Catholic in the Public Square
I confess. I am a Mac.
I used to love Steve Jobs’ presentations. His sense of timing, ability to communicate and excite, were unique to him.
I find this old video of a young Steve Jobs talking about Apple at Apple’s beginnings fascinating. Even at this young age and in this overly casual environment, he already had that stage presence. He also spoke from the hippie ethos of that time. This is an interesting look backwards into our recent history. If you enjoy that sort of thing, have a watch.
The following Yahoo News article describes a raid on a sweatshop in India where enslaved children, some as young as 8 years, were forced to make Christmas decorations.
Many of these decorations are being sold on eBay. Read the excerpt of the Yahoo News article below for tips on how to avoid buying them yourself. Watch the video on the link at the end of the excerpt for more information.
Police and child advocates broke padlocks and busted down doors in a surprise raid of a sweatshop in India, only to find a group of children imprisoned who had been forced to make Christmas decorations.
The children were kept in rooms approximately six feet by six feet and had been forced to work up to 19-hour days making the decorations, which advocates believe may have been intended to be sold on the cheap in the United States.
Human rights group Global March for Children led the raid, but also got help from former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who now serves as the United Nations special envoy for global education.
The 14 children who were freed are now in the process of being reunited with their families, who are scattered across India.
Brown released video to ABC News and Yahoo! News revealing what he says were the illegal conditions in which the children in Delhi were discovered.
“There is no parent in the world who would ever want their child to be subjected to conditions that you see in these films of children in dingy basements, without air, without food, without proper care, being forced into child labor for all these hours of the day. I think every parent who sees these films will want this practice brought to an end as quickly as possible.”
Child advocates say American consumers would likely never know the origin of goods made with child labor, which Brown says has become a global epidemic that needs to be solved.
In a push to garner more attention on the issue worldwide, Brown’s office released a new report today, “Child Labour and Educational Disadvantage – Breaking the Link, Building Opportunity,” which says 91 million children in the global workforce are younger than 12 years old.
In the case of the children rescued in Delhi, he says they were both injured and scared.
“Some of them are lacerated because they’re working with glass. And we found these children in this basement. They were not being paid,” he said. “They had been trafficked themselves. And they were making these Christmas decorations that were being sold in our shops and our web sites in the West.”
Priyanke Ribhu of Global March says many children in India are often lured away from their parents by gangmasters who befriend their parents in the remote villages where they live. The gangmasters reportedly promise parents their kids will be taken to a better place where they will be provided a real education and many great
opportunities they could not receive in their villages. Parents are also often told the children will be able to send money back home to help their families.Far too often, Ribhu says, the children simply end up locked away behind padlocks only to work 17-,18-, even 19-hour days with no one to help them. Ribhu says holiday decorations similar to those discovered in the recent raid can be found on eBay and in other marketplaces online or in stores.
In addition, she says, the items are often sold off into a sophisticated network of suppliers that make it nearly impossible for retailers or consumers to know whether the goods they are purchasing have been made by child labor.
Ribhu warns, however, there are some tell-tale warning signs American consumers can be on the lookout for if they wish to avoid purchasing products made with child labor. First, she says, if the holiday decorations you are purchasing are not labeled with the country they are made in you might want to be concerned. Next, she says if they have an unusually low price and are marked as “hand made” it is another red flag.
Ribhu also warns to be cautious when examining “hand made” items that are also marked as being made in India.
While child labor was largely outlawed in the United States following the industrial revolution more than 100 years ago, Brown told ABC News and Yahoo! News that India has yet to ban child labor itself. He says currently, the country only has a ban on hazardous working conditions, but he wants to pressure the government to immediately take action to protect children there. (To see a video and read more of this Yahoo News story, go here.)
What is this “fiscal cliff” that commenters and pollsters talk about? What difference does it make to you and me?
The following excerpt from a Yahoo Finance article does a good job of answering these questions.
As usual, our elected officials are taking polls to learn what we the people think about their brinksmanship politics. They use the results of these polls to determine how far they can go in endangering the rest of us and keep their jobs. I don’t read much about them putting our country first, just how they can frame their irresponsibility so that the other guy takes the political fall for it.
BOTH parties are at fault here. NEITHER party appears to give a care about this country.
Pollsters are polling us. Politicians who don’t care about governing are using those polls to determine their next move in the one thing they do care about, which is making the opposite political party look bad.
I doubt that many people who are being polled know what the “fiscal cliff” is, or why it matters to them. I don’t want Public Catholic readers to be that uninformed.
The Yahoo Finance article says in part:
The fiscal cliff refers to the potentially disastrous situation the U-S faces at the end of this year. At midnight on December 31st, a number of laws are set to expire. If the President and the Republicans don’t reach an agreement before then, Americans could face broad government spending cuts and tax increases on January 1st. The combined amount would total over 500 billion dollars. Those 500 billion dollars equal about three to four percent of the nation’s entire gross domestic product. This is what’s referred to as the fiscal cliff.
