Hidden Holiness

7 Differences

chapter seven Differences Saints Who Are Different Naturally speaking, people are filled with repulsion at the idea of holiness . . . After the last war, everyone was talking about the lost generation. After this war [World War II] thank God, they are talking more about saints . . .Archbishop Robichaud, in his book Holiness for All, emphasizes the fact that the choice is not between good and evil for Christians—that it is not in this way that one proves one’s love . . . but between good and better. In other words, we must give up over and over again even the good things of this world, to choose God . . . It is so tremendous an idea that it is hard for people to see its implications . . . We have not begun to live as good Jews, let alone as good Christians. We do not tithe ourselves, there is no year of jubilee, we do not keep the Sabbath, we have lost the concept of hospitality . . .We devour each other in love and in hate; we are cannibals. There are, of course, the lives of the saints, but they are too often written as though they were not in this world. We have seldom been given the saints as they really were, as they affected the lives of their times—unless it is in their own writings. But instead of that strong meat we are too generally given the pap of hagiography. Too little has been stressed the idea that all 155 HIDDEN HOLINESS 156 are called. Too little attention has been placed on the idea of mass conversions .We have sinned against the virtue of hope.There have been in these days mass conversions to Nazism, Fascism, Communism. Where are our saints to call the masses to God? Personalists first, we must put the question to ourselves. Communitarians, we will find Christ in our brothers and sisters.1 Always radical, Dorothy Day put those lines into her column in The Catholic Worker in May 1948,and they ring with her passionate impatience. As someone who converted to socialism and then to the Gospel, who wrote and worked for the wretched masses,she knew of what she spoke.She knew in her lifetime the fearsome power of mass movements, of the sway ideology could have over millions of ordinary people. She knew how the desperation of poor wages, or during the Depression no work or money at all, converted many against the “American Dream,” how it revealed to them the disparities that exist even in the best of times. Perhaps her unrepentant social and political radicalism, something she found in the Gospel, in Christ’s very actions, will keep her case for canonization in slow motion for a long time. Her granddaughter and others echo the line she herself used quite often.“Don’t call me a saint; I don’t want to be dismissed that easily.”2 Michael Harrington, a social and political radical himself, worried that despite her social and political radicalism an eventual canonization would “use” her, as such official actions do, showcasing her theologically (and culturally) conservative side, her obedience, in the end, to the hierarchy . Perhaps all the details of her own life—an abortion, a common law relationship and a child born from it, numerous arrests (and jail time) for protest activities both early and late in life—could be scrubbed clean and buried by her later authentic piety and devotion to the church. But along with Merton and the very real imperfections of his life—an illegitimate child, a late-in-life love affair with a nurse, Dorothy does make sanctity accessible, as Jim Forest points out and as her recently published diaries , edited by Robert Ellseberg, powerfully affirm.3 During WWII, in a time of uncertainty about what The Catholic Worker was accomplishing, she wrote: We can do nothing today without saints; big ones and little ones. The only weapons we will develop will be those of prayer and penance.And the world will leave us alone, saying—after all, they are not doing anything . Just a bunch of smug fools praying. (July 19, 1943) Dorothy’s diary is less the literary document than say, Thomas Merton ’s is.Yet in documenting almost a half century of her life and the entire history, to that point, of the Catholic Worker Movement, her entries are not just chronicles of Catholic radical witness during...