchs, both Democrat and Republican, and they hate him for having done so. This is why I’m a registered Independent for voting purposes.

  12. Regarding Dorothy Day,
    I recommend balancing her numerous accolades with a reading of,
    The Catholic Worker Movement: A Critical Analysis, by Carol Byrne.

    The shell game of all “Movements” is to obscure/distract from what they are actually doing. We play along because there’s some un-Godly enticement that’s hooked some simmering desire(s) of our flesh.
    Altruism becomes virtue-signaling and devolves into a fascade to hide gross sin(look at paedophilia stats of different professions and institutions).
    Communism subsumed the “Anarchism” of Ms.Day’s youth and I suspect her as well. Now Corporatism is subsuming Communism and Capitalism, and I suspect many of all persuasions inside and outside The Church.
    I recommend listening to Alexander Solzenitsyn’s full commencement speech at Harvard in 1978, for a more pragmatic wariness of Satan’s more current plan of seduction.
    Thanks and God bless y’all!
    TD

  13. Chapp states in conclusion: “I do not have any prescriptive proposals or any answer to the thorny questions of how to negotiate all of this.” So why publish a turgid mishmash of half-digested political and economic theories that clearly demonstrate that the author is, by his own confession, far “out of my wheelhouse”? While I realize CWR’s need for content, sophomoric material like this article that “incite more heat than light” should have no place in it.

    • Writing like this attracts a gaggle of clicks, clacks and quacks. People respond, one way or another. Isn’t it a sideshow at a circus?

  14. Her disgust of the “all encroaching state” is notably absent from her multiple glowing articles on Castro’s Cuba, filled with praise for the violent communist takeover and for Castro himself. She also visited Lenin’s grave to pay homage to that communist leader who was not shy about wielding the power of the state. She was a huge fan of liberation theology in Latin America. Dorothy Day said many things that can be construed as consistent with Catholicism, but also far too many things that can’t. The attempt to canonize her is nothing more than an attempt to canonize the evil ideology of communism. And no Catholic should participate in the process. If you doubt my characterization of her, read The Catholic Worker, her newspaper, which is available online. The author of this article apparently hasn’t.

    • Thanks for these points. My sense or suspicion in reading this article was that it was more revisionist in its arguments. Other writers have raised legitimate questions as to Day’s thinking, questions we would do well to consider in any critical analysis.

    • Dorothy Day was a communist to the end of her life, who constantly tried to obscure and downplay that fact. But her adulation for Castro belied not only her alleged pacifism, but also her purported youthful conversion away from Marxism. Personally, I think she was a Marxist plant within the Catholic Church, right to the end.

      • I don’t know a great deal about Dorothy Day but she must have been at the least extremely naive about Castro. She wouldn’t be the first American taken in by him.

        • She could not have fawned over Castro the way she did without having been a lifelong communist. I understand she was also enamored with the North Vietnamese. We’ll have to agree to disagree.

          • I’m curious, did she ever discover the truth about Cuba & Castro? Or did she hold on to pro-Castro narratives the rest of her life?

          • mrscracker, She never walked back or modified any of her praise of Castro or his regime. Funny kind of pacifism that exempts violent revolution as long as communists are doing it. It’s interesting how her defenders on this thread never address this glaring problem.

        • Better yet, read her own words. “Marx… Lenin… Mao Tse-Tung… These men were animated by the love of brother and this we must believe though their ends meant the seizure of power, and the building of mighty armies, the compulsion of concentration camps, the forced labor and torture and killing of tens of thousands, even millions.” From The Catholic Worker 1951. https://catholicworker.org/232-html/. While she doesn’t condone the violence, she asserts that they meant well and have common cause with Christians. This is madness. If she wasn’t a communist herself (and I believe she was) then she was a prime example of what Lenin described as “useful idiots”.