If there isn’t a resolution, here are the specifics of what will happen.
Taxes would go up for almost every taxpayer and many businesses. The Bush-era tax cuts, which tax relief for middle and upper-class tax payers, would be a thing of the past. So would President Obama’s payroll tax cut which added about a thousand dollars a year to the average worker’s income.
Government spending would be slashed. That means less money for most military, domestic and federal programs. $26 billion in emergency unemployment-compensation would be gone. Medicare payments to doctors would be reduced by $11 billion. Federal programs would take the biggest hit. They stand to lose a total of $65 billion.
If the fiscal cliff isn’t avoided, some investors will be hit hard. Those who receive qualified dividends could see the tax rate on those dividends go from 15% to almost 40% in 2013.
Many business owners believe going over the fiscal cliff will cripple the economy, triggering a deep recession. (Read more here.)
America needs more babies for its economic health.
At least, that’s what U.S. News and World Report says in it’s recent article “Why a Falling Birth Rate is a Big Problem.” According to the article, America has historically had high birth rates compared to our cousins in Europe. Many economists feel that contributes to our relative economic well-being.
This article, with its what’s-good-for-business viewpoint, fits in perfectly with the way people in the West have approached their children, homes and families for decades now. Its short-term, through-the-peep-hole way of looking at the situation fits this approach, as well. It’s easy to pick out one thing to be concerned about if you focus to a small enough point. In this way, the article is able to give short shrift to long-term trends and social concerns other than what’s-good-for-business.
One thing that seems clear to me is that when any group of people has a sustained birth rate that falls below the replacement level, they are acting out a form of group suicide. The U.S. News and World Report article looks to economic reasons for declining birth rates. I do think that this explanation fits sudden dips in birth rate that correlate with economic downturns, which is what the small-point perspective gives us. But while the article addresses long-term declines in birth rates in a small way, I don’t think it gives them enough consideration for its analysis to have any real meaning.
The situation which leads to what I referenced earlier — a form of group suicide by low birth rate — is not something that occurs due to short-term economic downturns. In fact, the overall trend in decline in birth rates has been steady throughout the West for almost half a century now. While rates do take a slightly less precipitous drop and may even go up a notch or two during times of economic boom, the overall trend has been a steady downward slope for decades.
One factor that correlates closely with this trend is the decline in respect for motherhood and fatherhood and the social/political dismemberment of the family. I have experienced some of this myself.
When I had my second child, there were plenty of people on hand to tell me that “two was enough” and that I shouldn’t have any more.
When I left the House of Representatives to stay home and raise my first baby, more than one person felt called to inform me that I was “wasting my life” by doing so.
Mothers don’t get any respect. Raising little children, guiding them, making a home for them, nurturing, protecting, training and loving them into productive adults, is considered the lowest form of work we can have. It’s so poorly thought of that women will leave their own children at home and go get a job at a daycare, raising other people’s children. That, the paycheck and the clear-cut employment, are what is respected; not raising their own babies.
Children are universally regarded as a burden in our society, rather than a blessing. We look at our own young and make jokes about being around a little baby will drive anyone to birth control. Why is this? Have babies stopped being cute? Are they no longer cuddly? Do our office cubicles and breakroom microwaves really warm our hearts so much that we no longer feel the need to hold our own child in our arms?
What has become of us in the West that we no longer love our own young? What is wrong with people who have no desire to create life?
Has our cultural narcissism and overweening me-ism supplanted our ability to give to the point that we no longer want and cherish our own children?
If we truly want more babies, for, as this article so crassly puts it, the sake of the economy, then we need to start treating mothers, fathers and families with a little more respect. We are a society that has sacrificed everything, including our fertility and the warmth of home and family to the almighty paycheck. In our world, God is a sideshow while the gods of commerce, like the ring of Mordor, bind and rule us all.
How ironic that the same forces for which people have sacrificed their birthright to home and family are the ones that now “need” a higher birth rate. We need babies to make money. Even though, as we’ve been told many times, babies cost money. In fact, we’ve been told that babies cost too much money. And they make us unavailable for all the other things that we are told we should want instead of children.
How to turn this around? How to undo the selfish deed of selling childlessness as a good thing in life?
Maybe we should begin by giving some respect to the people who make good, productive people: A woman and a man, united in marriage.
The U.S. New and World Report article reads in part:
It sounds like one of those stories you can safely ignore: The U.S. birth rate has hit a record low, led by a big drop in the portion of immigrant women having babies.
