By Kenneth J Uva
A recent obituary in The New York Times for Sister Megan Rice, “Fierce Critic of Nuclear Weapons” (October 18, 2021) was accompanied by a photo of Sister Megan from 2012 wearing a tee shirt with the words “THE CATHOLIC WORKER.” While the Catholic Church is historically associated with conservative movements from the time of the French revolution, through the emergence of the Italian state in the nineteenth century, through the Cold War and McCarthyism, and through today’s “pro-life” movement, there is another side to Catholic social and political thought. Not all Catholics viewed life as a struggle against the modern, secular world. There was also a liberal side to Catholic life before, during, and after the Cold War era. The actions of the Catholic left must, therefore, be considered from a different point of view.
For our purposes, Catholic liberals are defined solely in terms of their secular political orientation. This, of necessity, excludes from our discussion any consideration of the views of a person or group with respect to Church questions, such as “modernism,” “Americanism,” and other matters that caused divisions within the American Church during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. A “liberal” in this study is a person who believes in “maximum human freedom under law, social progress, and democratic equality.” [1] American Catholic liberals also refused to identify the Church with any particular form of government and, in fact, were staunch defenders of the Church against attacks by the non democratic (i.e. Communist) left. Liberals believed that material improvements in people’s lives were possible and desirable. In spite of many protestations and cosmetic statements to the contrary, social reform was never a priority of the traditional Church.
Sympathy for progress, human freedom, and material improvements in people’s lives may seem to be benign goals, but Catholic liberals faced strong opposition from fellow Church members. When William J. Sullivan, S.J., wrote an article on Catholic liberals for The Catholic World, one reader responded by writing that the “basic tenets of liberalism are…. the rejection of religious authority and the notion that truth and morality are relative.”[2]
The Catholic World also published an article that responded to Sullivan by criticizing liberals for their “idealistic belief in quick solutions” to social problems and or the cardinal sin of “remaking institutions to suit their needs.” Conservatives, the article pointed out, were much more cautious, and therefore better. “Trusting to the inherited wisdom of the race, (a conservative) prudently and reverently advances one step at a time, building on the accomplishments of the past and fearful lest he tear the social fabric in his effort to sew the garment of progress.”[3] This reasoning provides an excellent illustration of the kind of conservative Catholic reasoning that was used as a weapon against social progress for many years.
The Catholic left during the Cold War consisted of a number of components. The anticommunist faction was made up primarily of labor groups, of which the Association of Catholic Trade Unionists (ACTU) was the most prominent. The other significant group on the left was the Catholic Worker and its offshoots. The Catholic Worker was both a movement and a newspaper. Each had enormous impact on Catholic political thought. While not pro-Communist in the sense in which this term was employed during the Cold War, the Catholic Worker movement did not choose to designate anticommunism as one of its priorities. As we shall see, the Catholic Worker maintained as all-encompassing a world view and philosophy as those great rivals in the struggle over the modern world – the Catholic Church and the Communist Party.
There were also Catholics on the left who were either unaffiliated with major movements or who achieved their prominence as individuals. Paul O’Dwyer, a lawyer and politician and definitively a man on the left, was attached to no major Catholic left organization. Michael Harrington, writer and social activist, began his career with the Catholic Worker, but became well-known as an advocate of liberal and left causes independently of that group. The Berrigans committed acts of resistance and protest to the Vietnam War that resulted in imprisonment.
All elements of the Catholic left drew their philosophies from Church teachings, thus placing themselves squarely within the boundaries of the Church. They also refrained from criticizing the Church hierarchy and emphasized their desire to apply Catholic principles of charity and love to society as a whole. Traditional Catholics, however, took issue with the Catholic left’s interpretation of these principles, as evidenced by the letter and article cited earlier that appeared in The Catholic World.[4]
The source of Catholic social doctrine most frequently referred to by traditional and leftist Catholic groups was the Encyclical on the Condition of the Working Classes, Rerum Novarum, issued by Pope Leo XIII in 1891.[5] The first line of the encyclical categorized it as an attempt to deal with the modern world, one in which the Church could no longer rely on the protection of European monarchies, but instead had to address itself to a rising tide of popular agitation. It read:
That the spirit of revolutionary change,
which has long been disturbing the nations
of the world, should have passed beyond the
sphere of politics and make its influence
felt in the cognate sphere of practical
economics is not surprising.[6]
The encyclical concerned itself with “elements of the conflict,” among them “the changed relations between master and workmen.”[7] As with many great documents, the thrust of Rerum was ambiguous enough to provide a foundation for more than one point of view. For example, while the left would later refer favorably to Rerum’s criticism of “unbridled competition” and “concentration of wealth,” the encyclical also came out solidly against socialism and in favor of private property.
Pope Leo contended that since people preceded the state, they possessed the right to provide for the sustenance of their body free from state interference.[8] Socialists, by attempting to abolish private property, “strike at the interest of every wage-earner, since they would deprive him of the liberty of disposing of his wages, and thereby of all hope and possibility of increasing his stock and of bettering his condition in life.”[9] This argument was much the same as that used in a series of U.S. Supreme Court decisions rendered during the same era as the encyclical. The Court held that social legislation aimed at the regulation of wages, hours, and working conditions deprived the worker of his right to contract for his labor, as if individual workers actually had the opportunity to negotiate a fair “contract” with a powerful employer.[10] Pope Leo concluded that “private ownership is in accordance with the law of nature.”[11]
These kinds of pronouncements did not deter Catholic liberals from their path since there was still much in Rerum Novarum to suit them. For example, Pope Leo also wrote that “God has granted the earth to mankind in general,” and noted that natural law did not decide the distribution of property, but instead left this matter to man to determine by his “own industry and by the laws of individual races.”[12]
The Church, of course, had a central role to play in this great modern conflict between labor and capital by ensuring that the workers and the wealthy lived in harmony as natural law intended. The Church would teach workers to labor honestly and to preserve property while urging employers to respect the dignity and worth of workers and to treat them fairly and not to overwork them.[13]
The role of the state, according to Rerum Novarum, is to guard the interests of all fairly and equally. This is, of course, contrary to the views of the Socialists who maintain that the state should guard the interests of its workers above all. The state, according to Pope Leo, should intervene if the general interest or the interests of any particular group suffer and if the problem cannot be resolved in any other way. The potential dangers enumerated by the Pope as presenting justification for state interference included strikes (or revolutions?) that endangered public peace; threats to health and safety; situations that might cause the ties of family life to be relaxed; and curiously, the danger to morals presented by the mingling of the sexes in factories.[14]
Rerum Novarum was, in essence, a document that called for the maintenance of the status quo. Its view was that while the natural order of things consists of the many laboring for the few, workers should not be forced to live intolerable lives. Work should not be injurious to safety and health, and wages should be sufficient to maintain a worker and his family in reasonable comfort. Unions are useful, according to Pope Leo, to help “each individual member to better his condition to the utmost in body, mind, and property.”[15] The encyclical omitted any mention of the use of unions for collective political action. Thus, in spite of the desire of the Catholic left to see Rerum Novarum as a document that placed the Church on the side of the lower classes, this encyclical was not a revolutionary manifesto. In fact, it was a weapon against socialism. By attempting to preserve the established order at a time when workers were at a decided disadvantage, Rerum Novarum was not the humanistic treatise the Catholic left believed it to be. Yet, because the encyclical addressed certain labor issues and advocated the fair treatment of workers, Rerum Novarum did move the Church one step away from the reactionary intransigence of Pius IX and toward recognition of the problems affecting modern society.
