![\"\"](\"http:\/\/consistent-life.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/1-Day-1.jpg\")
\r\nAs anyone who has embraced the consistent life ethic (CLE) will tell you, the sense of isolation, of not fitting in <\/a>\u00a0can be paralyzing. This is all the more true when it comes to the traditional American political spectrum, with its the left-right\/conservative-progressive dichotomy. CLE political positions, linked as they are by the underlying conviction that all human beings possess inherent dignity and worth, are at odds with the standard narratives of left and right and lead to a sense of alienation from both.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n Dorothy Day, co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement<\/a>, knew this sense of isolation better than most.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n Day and the Poor<\/strong><\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n As a radical left-wing journalist in her young adulthood, Day developed a social conscience that led her to side consistently with the workers, the poor, and other marginalized people:<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n [W]hat I read made me particularly class-conscious. I used to turn from the park with all its beauty and peacefulness and walk down to North Avenue and over West through slum districts, and watch the slatternly women and the unkempt children and ponder over the poverty of the homes as contrasted with the wealth along the shore drive. I wanted even then to play my part. I wanted to write such books that thousands upon thousands of readers would be convinced of the injustice of things as they were. I wanted to do something toward making a \u201cnew earth wherein justice dwelleth.\u201d<\/p>\r\n Or as she would put it in a diary entry from 1945, Day \u201cbecame converted to the poor, to a love for and desire to be always with the poor and suffering\u2014 the workers of the world.\u201d This progressive social conscience led her for a time in her youth to identify with a variety of anarchist, socialist, and communist organizations who shared her social vision for a more just society.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n Day and Abortion<\/strong><\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n But as an adult convert to Catholicism, she came to marry this progressivism with a deeply-rooted traditionalist Christian faith that reinforced in her the conviction that every human life is priceless and irreplaceable. Her conversion experience prompted her to reflect on some of the earlier tragedies and mistakes of her life, especially the painful experience of having an abortion in an ultimately futile attempt to maintain her relationship with the baby\u2019s philandering father. In 1973, shortly after Roe v. Wade<\/em> was decided, Day reflected on the pain abortion had caused for many women, as well as for herself: Suddenly the thought came into my mind of abortion and even then though our entire [Protestant] pop has been taught that it was not \u201ctaking life\u201d\u2014\u201cLife only began at 4 \u00bd months.\u201d Legal restrictions alone made women guilt ridden. Does the changing of laws\u2014 the Supreme Court decision\u2014do away with this instinctive feeling of guilt? My own longing for a child.<\/p>\r\n Most deeply disturbing for Day was the way that many of her collaborators in the 1960s anti-war movement didn\u2019t share her reverence for human life, lamenting how \u201cthose in this peace crowd do not hesitate to have abortions\u201d (November 12, 1962 letter to Thomas Merton). She elaborated in another letter: \u201cHere we are as pacifists seemingly on the side of life, and so many in the peace movement denying life\u201d (March 3, 1967 letter to Jim Forest).<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n Rejecting Left and Right<\/strong><\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n Thus, Day and the Catholic Worker don\u2019t fit neatly into the usual left\/right dichotomy. Like socialist radicals, she made the cause of the poor and workers central to her vision of a just world. But like conservative traditionalists, she was deeply grieved by the prevalence of abortion in society. As this icon of Day communicates,<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n she combined traditionally \u201cconservative\u201d methods and emphases, such as charity, the works of mercy, and an emphasis on personal responsibility to address social needs, with traditionally \u201cliberal\/progressive\u201d methods of social change, such as protest and nonviolent civil disobedience.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n As a Catholic Worker from Philadelphia once explained to me, the Catholic Worker isn\u2019t a \u201cliberal\u201d or \u201cconservative\u201d organization, but rather a radical<\/em> one. While conservatives are generally happy with \u201cthe system\u201d with only minor tweaks, and \u201cliberals\u201d would focus on making structural changes within the system in order to make it work, a radical organization such as the Catholic Worker is convinced that the system doesn\u2019t work <\/em>and is so fundamentally flawed and corrupted by sin that it can\u2019t<\/em>.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n Personalism<\/strong><\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n For Dorothy Day, the philosophy that best expressed these seemingly divergent convictions in a coherent and intellectually satisfying manner was \u201cpersonalism,\u201d a philosophy imported from French Catholicism by her mentor and Catholic Worker co-founder Peter Maurin. At its root, personalism stresses three things:<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n (1) The invaluable worth and dignity of the individual person;<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n (2) The fundamentally social nature of the person (that is, persons are always \u201cpersons-in-community\u201d); and<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n (3) the moral imperative of personal responsibility, which stressed persons, rather than institutions or ideologies or rulers, as primary moral agents and the essential subjects of history.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n Personalism means that persons, rather than ideas, agendas, or any other abstraction, are what ultimately matter. All other issues are subordinated to the needs of the person standing before you. Personalism for Day was also an authentic third way between the twin dangers of liberal capitalist individualism and person-negating communist collectivism. Both, she felt, in different ways, devalue the person or make the person\u2019s importance subordinate to some greater cause or conflict.