[Photos: Kennedy Center Honors Led Zeppelin, Hoffman, Letterman ]
This development doesn’t directly affect anybody, since it’s one of those long-term societal trends that occurs in small increments and doesn’t change the unemployment rate, the price of gas, the direction of the stock market or any of the big economic forces that make our lives better or worse today. And since the trend is strongest among immigrants, it sounds like maybe this is something happening in a shadowy part of the economy that doesn’t matter all that much.
But it does matter, and if the trend persists, it could mean lower living standards for most Americans in the future.
It may seem intuitively obvious that a slower-growing or declining population is good for the economy, especially when you think about starving children in poor parts of the world where there’s not enough food for everybody. In places where resources are severely limited–and economic policies are dysfunctional–it may be true that a growing population is a bad thing.
But that’s usually because such economies are static, and instead of creating wealth they typically just divide up what’s already there. That’s not the situation in America, which has a dynamic economy that creates wealth and more than enough resources for all of its citizens.
[See: What Keeps People Out of the Middle Class ]
On the contrary, one of the great strengths of the U.S. economy, especially compared to Europe and Japan, is a relatively high birth rate, which keep the population young, on average, and population growth robust. “Everybody comes into world with one mouth and two hands,” says economist Donald Boudreaux of George Mason University. “It’s generally true that most people produce more than they consume.”
A growing population is good for the economy when rising productivity continually reduces the amount of resources required to produce a given amount of output. Even now, with the U.S. economy in a rut and too many people out of work, productivity is rising, which means a larger population would generate more wealth per person than a smaller one. Boudreaux points out that Manhattan, one of the mostly densely populated places in America, is also one of the wealthiest, whereas rural states like Mississippi are sparsely populated, and much poorer. (Read more here.)
Map of South China Sea area affected by China’s new maritime policy. source: CIA
China recently issued a new maritime policy which, it says, allows Chinese border patrol to board and expel foreign ships (ie, non-Chinese ships) from the China Sea.
This policy expands China’s borders beyond what maritime law currently allows and would infringe on the shipping rights of neighboring nations, some of whom, such as the Philippines, are United States allies.
I am posting this because I think it’s pertinent to America’s economic policies. China’s new military and economic prowess are the weapons that we built by exporting our industrial base to a Communist country. I believe this is a direct result of the sell-out of the American people and America’s interests by both political parties in the service of multi-national corporations.
For all their demagoguery, neither political party can seriously address the deficit, our overall budget, or how to effectively govern this country so long as they continue to ignore most of the causes for these problems. In addition, China’s growing military might and its impact on our allies in the South Pacific, while they pose no direct threat to America at this time, are likely to become more serious in the future.
Our problems in this country almost all stem from poor governance by bad elected officials of both political parties who are more interested in bashing one another than doing something for the people of this nation.
The China Daily Mail article reads in part:
The Philippine Government recently denounced China‘s new maritime law that will allow its border patrol to board and expel foreign ships in the South China Sea.
In a statement through the Department of Foreign Affairs, Philippine officials described the policy as a “gross violation of the Declaration on the Conduct of Parties in the South China Sea”, among other cited international agreements.
Moreover, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations or ASEAN has also voiced concern over China’s latest pronouncement as it may impede maritime access over the tension-filled area.
This latest round of diplomatic row comes right after China’s issuance of new passports that included a map of South China Sea, prompting the Philippines to issue a separate visa form for Chinese nationals. (Read more here.)
Losing. Sucks.
There has been a spate of articles and interviews, including one with no less a personage than former Presidential Candidate John McCain, expressing the hand-wringing dismay of defeat that many right-wing politicos and even some socially conservative Christians seem to feel because they got slam-dunked in the November 7 election.
I’ve ignored most of this, for three reasons.
1. It’s natural to go a little nuts after you get beat in an election. It’s a humiliating experience all around and it makes anyone who goes through it a little bit crazy for a while.
2. I’ve never taken the Republican position on social issues all that seriously in the first place. I know there are many sincere people who have an R on their voter ID card who believe in traditional moral values right down to the ground. But I have thought for quite some time now that these people are being tolerated, patronized and used by the party power structure. I think the Republican Party is really all about corporatism and is just using social issues to get votes to push for corporatism once it gets power. I’m basing this on what they’ve done when they do get power.
3. I’ve assumed that after the clothes-tearing, ashes on the head, woe is me, I wuz robbed, post getting beat emotions pass that most people will settle down and go back to thinking more carefully again.
One of the miseries of the internet is that it makes it too easy for people to pull down their own pants in public. There was a time when we confined our crazy grief from the getting whupped times in life to the safety of our homes, families and close friends. We kept our embarrassments within the circle of people who would never tell on us, and who, out of the blindness of love, would soon forget it as if it never happened.
Losing. Sucks.