On May 15, 1931, Pope Pius XI issued the encyclical Quadragesimo Anno to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of Rerum Novarum.[16] Pope Pius reiterated the teachings of Leo XIII, but also carried Catholic social thought further by maintaining that “the right ordering of life cannot be left to a free competition of forces.”[17] Pius XI criticized capitalists, saying that their power over money and credit resulted in such dictatorial power over “the soul… of economic life, that no one can breathe against their will.”[18]
Pope Pius’ conclusion was that the “ultimate consequences of the individualist spirit in economic life are these: free competition has destroyed itself; economic dictatorship has supplanted the free market; unbridled ambition for power has likewise succeeded greed for gain; all economic life has become tragically hard, inexorable, and cruel.”[19]
Pius XI’s solution was a society in which harmony and cooperation between groups and classes, rather than class struggle, would solve economic problems. Such a society, would respect the hierarchic structure of the whole, along the lines of the Mystical Body of Christ. Thus, various “vocational groups” would interact under the guidance of the Church to guarantee fair wages, prices, and the preservation of private property.[19a] This view of society was quite consistent with the corporatist state of Fascist Italy.
Rerum Novarum and Quadragesimo Anno were used by Catholic liberals to support their arguments in favor of minimum wages, child labor laws, and other legislation aimed at mitigating the harsher aspects of industrial society. In his study of Catholics in the 1950s and 1960s, Charles A. Fracchia observed that “the encyclicals could be used to make the Church appear socially progressive and yet avoid the excesses of communism.” [19b] Of course, the left would emphasize the call for economic justice in these encyclicals while ignoring their advocacy of the status quo, under Church auspices, between the laboring and the owning classes. The application of these Papal documents by the Catholic left was central to the support of leftist positions before and during the Cold War.
Catholics in the Labor Movement
Throughout U.S. history, the vast majority of Catholics in America have been members of the working class. This was especially true during the periods of heavy Irish and German immigration during the middle and late 1800s. It is not surprising that when the Knights of Labor was founded in 1869, a majority of its members were Catholic. After 1878, the organization was headed by a Catholic, Terence Powderly.[20]
The Knights of Labor caused an early controversy within the American Catholic Church. A political and trade union association, the Knights organized as a “secret” society, with private meetings, records, and membership lists. During the early 19th century, the American Catholic Church, because of its concern with Freemasonry, condemned all secret organizations. After the formation of the Knights of Labor, more than half a century later, the hierarchy ruled that unions were not in violation of the earlier condemnation since they had “no other purpose than (workers’) mutual help and protection in exercising their trade.”[21] The matter did not rest there, however. In response to a petition by Archbishop Elzear Tashereau of Quebec, the Congregation of Propaganda Fide in Rome condemned the Knights in 1884. The U.S. hierarchy did not act on the matter for several years. Eventually, by a vote of 12 to 10, the hierarchy chose not to condemn the Knights and referred the matter to Rome.
James Cardinal Gibbons of Baltimore represented the Knights and argued that there was nothing in their constitution or bylaws that should result in condemnation. Rather, Gibbons stated that the organization was necessary, considering the economic and social conditions of the day, to protect workers in pursuit of their trades and livelihoods. Gibbons also employed an argument that was always foremost in the minds of American Catholics — that the condemnation would make the Church appear to be un-American and cause it to be a target of political persecution. This was a constant concern due to the Church’s minority position and its largely immigrant makeup.
The Propaganda agreed with Gibbons. His victory earned him a reputation as a friend of labor. The Knights were asked to remove a section of their constitution which the Propaganda considered to be favorable to communism and socialism, and they did so. For reasons unrelated to the Catholic Church, the Knights of Labor faded away during the 1890s and never became a strong political force.
Although Rerum Novarum had called for the formation of Catholic unions, this idea never caught on in the United States.[22] This was due, in great part, to the reluctance of the American hierarchy to set Catholics apart from the rest of the U.S. society in civil and political affairs, thus exposing them to persecution as a weak, yet visible, minority.
One attempt to create a Catholic labor movement was made by Peter Dietz, a priest who founded the Militia of Christ for Social Service in 1910. Dietz was a member of the Central Verein, the German-American political and social organization which, along with the Knights of Columbus, was a Catholic group heavily committed to opposing socialism.[22a]
The Militia, open to Catholics only, was aimed at fighting Socialist attempts to capture the labor movement. Its goal was “the defense of the Christian order of Society and its progressive development.” The organization failed because of a lack of grass-roots support.[23]
The Great Depression of the 1930s stimulated union organization. Organizing disputes arose, and CIO unions were expelled from the American Federation of Labor, a split that was not resolved until 1955. One issue that plagued the union movement was the question of Communist control of various locals.[24]
In early 1937, Martin Weising and Ed Squitieri, concerned with Communist influence in Local 1212 of the Utility Workers in New York, joined with John Cort of the Catholic Worker to form the Catholic Association of Trade Unionists. The group was later known as the Association of Catholic Trade Unionists (ACTU). Its formation was announced on page one of The Catholic Worker:
A group Catholic Union men meeting around
the kitchen table here at St. Joseph’s House
officially founded last Saturday afternoon
a new organization to be known as the Catholic
Association of Trade Unionists, designed to
educate, stimulate, and coordinate on a
Christian basis the action of Catholic
workingmen and women in the American Labor
movement.[25]
The ACTU based its mandate on Quadragesimo Anno. Its constitution, adopted in May 1938, stated one of the goals to be:
- Work towards a Christian reconstruction of the social order through the promotion of the programs contained in the Papal Encyclicals.[26]
The position of the ACTU was generally in conformity to the doctrines espoused in Quadragesimo Anno. For example, its newspaper, The Labor Leader, consistently ran editorials in favor of private property and in opposition to radicalism, communism, socialism, and class struggle. The paper also maintained that the interests of labor and capital were essentially harmonious. Except for its advocacy of a city takeover of Con Edison, the ACTU was opposed to the collective ownership of industry.[26a]
The first editorial of The Labor Leader set forth the group’s philosophy:
We are not opposed to Capitalists, Communists,
Fascists or labor racketeers because we must
have something to denounce and attack. We
oppose these groups because they disagree very
sharply with our own very definite ideas as
to what is a good trade union, what are proper
relations between employee and employers,
what is a decent economic order, or what is
the right function of the state in labor relations.[27]
The ACTU was a true organization of Catholic unionists, and according to Maurice R. Berube, the editor of The Labor Leader, which ceased publication when the ACTU folded during the mid-1960s, it was never an outlet for clerical opinion.[28] In its early years, the ACTU fought Communist influence in unions. For example, The Labor Leader criticized Joseph Curran of the National Maritime Union for allowing himself to be influenced by Communists. “It pains us to find the leader of this group, himself a non-Communist, falling so definitely for the party line,” the editors wrote.[29]
World War II intervened to curtail the activities of the ACTU, but the beginnings of the Cold War would involve it more heavily in the question of Communists in unions and in American life, in general.
