In an interview with Sojourners in 1976, Dorothy explained how she became enamored with revolutionary thinking, but also came to see where it led-to destructive and dystopian nightmares:
For me, I could never see the violence, the obliterating of a whole class. Unfortunately, in the 1940’s the whole liberal crowd were all so pro-Soviet that they wouldn’t believe any of the stories that came out about the transferral of the whole Ukrainian population to Siberia. Now we read the account in Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago. I mean, a liberal crowd will sort of go with the fashion.Indeed.
But correcting herself, and not going with “the fashion,” whether Left or Right, was what Dorothy Day’s whole life was about.
When the guns were blazing during World War II, she pointed out, not just how it violated pacifist principles, but how the Allies were violating just war standards, which they claimed to espouse. When Christians began accepting birth control and even abortion she upheld the Church’s teachings on sex and human life, every bit as vigorously as she preached against war or on behalf of worker’s rights. On labor and politics, she once said, “I am inclined to be sympathetic to the Left, but when it comes to the Catholic Church, then I am far to the Right.”
That’s dynamic orthodoxy for you.
Related Posts:
Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker Movement
Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker Movement - PART II
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