But the internet makes it all to easy to spew out a bunch of hyped up, grief-ridden angst onto the screen and then, by hitting send, memorialize all our crazy stinkin’ thinkin’ for the ages.
My totally unsolicited advice and equally unsolicited but sincere admonition to all these woe-is-me sayers is to calm down, slow down, take a breath and wait. Give yourself the space to feel and think this through before you jump in there and start saying things you’ll have to explain away later.
If, for those of you this may happen to, somebody sticks a mike in your face and asks what you think, tell them you’re still too close to it to have thought it through and you’ll get back with them. They may argue. They may accept it. But who cares? The press doesn’t have subpoena powers. You don’t have to talk to them if you don’t want to, and my advice is that when you’re feeling as shook up as a lot of people appear to be about this election, you shouldn’t want to.
As to the questions I posed in the title, Should Republicans drop pro life; should evangelicals give up on traditional marriage; should everybody but the Catholic Church run away, I have an answer for you.
No.
If you believe it, and you know it’s right, then why would you be dropping out and giving up and changing course?
If, right now, you’re too frazzled and frizzled and just plain scared to face the fight head-on, take a breather. Tomorrow is Advent. Go say your prayers. Take an honest look at yourself. Go to confession. Get right with God.
And also, clean up your house, hug your kids, tell your spouse how much they mean to you, go to a movie, read a good book, and spend an evening with your friends.
Losing. Sucks. Life is beautiful anyway.
After the New Year is plenty soon enough to start gearing up for the next political war. I know that the boys and gals in DC are already threatening to push the whole country and the entire world along with it into economic catastrophe. If you’re going to do one political thing, I would advise you to send your Congressman and Senators an email telling them to stop show-boating and just do their jobs, at least until after Christmas. The New Year is soon enough for them to start whamming each other.
There. I’ve said my say.
If you’ve got any thoughts on any of this, feel free to chime in. I’ll even allow wailing and moaning and we wuz robbed complaints just this once.
Christianity in India is growing most rapidly among the Dalits, or the so-called Untouchables.
Even though caste discrimination is illegal in India, Dalits are, according to a July CNA article, still viewed as “impure and essentially worthless.” Dalit women suffer the worst, since they are discriminated against both as Untouchables and also for being women. Dalit girls are often victims of prostitution and human trafficking.
The radical message of Christianity that every human being is created in the image and likeness of God has the power to transform people who have been treated like human garbage all their lives. According to the article, it is doing that now among the Untouchables of India.
The CNA article describing one Christian mission to Dalit girls says in part:
Bangalore, India, Jul 12, 2012 / 04:07 am (CNA).- A human rights group in India says Christianity has brought slow but lasting change to the country’s Dalits or “untouchables,” especially for the community’s women who are often victims of prostitution and human trafficking.
“The Dalits are told that they are less than animals and we tell them they are not,” non-profit director Jeevaline Kumar told CNA, “because they are made in the likeness of God.”
Kumar – who heads up Operation Mobilisation’s Anti-Human Trafficking Project in Bangalore, Karnataka – explained that the simple message that every person created in God’s image has transformed the lives of India’s Dalits.
“They are crying out for a change now that they know they can live differently,” she said.
At roughly 250 million people, Dalits make up close to one quarter of the country’s 1.2 billion member population but, according to the caste system, are seen as inherently impure and worthless.
“It is not normal in our world for how these people are treated,” Kumar said.
Although caste discrimination, not the caste system itself, was technically outlawed in 1950 after India won its independence from Great Britain, law enforcement is still lacking.
Dalit women bear the brunt of caste discrimination, Kumar added, since women are looked upon even more unfavorably in Indian culture as they will need to be married off at the expense of their parents.
“The women are the Dalits of the Dalits,” Kumar said, explaining that many of them are forced into lives of prostitution, cleaning human waste or being aborted as soon as their gender is learned.
Prostitution, either in a brothel or as a temple “devadasi,” is among one of the greatest risks that threaten Dalit girls and women.
Even though the caste system teaches that they are impure, Kumar said that “when it comes to sex, no one thinks of them as untouchable.”
Three million people in India are forced into lives of sex-trafficking, 1.2 million of whom are children and 250,000 of whom are enslaved for “ritualized temple prostitution,”According to the Dalit Freedom Network.
“A little help can change the lives of these girls,” she said.
Her organization, which is just “one of many that works towards the same goal,” is striving to promote the message that “there is value in every human being” by responding to “Jesus’ mandate” to “love thy neighbor.”
Her work with the Tarika Institute, a school that trains women who have rescued from prostitution in tailoring, spoken English and computer skills, has been especially inspiring, she said.
“I have known God like never before after I got involved in acts of justice,” she said. “It really brings meaning and fulfillment in anyone’s life.” (Read more here.)