Before World War II, U.S. Communists were accepted by many on the left as an indigenous, radical movement, but the onset of the Cold War made them suspect as functionaries of the Soviet Union. At the same time, there was significant Communist influence in the CIO, and many locals were virtually Communist controlled.
At its 1947 convention, the CIO endorsed an anticommunist foreign policy for the United States. This anticommunist position strengthened the resolve of those within the unions who wanted to drive the Communists out. A major effort was made against the United Electrical Workers (UE), praised by the Daily Worker as the “main industrial base of our party.”[31]
The UE, with 600,000 members, was the third largest CIO union. When it was expelled from the CIO, ACTU members were instrumental in backing the anticommunist forces active in most of the locals.[32] Michael Harrington has written that in the fight, it was ACTU members, rather than the organization itself, that played the significant role.[33] Regardless of the means of participation, Catholic unionists did play a central role in expelling a Communist-dominated union from the CIO and in establishing the International Union of Electrical Workers (IUE) as a non-communist alternative.
The ACTU’s traditional anticommunism fit in well with national policy and with growing trends within the labor movement after World War II. It was increasingly active in the UE during these years, as well. The ACTU supported the opposition to the UE leadership in several ways. The ACTU published Searchlight, the publication of the “UE Committee for Rank and File Democracy,” and formed Members for Democratic Action (MDA), which was exclusively concerned with Communists in the UE.[33a]
By 1947, the MDA had succeeded in electing officers in several UE locals, but was defeated at the national convention in September. When anticommunist elements failed to gain control of the UE, it was expelled at the CIO convention later that year.[33b]
The expulsion of the UE from the CIO in 1947 represented the apex of ACTU influence, which was to wane in the aftermath of the New York City cemetery workers’ strike in 1949.
The ACTU experienced a conflict between its unionism and its Catholicism in that controversy. Local 293, United Cemetery Workers of the Food, Tobacco, Agriculture and Allied Workers CIO, was involved in contract talks with the trustees of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, who managed several Catholic cemeteries in New York City. The union demanded a five-day, 40-hour work week at the same pay as the previous year’s contract. The trustees rejected the demand on the grounds that the dead must also be buried on Saturdays. The union called a strike which immediately prompted an attack on the union leadership.
A letter sent by Msgr. Ehardt of St. Patrick’s to the union blasted the cemetery workers’ leaders in the kind of language Joseph McCarthy would later perfect:
I know and you know that the ‘leaders’ of
your union used tactics similar to communists
in dealing with Management and in dealing
with its members. I know and you know of the
unchristian things they have said and done
in order to arouse class and religious
antagonism.[34]
The trustees made new proposals, one of which was for the union to disaffiliate from its Communist-dominated international. The union’s response was to widen the strike.[35]
Cardinal Spellman, the boss of every Catholic in New York, decided it was an opportune time for him to intervene. He summoned the strikers by telegram, spoke to their leaders, and then invited the men as individuals to return to work and to form a new union not affiliated with the International. His Eminence was, in fact, telling the men that he would not allow them to return to work as members of UCW Local 293, CIO. The terms were rejected by the membership.[36]
Spellman then paid a visit to a strike site, accompanied by three busloads of seminarians. The Cardinal led the group across the picket lines and broke the strike. After an eight-week confrontation, the cemetery workers accepted Spellman’s offer and affiliated with Local 32-B, Building Service Employees International Union, AFL.
The Catholic left supported the strikers and was therefore placed in opposition to the hierarchy. The Catholic worker had provided pickets, relief to the strikers, and supportive editorials.[37] The ACTU supported the strikers officially, as part of the union movement and through editorials in The Labor Leader. Yet, the forces of the Catholic left could not prevail against the Cardinal. The ACTU suffered losses in prestige, power, and money. Contributions from the Archdiocese, which had totaled $3,000 in 1948, ceased, as did other donations and clerical subscriptions to The Labor Leader. Power in the Catholic Church rested firmly with the hierarchy which showed it could not only choose its battles, but win them, as well.
The Labor Leader
Throughout the Cold War, the ACTU expressed its opinions through its newspaper, The Labor Leader. These opinions were, generally, in favor of social legislation and civil rights, and against communism.
A 1948 editorial denouncing Presidential candidate Henry A. Wallace provides a good example of the ACTU political position during the Cold War. While acknowledging that Wallace’s views were generally consistent with the social objectives of the ACTU, the editorial condemned Wallace for his flirtations with and support by Communists:
In recent years Mr. Wallace has veered
Slowly, but nonetheless surely and steadily,
from his original principles. Today he is
the knowing — or even worse, the unknowing —
tool of the Communist party. As such he is
the spearhead of the most reactionary force
in American life — a force which glorifies
the State and denies individual man all rights,
freedoms, and dignities. Mr. Wallace is no
longer worthy of support.[39]
The Labor Leader and the Catholic left, in general, emphasized that the most effective way to fight communism was to eliminate its causes. For example, while commenting favorably on the defeat of the Communists in the Italian elections of 1948, the newspaper noted that the Christian Democrats faced the need for domestic reforms with respect to absentee landlords, poverty, and other economic problems.[40]
When Pope Pius XII called for social reform to eliminate poverty and unemployment, The Labor Leader found itself in possession of a prize, highly valued by the Catholic left – a Papal call for social reform. Exulted The Labor Leader:
Seldom has the Pope, or any Pope, stated in
such strong terms the futility of fighting
Communism without a constructive program of
social justice…. We hope that those Catholics
whose anti-Communism suffers from negativities
will study the Holy Father’s words and ponder
on the necessity of positive action and a
positive program.[41]
The Labor Leader commented on many of the popular themes of the Cold War era, including the alleged presence of Communists in labor unions and the persecution of the Church in Eastern Europe. One often recurring theme explored by the paper concerned the theory that the rich (including rich liberals) caused communism. This working class “status resentment” of the rich and educated was an idea shared by Senator McCarthy and his supporters, as well. The Labor Leader, however, opposed McCarthy, not only for the usual reasons, but also because the Senator, according to the paper, stood against “EVERY measure aimed at abiding the Working man and his family.”[42]
Status resentment was demonstrated by “Don Capellano,” a columnist for The Labor Leader,” on several occasions. Capellano maintained that money spent by Communists was not furnished by unions but rather by “wealthy men and women whose money was often made from the labor of exploited workers.”[43] Capellano cited Corliss Lamont, Alger Hiss, and Whittaker Chambers as examples of wealthy persons who had become Communists. “Roosting in our local trees,” Capellano wrote, “we have many vulture wealthy Communists.”[44] He concluded:
Communists are not made in the slum, they are
recruited there by the power-hungry liberals
who label the workers’ poverty and degradation
with the names of their own debasement. And
this is their debasement: powerless and
frustrated deep in their insides, they seek
power and growth in a collective power that
gives them both direction and assusrance.[45]
“Don Capellano” was the pen name of the Reverend Charles Owen Rice, a priest who served as director of the Catholic Radical Alliance of Pittsburgh. Rice was a strong anticommunist and the founder of the Pittsburgh ACTU chapter. He wrote numerous columns dealing with the wealthy, liberal origins of communism for The Labor Leader.[45a]
As a Catholic labor organization, the ACTU newspaper’s favorite stories were those in which a Church figure (best of all, the Pope) made a statement favoring the ACTU’s position of promoting anticommunism through the achievement of improved wages and working conditions. For example, The Labor Leader ran a page one story on a speech by Msgr. William Bradley, Director of Catholic Charities for the Archdiocese of Santa Fe. Bradley called low wages and poor working conditions “fertile ground for the seeds of social discontent and subversive activity.” Americans with living wages were “poor recruit(s) for Communism.”[46] This linkage between material well-being and anticommunism constituted the basic line of the Catholic left during the Cold War.