          • “Marx… Lenin… Mao Tse-Tung… These men were animated by the love of brother and this we must believe”

            I don’t want to comment on the fact that she was obviously wrong so much as on her saying we “must” believe in their good intentions. I find that very strange, it sounds almost like a article of faith. Why “must” we believe that? It can’t be a simple matter of charitably assuming the best about everyone, because the Christian faith does not require we assume good intentions against all evidence.

          • Wow. While I don’t doubt her piety, clearly she was one of those people Solzhenitsyn talks about in the Gulag Archipelago, one so blinded by their ideological commitments that they are convinced that the Gulag system is a aberration instead of a necessary organ of the ideals of Marxism.

          • Thank you, Molly, for that link.
            I am a naturalized citizen, born and raised in another country, so I did not know enough about Dorothy Day. I did suspect she was a communist from reading occasional copies of The Catholic Worker piled in our church’s vestibule.
            What concerns me is, the USCCB is promoting her cause for canonization. Lord, have mercy.

        • Dear Carl,

          Truth may be great and mighty above all things, but you’re up against something with which the finest minds in the Church have struggled for the past two centuries: rei novae, the “New Things” of modernism, socialism, and the New Age. Empirical evidence and logical consistency carry no weight with adherents of rei novae. The only thing that matters is their personal faith — meaning their personal opinion — and whatever facts, real or imagined, they choose to admit. Nothing else has any validity for them. By arguing using reason and facts you insult their purely faith-based religion at the deepest possible level.

          This, as Msgr. Ronald Knox suggested in Enthusiasm (1950), is the essence of rei novae, what Pope St. Pius X called “the synthesis of all heresies,” which requires a shift from reason guided and illuminated by faith, to faith alone. The fact that this flatly contradicts what the Catholic Church has clearly taught from the beginning is irrelevant. As Henri de Saint-Simon declared, the Old Christianity consistent with reason must give way to the New Christianity of personal opinion. Faith must create a new world and establish the Kingdom of God on Earth . . . despite the fact that Christ Himself declared that His kingdom is not of this world, and the Catholic Church condemned the rejection of reason in, e.g., Canon 2.1 of the First Vatican Council, the first article in the Oath Against Modernism, and § 2 of Humani Generis.

          You must be perfect as the adherents of rei novae are perfect or be cast into the Outer Darkness forever, do not pass Purgatory, do not collect 200 days Indulgence. Dorothy Day was not perfect by their definition and therefore is damned for all eternity as far as they are concerned. She is not permitted an error in judgment or any mistake whatsoever, nor is any defense or explanation allowed.

          Did Dorothy Day support Castro? Yes. So did a friend of mine who changed his mind and spent the rest of his life fighting him and Che Guevara, whom he knew personally . . . and called a traitor among other less printable things. Dorothy Day also supported the Catholic Radical Alliance of Pittsburgh until it became painfully obvious that they were worshiping “Holy Mother the State” and not God, whereupon she immediately cut ties with them. She gave them as much slack as she could until it became intolerable — but then remained silent about it, leading to endless speculation as to the reason for the split. If Dorothy Day changed her opinion about Castro — and I have no idea if she did — she would have remained silent about it. Rightly or wrongly, she believed that Castro and the C.R.A. of Pittsburgh were for the poor, but — rightly or wrongly — refused to engage in today’s favorite sport of backbiting and sneering once she disassociated from someone.

          So, while the references and cites you give are useful to readers honestly seeking the truth and conformity with reality, you will never convince the naysayers and those whose minds are already made up; recall C.S. Lewis’s observation that the eighteenth century was probably (at least in general) the last time you could expect to persuade someone by logical argument and objective facts. Having myself been the victim of similar faith-based judgments, I am fully aware that no amount of truth, reason, or mere facts will prevail against those who “KNOW” the “real truth” as revealed by their Inner Light and conviction.