Dorothy Day
Public Catholic reader Manny, who has his own blog at J’s Cafe Nette posted a link to this article in the comments on my earlier post, Dorothy Day: The Woman Who Loved Much. I like Manny’s link so much I decided to put it here.
Dorothy Day’s abortion and subsequent conversion and life of sacrifice for human life and dignity are a remarkable are a powerful reminder to women who are abortion survivors that nothing … nothing … is greater than God’s all-encompassing mercy which comes to us through the shed blood of our Lord Jesus Christ.
The article Manny linked to and others like it can be found at The Catholic Resource Center. Please pay them a visit and see what they have.
Here is the article in full:
Dorothy Day’s Pro-Life Memories
DAN LYNCH
I wish every woman who has ever suffered an abortion would come to know Dorothy Day. Her story was so typical. Made pregnant by a man who insisted she have an abortion, who then abandoned her anyway, she suffered terribly for what she had done, and later pleaded with others not to do the same.
“But later, too, after becoming a Catholic, she learned the love and mercy of the Lord, and knew she never had to worry about His forgiveness. [This is why I have never condemned a woman who has had an abortion; I weep with her and ask her to remember Dorothy Day's sorrow but to know always God's loving mercy and forgiveness.] She had died before I became Archbishop of New York, or I would have called on her immediately upon my arrival. Few people have had such an impact on my life, even though we never met.”
Thus spoke the late Cardinal John J. O’Connor. The remainder of this article substantially contains Dorothy Day’s actual words as edited and sometimes paraphrased by Dan Lynch. The information concerning her abortion was obtained from her biographers and her autobiographical novel, The Eleventh Virgin. Dorothy never publicly wrote or spoke about her abortion. Her writings may be found at CatholicWorker.org.
Dorothy Day: I hobbled down the darkened stairwell of the Upper East Side flat in New York City. My steps were unsteady. My left arm held the banister tightly. My right arm clutched my abdomen. It was burning in pain. I walked out onto the street alone in the dark. It was in September of 1919. I was twenty-one years old and I had just aborted my baby.
Lionel, my boyfriend, promised to pick me up at the flat after it was all over. I waited in pain from nine a.m. to ten p.m. but he never came. When I got home to his apartment I found only a note. He said he had left for a new job and, regarding my abortion, that I “was only one of God knows how many millions of women who go through the same thing. Don’t build up any hopes. It is best, in fact, that you forget me.”
I wrote about this experience in my autobiographical novel, The Eleventh Virgin. In my youth I had thought that the greatest gift that life could offer would be a faith in God and a hereafter. But then there were too many people passing through my life, — too many activities — too much pleasure (not happiness). The life of the flesh called to me as a good and wholesome life, regardless of God’s laws. What was good and what was evil? It is easy enough to stifle conscience for a time. The satisfied flesh has its own law. How much time I wasted during those years! I had fallen a long way from my youthful ideals. When I was fifteen I wrote, “I am working always, always on guard, praying without ceasing to overcome all physical sensations and be purely spiritual.”
But these “physical sensations” allured me. I lived a social-activist Bohemian lifestyle in Greenwich Village, New York City. I think back and remember myself, hurrying along from party to party, and all the friends, and the drinking, and the talk, and the crushes, and falling in love. I fell in love with a newspaperman named Lionel Moise. I got pregnant. He said that if I had the baby, he would leave me. I wanted the baby but I wanted Lionel more. So I had the abortion and I lost them both.
I later wrote in my autobiography,The Long Loneliness, “For a long time [after my abortion] I had thought I could not bear a child, and the longing in my heart for a baby had been growing.”
In 1924 I started a “live-in” relationship with Forster Batterham, an atheist and an anarchist. He believed in nothing except personal freedom to do as you please. We took up residence in a beach bungalow on Staten Island, New York. We foreshadowed the hippies of the sixties and lived a carefree lifestyle living off the land and sea — gardening, fishing and claming. I thought that we would be contributing to the misery of the world if we failed to rejoice in the sun, the moon, and the stars, in the rivers which surrounded the island on which we lived and in the cool breezes of the bay. Like Dostoevsky, I began to believe that the world would be saved by beauty. It was this beautiful, natural world that slowly led me back to God. “How can there be no God,” I asked Forster, “when there are all these beautiful things?”
However, I felt that my home was not a home without a child. For a long time I had thought that I could not have a child. No matter how much one is loved or one loves, that love is lonely without a child. It is incomplete. Soon I became pregnant again. I saw this as a miracle from God because I thought that He had left me barren after the abortion. I wrote in a letter to a friend, “I always rather expected an ugly grotesque thing which only I could love; expecting perhaps to see my sins in the child.”