Papal encyclicals and other statements from Church leaders on social welfare were used by the ACTU to link the Church with the labor movement. Thus, such statements became a legitimizing tool. Pope Pius XII made several statements on social welfare, and although there is still much debate among scholars over which side Pius was on, he was revered by the ACTU. When he died in 1958, he was called “one of the great friends of labor and the working man…. He endorsed the trade union movement to help secure the basic rights necessary for the dignity of man.”[47]
Work
The Labor Leader, published in New York, had its Midwestern counterpart in Work, the paper of the Catholic Labor Alliance. Published in Chicago, Work was edited by Ed Marciniak, who was associated with the Chicago Catholic Worker.
Work’s pages were filled with statistics illustrating facts such as the percentage of people with low incomes and the number of corporations in control of a given portion of the economy. As a hybrid of The Labor Leader and The Catholic Worker, Work expressed a concern with specific labor issues, as well as a philosophically-based sense of social justice.
Work was also anticommunist, but as was true of much of the Catholic left, the magazine’s editors believed that internal measures to control communism in the U.S. were threats to civil liberties and that communism could best be fought by eliminating its causes. For example, one article opposed a provision of the Taft-Hartley Act that required all union officers to sign an anticommunist oath before their union could be recognized by the National Labor Relations Board. This oath was dangerous, according to Work, because the provision’s definition of “communism” was so loosely formulated that union leaders could be fined or jailed for joining progressive groups that were labeled “communist.”[48]
The Cold War and its anticommunist hysteria were not far along before Work began to lament the forced conformity resulting from the fear of being labeled “Communist.” For instance, when news from Hollywood indicated that movie studios would make fewer films of social significance as a reaction to investigations into the industry by the House Un-American Activities Committee, Work editorialized:
Don’t misunderstand us. We don’t believe
that every picture coming from Hollywood
must be loaded with social significance.
But we do believe that the Movie Capital
should make films that point up our economic
needs as a nation, films that fight for social
justice, films that promote harmony among racial
and religious groups.
It is too bad that Hollywood must bow before
the anti-red hysteria. It is bad for our democratic
way of life, for the God-given rights of our
citizens, and for the cause of justice
and truth. It’s too bad.[49]
Work published many articles critical of negative anticommunism, often citing clergymen as their authority. A 1948 story, entitled “On Whose Side Are the Anti-Communists,” quoted Cardinal Saliege of Toulouse, France; Don Capellano (Rev. Rice) of The Labor Leader; and others on the subject. Negative anticommunism refused to recognize that frustration, despair, and uncreative labor were the true causes of communism. These causes had to be attacked if communism was to be stopped.
Anti-Communism of the negative, stupid, and
shortsighted type has done a great deal of
harm to the working class, the Church, and
the Faith.
When the Communists attack injustice, want
and inequalities, an anti-Communist attitude is
not sufficient to put things right and to create order.
We must know and preserve the dignity of life,
the dignity of body and soul, of labor and
family. We must work for a social order
which allows that dignity to express itself
in the condition of everyday life.[50]
In 1951, Work ran an editorial of the All-American Conference to Combat Communism, which was planning to raise $5 million to fight communism in the U.S. The editorial quoted Father Frederick McGuire C.M., a former China missionary. He believed that U.S. anticommunism resulted from fear that the status quo might be upset and that “standards of comfort and luxury” might be jeopardized. McGuire said:
The people of our country have fostered
communism in their midst by the materialism
of their lives, by their departure from
Christian principles and by their failure
to assert the positive doctrine of Christianity.
Too often communism is condemned by those who
fail to offer a hungry people the Christian solution.[51]
Coupling anticommunism with social reform was a recurring theme of Work and of the Catholic left, in general. One particularly strong statement of this view was presented by Father Paul J. Hallinan of Cleveland in a box on the editorial page of Work in 1955.
Anti-communism by itself is a hypocrisy and
a sham. We need men in public and private life
to expose and discuss this false system of life.
But we do not need individuals who make
anti-communism a career or a hobby to cover
their own baseness, who find ‘socialism’ in every
Catholic plan of social justice, who call the
thinking man ‘an egghead’ and the active
man a ‘do-gooder,’ and condemn the lot.[51a]
The editors of Work, in common with members of other groups on the Catholic left, considered themselves part of the Church and defended it against attack. An editorial approving Pius XII’s excommunication of Catholics who belonged to the Communist Party also argued that Catholics were not being ordered to adopt negative anti-communism. As the editors stated:
….it would be sheer stupidity to read
into the Holy Father’s decree things he
never intended. This the communist Daily
Worker tried to do when it said that the
Pope was commanding American Catholics to
adopt all the views of the House Un-American
Activities Committee and to engage in
witch-hunts in our own parishes and unions.[52]
People would also be misreading the Pope, according to Work, if they believed that the excommunication decree was all that was required to oppose Communism. The real way to fight Communism was through the promotion of progressive social reform.
Catholics and Labor: An Appraisal
Catholics in the United States occupied a unique position with respect to labor unions. Unlike their European counterparts who organized unions along religious lines, American Catholics had special Papal permission to join non-Catholic unions.[53] Catholic unionists, especially when organized into a group such as the ACTU, were often forced to reconcile their Catholicism with their unionism. Maurice Berube, who served as editor of The Labor Leader, has argued that the ACTU was, in fact, a bona fide union organization. While the ACTU was certainly not a Trojan horse within the labor movement, it was also a bona fide Catholic organization.
Each chapter of the ACTU had a chaplain who reported to the bishop. Only practicing Catholics were permitted to become members, and their faith had to be attested to by a priest. Members were also bound to participate in the ACTU’s many religious activities, including retreats, communion breakfasts, and special masses.[54] ACTU labor schools, the first of which was organized at Fordham University in 1937, were designed to teach a curriculum of Catholic social doctrine, labor history, and union leadership. The clergy was heavily represented on the schools’ faculties.[55]
A strong case can be made that anticommunism was the sole driving force behind the ACTU. The organization’s support of Franco during the Spanish Civil War showed that it adhered to the Church’s position, rather than organized labor’s position, on that issue. The labor movement in the U.S. and Europe was heavily in favor of the Republicans. At the American Communication Association Convention in 1940, the ACTU conference helped to defeat a resolution that criticized the Dies Committee (House Un-American Activities Committee) for anti-unionism and red-baiting on the grounds that such criticism constituted a “Communist Party line” position.[56]
Although the ACTU was established under the auspices of the Catholic Worker, it quickly staked out a much stronger anticommunist position. After World War II, anticommunism was the ACTU’s primary purpose. As the Communist issue died, so did the ACTU. Although the group lasted until the mid-1960s, it never approached the level of activity of 1947-1950, the years of its great anticommunist drive.