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n This synthesis of the individual and the social was so novel in American society that it aroused great suspicion from both the right and the left. Robert Ellsberg observes that personalism was so outside the American experience that \u201creaders from both the left and the right often found it difficult to locate the movement along the conventional political spectrum\u2026 To many seasoned observers, the very idiosyncrasy of these positions suggested a smokescreen, designed to obscure the true intentions of its proponents.\u201d Indeed the FBI maintained a surveillance file on Day for her entire career as a Catholic Worker, and her resolute pacifism lost the Catholic Worker<\/em> newspaper over a third of its subscriber base during World War II.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n Day came to understand that adopting a personalist outlook on life meant losing a lot of friends who didn\u2019t share her same core values. As she wrote in a 1943 letter to a fellow Catholic Worker, \u201cPersonalism isolates you in this mad world!\u201d But it also offered her a radically open view toward others, which, for her as a Christian, meant seeing Jesus equally in all people.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n Reflecting on an upcoming trip to Cuba, which was fresh off Fidel Castro\u2019s communist revolutionary takeover, she wrote: \u201cI go to see Christ in my brother the Cuban, and that means Christ in the revolution[ary], [and] Christ in the counter-revolutionary. But to both sides, being violently partisan, such an attitude will be considered reasonable by neither\u201d (Diary entry, September 2, 1962). Nevertheless, she clung to the belief that personalism offered the best \u2013 indeed the only \u2013 just and humane way to create \u201ca new social order wherein justice dwelleth, which is neither capitalist nor communist nor totalitarian in any way\u201d (February 7, 1969 letter to Karl Meyer).<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n Personalism and the CLE<\/strong><\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n Because of her personalism, Day was an early adopter of what came to be the consistent life ethic. The infinite value of the person, Day believed, meant that something eternal and irreplaceable was lost when a person is killed through neglect or belligerence, and she took a solid stand for her entire life against all killing of human persons. As Daniel Berrigan put it in the foreword to Day\u2019s memoir The Long Loneliness<\/em>, \u201cWhat held me in thrall was an absolutely stunning consistency. No to all killing. Invasions, incursions, excusing causes, call of the blood, summons to the bloody flag, casuistic body counts, just wars, necessary wars, religious wars, needful wars, holy wars\u2014 into the fury of the murderous crosswinds went her simple word: no.\u201d<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n Day herself would connect the issues in a way that is now so familiar to those of us who embrace the CLE. \u201cWe are aghast at the continuing and spreading warfare in the world\u2014 the waste of human life, and at home too with abortion used to save the resulting consequences of our acts from suffering, from the cross we impose upon them\u201d (1971 letter to Daniel and Philip Berrigan).<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n Dorothy Day\u2019s long career as a Catholic Worker stands as a testament to the possibilities that can open up when we reject the boxes forced upon us by the prevailing society. The CLE is a personalist outlook, one which embraces the inestimable value of each and every human life and stands in ready defense against any threat that would destroy it or force it to exist in poverty and degradation. It combines the best of the progressive social vision of justice and equity for all people with what is good from the conservative esteem for and defense of every life, \u201cfrom womb to tomb.\u201d Only such visions that can bridge the divides and make common cause toward a better world can ever<\/em> come close to achieving Day\u2019s goal of creating \u201ca new society from within the shell of the old.\u201d<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n ===========================================<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n For similar posts, see:<\/em><\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n Women’s History Month: Jane Addams<\/a><\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n Courageous Woman: Elizabeth Anscombe (1919-2001)<\/a>\u00a0<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n Celebrating the Life of Daniel Berrigan<\/a><\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n Abby Johnson Remembers Dan Berrigan<\/a><\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n The Redemptive Personalism of Saint Oscar Romero<\/a><\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n For more of our posts from Rob Arner, see:<\/em><\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n On Being a Consistent Chimera <\/a><\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n The Consistent Life Consensus in Ancient Christianity\u00a0<\/a><\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n The Real Meaning of Mother\u2019s Day<\/a>\u00a0<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n Where Does Martin Luther King Jr. Fit Into the Consistent Life Ethic?\u00a0<\/a><\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" by Rob Arner As anyone who has embraced the consistent life ethic (CLE) will tell you, the sense of isolation, of not fitting in \u00a0can be paralyzing. This is all the more true when it comes to the traditional American political spectrum, with its the left-right\/conservative-progressive dichotomy. CLE political positions, linked as they are by… <\/p>\n\r\n
Union Square to Rome<\/em>, 37<\/cite><\/blockquote>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n
<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n
Diary entry dated April 13, 1973<\/cite><\/blockquote>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/consistent-life.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/1-Day-4.jpg\")
<\/figure>\r\n<\/div>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/consistent-life.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/1-Day-2.jpg\")
<\/figure>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/consistent-life.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/1-Day-3.jpg\")
<\/figure>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n