our filthy, rotten system

[Dorothy Day] vividly perceive[d] the culture of death ascendant in the nation's customary ways of making do. That culture's idolatrous worship of individual autonomy, its reliance on usury, its fetishizing of corporate power, its nonchalance about sexuality, its neglect of the poor, its murderous addiction to increasingly apocalyptic weaponry to underwrite a spurious notion of security - all are instances of an intolerable situation in which acquiescence has become indistinguishable from sin. 'Our problems stem,' she used to say, 'from our acceptance of this filthy, rotten system.'

Dorothy Day's thorough renunciation of our filthy, rotten system has made her, at the very least, a challenging heroine. What makes her something more, what shines through this journal particularly, is her distinctive announcement that the one true antidote for the system is the Church. - Foreword to On Pilgrimage by Michael O. Garvey