The Catholic Worker
The most influential group on the Catholic left during the Cold War was one which operated without official Church sanction and which was founded by a convert. The Catholic Worker began as a newspaper, but became a social and political movement that had enormous impact on the thinking of a generation of Catholic radicals and liberals.
Dorothy Day, the Catholic Worker’s founder and guiding light for forty-seven years, was born in Brooklyn in 1897 and was raised in the Midwest as a Methodist. As a high school student, her reading of Carl Sandburg in The Day Book, a newspaper concerned with labor struggles, of Jack London, and of the Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin, instilled in her a sense of class struggle and economic inequality. As she wrote in her autobiography The Long Loneliness:
I felt even at fifteen, that God
meant man to be happy, that He
meant to provide him with what he
needed to maintain life in order
to be happy, and that we did not
need to have quite so much destitution
and misery as I saw all around me and
read of in the daily press.[57]
The sense of injustice prompted Day to join the Socialist Party at the University of Illinois, and in 1916, to accept a job on The New York Call, a Socialist daily. During World War I, Day worked on The Masses, edited by Max Eastman and Floyd Dell. When The Masses was suppressed for its opposition to the war, Day worked for its successor, The Liberator, edited by Crystal Eastman, Max’s sister. During the war, Day participated in a suffragist march and was arrested for picketing the White House, the first of many arrests she was to endure for her political activities.[57a]
Her early years in New York brought Day into a circle of young Socialist radical intellectuals. It was a bohemian society that included John Reed, Eugene O’Neill and Hart Crane, as well as the Eastmans and Dell. Day continued to write about, and participate in, labor struggles. In 1927, Day became pregnant by her common-law husband, Forster Batterham. This precipitated her conversion to Catholicism, the central event of her life.
While living in a beach house in Staten Island with Batterham, who was an anarchist and an atheist, Day began to pray daily. She had begun to believe strongly that prayer was a weapon against loneliness and unhappiness. She became convinced that she wanted to thank God. As she wrote in her autobiography:
I had been passing through some years of
fret and strife, beauty and ugliness –
even some weeks of sadness and despair.
There had been periods of intense joy
but seldom had there been the quiet beauty
and happiness I had now. I had thought
all these years that I had freedom, but
now I felt that I had never known real
freedom nor even had knowledge of what
freedom meant.[58]
Day gave birth to a daughter and had her baptized. Shortly afterwards, she was baptized herself. These actions led to the breakup of her common-law marriage with Batterham, who could never accept her conversion. Yet, Day felt that the Sermon on the Mount, not communism, was to be the way to truth in her life.[59]
Day’s conversion led to personal philosophical conflicts since she was still filled with compassion for the poor and for the workers, a compassion she felt was lacking in the Church:
I was just as much against capitalism and
imperialism as ever, and here I was going
over to the opposition, because of course the
Church was lined up with property, with the
wealthy, with the state, with capitalism, with
all the forces of reaction. This I had been taught
to think, and I still think it to a great extent.[60]
Day acknowledged the Church’s lack of responsibility for the poor, for workers and for blacks and the Church’s consent to their oppression by industrialist-capitalist society. She also believed the Church was “Christ made visible” and He could not be separated from the Church.[61] Unlike many other radicals of her time, when Dorothy Day embraced Catholicism, she did not cease to be a radical. She was not a revolutionary, but her concern for the poor and oppressed was manifested in her life’s work. Day was never a friendly witness, an editor of Reader’s Digest, or a writer for The National Review, the fates of some former radicals.[62] She devoted her life to the effort to bring Christ’s message to the material world of working, living people. As she wrote: “How I longed to make a synthesis reconciling body and soul, this world and the next…”[63] Day would spend the next fifty years searching for this reconciliation. What her biographer William Miller calls her “quality of passionate and ruthless seeking” led her from bohemianism and political radicalism to Catholicism and personalism, with one marriage, one common-law relationship, and a stint as a writer for M.G.M. along the way.[64]
Peter Maurin and The Catholic Worker
After her conversion, Day supported herself with the royalties earned from a book she sold to Hollywood. (The book was never made into a movie.) Day also worked at various journalism jobs. For Commonweal, she wrote articles on labor matters and on the poor of Mexico City, which she visited. In 1932, Commonweal’s editor, George Shuster, introduced Day to Peter Maurin.
Maurin was born in 1877 in the south of France. One of 23 children, he spent his early years on a farm. His odyssey took him to Paris and then Canada, and finally to the U.S. in 1911. During these years, Maurin supported himself through a variety of odd jobs while engaging anyone who would listen to him in discussions about his economic and political philosophy.
At a time when radicalism in politics was defined chiefly in Marxist terms of worker control through the state apparatus, of the means of production and distribution, Maurin offered a philosophy of personalism. His aim was to go back to the land. He rejected the modern faith in “progress” and technology and the idea that history was evolving toward a particular end. Thus his “personalist” philosophy was opposed to both liberalism and Marxism.
In The Long Loneliness, Day wrote at length about Maurin as a person and as a philosopher. It is very easy for a reader to dwell too much on the superficial aspects of Maurin’s character. His dirty, rumpled clothes, his constant need for a bath, his relentless pounding of his “points” to anyone who would listen can make him appear to be a comic figure. But his influence on Day was profound, as she often admitted. It was Maurin who changed Day’s thinking from the object (political and social change) to the subject (the person).[65] Maurin’s ideas of community, the dignity of work and opposition to a large and impersonal social and economic system were to become the driving forces behind the Catholic Worker movement.[66]
Many of Maurin’s ideas were affected through the efforts of Dorothy Day and others from the Catholic Worker. Such Worker projects as Houses of Hospitality for the needy and farming communes were first espoused by Maurin, who actually took no part in the newspaper, except to contribute occasional “easy essays.”[67] Two examples of this literary form follow:
Church and State
Modern society does not believe in a Church’s State;
it believes in a businessman’s State “And it is the first time
in the history of the world that the State is controlled by
businessmen,” says James Truslow Adams.[68]
Rome or Moscow
And because clergymen are not interested in the sociology
of St. Francis of Assisi, St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Thomas
More, the forgotten man is becoming interested in the
sociology of Karl Marx, Lenin and Stalin. And because
clergymen are not interested in a technique of leadership,
the forgotten man is becoming interested in a technique
of dictatorship. And because clergymen are not interested
in Dynamic Catholic Action, the forgotten man is becoming
interested in Dynamic Bolshevik Action.[69]
Maurin used the Catholic Worker movement and newspaper as a sounding board for his ideas about “cult, culture, and cultivation.” He was opposed to class struggle and political organization. When asked about the labor movement, Maurin’s reply was, “Strikes don’t strike me.”[70]
The first issue of The Catholic Worker was published on May Day, 1933. The paper’s philosophy was expressed in an editorial:
For those who are sitting on park benches
in the warm spring sunlight.
For those who are huddling in shelters
trying to escape the rain.
For those who are walking the streets in
the all but futile search for work.
