Pacifism

A repost of Dorothy Day’s 1936 Catholic Worker editorial on pacifism

'Christ breaks the rifle', Otto Pankok, 1950

The Catholic Worker is sincerely a pacifist paper.

We oppose class war and class hatred, even while we stand opposed to injustice and greed. Our fight is not “with flesh and blood but principalities and powers.”

We oppose also imperialist war.

We oppose, moreover, preparedness for war, a preparedness which is going on now on an unprecedented scale and which will undoubtedly lead to war. The Holy Father Pope Pius XI said, in a pastoral letter in 1929:

“And since the unbridled race for armaments is on the one hand the effect of the rivalry among nations and on the other cause of the withdrawal of enormous sums from the public wealth and hence not the smallest of contributors to the current extraordinary crisis. We cannot refrain from renewing on this subject the wise admonitions of our predecessors which thus far have not been heard.

“We exhort you all, Venerable Brethren, that by all the means at your disposal, both by preaching and by the press, you seek to illumine minds and open hearts on this matter, according to the solid dictates of right reason and of the Christian law.”

“Why not prepare for peace?”

1. Let us think now what it means to be neutral in fact as well as in name.

2. American bankers must not lend money to nations at war.

3. We must renounce neutral rights at sea.

   
   

These three points are made by Herbert Agar in “Land of the Free.” Neutrality “in fact,” he says, could be practiced on by either saint or cynic.

In fact, it would mean that either we must not pass judgments (upholding a positive stand for peace instead) or else in condemning Italy, also to condemn Ethiopia for resisting. To do this one would indeed have to be either saint or cynic.

The cynic would say, “It is none of my business.”

The Saint would say, and perhaps he would be a very wise man in saying it, “The conquered conquers in the end. Christ was overcome and He overcame. There was His ostensible failure on the Cross, yet He rose triumphant and Christianity spread over the world. The Christian thing to do would be not to resist, but when anyone asked for one’s coat, to give up one’s cloak besides. As Peter Maurin pointed out in the last instance, Australia could be given up to Japanese expansion for instance, if England objected on”noble” grounds for Japan’s aggression in Manchuria. But recognizing that the majority of people are not Saints; that they are swift to wrath, to resist aggression (when they are not the aggressors), then we can only insist ceaselessly that even when the people are taking sides mentally they must keep out, they must not participate in “a War to end War.”

In the last war we helped to impose an unjust peace, even if we grant that we sincerely thought we were engaged in a noble crusade and were throwing our support on the right side in the conflict. We were influenced to this way of thinking not only by deliberate propaganda, but also by the muddle-headedness of pacifists who were not truly “peace-lovers.”

Example Again

If we are calling upon nations to disarm, we must be brave enough and courageous enough to set the example.

Nations can live at home. That is the title of a recent book, and many surveys are being made at present to find out how many nations can do without trade and “live at home.”

If we abandoned our neutral rights at sea, we would still have a surplus of food and material goods with which to help feed nations which had been made gaunt by war. We are not suggesting this as a business note but as a reminder of Christian Charity.

Do we believe we help any country by participating in an evil in which they are engaged? We rather help them by maintaining our own peace. It takes a man of heroic stature to be a pacifist and we urge our readers to consider and study pacifism and disarmament in this light. A pacifist who is willing to endure the scorn of the unthinking mob, the ignominy of jail, the pain of stripes and the threat of death, cannot be lightly dismissed as a coward afraid of physical pain.

A pacifist even now must be prepared for the opposition of the next mob who thinks violence is bravery. The pacifist in the next war must be ready for martyrdom.

We call upon youth to prepare!

Fare Forward, Voyagers!

In this book, David Craig, real life poetry professor, becomes James, self-styled beatnik and narrator, in order to tell the story of his young adulthood. The book opens with the narrator walking out of his job and driving through the night, his girlfriend barely conscious in the back of the truck, across Ohio to Cleveland, where they plan to set up new lives. The ensuing tale reads as a life of drifting, of spontaneously taken journeys, by pick up, greyhound bus and hitch hiking.

