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Hurrah for Heroes and the Dorothy Day Difference While standing downtown with Fran in pouring rain across from the Liberty Bell on Tuesday, October 17, we were in mourning as the president signed the “Military Commissions Act” curtailing rights guaranteed in the Bill of Rights and the Magna Carta. Our editor, Joe Bradley, invited me to write something about the heroes who have gifted my developing vision of what peace and justice are, or ought to be. Present that day among the forty or so protestors were long-time heroes of the movement, Joe Bradley, himself, who since the death of Tom O’Rourke, is the go-to-guy in the Catholic community on peace issues. Al Krass, local leader among laymen and clergy striving for justice and peace, stood with us, as did Brandywine Peace’s Bob Smith, a veteran of Plowshares actions. On the next Friday at noon till one, we took our usual stand on 15th Street between Walnut and Locust where observant Jews, Cy and Lois Swartz, led an ecumenical vigil for justice and peace between Israelis and Palestinians. CPF members Lee Hoinacki, David Graham, and Phyllis Grady are usually there holding signs and passing out fliers calling for peace in the Holy Land. As a youngster growing up in the Depression’s dark days, I learned at home, school, and church that there was much injustice in the world, and I could see for myself: hungry men knocking on the kitchen door for a handout, overburdened mothers, kids carting firewood home from Morris Park, with no safety nets other than extended families and parish. We longed for better days during those hard times. As the war in Europe threatened to engulf our country, the question of peace or war was seriously debated. My mother listened to Charles Lindbergh, the flier, and Charles Coughlin, the radio-priest, and subscribed to his Social Justice. All three argued that the U.S. should stay out of Europe’s troubles. Pearl Harbor silenced the debate, and we flip-flopped. My brother Jack joined the marines; I was in the navy, and my brother Paul shortly after WW2 joined the army. War and “the bomb” seemed the way to peace─how wrong we were! In September, 1946 I enrolled at St. Joe’s College, and soon was reading Belloc and Chesterton, Catholic apologists, and opponents of English socialism and imperial capitalism. I became enamored of their call for a back-to-the-land, distributist, movement toward a more just social order consistent with Rerum Novarum and Quadragesimo Anno. I read the critiques of modern society by Vincent McNabb, O.P,. in Old Principles, New Order, Chesterton’s Orthodoxy, and Belloc’s The Servile State and The Restoration of Property. I found The Catholic Worker in the college library and each month sought out Dorothy Day’s On Pilgrimage writings and Peter Maurin’s Easy Essays. Soon I was reading John Cogley and other editors in Commonweal, especially during Senator Joe McCarthy’s anti-communist crusade. In the summer after junior year I went up to the Catholic Worker’s Maryfarm near Newburgh, N.Y., and stayed six weeks. Amid the spiritual retreats, encounters with men coming in “off the road,” and the subsistence farm operation there, I grew to admire Jane O’Donnell, the house-mother. Dorothy Day came up the Hudson to the farm frequently. Her embrace of the poor, both in rhetoric and in living style, and her distinction between destitution and poverty had a great impact on my thinking. A radical of radicals, Ammon Hennacy, regaled us with stories of being “on the road,” of going to jail for refusing his WWI draft notice, and of his association with Eugene Debs, the head of the socialist Wobblies, another imprisoned WWI-resister. Back in Philadelphia, I met Catholic Workers Charlie Butterworth and Dick Leonard, who fully lived in the CW justice and non-violence tradition. They were gentle guides in enriching my thinking. Visiting the Gesu parish, I met Anna McGarry, the local Catholic community’s lonely pioneer in pursuing interracial justice; Dennis Clark, a classmate from St. Joe; and Helen Adler. All worked with Fr. Michaelman in the Gesu parish and were active in the Catholic Interracial Council. Through the years I was introduced to the dedicated work of some remarkable nuns: Anne Boniface, a Trinitarian, who worked at a Southwest Philly community center for many years, and Margaret McKenna, a Medical Missioner, who founded and directs a recovery program for substance abusers at New Jerusalem Lara in Northcentral Philadelphia. As the fifties turned sixty, the civil rights struggle in the South, and the Viet Nam resistance coalesced together the issues of justice at home and peace abroad. I was astonished at Martin Luther King’s Gandhian approach in confronting the hardened hearts and narrow minds of so many of us, and his denunciation of the war led civil rights activists to become war protesters. One of the memorable experiences I had was to join some Philly priests, Tom Craven, Dan Devine, John Donahie, John Doogan, Jim Hughes, Bill Leahy, and perhaps one or two others, in attending the funeral of Dr. King in Atlanta. As we walked behind the casket, carried on a mule-drawn wagon through center city streets from the Dexter Avenue Church to Morehouse College, black clergymen and their flocks softly sang one spiritual after another as they made their way with us. I felt that I could see through the sad eyes into the souls of hundreds of black folk standing still in sorrow in front of their homes, as the procession carrying their slain hero passed. The monk, Thomas Merton, describes a similar kind of unifying moment once in downtown Louisville on a visit to his doctor. As resistance to the War in Viet Nam roiled up, I followed the lead of clear thinkers from the Catholic Left, especially Dan and Phil Berrigan, Thomas Merton, Dick McSorley, and Michael Doyle. I sat in, non-violently, at the U.S. Capitol chambers, and spent a night in the D.C. jail with such worthies as Presbyterian William Sloan Coffin, Paulist James Carroll, Jesuit Dick McSorley, and pediatrician Ben Spock. My cell-mate was a Maryknoller, Peter Barry, who would later spend thirty-some years on the Chinese mission in Hong Kong. My peak experience was to be there one Sunday in Camden when a federal jury pronounced Michael Doyle and the others of the Camden 28 not guilty of crime when they destroyed draft records. Then came the Vatican II ocean-change in the church’s conception of its calling in the modern world. The council introduced a galaxy of heroes: John XXIII, the council fathers, especially the leaders of the western European church, the invited guest-participants, the theological consultants like Hans Kung, John Courtney Murray and Gregory Baum, and the historians of the council like Xavier Rynne. The council’s clarion call for Catholics to seek justice and pursue peace meant that diocesan curias could cede their complete control over consciences and commitments to the concerned individual. Life has gifted me with all these heroes and more. I can not close without lauding John McNamee, who pastors St. Malachy parish in the Gospel-servant spirit, and Frank McDermott, a teacher, mentor and friend, who was unyielding in his commitment to keeping alive for his poor flock the Assumption parish school and church despite chilling winds blowing from 222. His eloquent letter-exchange with higher-ups is there to be read in the diocesan archives at Overbrook, or at LaSalle University Archives. Though Dorothy Day, preferring not praise, but committed involvement, would reject the accolade that she was admired by all my heroes, I say that admiration of her work inspired many to service in the cause of peace and justice. Frank McGinty |