For those who think that there is no hope
for the future, no recognition of their
plight – this little paper is addressed.[71]
In its early years, The Catholic Worker was heavily concerned with labor and civil rights issues. A good summary of its position was contained in an editorial that appeared in October, 1933:
We recommend that Catholic youth in
schools, labor unions, all existing
organizations in parishes in both city and rural
regions should acquaint themselves with
themselves with Catholic stand on such issues as
international peace, the Negro question, the
rights of labor, the farm question, the rural
life movement.[72]
True to its word, The Catholic Worker, in the years before World War II, wrote consistently on the issues of labor, civil rights, and world peace. As was common on the Catholic left, The Catholic Worker often tried to link its positions to those of the Church, usually through the familiar approach of interpreting certain Papal encyclicals. However, on many issues, the Worker held positions that were not popular with Catholics, and in some cases, The Catholic Worker was diametrically opposed to official positions of the U.S. Church hierarchy. For example, The Catholic Worker favored the child labor amendment limiting hours and dangerous work for children. Most U.S. bishops, including all eight from New York, opposed the amendment. Patrick Cardinal Hayes of New York City based his opposition to the amendment on the principle that parents, not the state, should exercise control over the lives of their children.[73]
In addition, unlike the overwhelming majority of Catholics in the U.S., The Catholic Worker supported the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War. This support led Fr. Charles E. Couglan’s Social Justice to ask whether The Catholic Worker’s “attitude on the Spanish question was enough to make one wonder if the thing were not downright Communism, camouflaged with Catholic paint.”[74]
In May, 1939, Bill Callahan wrote an article denouncing Social Justice for publishing Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a sham document depicting a Jewish plot to take over the world. The Catholic Worker received many letters from Catholics who protested Callahan’s article. One letter called Dorothy Day “a dirty Communist parading as a loyal Catholic, a wolf in sheep’s clothing serving your Red master, Joseph Stalin…”[75]
One of the great myths that motivated the Catholic Worker movement was the belief that the Church and its members were truly governed by Christ-like feelings of love and charity. Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker movement were constantly criticized by conservative Catholics, such as those who wrote for The (Brooklyn) Tablet for taking positions in favor of blacks and the poor that might have been consistent with Communist Party stands. Dorothy Day’s early belief that the Church was often lined up with the forces of reaction was given credence by her experience with The Catholic Worker. Nevertheless, she always remained an obedient daughter of the Church, who on several occasions said she would have stopped publication of The Catholic Worker if Cardinal Spellman had ordered her to do so.[76]
Catholic Worker supporters were of course not going to defend Coughlan’s side of the important issues of the day. However, Day’s position on the greatest issue of her time would lose support for The Catholic Worker. From the beginning to the end of World War II, Day maintained a steadfast pacifism. Because many Worker people and supports saw the war as an anti-Fascist crusade, this position caused great dissension in Worker houses of hospitality. It also resulted in a severe drop in the circulation of the paper. By 1941, people associated with or influenced by the Catholic Worker had set up thirty hospitality houses across the U.S. Some houses were closed as a result of the internal discord caused by Day’s pacifism during the war.[77] The circulation of The Catholic Worker dropped from 160,000 to 50,000.[78]
In spite of Day’s unpopular pacifism, both the paper and the movement survived the lean years of World War II. Peter Maurin’s faculties began to fade, and he died in 1947. Dorothy Day credited his ideas as the force behind the Catholic Worker movement. She wrote about Maurin’s death and what she had learned from his life:
We cannot love God unless we love each
other, and to love we must know each other.
We know Him in the breaking of bread, and
we are not alone anymore. Heaven is a
banquet and life is a banquet too, even with
a crust, where there is companionship.[79]
The influence of Peter Maurin led the Catholic Worker to the development of a firm philosophical base. After his death, his influence on Day remained, and this base formed the core of Worker thinking as the Cold War approached.
The Catholic Worker adhered to a philosophy of personal, rather than state, responsibility for human needs, thus placing the group in fundamental opposition to communism. Also, while favoring egalitarianism and libertarianism, the center of the movement’s philosophy was Catholicism. Following Maurin’s ideas, the movement fostered decentralized power and participatory democracy. The primary model was the myth of the early Christian Church.[80] The movement opposed the concept of the nation-state and of nationalism as the major cause of war and oppression. The alternative, according to the Worker, was the self-governing community exemplified by the farming communes founded by the movement.
Distributism was the name given to this anti-state, anti-industrial agrarian philosophy. Based largely on the writings of the Catholic authors G.K. Chesterton and Hillaire Belloc, distributism also had an earlier adherent in the Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin (1842 – 1921).
Kropotkin was constantly quoted or referred to in the pages of The Catholic Worker. His philosophy was based upon the rejection of the state and upon direct, rather than parliamentary or representative action. Kropotkin used his study of natural history to show that man is a social being who does not need government for survival and well-being. In fact, according to Kropotkin, government caused the inequality that resulted in crime and violence.
Kropotkin’s study of geography, geology, and zoology taught him that species prosper through mutual aid, sharing, and cooperation. This line of thought placed Kropotkin in direct opposition to Darwin’s belief in the survival of the fittest. As Kropotkin wrote in Mutual Aid: “Unbridled individualism is a modern growth, but it is not characteristic of primitive mankind.”[81] Kropotkin’s anthropological evidence included such observations as the fact that primitive societies, such as the Hottentots and the Eskimos, share their food and never let a member of the community starve. His philosophy and that of the Catholic Worker can be summed up in the following passage from Mutual Aid:
In the practice of mutual aid, which
we can retrace to the earliest beginnings
of evolution, we thus find the positive and
undoubted origin of our ethical conceptions;
we can affirm that in the ethical progress of
man, mutual support — not mutual struggle — has
had the leading part. In its wide extension,
even at the present time, we also see the best
guarantee of a still loftier evolution of our race.[82]
Not surprisingly, at the time of his death in 1921, Propotkin was a firm opponent of the Bolshevik terror sweeping Russia.
One of the towering Catholic figures of the twentieth century, Thomas Merton was also a favorite of the Catholic Worker. His life and thought cannot be easily summarized, since he was the author of some 40 volumes and the subject of more than 15 books, 70 doctoral dissertations, and innumerable articles.[83]
Merton was a French-born Catholic convert who became a pacifist, a Trappist monk, and one of the most original and influential Catholic thinkers of the modern era.[84] His pacifism, his anguish about blacks and the poor, and his concern with the uprooting of humanity by industrialism were well-received by the Catholic Worker. In the mid-1960s, Merton attempted a synthesis of Catholicism and Zen. He was also an opponent of the Vietnam War.
Merton’s spiritual journey to the Trappist monastery is detailed in his autobiography, The Seven Story Mountain.[85] His popularity with the Catholic Worker may be explained to some extent by the parallels between his spiritual journey and that of Dorothy Day. Merton, like Day, was a convert who had formerly espoused communism or radical socialism.
Merton had much to say about communism. His first confession — that he failed to distinguish between the evils that communism tried to cure and the validity of the solutions — was common to ex-radicals. To Merton, as to Maurin and Day, communism was only another aspect of the same materialism that produced capitalism and its subsequent breakdown. Merton’s solution to the problem of communism — a call for the Christ-like acts of charity and mercy on the part of Catholics — was consistent with the resolution espoused by the Catholic Worker:
Catholics are worried about Communism;
and they have a right to be, because the
Communist revolution aims, among other things,
at wiping out the Church. But few Catholics
stop to think that Communism would make very
little progress in the world, or none at all,
if Catholics really lived up to their obligations,
and really did the things Christ came on earth
to teach them to do; that is, if they really loved
one another, and saw Christ in one another, and
lived as saints and did something to win justice
for the poor.[86]
The Catholic Worker and the Cold War
The Catholic Worker took an early position against the myths and ideas behind the Cold War. An editorial in the May 1947 edition set the tone:
What is Our Stand on Russia?
