The Saint Louis Tribune was not alone in casting doubt as to whether Dorothy Day could become a saint: They asked, “Could a bohemian journalist, who had a failed marriage and an abortion, be a candidate for Catholic canonization?”
This, it seems to me, is a bit of a strange question because in reality aren’t all saints unlikely?
I did a little research and came up with a few saints that jumped out at me as some of the most unlikely.
1) Moses the Black – Besides having one of the coolest and most ominous sounding names in the history of Christianity his story has to be one of the unlikeliest saint stories.
Moses the Black (I just love saying his name) was a slave of a government official in Egypt who fired him for pure badassery. Think about that for a second. Dude was so bad he got fired from being a slave. Internalize that for a moment, would you? Turns out that his owner suspected him of nothing short of thievery and murder. And knowing that he himself was human and was required to close his eyes for 6-8 hours a night and Moses probably didn’t have any such weakness like sleeping, he thought it best to simply fire him. Politely
November 26, 2012 at 4:33 pm
Dorothy Day was a lifelong leftist. To even propose her as a candidate for sainthood is blasphemy. See http://dorothydayworker.blogspot.com
November 26, 2012 at 4:38 pm
My main problem with Dorothy Day is that I don't trust the people who are her biggest fans. Their judgement is as my teen aged cousins would say, is "so stank" that I wouldn't touch anything they're into.
November 26, 2012 at 4:41 pm
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November 26, 2012 at 5:11 pm
Dymphna, go to that blog I mentioned in my comment, and you will see Dorothy Day herself "so stank", not just her supporters.
November 27, 2012 at 8:19 am
We have the advantage of perspective, and know that Leftism is sub-optimal, and free markets are actually better for the poor. But people living in the 1930s did not; as far as they could tell the alternative to Leftism was "leave the poor to die in the gutter, and call in Pinkertons to machine-gun striking miners". Mostly because far too many of the opponents of Leftism, y'know, advocated leaving the poor to die in the gutter, and called in Pinkertons to machine-gun striking miners.
It hardly seems fair that, if someone might be a saint for their tending the sick, we hold it against them that the medicine of their day involved leeches and bleeding out the bad humors. Those things, like Leftism, frequently just made matters worse: but could the people at the time be expected to know?
Besides which, there's Leftism and Leftism; in Day's day there were syndicalists and trades-unionists who would be the first to oppose Marxists, for the very same reasons they opposed big business. It was the Cold War that forced both left and right to close ranks; before it, for example, Britain's most extreme opposition to big business often came not from the left at all, but from "Tory Radical" agrarian monarchists like J. R. R. Tolkien.
Which of the many, many kinds of Leftist was Dorothy Day? Are you so certain that the perspective of our politics, right or left, is really qualified to judge? It was only forty years ago that all black Americans were Republicans and nearly all Catholics were Democrats. Are you sure you actually know that the categories meant then what they mean now?
November 27, 2012 at 1:22 pm
SF, Dorothy Day was an outright leftist. Go to the link I provided. It gives plenty of proof that the woman was associated with communist fronts and leftist causes long after her supposed conversion to Catholicism.
November 27, 2012 at 11:10 pm
I didn't say she wasn't associated with leftist causes, and even assuming you or your source are correct about her associating with communist fronts, did she know they were communist fronts? Did that mean the same thing then that it would mean in the post-Cold War era?
You characterized something I said—the undisputable fact that the Anglo's heritage is one of treason to Christendom and the West, and that the Anglo invented deliberate genocide and systematic terror-rape (I was talking about Irish history, I don't know what you thought I was referring to)—as a leftist argument and a denunciation of the White man. In fact I am pure European from end to end, Irish, Czech, and French, and know more bad things about the left than you know about anything. Also? Scots-Irish people are, in fact, Anglo, they were an occupying force placed in Ireland by the English, and are Lowlands Scots…i.e. pure Anglo-Saxon. Dae ye ken the auld Scots leid? Tis nae Gaelic.
If you—based on your assumptions about the origin of my opinions, who am your contemporary living under identical conditions to you—so completely misread my meaning, what are the odds you have correctly read Day's? I doubt very much she talked cheerfully of murdering capitalists in their beds and butchering their horses and deliberately defacing their art—but Hilaire Belloc and G. K. Chesterton did, after Chesterton's conversion (and Belloc never left the Church).
November 30, 2012 at 10:43 pm
Sophia's Favorite, please take a deep breath. Let's return to Dorothy Day before you have a stroke. Here are some samples of Day's "Catholic Worker" writing AFTER her conversion to Catholicism: "And now I had become a Catholic and Smokey and I were fellow-workers in a Catholic endeavor to build up a decentralist, libertarian, or in other words, an anarchist-pacifist social order" (October 1970). "No one who ever read 'Three Who Made a Revolution' by Bertram Wolff, could fail to be interested in the historic struggle which is now going to in the Communist Party throughout the world, and certainly from any point of view, it was a privilege to be invited to attend [the 16th Annual Communist Party USA Convention] as an observer"(March 1957). "In 1954 I had written an article for the Catholic Worker entitled 'Ho Chi Minh and Theophane Venard, the hero and the saint.' . . . If we had had the privilege of giving hospitality to a Ho Chi Minh, with what respect and interest we would have served him, as a man of vision, as a patriot, a rebel against foreign invaders" (January 1970). "Fortunately, the Papal States were wrested from the Church in the last century, but there is still the problem of investment of papal funds. It is always a cheering thought to me that if we have good will and are still unable to find remedies for the economic abuses of our time, in our family, our parish, and the mighty church as a whole, God will take matters in hand and do the job for us. When I saw the Garibaldi mountains in British Columbia . . . I said a prayer for his soul and blessed him for being the instrument of so mighty a work of God. May God use us!" (July-August 1969). These are from the blog "Dorothy Day Another Way." If you prefer hard copy, please read Dr.Carol Byrne's invaluable book "The Catholic Worker Movement (1933-1980): A Critical Analysis," published in 2010.