On the contrary, I gave birth to a beautiful daughter, Tamar Teresa, on March 4, 1926. I remembered that the labor pains swept over me like waves in the beautiful rhythm of the sea. When I became bored and impatient with the steady restlessness of those waves of pain, I thought of all the other and more futile kinds of pain I would rather not have had. Toothaches, earaches, and broken arms. I had had them all. And this was a much more satisfactory and accomplishing pain, I comforted myself.
I thought about famous men who wrote about childbirth such as Tolstoy and O’Neill and I thought, “What do they know about it, the idiots.” It gave me pleasure to imagine one of them in the throes of childbirth. How they would groan and holler and rebel. And wouldn’t they make everybody else miserable around them. And there I was, conducting a neat and tidy job.
The waves of pain became tidal waves. Earthquake and fire swept my body. Through the rush and roar of the cataclysm that was all about me, I heard the murmur of the doctor and the answered murmur of the nurse at my head. In a white blaze of thankfulness I heard faint about the clamor in my ears, a peculiar squawk. They handed my baby to me. I placed her on my full breast where she mouthed around, too lazy to tug for food. I thought, “What do you want, little bird? That it should run into your mouth, I suppose. But no, you must work for your provender already!”
No matter how cynically or casually the worldly may treat the birth of a child, it remains spiritually and physically a tremendous event. God pity the woman who does not feel the fear, the awe, and the joy of bringing a child into the world.
I was filled with awe of my baby’s new life and in gratitude to God I wanted her to be baptized in the Catholic Church. I did not want my child to flounder as I had often floundered. I wanted to believe, and I wanted my child to believe, and if belonging to the Church would give her so inestimable a grace as faith in God, and the companionable love of the Saints then the thing to do was to have her baptized a Catholic. This was the final straw for Forster who wanted nothing to do with any commitments or what he termed as my “absorption in the supernatural”.
I knew that I was going to have my child baptized a Catholic, cost what it may. I knew I was not going to have her floundering as I had done, doubting and hesitating, undisciplined and amoral. I felt it was the greatest thing I could do for my child.
So Tamar was baptized in June. For myself, I prayed for the gift of faith. I was sure, yet not sure. I postponed the day of decision. To become a Catholic meant for me to give up a mate with whom I was much in love. It got to the point where it was the simple question of whether I chose God or man. I chose God and I lost Forster. I was baptized on the Feast of The Holy Innocents, December 28, 1927. It was something I had to do. I was tired of following the devices and desires of my own heart, of doing what I wanted to do, what my desires told me to do, which always seemed to lead me astray. The cost was the loss of the man I loved, but it paid for the salvation of my child and myself.
I painfully described this loss in The Long Loneliness: “For a woman who had known the joys of marriage, yes, it was hard. It was years before I awakened without that longing for a face pressed against my breast, an arm around my shoulder. The sense of loss was there. It was a price I had paid. I was Abraham who had sacrificed Isaac. And yet I had Isaac, I had Tamar.”
I always had a great regret for my abortion. In fact, I tried to cover it up and to destroy as many copies of The Eleventh Virgin as I could find. But my priest chided me and said, “You can’t have much faith in God if you’re taking the life given to you and using it that way. God is the one who forgives us if we ask, and it sounds like you don’t even want forgiveness — just to get rid of the books.” I never forgot what the priest pointed out — the vanity or pride at work in my heart. Since that time I wasn’t as worried as I had been. If you believe in the mission of Jesus Christ, then you’re bound to try to let go of your past, in the sense that you are entitled to His forgiveness. To keep regretting what was, is to deny God’s grace.
After my conversion, I struggled to support my child as a single parent working as a free-lance writer. In December 1932 I was in Washington D.C. covering the Hunger March of the Unemployed. Watching the ragged men marching moved my sense of social justice and I was inspired to go to the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception to pray. I cried out to God in anguish that some way would open up for me to use what talents I possessed for my fellow workers, for the poor.
When I returned to New York, I found waiting for me an unkempt man with fire in his eyes. Immediately he began preaching to me in a thick French accent his grand vision for social justice. His name was Peter Maurin and together we founded the Catholic Worker Movement.
We opened houses of hospitality for the poor, the hungry, the homeless, and for abused women and pregnant mothers. We practiced the spiritual and corporal works of mercy. One day thirty year old Elizabeth came to us at the end of her pregnancy. Her husband was a drug addict. It was New Year’s Eve, the eve of the Feast of the Holy Family. He came to our house drugged and sat at supper asleep while his wife fed him.
I called the ambulance but he refused their help. He muttered, “She’s my wife. She has to stick to me. She has to take care of me.” Oh, I thought, The distortion of the idea of the Holy Family. She has to take care of him and she’s about to bear his child! But we had a little bed ready for the baby, and a box of pretty garments, and she was happy as she looked at them, and there was even gaiety in our midst as we sat around the fire and had a cup of tea in the holiday spirit.