We are fighting principalities and powers,
not flesh and blood, and the Russians are our
neighbors, our brothers in Christ, and not
just a world power seeking empire.
As for the prison camps and oppression practiced in the Soviet Union, these should be fought with love:
Love is a beautiful word, but as Father
Zossima said, LOVE IN PRACTICE IS A HARSH
AND DREADFUL THING COMPARED TO LOVE IN DREAMS.[87]
The Marshall Plan, a major U.S. Cold War initiative designed to fight communism by rebuilding war-ravaged Western Europe, was opposed by The Catholic Worker. Using economic aid in this manner, according to the paper, was a violation of the concept of Christian charity. The paper also noted “The fact is that it (the Marshall Plan) has for its prime purpose the extension and propagation of an economic system (capitalism) we believe to be unjust and immoral.”[88]
One major distinction between the position of the Catholic Worker movement and that of more conventional liberal Catholics was that the Worker did not believe that Communists were evil or motivated by malice. One article accepted “Communist brethren” as people who burn with a zeal for righteousness, a love for the oppressed, a desire to see justice achieved.” While opposing communism because it replaces one repressive system with another, the author concluded:
I could conceive of a Communism devoid
of materialism and atheism and being in harmony
with Catholicism, I cannot conceive of industrial
capitalism being such.[89]
During the espionage trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and during the subsequent appeal process, Then Catholic Worker ran numerous pleas for clemency. After the execution of the Rosenbergs, Dorothy Day wrote an article entitled “Meditation on the Death of the Rosenbergs.” Day accepted the Rosenbergs’ guilt, but noted that Ethel last act had been to kiss one of the prison matrons accompanying her to the electric chair. “Her last gesture,” wrote Day, “was one of love.” She concluded:
Let us have no part with the vindictive
state and let us pray for Ethel and Julius
Rosenberg. There is no time with God and
prayer is retroactive. By virtue of the
prayers we may say in the future, at the
moment of the death which so appallingly
met them, they will have been given the
grace to choose light rather than darkness.
Love rather than hate. May their souls, as
well as the souls of the faithful departed,
rest in peace.[90]
In a similar vein, when Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, who had been the Secretary of the U.S. Communist Party, died in Moscow in 1964, Dorothy Day wrote an article entitled “Red Roses for Her.” Day concluded that Flynn “held out her arms to God (and the word God itself means Good, Truth, Love, and all that is most beautiful) at the moment of her death, and was received by Him. And she will be judged by the love that is in her heart.”[91]
The Vatican issued a decree in July 1949 excommunicating Communists.[92] When the Archdiocese of New York used this decree to attack the Catholic Worker movement, the movement fought back by turning the other cheek.
Reverend Broderick of the staff of St. Patrick’s Cathedral interpreted the decree in a sermon. According to Broderick, this pronouncement had turned the
Clock to midnight on the masquerade party —
the fifth columnist is unmasked, the fellow
traveler, for all his protestations of progressive
Christianity, and for all of his attachments
to the so-called idealist Christian left, must
declare his proper loyalty. The toying parlor
pink must show his true color —
red or not red… There is no place in the Church
of Christ for religious centaurs, for collaborators,
equivocators, appeasers, temporizers, straddlers,
deluded professional liberals, carpetbaggers…[93]
Consistent with its policy of not attacking personally those with whom it disagreed, The Catholic Worker merely responded to this rather intemperate attack by answering that “it is hardest to love and live in peace with those of one’s own family…”[94]
While generally refraining from personal attacks, The Catholic Worker produced a steady flow of anti-Cold War articles throughout the late 1940s, the 1950s, and the early 1960s. In essence, the Worker’s view was that communism should be opposed not by Cold War or by military action or by “internal security” measures, but by Christian charity.
“Why Communism?” asked The Catholic Worker. Some have too much, others have too little. The solution was a Christian asceticism. “A moderate table should be enough for you; reckless gluttony is not a sea to be ventured on.”[95]
This thread of thought permeated much of the writing in The Catholic Worker throughout the 1950s. For example, in a long review of Witness by Whittaker Chambers, Betty Bartelme summarized Chambers’ career and criticized his lack of concern for social reform as his chief failing:
Chambers’ disillusionment in Communism and in
the New Deal government under which flourished
may account for his seeming lack of interest in
social reform. It does not change the fact that
necessity for social reform still exists; that
materialism still does its corroding work…
(Communism) could only be rooted out by a stronger
idea — the religion of love. The due processes of
law cannot do it — they are not equipped for such
a task. Only a return to God in true Christianity
will have any effect on the world which is racked
by the disease of which Communism is only a by-product.[96]
While social reform and charity were presented as solutions to the problem of communism, the type of Cold War measures taken at home were considered the wrong answers. In an article in The Catholic Worker on McCarthyism, the authors wrote that “super-patriots” in the U.S. were attempting to limit individual freedom just as the Communists did. The authors concluded that “Catholics should reexamine the basic tenants of their own Faith and in the American political and democratic system. For with the distortions and oversimplifications of McCarthy, we are headed for the disruption of everything both of these represent at their finest.”[97] Articles dealing with other Cold War controversies, such as the McCarran Act, appeared frequently throughout the 1950s and repeated the basic theme.
When Michael Harrington’s book, The Other America, was published in 1962, it had a major impact on U.S. liberals.[98] In fact, some have credited this book, detailing poverty in the U.S., with playing a major role in influencing President Kennedy to undertake plans for a war on poverty. Harrington, who later became a member of the executive committee of the Socialist Party and Chairman of the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee, is one of several prominent Catholic leftists who started at The Catholic Worker. Harrington served as associate editor of the newspaper in 1951 and 1952, and continued his association with the paper as a contributor for many years after.
An article Harrington wrote contains a good statement of the Catholic Worker position on the Cold War. Entitled “Negative Approaches to Communism,” Harrington’s article on the Humphrey-Dies Bill, which outlawed the Communist Party, attacked a series of Cold War assumptions.[99] The U.S., he wrote, was unable to cope with Stalinism through any means other than by the support of reactionary forces abroad (Chiang, Franco) and witch-hunts at home. Liberals were responsible for the Humphrey-Dies Bill, an undemocratic law designed to support Cold War policies. Harrington noted that the bill was named for Senator Hubert Humphrey, who was Vice Chairman of Americans for Democratic Action. The answer to Stalinism, according to Harrington, was voluntary communism (distributism) with worker participation in the organization and distribution of goods. He concluded:
The United States is not a police state — yet.
Men may still speak out at a great price. Fewer
speak. Yet all of those laws are part of a massive,
deep, unprecedented movement toward a police
state. Their source is always the same, the
political bankruptcy of American capitalism in a
hostile world.[100]
In the latter part of the 1950s, The Catholic Worker shifted much of its emphasis from the poor and from the witch-hunt aspects of the Cold War as that hysteria began to recede. The group then became more involved with pacifism as Day and others were arrested several times for refusing to participate in air-raid drills.
In 1960, The Catholic Worker discovered Cuba, and its pages were soon filled with the glories of Castro’s revolution.
