Receiving the Francis Magisterium in the spirit of Dorothy Day

Dorothy Day knew to receive our Faith through the prism of the lives of the saints and at the same time to reverence our hierarchy (source of efficacious sacraments and infallible teaching) with a brutal, candid realism about the failings and sins of any particular priest, bishop and pope. Dorothy's life and spirituality provide a marvelous template by which to receive the contrasting pontificates of Francis and John-Paul-Benedict.  She is unsurpassed (excepting Mother Theresa of course) in the boldness and vigor with which she reached out to those at the margins: the homeless, addicted, mentally ill, radicals, communists, artists, bohemians and all the rejected. She epitomizes like no one else Francis' passion to reach out to those who feel neglected and rejected by the Church. Indeed, she was most at home with these very people and clearly had problems with someone like Cardinal Spellman and his conviviality with war, wealth, status and power. At the same time, she was rigorous and uncompromising in her acclamation of the Truth of our faith in all its splendor and depth. There was nothing puritanical or prurient in her view of sexuality and romance: she was flamingly passionate in her love affairs even as she later embraced the rigorous, vigorous Catholic ethos of chastity, largely from her exquisitely feminine sense of the needs and vulnerabilities of women and children. If the dual JPB pontificate announced Truth with impeccable clarity, depth and gentleness; and Francis burns with desire to share the Love of Christ with the alienated; than Dorothy is a splendid, fascinating, synthesizing embodiment of both impulses, which require crave each other in a marriage made in heaven.

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.

My Prayer

Draw me to Yourself O Lord, fill me with your love.
Draw me to Yourself, cleanse me of my sin.
Pour Your blood upon me and make me pure, holy, good.

I am sick, give me your health; I am sinful, give me your mercy; I am tired, give me your rest; I am weak, give me your strength; I am lonely, give me your love.

Preserve my heart in purity, patience, perseverence, and peace.
Seal and secure my heart in your love.
Revive, defend, enhance my innocence.
Sanctify me by the indwelling of your Holy Spirit.
Strengthen me with your beautiful strength.

Make me humble, holy, loving and pure.
Make me quiet, still, calm, attentive, alert, watchful and vigilant.
Make me receptive, docile, pliable, disponible, responsive, obedient and grateful.
Make me patient, painstaking, longsuffering, persistent and persevering.

Make me sensitive, compassionate, kind, generous, merciful;
Make me magnanimous, joyous, zealous, fierce and fearless;
Make me steadfast; make me wise and prudent in all things.
Make me trustworthy as I place my trust in you.

Inflame me with love for you and let this fire consume what is not of you and purify all my loves.

Let me sing your praises forever.
Let me be a Praise of your Glory.

Let your mercy be upon us as we place our trust in you.

Loneliness

Not long ago, someone who knows me well said: “You are greatly loved.” I agreed. I am arguably the most non-lonely man in the world: wonderful spouse and family (both of origin and of marriage), excellent network of friends, challenging and satisfying work, and a rich prayer life. If I am not the most blessed man on the earth, I am solidly in the top .01%. (About 1 in 10,000 are in my league!) Recently, nevertheless, I am aware of a loneliness within, an emptiness, a sense of isolation and sadness, even when I am in the midst of my loving family and community. This may be maturity: I just turned 70 and my mortal destiny looms increasing large and imminent. I identify two sources for this loneliness, like two streams converging to form one river: the psychological and the spiritual. Psychologically, we humans are, from conception on, fragile, vulnerable, fleshly, needy and desperately dependent upon support, nurture, comfort, affirmation and encouragement. It is the nature of things that our desperate needs are unmet at crucial points...by Mom, Dad, family, friends, others...and we become interiourly wounded, traumatized, and sad. Eventually, this inner sadness mixes with our personal history and makeup and takes a variety of shapes: depression, resentment, addiction, romantic and sexual longings, and so forth. I suspect that most of us suffer these compulsions in a cloud of unknowing without clear awareness of the underlying loneliness. This ache of the heart can, in varying degrees, be healed, comforted and transformed but when it is deep it becomes constitutive of the psyche with an irrepressible, unavoidable persistence. Underlying the emotional pain is a deeper spiritual or ontological reality: we are created with an infinite longing, a boundless desire that cannot be satisfied by any finite being or combination of such. We long for the Good, the True and the Beautiful. We are created for loving, eternal communion with God. And so, if my loneliness is in part a remembrance of a painful past; it is also a premonition of a glorious future. My yearning, my quiet loneliness cannot be sated by any combination of friendship, family or spousal/romantic joy! My solitude constitutes my psyche not only as an ache from the past, but as a Hope for a future that infinitely exceeds everything we know in this empirical world. And so I continue to seek healing for this twofold sadness with a dual approach that merges into one path: I deepen my yearning for God, especially in prayer and liturgy, and I strengthen the bonds of love, tenderness and reverence that bind me to family and friends. The two loves interpenetrate, enrich and strengthen each other...so that the solitude is purified into courage, perseverance, peace and Hope.

