Comments on: FEATURED: The Catholic Worker after Dorothy by Dan McKanan [Vol. 1, #40]

By: brent

brent — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 13:58:12 +0000

Thanks for the response, Brian; I really appreciate a chance for dialogue. Part of the difficulty of reviewing a book such as this is that it is somewhat out of my regular reading, so I am not well-read in many other histories of the Worker to round out a background for this book, so no, my critique is of the text itself, and rooted mostly in the relationships I’ve had with a few CW communities and workers.
It seems from your reply that perhaps a majority of recent histories ignore the relationship with anarchist and other Leftist traditions? In that case I certainly am in favor of a revisionist history presented in McKanan’s writing, for I have certain sympathies for the American anarchists, socialists, and the communists as well. I wouldn’t have realized that this part of the history has been ignored if not for your comments. I have currently been looking over the “New Program of the Communist Party USA “ from 1966, which is an excellent critique of exploitative capitalism, although it still falls short because it misses the much more radical critique provided by the Sermon on the Mount.
I hope that what I’m arguing for is that as a community of followers of Christ – whatever form that takes, be it the CW, or many other communities – we do not settle for any “radicalism” presented by the nation-state, the political-corporate-economic principalities and powers of the world. The notion that the critique of the powers must be more radical than any “liberal” or “conservative,” “Left” or “Right,” (which, I really like how you put it: “are only marginally helpful to any discourse of anything at all”) comes not just from Hauerwas, et al, but from Jesus the Christ: “My kingdom is not of this world…for this I have come into the world, to testify to the truth.” Also Paul, “do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may prove what the will of God is, that which is good and acceptable and perfect.”
I’m just not interested in “the potential to revitalize…the Left in America today,” (McKanan, 217), although I am invested and intensely concerned with revitalizing the church (ibid). Part of what makes this revitalization such a difficult course to navigate is that the narrative of the nation-state has become so interwoven and confused with the narrative of the church (ie, the gathered body of Christ, the “royal priesthood”).
Certainly we can come alongside others who are invested in practicing works of mercy, hospitality, peace-making; who are subverting or calling into question the dominating powers of the age; who are loving their neighbor as they love themselves. In my estimation, both Day and Maurin embraced an attitude of inclusion, “befriending” these other movements, as McKanan descibes it. If this part of the history of the Worker has been glossed over, left-out, erased, then it is a good thing that it appears in this re-telling of the history, and, as I said, I do appreciate the book quite a bit as a history.
Still, I must just repeat the words, “love the LORD your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the great and foremost commandment.” To make this distinction, and this confession, is what sets apart the church. It is easy for me, and certainly has been easy throughout the history of the church, to betray this radical vocation. It is often easier for me to just say that I don’t vote because I’m an anarchist than to go into the long details that make up that conviction, beginning with a confession of Christ who has been given “all authority in heaven and on earth.” But that is what I should be doing all the time; it’s just a lot easier to write these things than to really live them out, and yet that is our calling. I’m mostly trying to repeat the most radical call of the Gospel, and seperate that from any earthly powers that fall short of that. First, I am speaking for myself, to remind myself of the cost of discipleship (deny yourself…).
I hope that that articulates some more of my thinking behind the review. Your point that I have equated “liberalism” (as expressed today) with “the Left,” is well taken, and I understand the huge distances between the two. I think that my argument is that these are still essentially the same (along with “conservatism,” etc) as powers that fall short of the Cross of Christ.
-brent

By: Brian Terrell

Brian Terrell — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 23:20:28 +0000

Brent,
Dan McKanan’s book is most valuable as a corrective of certain misunderstandings and deliberate distortions of the history of the Catholic Worker movement and the thinking of its founders by some scholars and Catholic Workers in recent years. Reading your review, I sense that your critique is founded more on the commentary of these and less on an understanding of the writings of Peter Maurin and Dorothy Day.
Clearly distinctions such as “Left” versus “Right” fall short in describing the Catholic Worker and are only marginally helpful to any discourse of anything at all. Your assertion that “McKanan curiously aligns the anarchist tradition, of which Day and Maurin had great sympathies, with the Left,” presents a false dichotomy, as most proponents of the anarchist tradition, especially as Peter and Dorothy understood it, have so aligned themselves. I fear, too, that you add to the confusion by conflating, as many do today, American political liberalism with the political Left. I write this response a couple of days before the 2008 presidential election, laughing through tears to hear the Democratic (sic) Party and its militarist pro-corporate candidate Barack Obama characterized as being of the Left. O f course, the CW has little common cause with that sort of liberalism and Dan McKanan does not argue that it does.
There are, however, traditions of the truly radical political Left that are fundamental and that cannot easily be divorced from the CW and the thought Peter and Dorothy. Both found inspiration from and quoted extensively from these radicals, American and European, religious and secular. Note, for example, Peter’s debt to the work of the atheist communist-anarchist Peter Kropotin and Dorothy’s commendation of her friend, comrade and “sister in the deepest meaning of the word” Elizabeth Gurley Flynn as an example of what the Vatican Council calls the laity to be, Flynn’s lack of religious faith and her position as Secretary of the Communist Party, USA, notwithstanding. The Cuban Revolution of Castro and Guevara inspired Dorothy in ways that Roosevelt’s New Deal and Johnson’s Great Society did not. Dorothy was able to see the (decidedly “Leftist”) anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti and the IWW labor organizers who were murdered by the state or by mobs on behalf of the owning classes as saints and martyrs who died in the service of Christ and the least of His brothers and sisters. “It is impossible for any one of those who have real charity in his heart not to serve Christ,” she quoted Mauriac, “Even some of those who think that they hate Him have consecrated their lives to Him.” The concept that a truly “radical” versus a merely “liberal” critique can be found only among those who profess faith in Christ might be found in the writings of Alisdair MacIntyre or Stanley Hauerwas, perhaps, but it is alien to the thought Peter and Dorothy and to the tradition they founded.
You are correct that Dan McKanan would be mistaken if he did “equate this radical impulse (works of mercy) synonymously with the practices of the political Left,” but he does not do this. He does, however, recognize something essential about the movement and its founders that some other scholars choose to ignore when he notes the common ground, the kinship, friendship and debt the movement owes to the Left where it exists.
I encourage your resolve to go deeper into the writings of Peter and Dorothy and suggest more familiarity with the primary sources will increase your appreciation for Dan’s scholarship.
Brian Terrell

By: brent

brent — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 20:04:07 +0000

The evening after submitting and then posting this review, I was reading “The Violence of Love,” a collection of texts from Oscar Romero. In the preface to the book, it is descibed that “during his three years as archbishop of San Salvador, he became known across the world as a fearless defender of the poor and suffering…Yet he earned also the hatred and calumny of powerful persons in his own country – hatred that produced constant attacks on him in the national media and inevitably led to his matyrdom.”
Reading from these homilies, I found Romero expressing the radical and eternal love of the gospel; it is this vision that I hoped to plea for in this review, rather than settling for anything less, such as any mission of the nation-state.
Anyway, here are Romero’s words, which succinctly descibes the mission of the Church within the mission of other institutions:
“As Christians formed in the gospel,
you have the right to organize
and, inspired by the gospel,
to make concrete decisions.
But be careful not to betray
those evangelical, Christian, supernatural convictions
in the company of those who seek other liberations
that can be merely economic, temporal, political.
Even though working for liberation
along with those who hold other ideologies,
Christians must cling to their original liberation.”
June 19, 1977 (pg. 4, the Violence of Love)