For me, it reads as an account of poustinia, in the sense of setting out on a journey “with just a loaf of bread and a small sack of salt” to search for a place to settle, a community to serve.

A bit like Thoreau in ‘Walden’, James doesn’t spend much time in the actual poustinia, in this case at Madonna House, a religious community in Canada. All the same his time there, framed before and after by road trips, low paid jobs, spartan accommodation, tentative relationships, weed and mushrooms, carries the weight of the narrative. We anticipate it beforehand and wonder about its legacy afterwards. The process that led him there is shadowy but soon enough we find James alighting a bus in a small town, snow still piled up by the road, without a proper coat or hat, not sure what to do next. Having arrived, he is not sure how to behave. He maintains his diffidence and humour, but his jokes are received with blank stares. There are not many chances to meet girls; male residents are bused out every evening to a house away from the main compound. He wonders why people look so happy with so little on offer in the way of entertainment.

Ekaterina, nicknamed “Bee”, the founder of Madonna House, appears as “a large woman, of peasant stock it looked like in her loose-fitting cream-coloured shift.” Despite his misgivings, he joins the whole community to hear her lectures, “the least he could do” in return for their hospitality. She says, “Become poorer because you are beggars at the door of God.” And “I look around here and all I see are rich people in borrowed clothes”. He feels as if the words are directed at him, “The nerve”.

James spends his days sorting rubbish and donations and chopping wood, “frozen with boredom” until he eventually receives permission to spend a few days in one of the community’s poustinias.

Wanting to understand more, I turned to Catherine de Huek Doherty, the Ekaterina of this account, to read her own words on bringing the Russian concept of poustinia to the West, similar to the ones she visited in Russia with her mother. Poustinia literally means desert, a search for solitude, devotion to the people of a village community, a simple dwelling, with allusions to the desert fathers. A poustinik is someone who has been given permission to live in search of God, usually a man in their 30s or 40s, sometimes an older woman. Some spend a short time, a few weeks or a year, others their whole life in poustinia.

Catherine de Hueck Doherty, 1896-1985

Finding an abandoned farmhouse nearby she sets it up as a poustinia for the Madonna House community, writing a wonderful, inspiring letter of explanation to her supporters. She is very specific: bread and water or tea and coffee for westerners, simple furniture, no books except a bible. The idea turns out to be very popular.

She later responds to some unease within the community and decides to found a poustinia in an urban setting. This poustinia, “not for amateurs” is now in the heart. The modern day poustiniks will go about their business, just as a pregnant woman goes about her duties, with new life growing inside her. “You are pregnant with Christ” she says.

James experiences conversion, then disappointment. Ekaterina says to him, “So you’re ready to change the world now, hey, honeymooner” then prophetically “But now you must climb the cross…”

James leaves Madonna House, and hitches to Denver. On the way he punches a fellow hitch hiker who asks him, “Are you saved?” When work in the construction industry dries up, he becomes a taxi driver. He describes his fares, his boss and his landlord, quoting Ginsberg, “my wagon full of sunflowers”. A strong feature of this book is his devotion to the large cast of assembled all sorts, the “minnows” of the title: workmates, bosses, landlords, friends of friends, fellow hitchhikers, ones who offer hospitality, who appear in chance encounters, who often turn out to be poets. Helping the prose along is the narrator’s education in poetry. Indirect quotations from T.S. Eliot (Fare forward, voyagers!), Johnny Cash, Jack Kerouac, Kavanagh, Berrigan, Thich Nhat Hanh give the story its place within the Beat generation, coupled with deep appreciation for humanity. Thanks to the author’s determination not to be pious or judgemental, I found this a gentle, consoling, easy-going text, despite the tough subject matter, including drug taking and patronising attitudes to women.

In the final chapter, decades have passed. We learn some new things about James, that he still drives a cab, that he is half Choctaw Indian, that both he and his partner have suffered from childhood trauma which has effected their whole family. Although he recounts personal struggles with an evil spirit, a desire for fame for instance, he implies but does not recount the struggles of family, children, marriage, professional disappointment, that follow this tale, instead ending with the single word “Mercy”.

