A Third Way

Why did it have to be this way with religion--with her life as a Catholic--that she could not join these marching men and women?  Christ most certainly was with the marchers.  They were "His comrades."

She was emotionally overwrought, obviously, but her feelings, nevertheless, were expressive of a profound illness that had become acute in the body of Christendom. Those who professed Jesus had not made him Lord of history but history's lackey. And Dorothy, whose heart had always been drawn to the dispossessed, who had always stood aside from the main course that was crowded with persons struggling toward their bourgeois heaven, knew that the Christ they said was helping them in their struggle for bourgeoisity was really the anti-Christ.

"Is there no choice but that between Communism and industrial capitalism?" she asked. "Is Christianity so old that it has become stale, and is Communism the brave new torch that is setting the world afire?" How strange it was that "when Catholics begin to realize their brotherhood and betake themselves to the poor and to all races, then it is that they are accused of being Communists?"

"When the demonstration was over and I had finished writing my story," she said, "I went to the national shrine at the Catholic University on the feast of the Immaculate Conception.  There I offered up a special prayer, a prayer which came with tears and with anguish, that some way would open up for me to use what talents I possessed for my fellow workers, for the poor."--William D. Miller, Dorothy Day: A Biography, pg. 226.