On Tuesday, in
the previous posting on this subject, we noted that the Jesuit publication America
had run “The
Catholic Case for Communism,” an article by Dean Dettloff, their
correspondent in Toronto, Ontario, which not very subtly turned Dorothy Day,
the founder of the Catholic Worker Movement, into a shill for communism.
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| Dorothy Day |
Today we present
the response Mr. Geoffrey Gneuhs sent to America. Geoff was chaplain to Dorothy Day and the New
York Catholic Worker, and he gave the homily at her funeral in December
1980. He serves on the board of the Dorothy Day Guild, and is a founding
member of the interfaith Center for Economic and
Social Justice (CESJ):
* * * * *
Dear Editors:
May I offer some
“clarifying notes,” to use Dean
Dettloff’s words, to his lengthy and
rather quaint attempt in his article, “The
Catholic Case for Communism,” to present Dorothy Day, Catholicism, and
communism as compatible.
First, he never
defines communism, big “C” or little “c” communism, other than with the slogans,
e.g., “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”
(Karl Marx, The Critique of the Gotha Program, 1875), which sounds like
some of the current political cant.
Thomas Aquinas taught, “seldom affirm, never
deny, but always distinguish.” Distinguishing and nuancing are grossly lacking
in his article. Dettloff quotes, “Communists
are attracted to communism by their goodness,” a rather elliptical and not very
nuanced statement. He is quick to
dismiss “bourgeois capitalists,” ignoring the fact that most religious orders
(I was a member of one, the Dominicans), including the Jesuits, and other
groups, the New York Catholic Worker, for instance, have been and are supported
by kind and generous “bourgeois capitalists”!
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| Peter Maurin |
Second he states,
“that goodness drives so many communists then and now.” NOW? Really,
like Nicolas Maduro and Venezuela,
Communist China, Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua, Kim in North Korea. In the twentieth
century millions experienced communist “goodness” under Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol
Pot, among others. Strangely he refers
to “colonial capitalism” in America; yet capitalism is a nineteenth-century
term and system.
Third, he tries
to address the issue of private property and the communist insistence on the
abolition of private property. And here
he totally misunderstands and distorts Dorothy Day. As Dorothy used to quote,
“property is proper to man.” In her
memoir, The Long Loneliness (1952), she also explained that what she and
her mentor Peter Maurin advocated was in line with Thomas Jefferson: “That government governs best that governs
least.” She was influenced by the
Southern Agrarians, like Allen Tate, Robert, Penn Warren, Cleanth Brooks, and
later Wendell Berry.
The only way Marx,
Engels, and the other communists could get their theories tried was by the
power of the State. Yet Dorothy derided
“Holy Mother the State.” She pointed out
that it destroyed true liberty, personal responsibility, and community. (Louis
Budenz, editor of the Daily Worker, and Bella Dodd, major Communist leaders in the last century in
America, came to this same realization.
They rejected the Communist Party and its materialist view, and they
returned to their spiritual roots in the Catholic Church. This is something ignored by the author in his
very limited and selective “historical” analysis.
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| Hilaire Belloc |
Writing in the February 1945 issue of the Catholic
Worker newspaper in a front page article Dorothy wrote,
We believe that social security
legislation now hailed as a great victory for the poor and the worker is a
great defeat for Christianity. It is the acceptance of the idea of force and
compulsion [communism, the State] . . . The
state [under Franklin Roosevelt} entered in to settle problems by dole and work
relief.
She deplored the
“inefficiency and waste of bureaucracies.” Like Hilaire Belloc, G.K. Chesterton, and
others she was against the centralized, powerful Servile State.
She knew that
Christ never told Caesar to care for the poor.
She quoted St. Hilary of Poitiers: “The less we ask of Caesar, the less
we will have to render to Caesar.” She
said: “I did not look upon class war as something to be stirred up, as the
Marxists did . . . when we went to strike, we went to perform the works of
mercy.”
Hannah Arendt in
her Crises of the Republic (1972) pithily focused today’s
situation, which Mr. Detlloff never succinctly or even clearly states: “Our problem today is not how to expropriate
the expropriators, but rather how to arrange matters so that the masses,
dispossessed in industrialist society in the capitalist and socialist systems,
can regain property . . . the alternative between capitalism and socialism is
false, because neither really exists in its pure state anyhow, but because we
have here twins each wearing a different hat.”
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| Pope John Paul II |
Both Pope John
Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI in their respective encyclicals, Laborem Exercens and Caritas in Veritate,
addressed these issues from a Christian perspective, as did Dorothy, and
not from an ideological, communist, materialist point of view. Christ had no political or economic
ideology. The communist ideology,
so-called scientific materialism, is ontologically opposed to the
Christ-centered understanding of the human person and creation, an orientation
found in John Paul II’s Thomist personalism.
Neither Mr.
Dettloff nor the communists offer a solution to the dilemma posed by Arendt,
other than State-enforced bureaucratic policies that destroy liberty and
personal creativity. I would, however,
suggest that there is a Just Third Way, a doable, practical tool to help create
a personalist social order. The interfaith
Center for Economic and Social Justice (CESJ) in Arlington, Virginia, of which
I am a founding member, promotes what are called Capital Homesteading Accounts
(CHAs) that would be for every child, woman, and man in America, and that could
be adapted — and adopted — by every country in the world.
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| Norman G. Kurland |
Co-founded in
1984 by Dr. Norman Kurland (who was instrumental in the passage through
Congress of the initial enabling legislation for Employee Stock Ownership Plans
in 1973), CESJ recognizes the sovereignty, freedom, and dignity of the human
person, the right to private property, and the free market. It is a strong critic of “rigid capitalism” to
use Pope John Paul II’s term.
CHAs are inspired
by Abraham Lincoln’s Homestead Act in 1862 that offered land to those who would
work it with eventual ownership, but extends the concept to all other forms of
capital.
For Dorothy,
Christ was the beginning and the end — not ideology, politics, or materialism.
Sincerely,
Geoffrey Gneuhs
#30#