          By trying to be objective about Dorothy Day — or anyone else — or even by allowing someone to defend him- or herself or be defended, you risk temporal damnation, loss of reputation, income, and anything else the New Inquisition demands. Remember: by denying the role of reason, adherents of rei novae also deny the natural law which, like knowledge of God’s existence, is discernible by human reason alone, and thereby deny the natural virtues of temperance, fortitude, prudence, and, above all, justice. Further, since charity is not charity unless the demands of justice have been met, they also deny charity, and are thus self-justified in being absolutely merciless to those whom they have deemed unworthy of salvation or even existence itself.

          • How’s this for “Empirical evidence and logical consistency”? Dorothy Day repeatedly and fervently praised and admired ruthless violent communist leaders like Castro, Lenin, Marx, Moa, Ho Chi Minh. She never recanted this praise or admiration. She was a radical leftist prior to her conversion and never disavowed her early beliefs. This can be known by reading her actual words. It is not unreasonable to conclude from these facts that she likely remained a strong communist sympathizer until she died. You may draw other conclusions from these facts, but it doesn’t make those of us who conclude differently from you heretics, gnostics, irrational, uncharitable or any other of the insults you wove into your wordy rant.

          • Wow! A super wordy, super intellectual, intolerant ad hominem. This kind of post should be enough to deter anyone presenting an opposite view, or you’re rei novae.

          • Thank you, Michael Greaney,
            I hope you’ll take back your claim that you have the Truth and we, who disagree, are up against the finest minds (including yours?) in the Church for the past two centuries.
            Furthermore, I take exception to your accusing those who don’t agree with you to be uncharitable, unreasonable modernist adherents of what St. Pope Pius X called “the synthesis of all heresies.” Are you telling me I’m a heretic?

            I know a thing or two about the “third way,” which their followers always believed to be “just.” My knowledge is second hand, of course, as the movement I’m referring to has died before my time. But I happened to be the widow of someone who grew up in the Third Order Dominican community of Guild of Sts. Joseph and Dominic in Ditchling, Sussex, England; and I have some idea why Belloc’s, Chesterton’s and Eric Gill’s movement failed. (I am not a native English speaker, so please pardon me if I’m not able to express my ideas as brilliantly as you did yours.)

            It appeared that Fr. Vincent McNabb wanted that community to work the land as farmers, animal herders, etc. They turned out to be craftsmen and artists, whose products could not compete with what were in the market. For one thing, they refused to use electricity. Belloc’s books were handprinted and the printing press was hand-operated. They also lobbied for the government to control the prices of similar products in the market, so theirs could be competitive. In other words there was the need for the government to intervene.

            The dream of a “just distribution” of land died before it was born. It was deemed not feasible for the simple reason that some families were big, some, small. The smaller families would necessarily go for a better quality of life while the big ones would be left behind. It was further said that even St. Thomas Aquinas would not have approved of the system. I did not ask why.

            The products they made had very limited market in that they were mostly Catholic liturgical items. My father-in-law was the silversmith; he made sacred vessels, bishop’s crooks, etc. A family of weavers made altar vestments and linens. Gill, the pornographer, made the stations of the cross in the Westminster Cathedral that people clamored to be taken down upon learning that Gill was a pedophile.

            The rest of them were good, pious people, but that kind of living, they just found unsustainable. The Guild closed down in 1987 and what remains of it is a museum.

            I’m sorry if I sounded skeptical of your praises of the works and advocacy pf Dorothy Day. All I know was that the Guild, too, considered her their patron saint. My husband said her Catholic Workers newspaper was treated almost like scripture in that Guild.

            Ok, I’ve ranted. All I want to ask of you, Mr. Greaney, is – would you consider taking back your accusation that those of us who don’t agree with you are, maybe – uncharitable and unreasonable heretics? We are not.

            Thanks you and God bless you.

          • Mr. Greaney,
            Well then, if you won’t take back your accusation, please explain why, GENERALLY, people who don’t agree with your point of view are modernist heretics.

            You did not Molly’s arguments against Dorothy Day, instead you turned the table around to accuse people who don’t agree with you as rei novae.

            Explain to us why people who don’t agree with you are uncharitable, unreasonable heretics according to Pope Pius X’s encyclical against modernism. Please connect the dots, and not in a super intellectual way, either.

