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Dorothy Day
The great thing about God is that He (or at least the idea of Him) never stops paying attention to and loving you.
Religion is similar to a focus group gathering the hopes and needs of the populace. Report what you want and either a new religion can be created or an old religion adapted to supply that want.
Have I written here that what Brooks writes about "character building" and self denial would seem to cover homosexual conversion therapy? A crucial section of the Dorothy Day chapter is even titled "Conversion." It talks about her conversion to Catholicism, but the connection remains. And in that section we find this passage,
p90 To Day, separation was sin: separation from God, separation from one another. Unity was holiness: the fusion between peoples and spirits...
This is what at first appealed to even Heidegger about National Socialism. What even appealed to Foucault about Marxism. (Maybe.) Until he finally balked at Marxist attitudes toward sexuality. The "Orgy-porgy, Ford and fun" aspect to all these cults is seductive until the drugs wear off. (On page 87 Day even reports that in the days following her decision to join the Catholic Church she kept repeating to herself, "The opiate of the people.")
Dorothy Day's daughter, Tamar, was raised mostly by the Catholic Worker family as her mother was so busy and her leftist father refused to marry Day. The description of Tamar here is interesting,
p97 ... People described her as a gentle, hospitable person, without the propulsive spiritual longing her mother wrestled with. She accepted people as they were and loved them unconditionally...
You have to wonder if she was a comfortably spiritual person because of the religious environment she grew up in or if she was simply less troubled than her mother had been. Tamar wasn't Lizaveta, but I do suspect she had it more together, spiritually, than her mother.
I wish there was something here about Day's dealings with the Catholic Church hierarchy. She seems to have founded her own little order within the Church, pretty bold for a late convert. I love this quote I just found in Wiki, Jesuit priest Daniel Lyons "called Day 'an apostle of pious oversimplification.' He said that the Catholic Worker 'often distorted beyond recognition' the position of the Popes".[113]
And there's this, also in Wiki, following a battle with Cardinal Spellman about a cemetery workers strike, Day wrote in the Catholic Worker in April: "A Cardinal, ill-advised, exercised so overwhelming a show of force against the union of poor working men. There is a temptation of the devil to that most awful of all wars, the war between the clergy and the laity." Years later she explained her stance vis-à-vis Spellman: "[H]e is our chief priest and confessor; he is our spiritual leader–of all of us who live here in New York. But he is not our ruler." On March 3, 1951, the Archdiocese ordered Day to cease publication or remove the word Catholic from the name of her publication. She replied with a respectful letter that asserted as much right to publish the Catholic Worker as the Catholic War Veterans had to their name and their own opinions independent of those of the Archdiocese. The Archdiocese took no action...
I bet Spellman wouldn't support the current effort to make her a saint.
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