A Jew came into the office of The Catholic Worker the other day and sat around and read for a while. He nosed through Cahill’s Christian State and condemned it for its anti-Semitism. Then he looked at a missal for a while and hummed through some of the Gregorian plain chant.
“I cannot,” he said, “be a Communist because I believe in God.” And he said it sadly because he believed that the Communists were nearer to social justice in their efforts to bring about a proletarian state than were the believers in God.
When he left he took with him the apocryphal books of the Old Testament and the autobiography of St. Teresa of
People have been calling the office of The Catholic Worker and asking us if we had anything to do with the street meetings which were going on over at Long Island Station in
There were three Catholics speaking over in Brooklyn and by appealing to the baser instincts in their audience they were getting a huge crowd, a cheering crowd, which stood around for three hours listening to speakers who pointed out how red-blooded and 100 percent American they were, how filled with intestinal integrity, and how some scum parasites of Europe had come over here and taken over the country. The great danger was the Jew. All evils came from the Jew. Jewish materialism was the cause of all our ills. It was the Jew who brought about the revolution in
We have consistently tried to avoid discussion of European questions in the paper we are getting out. We feel that we can’t take up the subject of
I repeat, we the editors of The Catholic Worker had decided not to venture on world affairs. But when Catholics get up on
We believe that Hitler owes his success to the fact that it is easier to arouse a people against something concrete like a race than against an idea. It is not just the idea of materialism that the German people are fighting. They have made the Jew as a race the scapegoat. They have fastened on it the ills of present-day society. They have blamed Jews for defeat during the war, for the inflation after the war, for the present ills of the capitalist system. And even though individuals of the race, even though large masses of the race are guilty of the sins with which they are charged, the animus aroused against them is singular in that it is not an animus against the evils attendant on their actions, but against the Jews themselves.
To criticize the Jews for the protest which Jews have organized in this country and to say, as I heard them say at Long Island Station, “Are the Jews a sacred race that this enormous protest should have been organized?” is to be manifestly unfair. If no protests were organized on account of the persecution in
Another thing, horrible as the persecution of the Catholics is, it is not a persecution of a race or people. It is all Catholics, of whatever nationality, that are having to put up a struggle for a position. The Times tried to point this out when they said that in
For Catholics–or for anyone–to stand up in the public squares and center their hatred against Jews is to sidestep the issue before the public today. It is easier to fight the Jew than it is to fight for social justice–that is what it comes down to. One can be sure of applause. One can find a bright glow of superiority very warming on a cold night. If those same men were to fight for Catholic principles of social justice they would be shied away from by Catholics as radicals; they would be heckled by Communists as authors of confusion; they would be hurt by the uncomprehending indifference of the mass of people.
God made us all. We are all members or potential members of the mystical body of Christ. We don’t want to extirpate people; we want to go after ideas. As
In addition to getting out a paper, the editors of The Catholic Worker are engaging in a fight against the Unemployed Councils of the Communist Party. To combat them they are doing the same thing the Communists are doing, helping the unemployed to get relief, clothing, food and shelter. But we are cooperating with the Home Relief instead of obstructing them. Two or three times a week we have eviction cases. When a desperate man or woman comes in asking for help, we have to call the Home Relief to find out about getting a rent check. Then we have to find a landlord who will accept the voucher. Usually they won’t. There is only one landlord in our entire block who will take them. Over on Avenue B there is an Irish landlord willing to cooperate. On
After we have found an apartment, we have to commandeer a truck and men to do the moving. The sixteen-year-old boys in our neighborhood have been most helpful. Then there are always unemployed men coming into the office who are eager to help.
The other day we had a German Protestant livery stable man, giving us the use of a horse and wagon to move a Jewish family, and five Catholic unemployed men assisting their brother the Jew in getting transferred.
It is a situation which typifies the point I wish to make, that we are all creatures of God and members or potential members of the Mystical Body. This is something which those Catholics who bait the Jews lose sight of.
Servant of God Dorothy Day (1897-1980) was the cofounder with Peter Maurin of the Catholic Worker movement in 1933. Charles Gallagher, S.J., a visiting fellow at the Geneva School of Diplomacy and International Relations, found in the correspondence file in the Dorothy Day-Catholic Worker Collection at Marquette University this previously unpublished, unknown text. The text was published in