I’ll never forget the time that I had to literally stand up against birth control. My sister Della had worked for Margaret Sanger, foundress of Planned Parenthood. When Della exhorted me that I shouldn’t encourage my daughter Tamar to have so many children, I stood up firmly and walked out of the house whereupon Della ran after me weeping, saying, “Don’t leave me, don’t leave me. We just won’t talk about it again.” To me, birth control and abortion are genocide. I say, make room for children, don’t do away with them. I learned that prevention of conception when the act that one is performing is for the purpose of fusing the two lives more closely and so enrich them that another life springs forth and the aborting of a life conceived are sins that are great frustrations in the natural and spiritual order.
The Sexual Revolution is a complete rebellion against authority, natural and supernatural, even against the body and its needs, its natural functions of child bearing. This is not reverence for life, it is a great denial and more resembles Nihilism than the revolution that they think they are furthering.
Once I asked a man why he signed a petition for the Rosenbergs who had been convicted of treason in the fifties. “It is because I am against capital punishment,” he said. In other words, he, as the rest of us, is in favor of life — life until natural death.
I was happy that I could be with my mother the last few weeks of her life, and for the last ten days at her bedside daily and hourly. Sometimes I thought that it was like being present at a birth to sit by a dying person and see their intentness on what is happening to them. It almost seems that one is absorbed in a struggle, a fearful, grim, physical struggle, to breathe, to swallow, to live. And so, I kept thinking to myself, how necessary it is for one of their loved ones to be beside them, to pray for them, to offer up prayers for them unceasingly, as well as to do all those little offices one can.
When my daughter Tamar was a little tiny girl, she said to me once, “When I get to be a great big woman and you are a little tiny girl, I’ll take care of you.” I thought of that when I had to feed my mother by the spoonful and urged her to eat her custard. Shortly before she died I told her, “We can no more imagine life beyond the grave than a blind man can imagine colors.” How good God was to me, to let me be there. I was there, holding her hand, and she just turned her head and sighed. That was her last breath, that little sigh; and her hand was warm in mine for a long time after.
[End of paraphrased article]
End Notes
Dorothy Day is the co-founder of the Catholic Worker Movement. She is a model pro-life lay witness and intercessor. She was chosen as the 20th century’s most outstanding lay Catholic. Cardinal John O’Connor of New York introduced the cause for her canonization and said, “It is with great joy that I announce the approval of the Holy See for the Archdiocese of New York to open the Cause for the Beatification and Canonization of Dorothy Day. With this approval comes the title Servant of God. What a gift to the Church in New York and to the Church Universal this is!”
Dorothy Day, Servant of God, pray for us — for us who labor for a culture of life and a civilization of love, for the unborn, for the mothers in crisis pregnancies, for mothers who have suffered from abortions, for the poor and for the dying.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
Dan Lynch. “Dorothy Day’s Pro-Life Memories.” Catholic Exchange (September 24, 2002).
Reprinted with permission of the author.
THE AUTHOR
If you would like to order Entertaining Angels, the video tape of her life, Call toll-free 1-888-834-6261 or Write to The Missionary Image at 144 Sheldon Road, St. Albans, Vermont 05478.
Dan Lynch is director of The Apostolates of The Missionary Image and Jesus King of All Nationsand board member of The Association for the Arch of Triumph. He is leading a pilgrimage cruise the Blessed Mother’s house in Ephesus and to Holy Greece and Turkey in May, 2003. Please visit his website for more information.
Copyright 2002 Dan Lynch
Her sins–and they are many–have been forgiven, so she has loved much. But a person who is forgiven little shows only little love. Luke 7:47
Dorothy Day sets off controversy, even after her death.
She followed Christ as He called her, often to the discomfort and dismay of other Christians who sought a less radical Way. Does that sound familiar? If you spend much time reading biographies of the saints, it should.
The saints weren’t often people’s people. They were too busy being God’s people. The saints are also often converted sinners who had fallen into the muck and mire of their times and taken a good bath there. It seems that God often makes His saints from the worst sinners. It’s as if He can do the most with these edgy people from the pits of life; people who know that evil is real and who see by contrast that God and His love are the only solution to the evil they have known.
Dorothy Day was a converted sinner. She took her turn at living life in the fast lane of the early 20th Century. She ran with the crowd and followed its ways up to and including having an abortion. Then, as people have been doing for 2,000 years, she found Jesus, or, I would imagine, she let Him find her. And that made all the difference.
Dorothy Day lived her life for Christ after that. She founded a ministry to the poor called Catholic Worker Houses. She published a great deal in support of this ministry and did not step back from the requirement of living alongside the people she was trying to help.