Man Meets Woman

I have explained the masculine life itinerary as a vigorous, adventurous journey from the secure, encompassing womb of the mother through virile companionship and competition into the arms of our heavenly Father. I identified four pivotal dramatic transitions which are repeatedly enacted in every man's life: the handing over of the mother to the father in early childhood (classic oedipal resolution) in which the child establishes affectionate union with Dad and a relative release of dependency upon Mom; then there is identification with the other boys in competition and comraderie; thirdly, by adolescence there are secondary fathers (teachers, priests, coaches,) who provide a compensating, additional mentorship; and lastly each man must go into the desert, without any support or help, to do spiritual combat and depend on God alone. This narrative is accurate and correct but one-sided and could be understood as misogynist in that it fails to recognize the rich, complex, profound and miraculous ways in which virility is elicited by the feminine. And so I have come to recognize six distinct ways in which a man encounters woman such that his own virility is elicited, affirmed, strengthened and sealed in virtue. These are distinct even as in real life they interpenetrate and inform each other. First, there is the friendship of the brother-sister relationship. This is clear and strong in the blood connection but characterizes any genuinely "philia" relationship, free of the romantic or spousal, that involves equality, mutual reverence and affection, and shared interests and values. It is enhanced by the male-female contrast but serene in its freedom from the longing of the erotic. It can be a cousin, classmate, neighbor, colleague or other. In a gentle but enjoyable manner, this friendship evokes and accentuates a man's virility even as it flourishes in a commonality or harmony of equality and similarity. The second encounter is, of course, the sexual-romantic-spousal encounter with all its mystery, power and serendipity. Not least important for the man is the explosive, complex longing that overwhelms him and ultimately unveils a boundless loneliness, weakness and incompleteness. The third encounter with the feminine is the re-immersion into a "feminine" organism which encompasses, nourishes, educates and forms the man. This occurs with regard to the family (which is greater than the Mother), the school as "alma mater," the "motherland" and most sublimely with our Holy Mother the Church. Even a super-macho organization like "The Marines" can be understood as an encompassing organization that breaks down the singular male ego to resurrect it in a stronger form within a greater fighting body or organism. Such a "maternal enclosure" can take demonic forms in mob hysteria or criminal gangs but finds a wholesome and even holy embodiment in other societies insofar as they image the Communion of Saints for which we are all destined. A forth encounter, not unrelated to the previous, is the Marian Encounter or the "Fairy Godmother Dimension." In this case the man experiences the feminine as sublimely powerful even as it is beautiful, good, nurturing and peaceful. The ultimate expression of this reality is, of course, Mary crowned as Queen of Angels and Saints. As such, she far surpasses all other creatures in her beauty, goodness, and power. She is radiantly edifying and consoling. This reality is imaged in the fairy godmother who has marvelous power but in a feminine, maternal manner and is invincible against the raging of the evil powers. A vivid example of this is Gladriel (Cate Blancet as feminine elf) in the Lord of the Rings: her healing, protective, and radiantly lovely maternal influence is sublimely efficacious and confident and not in the slightest threatened by the empire of Evil rousing itself against all that is fragile and decent. Encounter with the luminous, mysterious and efficacious reality of such femininity has the effect of ennobling, purifying and sanctifying the otherwise explosive and disordered passions of the masculine heart. The fifth encounter is when the new mother "creates" a father by presenting him with their child. A man cannot even know he is father except through a revelation, in trust and truth from the mother. And later on, the father cannot emotionally or spiritually father the child if the mother does entrust her into his hands in a gesture of deepest trust an confidence. We can see, then, that suspicion and distrust from mother to father, work to destroy a man's paternity, which is to say his virility. The last, and sweetest, encounter is when a man fathers a daughter. This is entirely different from the experience of a man with his son. Not better, but different. There is less similarity and more difference so there is a certain reverent, fascinated distance which makes for surprise, delight and exhilarating amazement. It is admiration and elation of a distinctive nature. The father observes this new miracle of femininity as she evolves in innocence, spontaneity, elegance and grace into a magnificent woman. The love of a father for his daughter (or granddaughter) is surely a taste of the love of our heavenly Father and, along with the other five encounters, is simply the reality of heaven on earth.