          • “…By denying the role of reason, adherents of rei novae also deny the natural law which, like knowledge of God’s existence, is discernible by human reason alone, and thereby deny the natural virtues of temperance, fortitude, prudence, and, above all, justice. Further, since charity is not charity unless the demands of justice have been met, they also deny charity, and are thus self-justified in being absolutely merciless to those whom they have deemed unworthy of salvation or even existence itself.” You’re saying the above charge against those who oppose the Dorothy Day cause should not be taken personally? That’s rubbish, and you know it. Your post is nothing but an ad hominem attack rather than an answer to the thoughtful and principled objections which we opponents have raised–a typical sign that the respondent has lost the argument. By the way, “res novae” is an old Roman expression meaning “revolution” in the most literal sense. That’s the way Caesar and Cicero used it. That’s how it’s used in the first graph of Leo XIII’s “Rerum Novarum.” That label could better by applied to Miss Day than her challengers.

          • First Vatican Council, Canon 2.1:

            “If anyone says that the one, true God, our creator and lord, cannot be known with certainty from the things that have been made, by the natural light of human reason : let him be anathema.”

            Oath Against Modernism, Article I:

            “I . . . . firmly embrace and accept each and every definition that has been set forth and declared by the unerring teaching authority of the Church, especially those principal truths which are directly opposed to the errors of this day. And first of all, I profess that God, the origin and end of all things, can be known with certainty by the natural light of reason from the created world (see Rom. 1:19), that is, from the visible works of creation, as a cause from its effects, and that, therefore, his existence can also be demonstrated.”

            Humani Generis, § 2:

            “[A]bsolutely speaking, human reason by its own natural force and light can arrive at a true and certain knowledge of the one personal God, Who by His providence watches over and governs the world, and also of the natural law, which the Creator has written in our hearts.”

            Roma Locuta Est.

    • If we are supposed to know them by their fruits, know that she was a horrible mother. She put her own desires to save the world ahead of her taking care of her only daughter, often leaving her with strangers who happened to be around at the moment, even while the child was ill. And somehow among all that poverty, she managed to dump her daughter into four years of boarding school. Boarding school! How much did that cost, who payed and what kind of saint doesn’t care for her own daughter, with her own two hands? http://natcath.org/NCR_Online/archives/030703/030703k.htm

      Her daughter ended up leaving the faith, as did most of her grandkids. Oh, and do go read about her granddaughter Martha Hennessy who ended up in prison for breaking into a nuclear base.

      • I don’t think boarding school is always a terrible thing necessarily. It would just depend on the school, the student, & the circumstances.

  15. I think the tilling of the soil necessary for the reception of the seeds of the gospel starts at the level of the small family farm. It’s time to get to work. Many secular people know this, especially liberals, and they are being prepared for conversion. This is the new springtime of the western church, the hunger for righteousness in the youth seeking an authentic life. Interestingly enough it seems to be happening more on the blue coasts, where darkness abounds, grace is pushing up through the soil. Again, get to work. Be radical but stay grounded.stop bickering about how the seeds are being tossed and start turning over your lives, making furrows to catch them.

  16. “…the surge of desperate immigrants fleeing conditions in their own countries that our country helped to create,…” We embark once more on “The Great Apology Tour” at summer’s long-awaited event at the town’s fair/farmground. Must sees at the traveling carnival: Sideshow freaks! Snake-oil salesmen! Hucksters galore, and so much more! All for a nominal fee, of course.

  17. Christ, according to the Apostle Paul, would have the world know the truth. A world Church, rather than the insular, self protective post Reformation institution. A world absent of restrictive nation states on the subsidiary model would have been the logical consequence. in my mind.
    “To shock serious students into looking into the possibility of another society, an order made up of associations, guilds, unions, communes, parishes – voluntary associations of men, on regional vs. national lines, where there is a possibility of liberty and responsibility for all men” (Dorothy Day).
    Larry Chapp’s disenchantment, so to speak, of the powerful state encroaching on the rights of its citizens is more than ever a danger to simply being human [humanness now considered an enemy of the state and the bizarre values it enforces]. Where do the unending wars derive? A peaceable, charitable world akin to the heavenly is preferable – for some of us.

    • Of course a world becoming completely Catholic was an unrealized, though worthy target for the early Church. Paul’s evangelical journeys throughout much of the known Mediterranean world was an indication. Thomas was held to have been martyred in India. And at the advent of Christ nation states, particularly powerful, organized Rome already existed.
      Conceptually it would have required a world population living the Gospels for it to avoid corruption, conflict, and the inevitable consolidation of power – the nation state.

      • About alternatives within or to the nation-state, you raise a timely and profoundly rich line of questioning, also inviting a quote from St. Augustine:

        FIRST, Timely: The cognitive dissonance of our time involves the regnant range of (a) post-Renaissance nation-states, but also other idioms, (b) multi-national states (the Austro-Hungarian Empire until 1918; but recently tribalism, intermixed cultures and language groups, etc. within post-colonial and superimposed state boundaries, post WWII), and (c) the multi-state nation as best seen in the resurgent ummah, that is, the fideistic/mystical unity of pre-Christian (not meaning chronologically) Islam across all the globes nation-state boundaries superimposed by statist modernity.

        SECOND, Rich: Commenting on the overarching dichotomy between divine providence and the totality of human history, Gilson writes of St. Augustine’s two cities:

        “Midway between these two cities, of which one is the negation of the other, there is situated a neutral zone where the men of our day hope to construct a third city, which would be temporal like the earthly city, yet just in a temporal way, that is striving toward temporal justice obtainable by appropriate means. Such an idea seems never to have occurred to St. Augustine, at least, he never spoke of it” (Foreword by Etienne Gilson, St. Augustine, The City of God, Image, 1958).

        Perplexed by this broad riddle, especially the bipolar tension between modernity’s Secularism and global Islam, yours truly embarked on a three-sided research and book-writing project: “Beyond Secularism and Jihad: A Triangular Inquiry into the Mosque, the Manger & Modernity (2012): https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2017/04/29/the-mosque-the-manger-and-modernity/

        THIRD, the book doesn’t answer your question, but does wade around in it. Part reads this way:

        …The Medieval era Muslim and Christian systematizers, for example, Averroes and St. Thomas Aquinas, were intent on a broad synthesis of faith with the path of reason, as influenced by the rediscovered natural philosophy of Aristotle. The earlier St. Augustine offers a different and less comfortable examination capable of speaking to very unstable times like his and ours:

        “So it falls out that in this world, in evil days like these, the Church walks onward like a wayfarer stricken by the world’s hostility, but comforted by the mercy of God . . . It was never any different . . . So shall it be until this world is no more” (St. Augustine, The City of God, Book xviii, Ch. 51.).

        Ours is an Augustinian and even Apostolic time, and not a time of synthesis even if lubricated by Technocracy, Consumerism, or a compromised version of Synodality sprung fresh from the head of Zeus.

  18. Subsidiarity, or the respect due to the lower authority by the higher authority, is a good principle in accord with the natural law, but it is not an absolute principle, since, as many townspeople today can observe, local authority can also become corrupt and authoritarian. At such times the higher authority, guided by a more absolute moral principle of truth and justice, ought to step in to correct any malfeasance on the part of the corrupt local authority. However, to keep the inherent “sovereignty” or freedom of the lower authority from being encroached upon, it seems best that a judiciary, well-versed in the natural law, should be the correcting party rather than a higher executive or legislative authority which may be too tempted to usurp even more authority for themselves at a lower level. I do not know the full thought of Dorothy Day, but the problem with an “anarchic” proposal is that it tends to presuppose that the higher authority is bad in itself. It may be true that powerful higher authorities always go bad; but it is just as true with powerful lower authorities. Hence, what is needed is reasonable judicial authority that oversees both, but which itself has no power to legislate or execute. It is here where the Church should most “integrate” with the State. This is the reason why many Catholics I know voted for Trump in 2016 – to put forward a more rational and “conservative” court when the option was a progressive court which would show its complete detestation for natural law.

    • The potential for doing evil exists universally – from hegemonic mega-structures like our Federal government down to the local town council whose individual members might be corrupt. The value of subsidiarity is that evil structures and individuals are more readily disposed of at the local level than they would be further up the lines of bureaucratic structures.

  19. “And I did think that at the very least it was really cool that we had elected a Black president.”

    Did the thinking of Martin Luther King on ‘character’ enter the thinker’s thought process?

    Obama’s preacher preaching, “God damn America!” signified the type of religion Obama preferred, and that spoke to his character.

    But yeah, Obama is Black, and that is cool, like jazz, and counted for something when Affirmative Action was legal.

  20. William James’ quote is notable for the edited deletion of his reference to “…all big organizations as such, national ones first and foremost;”

    If given a choice, I suspect Americans would prefer a national bureaucracy to a one-world government bureaucracy. Subsidiarity is indeed a good principle.

  21. While it might be surprising, there is a great deal in Hayek that an open minded reader would find congenial to several of the key points here. I especially recommend his “Market Order or Catallaxy”, “The Creative Powers of a Free Civilization” and “The Results of Human Action but Not of Human Design” as starting points. Those who dismiss Hayek as a liberal ideologue simply have not read him, he is much more insightful and thoughful than his critics realize.

  22. Any time I see an author who capitalizes “liberal,” I immediately know I’m reading someone who is either entirely ignorant of intellectual history or so ideological that he can’t understand past authors (Patrick Deneen, Michael Handby, and the younger Schindler are particularly embarrassing examples of this). There is no single liberalism. Jacob Levy’s Rationalism, Freedom and Pluralism is a good antidote to this solemn non-sense.

  23. Thank you for the very insightful article. Previously I have had a negative view of Dorothy Day, but the article provides the cultural and political context necessary to better understand her. I now have a better viewpoint.

  24. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think what Trixie meant was, Dorothy Day as an advocate for the poor chose to send her daughter to four-years of expensive boarding school.

  25. BIG BUSINESS CAME FIRST
    1. Big Business came first.
    2. Big Government came as a response to Big Business, as means to moderating some of its harms to non-rich people.
    3. If you get rid of Big Government (the “Administrative State”), Big Business will become even more dominant than before, and its harms on the non-rich people will be even more profound.
    4. FDR’s “big government” New Deal left the business market economy in place, but also set up structural safeguards for non-rich working Americans (the New Deal was no boon to Americans too lazy to work).
    5. FDR’s New Deal broght the greatest period of prosperity and high standar of living for the masses in US history.
    6. When politicians in their 70s and 80s today talk about “making American great again” or whatever, they are talking about going back to the way things were in the postwar boom of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s.
    7. Dorothy Day is/was an admirable, virtuous, goodhearted lady, who lived out the Catholic ideal of love of neighbor and care for the troubled and less fortunate.
    8. But Dorothy Day’s anarchist philosophy is just as irrelevant and impossible today as it was in her time.
    9. We are not going to beome a nation of Amish farmers or traders (unless some global catastrophe eliminates electricity and motor vehicles).
    10. Today some Catholics dream that Distributism will usher in a national life that is like ten thousand Hobbit-like villages. The American Solidarity Party seems to be full of such people. It’s even in their party platform.
    11. We can enjoy Tolkien, but please we must abandon such fantasies as regards the real world. We must face up to our responsibility to make our nation and world as good as possible.
    12. Utopias never come into being in this world, whether Distributionist, Medievalist, Socialist, Objectivist (Ayn Rand), or Fascist.
    13. Let’s practice the virtue of intellectual moderation and sobriety. Let’s be Catholic.

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  1. On the prophetic anarchy of Dorothy Day – Via Nova

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