According to de Hueck Doherty, there’s a demand, in the life of the poustinik, to give up his solitary search for God and help the villagers with the haymaking or harvest whenever it’s needed. As Ekaterina tells “James”, “Don’t worry... you’ll find the words.”

Jesus in the Minnows by David Craig, 2023, Angelico Press

Poustinia by Catherine de Hueck Doherty, Fountain 1975, Ave Maria Press

This article was originally published in the Autumn 2023 issue of the London Catholic Worker newsletter.

Why Do the Members of Christ Tear One Another?

Fr. Stratman writes: “We think with Cardinal Faulhaber that Catholic moral theology must in fact begin to speak a new language, and that what the last two Popes have already pronounced in the way of general sentences of condemnation on modern war should be translated into the systematic terminology of the schools. The simple preacher and pastor can, however, already begin by making his own words of the reigning Holy Father (Pius XI), ‘murder,’ ‘suicide,’ ‘monstrous crime.’”

“But we are at war,” people say. “This is no time to talk of peace. It is demoralizing to the armed forces to protest, not to cheer them on in their fight for Christianity, for democracy, for civilization. Now that it is under way, it is too late to do anything about it.” One reader writes to protest against our “frail” voices “blatantly” crying out against war. (The word blatant comes from bleat, and we are indeed poor sheep crying out to the Good Shepherd to save us from these horrors.) Another Catholic newspaper says it sympathizes with our sentimentality. This is a charge always leveled against pacifists. We are supposed to be afraid of the suffering, of the hardships of war.

But let those who talk of softness, of sentimentality, come to live with us in cold, unheated houses in the slums. Let them come to live with the criminal, the unbalanced, the drunken, the degraded, the pervert. (It is not decent poor, it is not the decent sinner who was the recipient of Christ’s love.) Let them live with rats, with vermin, bedbugs, roaches, lice (I could describe the several kinds of body lice).

Let their flesh be mortified by cold, by dirt, by vermin; let their eyes be mortified by the sight of bodily excretions, diseased limbs, eyes, noses, mouths.

Let their noses be mortified by the smells of sewage, decay and rotten flesh. Yes, and the smell of the sweat, blood and tears spoken of so blithely by Mr. Churchill, and so widely and bravely quoted by comfortable people.

Let their ears be mortified by harsh and screaming voices, by the constant coming and going of people living herded together with no privacy. (There is no privacy in tenements just as there is none in concentration camps.)

Let their taste be mortified by the constant eating of insufficient food cooked in huge quantities for hundreds of people, the coarser foods, the cheaper foods, so that there will be enough to go around; and the smell of such cooking is often foul.

Then when they have lived with these comrades, with these sights and sounds, let our critics talk of sentimentality.

Our Catholic Worker groups are perhaps too hardened to the sufferings in the class war, living as they do in refugee camps, the refugees being as they are victims of the class war we live in always. We live in the midst of this war now these many years. It is a war not recognized by the majority of our comfortable people. They are pacifists themselves when it comes to the class war. They even pretend it is not there.

Many friends have counseled us to treat this world war in the same way. “Don’t write about it. Don’t mention it. Don’t jeopardize the great work you are doing among the poor, among the workers. Just write about constructive things like Houses of Hospitality and Farming Communes.” “Keep silence with a bleeding heart,” one reader, a man, pro-war and therefore not a sentimentalist, writes us.

But we cannot keep silent. We have not kept silence in the face of the monstrous injustice of the class war, or the race war that goes on side by side with this world war (which the Communist used to call the imperialist war.)

Read the letters in this issue of the paper, the letter from the machine shop worker as to the deadening, degrading hours of labor. Read the quotation from the missioner’s letter from China. Remember the unarmed steel strikers, the coal miners, shot down on picket lines. Read the letter from our correspondent in Seattle who told of the treatment accorded agricultural workers in the North West. Are these workers supposed to revolt? These are Pearl Harbor incidents! Are they supposed to turn to arms in the class conflict to defend their lives, their homes, their wives and children?