Her wary attitude towards government and stubborn pacifism did not always sit well with people in the depression-ridden, war-bound years of the 1930s and 40s. It found even less support during the Cold War years that followed. I suspect Dorothy Day seemed an embarrassment, an unrealistic fanatic, to a good many of the good, church-going people of her day.
It is only now that she begins to make sense. Corporatism is beginning to take a deep toll on the lives of Americans. We have morphed into a country that is continuously at war with an ever-changing cast of enemies. The over-weaning power of government has begun to focus on active legal persecution of the Church itself. These are our times. It appears that Dorothy Day, the uncomfortable convert, is beginning to seem less like a nutty fanatic and more like a prophet for our days.
It is in that prophetic role that she continues to set off controversy. Her life is a flashpoint of disagreement for a lot of people today, just as it was in the past. Some people try to cast Dorothy Day as “their” saint, as an apologist for their personal politics. Other people attempt to disregard her and disown her because they see her life as an attack on their personal politics.
But if Dorothy Day was a living saint, then neither of these reactions apply. Saints live their lives in the service of God, not partisan politics. They don’t try to be popular with people. They set their sights on the narrow way and they walk it all the way home.
The American bishops recently cast a unanimous vote in support of the cause of declaring Dorothy Day a saint. There are a lot of potholes in the road ahead of them in this cause. Most saints are undeclared and unofficial. That’s because, hard as it is to be one, it’s even harder to be officially declared one.
For myself, I have no doubt that Dorothy Day is in heaven. I have no doubt that she lived her life for Jesus and that she was a woman of great courage. Dorothy Day was one of God’s warriors in the battle for life and human dignity. Despite, or maybe because, of her rough beginning, she was one of His best works.
Deacon Greg Kandra, who blogs at The Deacon’s Bench, has an interesting article about the new push by American bishops for the cause of sainthood for Dorothy Day. It reads in part:
Dolan on Day: “I’m convinced she is a saint for our time”
November 27, 2012 By Deacon Greg KandraThe New York Times takes a look at the latest efforts to promote the sainthood cause of Dorothy Day:
Dorothy Day is a hero of the Catholic left, a fiery 20th-century social activist who protested war, supported labor strikes and lived voluntarily in poverty as she cared for the needy.
But Day has found a seemingly unlikely champion in New York’s conservative archbishop, Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan, who has breathed new life into an effort to declare the Brooklyn native a saint.
Cardinal Dolan has embraced her cause with striking zeal: speaking on the anniversaries of her birth and death, distributing Dorothy Day prayer cards to parishes and even buying roughly 100 copies of her biography to give out last year as Christmas gifts to civic officials including Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg.
This month, at Cardinal Dolan’s recommendation, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops voted unanimously to move forward with her canonization cause, even though, as some of the bishops noted, she had an abortion as a young woman and at one point flirted with joining the Communist Party.
“I am convinced she is a saint for our time,” Cardinal Dolan said at the bishops’ meeting. She exemplifies, he said, “what’s best in Catholic life, that ability we have to be ‘both-and’ not ‘either-or.’ ”
As someone who was both committed to social justice and loyal to church teachings, Day bridges wings of the contemporary church in a way that few American Catholic figures can.
Day, born in 1897 to a nonobservant Protestant family, dropped out of the University of Illinois and moved to New York to work as a journalist for leftist publications in the bohemian literary world of downtown Manhattan. She converted to Catholicism in 1927, citing a spiritual awakening that was accelerated by the joy that she felt upon the birth of a daughter, Tamar. She said she chose Catholicism for many reasons — partly because it was the religion of so many of the workers and poor people whose cause she fought for as a socialist writer, and partly because she had lived in Chicago with Catholic roommates whose faith had deeply impressed her.
She spent decades as a passionate lay Catholic, devoting her life to the principles of social justice, including pacifism and service to the poor, that she felt were at the root of her religion’s teachings.
Though she was traditional in her religious practices and strong in her love for the church, her relationship with the church hierarchy in her lifetime was not always smooth. Not a single Catholic bishop came to her funeral in 1980, according to Robert Ellsberg, the editor of her letters and diaries. (Read more here.)
Representative Rebecca Hamilton, 17-year member of the Oklahoma House of Representatives talks about life as a Public Catholic. Read her Bio Here
Join the Discussions of the Year of Faith
Click here throughout the Year of Faith, as the Catholic Channel at Patheos.com invites Catholics of every age and stripe to share what they are gleaning and carrying away from this gift of timely focus.
Follow Patheos on
Copyright 2008-2013, Patheos. All rights reserved. Terms of Service | Patheos Privacy Policy | Site developed by Avalon Consulting, LLC
Follow Patheos
News & Politics: