The Catholic Worker as Matriarchy: Absence of Father

My lifelong fascination and admiration for Dorothy Day is being renewed by reading the Jim Forest biography All Is Grace.  Her profound love for the poor and deep Catholic faith have inspired me to pray to her for our work at Magnificat Home in providing a home for women. In her femininity she is fierce, fearless, compassionate, intelligent, and determined. My favorite vignette: she picks up two cold, homeless men; brings them to the bar she frequented with radicals, writers and mobsters of various stripes. She sits at the bar, orders three shots and then busts spontaneously into song. Eugene O'Neill was among those awestruck by her strange beauty...bold, passionate, unrestrained by custom, radiantly feminine! I have always, however, been put off by her anarchism and pacifism. Reading Forest's chapter on the Catholic Worker in the 60s helped me understand the underlying problem: absence of the masculine as paternal. Forest quotes Tom Cornell as saying that the anarchy of the Catholic Worker was Dorothy's anarchy. It was (and probably still is) a matriarchy. She was the one in charge...even as, true to her anarchy, she was "not in charge." Especially in the late 60s the NY Catholic Worker received an influx of "hippies" enamored of  rebellion, drugs and free sex. The community lacked the resources for control and protection. There was an absence of the paternal  as an internal principle of order, accountability, discipline and definition. Dorothy herself, and her movement, lacked an appreciation of the necessary use of fatherly force in a way that is rational, controlled, peace-enhancing and even merciful, for the victims and offenders both. She would never call the police. Her own experiences of the police in her radical youth was tarnished with abuse. In our own residences for women here in Jersey City we have received police visitations perhaps 25 times or more.  Impeccably they are gentlemanly, courteous, reassuring, professional...really agents of peace and protection. Dorothy seems not capable of imagining such. The root cause for this may be that her ferocious femininity was never balanced by a compensating virility. Her father seems not to have been a strong presence although she follows him into a career in journalism. He moved frequently for his career and so left a sense of rootlessness and impermanence that followed Dorothy as she traveled always and everywhere in an illusive homelessness even as she rooted herself always with the poor and in the Church.  She loved, passionately,  a very short list of men, but the love was largely unrequited. When she told her first lover, Lionel, that she was pregnant he left her to abort their child. This abandonment surely left her wounded. The "love of her life" Forester also left her when she became both pregnant and Catholic. Again, she is deeply violated by abandonment. These pivotal relationships surely left a negative effect. But not all is dismal. Her friendship with Eugene O'Neill remained chaste and drew her (she attests) closer to God. Peter Maurin was a significant masculine influence and the Catholic Worker may not have happened without him. In that sense the movement did issue from the conjoining of man and woman. Brilliant and learned in an eccentric manner, he was a humble and holy man but weak compared to the Lioness Dorothy whose imprint clearly determined the nature of the paper and movement. More deeply and spiritually, she was relentlessly, obediently filial in her loyalty to the masculine, hierarchical Church. Her bridal soul was receptive of the Divine Bridegroom...immaculately so from the time of her conversion. But that wholesome spousality never was reflected in her social practice which retained a militant femininism of a distinctive flavor. I am sensitive to this since my own Irish Catholic family sustains a milder form: a fiery femininity that is allergic to masculinity as authority, warrior, entrepreneur or preacher.  While our five uncles all served honorably in World War II the traditional Irish Catholic pride in the noble virility of fireman, policeman, soldier and FBI agent has been largely forgotten in the anti-war, anti-authority, anti-masculinity tsunami of the 1960s.  And so we see that the Catholic Worker is emblematic of the affliction that is destroying our society and parts of our Church:  the absence of the strong-and-gentle father.