LABOR DAY REFLECTION ON DOROTHY DAY

I asked if I could talk to my friend Heath Carter, an associate professor at Princeton Theological Seminary, about a hero of mine, the Catholic social activist Dorothy Day, and her involvement with the labor movement. “Heath teaches on Dorothy Day regularly in his courses. ‘Everywhere I’ve taught,’ he says, ‘she frustrates my students.’ People want to know how to solve huge social problems. They want clear answers that fit neatly within our prefabricated ideological contexts. But Day was bearing witness to a different kingdom, a different way of being in the world. . . .”

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“Day was committed to personalism and subsidiarity, the beliefs that social problems must be dealt with at the most grass-roots, local level possible, with real human relationships always in view. She called on the church and society to love their neighbors — to pay attention to the human beings around them, especially the poor. . . . She believed in the need for structural change to address systemic injustice. But she also thought we should never view poverty or the rights of workers as simply issues for the government to solve.

“Instead, she wanted middle- and upper-class Americans to take personal responsibility for creating a world where the dignity of every human being is affirmed and embraced. She cast a vision in her 1963 book ‘Loaves and Fishes,’ ‘It seems to me that in the future the family — the ideal family — will always try to care for one more. If every family that professed to follow Scriptural teaching, whether Jew, Protestant, or Catholic, were to do this, there would be no need for huge institutions, houses of dead storage where human beings waste away in loneliness and despair. . . .

“. . . Day was a Christian who took the teachings of Jesus seriously and wanted Christians to live out this ethic in their daily lives. She ultimately saw dehumanization in any form as the enemy, which led her to notice deep connections between stances that are sometimes set at odds. She saw dehumanization at work in industrialists’ abuse of laborers; also in systems that produced abortion; also in militarization and war.

“Day had a vision of self-sacrificial faithfulness, loving our neighbor, and trusting the mystery of God with the results. . . . Her daily, radical faithfulness dares me to imagine a world made new.”