Last Friday, Our Lady of the Lake University had a wonderful day-long forum  about the activist, journalist and founder of the Catholic Worker Movement, Dorothy Day, jointly hosted by the Worden School of Social Work and the university’s new MFA/social justice program.   I was invited to speak for five minutes (five minutes!) about the third and last phase of Dorothy Day’s life, and specifically about Dorothy Day and Peace. — Susan Ives

The word – the one word – I want you to hold onto as I speak is integrity. Today, we simplify integrity’s meaning to denote honesty, but it comes from the same Latin root that give us the mathematician’s integer – a whole number – and integration – to make whole. Integrity is wholeness.

For Dorothy, there was no such thing as “a means to an end.” The means and the end were the same. As her protestant contemporary, AJ Muste said, “There is no way to peace. Peace IS the way.” And Gandhi: “BE the change you wish to see in the world. There was no such thing as the lesser of two evils. Evil was – evil. You could not fight yourself to peace. Peace was the only way to peace.

She took seriously the great commandment laid out by Jesus in Matthew: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’”  The Golden Rule.

She took seriously what you Catholics call the Mystical Body of Christ: “Inasmuch as you have done it unto the least of these,” Jesus said, “you have done it unto me.” She believed that if all human beings are all of one body – if an injury to one is an injury to all –then war could never result in good. Never.

In 1911 the labor organizer Joe Hill wrote a song “the preacher and the slave,” that probably summed up pretty accurately how most people felt about religion at the time:

      You will eat, bye and bye
      In that glorious land above the sky
      Work and pray, live on hay
      You’ll get pie in the sky when you die (that’s a lie!)

But Dorothy didn’t buy into pie in the sky theology. She took the words of the Lord’s Prayer seriously: “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” As above, so below. God’s kingdom was one. Integrated. Whole.

And she took the words of the Sermon on the Mount seriously. To love your enemy, bless those who persecute you, turn the other cheek.

This was her integrity, her wholeness. Mercy, justice, peace – they were integrated — all inalienable parts of the whole.

And boy – did that get her into holy shit. Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker movement were pacifist. The Church was committed to a doctrine of Just War, first laid out in the Fourth Century. Wars could be justified, if they were fought for a righteous cause in a fair way. Dorothy didn’t buy into this. They would have liked her better if she did. read more…