Is the Pope Catholic?

This question used to be a silly joke, like “Does a bear have hair?” or “Does a bear pee in the forest?” But it has become, for many of us, a pressing question. I have serene confidence in the faith of Pope Francis which I see as deep and edifying in some ways but weak and challenged in others. With the father of the boy with an evil spirit (Lk 9:24), and with all of us, our Holy Father has to pray: “Lord I believe, help thou my unbelief.” Three dimensions of faith can be distinguished even as they interpenetrate each other: the intellectual (Truth) in its clarity and depth of perception of the spiritual realities; the mystical or prayer dimension (Beauty or Splendor of God) in the soul’s intimate, silent communion with God; and the drama (Good) in which we act out and express our love for God and neighbor. Father Groeschel said that often a saint is especially strong in one or the other: e.g. St. Thomas in the first; St. John of the Cross in the second; St. Mother Theresa of Calcutta in the third. Pope Francis is very strong in the dramatic or action aspect as he is so strongly drawn to the poor and needy. A real “Martha”...he is exemplary! He also seems to have a profound and distinctive friendship with Christ as his homilies are (for me) inspiring. His weakness is intellectual: he is really an "emotivist" in that he works from feeling and spiritual intuitions and does not think in a systematic manner. He is confused about some things and therefore confusing. This does not make him a bad person; but it makes him a weak pope since the pope’s main job is to teach. This brings to mind the “Peter Principle” which stated that one rises in an organization to the position where he is weakest. When I taught in a Catholic high school, a sister, a marvelous woman and outstanding teacher,  was a catastrophe as principal. But I am not worried about the Church. The Body of Christ, the Bride of Christ, is SO much bigger that the pope. And we have had much worse. The Church will survive. In the parish of my youth (St. John’s, Orange, NJ) our pastor, was a flamboyant eccentric who was never around. Randomly, he would appear in Church in phantom-of-the-opera-like cape and dash around nervously and then disappear for a few more months. But the parish flourished with fine priests, huge school with sisters of charity and christian brothers, and tons of large families. The Church did not just survive, it flourished! (By way of analogy, I am not worried about the USA under Trump either: the institutions are strong and resilient and the organism is basically healthy...nothwithstanding the spiritual/moral/cultural crisis!)  The book “Gathering of the Ungifted” raised, for me, a question over 40 years ago: How does the Church deal with those with weak faith? Those who deny or doubt essential beliefs? Is there a litmus test: if you don’t believe certain things you are expelled? The answer was a firm NO! There is no litmus test. Actually we are all weak in faith and in need of God’s grace. If one is gifted, gratuitiously and serenditiously, with powerful attraction to the poor, and to prayer and liturgy, and to the teachings of the Church, than one should drop to the floor in gratitude and adoration; proclaim oneself unworthy of such a precious gift of faith; and be most tender, kind and patient with those not so gifted. Among those I would include our Holy Father. May the Holy Spirit protect him, console him, strengthen him especially in his weakness, and infuse him with wisdom, knowledge and understanding!