Last month a Negro in Missouri was shot and dragged by a mob through the streets behind a car. His wounded body was then soaked in kerosene. The mob of white Americans then set fire to it, and when the poor anguished victim had died, the body was left lying in the street until a city garbage cart trucked it away. Are the Negroes supposed to “Remember Pearl Harbor” and take to arms to avenge this cruel wrong? No, the Negroes, the workers in general, are expected to be “pacifist” in the face of this aggression.

Perhaps we are called sentimental because we speak of love. We say we love our president, our country. We say that we love our enemies, too. “Hell,” Bernanos said, “is not to love any more.”

“Greater love hath no man than this,” Christ said, “that he should lay down his life for his friend.”

“Love is the measure by which we shall be judged,” St. John of the Cross said.

“Love is the fulfilling of the law,” St. John, the beloved disciple said.

Read the last discourse of Jesus to his disciples. Read the letters of St. John in the New Testament. And how can we express this love–by bombers, by blockades?

Here is a clipping from the Herald Tribune, a statement of a soldier describing the use of the bayonet against the Japanese:

“He (his father) should have been with us and seen how good it was. We got into them good and proper, and I can’t say I remember much about it, except that it made me feel pretty good. I reckon that was the way with the rest of the company, by the way my pals were yelling all the time.”

Is this a Christian speaking?

“Love is an exchange of gifts,” St. Ignatius said.

Love is a breaking of bread.

Remember the story of Christ meeting His disciples at Emmaus? All along the road He had discoursed to them, had expounded the scriptures. And then they went into into the inn at Emmaus, and sat down to the table together. And He took bread and blessed it and broke it and handed it to them, and they knew Him in the breaking of bread! (St. Luke, 24, 13-35.)

Love is not the starving of whole populations. Love is not the bombardment of open cities. Love is not killing, it is the laying down of one’s life for one’s friend.

Hear Fr. Zossima, in the brothers Karamazev: “Love one another, Fathers,” he said, speaking to his monks. “Love God’s people. Because we have come here and shut ourselves within these walls, we are no holier than those that are outside, but on the contrary, from the very fact of coming here, each of us has confessed to himself that he is worse than others, than all men on earth ... And the longer the monk lives in his seclusion, the more keenly he must recognize that. Else he would have no reason to come here.

“When he realizes that he is not only worse than others, but that he is responsible to all men for all and everything, for all human sins, national and individual, only then the aim of our seclusion is attained. For know, dear ones, that every one of us is undoubtedly responsible for all men and everything on earth, not merely through the general sinfulness of creation, but each one personally for all mankind and every individual man. For monks are not a special sort of man, but only what all men ought to be. Only through that knowledge, our heart grows soft with infinite, universal, inexhaustible love. Then every one of you will have the power to win over the whole world by love and to wash away the sins of the world with your tears ... Each of you keep watch over your heart and confess your sins to yourself unceasingly ... Hate not the atheists, the teachers of evil, the materialists, and I mean not only the good ones–for there are many good ones among them, especially in our day–hate not even the wickedness. Remember them in your prayers thus: Save, O Lord, all those who have none to pray for them, save too all those who will not pray. And add, it is not in pride that I make this prayer, O Lord, for I am lower than all men...”

I quote this because that accusation “holier than thou” is also made against us. And we must all admit our guilt, our participation in the social order which has resulted in this monstrous crime of war.

We used to have a poor demented friend who came into the office to see us very often, beating his breast, quoting the penitential psalms in Hebrew, and saying that everything was his fault. Through all he had done and left undone, he had brought about the war, the revolution.

That should be our cry, with every mouthful we eat, “We are starving Europe!” When we look to our comfort in a warm bed, a warm home, we must cry, “My brother, my mother, my child is dying of cold.

“I am lower than all men, because I do not love enough. O God take away my heart of stone and give me a heart of flesh.”