Liberal Catholicisms: Three Types

Rod Dreher, in a recent blog, predicts the demise of liberal Christianity. He has a good point about the internal contradictions and instability of liberal Christianity in the face of an aggressive secularism. But he underestimates the resiliency and durability of religious liberalism in our culture and he fails to distinguish its types. In the Catholic world that I know, there have been three distinct liberalisms. First, there was the wholesome Catholic liberalism of 1945-65 in which we were raised: vigorous in defense of the working man, of the poor, and of civil rights for blacks;  patriotic and yet internationalist and unflinchingly anti-communist. Most of all, it was absolutely, if inarticulately, pro-family and pro-life.  That liberalism died around 1970 and was survived by two descendants which we will call militant and modest liberalism. The first is more cultural and moral, the second primarily political. The first comes out of the sexual revolution, the second attempts to perpetuate the earlier wholesome version by ignoring The Culture War. The first issues from a philosophy of the Sovereign Self as autonomous and free to assert its own choice and values; the second draws, at least indirectly, from a concern for the common good. The militant is fanatically committed to an ethos of sterile, which is to say contraceptive, sex and all its correlates: abortion as backup, homosexual marriage, easy divorce, recreational pornography, cohabitation and sexual license. The modest liberal is often personally traditional, sometimes admirably so, but retreats from defending that way of life in the public square and therefore defers to, even collaborates with, the militant. The later is viciously condemnatory of the Catholic Church as misogynist, homophobic, regressive, authoritarian, and repressive. The modest is more patient, deferential and respectful of the Church. Abstaining from The Culture War he sides with neither tradition nor liberation. He inherits from the earlier generations a quietness, a shyness and a reticence about sexuality that was admirable in a different time. To handle the moral dissonance, he practices avoidance and denial: professes to be pro-life but votes unfailingly pro-choice and despises the pro-life movement as moralistic and arrogant and in league with "The Right." Largely uncertain about contraception, legal abortion homosexuality, he relegates it to the private sphere and thus sides, in practice, with the militant. Tentative and uncertain on Catholic truth and practice, he apes the militant in a rigid, dogmatic allegiance to leftist positions on taxes, guns, immigrants, the death penalty, and the entire litany. And so the two live, more or less happily together, in the Democratic Party. The modest liberal in effect enables the cultural agenda of the militant as it looks away in denial. In the hard game of politics, then, the modest liberal sides with its militant sibling against traditional Christian values. Considered in itself, modest Catholic liberalism is a continuation of an honorable tradition that vigorously advocates for the poor and marginalized and for the common good as it assumes a quietness and reticence about matters of sex and marriage. But in the post-1960s context it has become complicit with an agenda that deconstructs family, gender, chastity and spousal fidelity. Let us consider the Jesuit order which is often viewed, somewhat unfairly, as heretical. The reality, in my view, is more complex. My (more than anecdotal but less than rigorously statistical) experience is that no more than 20% of Jesuits are militantly liberal in an articulate and forceful rejection of the Church's teaching. Perhaps 10% are similarly articulate and forceful in their defense of our traditions. These last, however, are largely marginalized since the remaining 70% are modest liberals: leaning left politically but culturally uncertain, indifferent or removed. As a result, the leading Jesuit institutions (America magazine, Georgetown, Boston College, etc.) are overwhelming controlled by the critical mass of militants like Thomas Reese and James Martin. Pope Francis is complex and contradictory but certainly in his all-important appointments of bishops and cardinals he is a modest liberal who has made his peace pact with the militants and has no taste for the Culture War. He and his appointees are concerned about the environment, open borders for refugees, and a redistribution of wealth. They prefer not to engage with the pandemic of sexual license, pornography, infidelity, lustful objectification of women and the decomposition of family, spousality, paternity and maternity. Theirs is a soft materialism that trusts that the family structure will be restored by higher minimum wage and capital gains tax. The militant version is flat-out a contradiction of the Catholic way of life. The modest is an attempt to split the difference. It is a thin religion, blending seamlessly into the mainstream as it condemns war and champions the earth and avoids abortion. "Catholic Lite"...it is feeble in its resistance to elite, hegemonic culture and cannot protect its young from the allure of a careerist, materialist and sexually liberated lifestyle. In time, it will largely (as Dreher predicts) drift into secular liberalism. Mainstream Protestant churches are a stop-over as the militant becomes increasingly secular. The Catholic Church will continue, in the foreseeable future, to fill up with modest liberals, a la the lieutenants of Pope Francis, since the religious instinct itself as well as the noble liberal instincts (inclusion, care for the needy, yearning for peace, care of nature, etc) are both irrepressible. We can only hope that this modest liberalism will find in its heart the fortitude, the certainty, the magnanimity and the sense of purpose to defend family, fidelity, fecundity and chastity against its wicked twin.