William Worthy, who lost his passport for defying the ban on U.S. travel to Cuba, wrote one of the first of a great number of articles on Cuba for The Catholic Worker.[101] Worthy accepted, at face value, Fidel Castro’s statement that he was not a Communist, and commented favorably on the Cuban leader’s assertion that “Capitalism may kill man with hunger. Communism kills man by wiping out his freedom. Cuba has a revolution that satisfies man’s material needs without sacrificing his freedom.”[102] Worthy added, fawningly, that this statement:
appeals to me because it puts Cuba on the
side of freedom in the worldwide revolution
against colonial and semi-colonial domination.
Recently in the United States perspective,
negroes begun to identify themselves with this
revolution. To those with eyes to see causes,
effects, and relationships, it has become obvious
that different branches of the same European-
North American power clique exploit negroes
in Little Rock, Cubans in Oriente, and blacks
in the Union of South Africa.[103]
Six Months later, The Catholic Worker reprinted from Liberation, an article by David Dellinger. The Dellinger piece was so uncritical of Cuba, and so full of praise and so utterly lacking in objectivity and perspective that it could have been be written by the Cuban press ministry. “For the second time in my life” (the first time was in Republican Spain in 1936), wrote Dellinger, “I have seen man’s cynical and self-destructive inhumanity to man being replaced by the spirit and practice of a kind of brotherhood that is unknown to us who live in a country whose ideals are behind it and where the ‘rights’ of property override the rights of human beings.”[104] The article recited the litany of past U.S. abuse of Cuba while praising the progress made in schools, in new healthcare centers, in increased wages paid to workers, and in the prosperity of the farms. Dellinger also echoed the party line by writing that “I found no interest in holding elections in the near future, among either supporters or opponents of the regime.”
The real threat to the United States from Cuba, according to Dellinger, was not communism, but humanism. The U.S., he wrote, was afraid that “humanism will spread from Cuba to the rest of Latin America.” He concluded, as if there was anything further to say, with the following:
Cuba has brought new freedom and dignity
to its people and enriched the human heritage
by its far reaching economic and social changes.
Will the Revolution now be so overwhelmed by
its struggle for survival against the rival
encroachments of capitalist America and the
Communist bloc that its progress grinds to a
halt? Or will the revolutionary enthusiasm of
several million Cubans continue to add new
dimensions to man’s understanding of freedom?[105]
The Catholic Worker was a sponsor of the Non-Violent Committee for Cuban Independence, and Dorothy Day, herself, wrote extensively in praise of Castro and the Cuban revolution. In one such article, after detailing the poverty and illiteracy to which the revolution responded, Day wrote this startling passage:
We are certainly not Marxist socialists nor
do we believe in violent revolution. Yet we
do believe that it is better to revolt, to fight,
as Castro did with his handful of men, and this
gained them into his army – than to do nothing.[106]
Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker movement had maintained a pacifistic stance from the movement’s inception through World War II, the Korean Conflict, and the Cold War. Yet, when it came to Cuba, Day approved of war. If it is, perhaps, a comment on the naïve idealism of Day, then she would support violence in this instance. The rhetoric of the Cuban Revolution was similar to the rhetoric of Maurin and The Catholic Worker. As Day pointed out, “We believe in farming communes and cooperatives, and will be happy to see how they work in Cuba.”[107] The Catholic Worker movement’s members sincerely believed in the rhetoric, and their belief enabled them to ignore the executions and oppression in Cuba because the right noises came from that country. When she traveled to Cuba in 1962, Day wrote a series of articles for The Catholic Worker that gave a tourist-type account of the country. Day praised the cooperative farms, the freedom of religion, the availability of many books, as well as the advances made in health, education, and housing. These glowing, uncritical press releases for Cuba constituted the low point in the integrity of Dorothy Day and The Catholic Worker. Day thought she had finally found the cooperative, sharing society she had long sought, a Catholic Worker farming commune writ large. As was common with many American radicals who traveled to Communist countries, Day allowed her enthusiasm for the ideas put forth to temper her vision and her judgment. Thus, the events and conceptions of the 1950s and the Cold War gave way to the new realities and concerns of the 1960s.
Many readers of The Catholic Worker objected to this one-sided view of the Cuban Revolution.[108] This lapse from pacifism, however, proved to be an aberration as Day was one of the founders in 1962, along with Thomas Merton, of Pax Christi, a Catholic peace group.[109] During the 1960s, Catholic Worker people were deeply involved in opposition to the Vietnam War. Roger La Porte, a Worker, immolate himself at the U.N. in protest.[110] David Miller, the first person to publicly burn a draft card after such an act was made a crime, was also a member of the group.[111] Day, herself, kept up her activities for peace, civil rights and labor, and was last arrested in 1973, while demonstrating for Cesar Chavez’s United Farm Workers.[112]
When Dorothy Day died in 1980 at the age of 83, David J. O’Brien, history professor at Holy Cross College, called her “the most significant, interesting, and influential person in the history of American Catholicism.”[21]113 Newsweek said she was “perhaps the most influential U.S. Roman Catholic of her time.”[114] Among the mourners at her funeral were other significant American Catholic leftists such as peace activist Daniel Berrigan, Cesar Chavez, and Michael Harrington. It is a comment on her impact on the Catholic left that Day was associated with virtually all the important left-leaning Catholics of her era.
John C. Cort, one of the founding members of the ACTU and a journalist and commentator, had also been a member of the Catholic Worker. As early as 1952, he acknowledged Day’s influence on the Catholic left. Cort noted that during the worst years of the Depression, when it seemed as if the Communists would be the only force agitating for the poor and the workers:
It was then that this woman Dorothy Day,
with nothing but tremendous courage and
tremendous faith, started a newspaper and soon
after a House of Hospitality to feed and shelter
the poor…
It was only natural that those of us who
were interested in starting a movement should
have gravitated to The Catholic Worker…
We all owe a great to Dorothy Day. Without
her it is not at all certain that the ACTU
would have been founded…[115]
Dorothy Day and The Catholic Worker had a very specific vision of society. Day lived the Sermon on the Mount through voluntary poverty and an acceptance of personal responsibility for the poor. The Catholic Worker movement founded houses of hospitality and rural communes in more than 40 locations throughout the United States.[116] Many Catholic radicals of the period were at one time associated with The Catholic Worker. Yet, Day never used the movement as a power base for personal aggrandizement. She lived simply at Worker headquarters on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, among the derelicts and shopping-bag ladies to whom the Catholic Worker extended its mission.
A Catholic radical but not a radical Catholic, Day was always a loyal communicant of her chosen Church. She believed in its traditions and ceremony. She attended mass regularly, said the rosary, was a conservative on religious matters, and a follower of Church doctrine on divorce, birth control, and abortion. In 1948, when The Catholic Worker advised young men to refuse to register for the draft, the Vicar-General of the Diocese of New York ordered the Worker to cease and desist from such illegal activity. Day complied.[117]
It may seem paradoxical that a person such as Dorothy Day, who devoted her life to the poor and the helpless, would submit to another authority to matters connected with such efforts. One can argue, for example, that abortion and birth control are weapons by which the poor can improve their lives or, at least, avoid slipping deeper into poverty. Yet, Day followed the Church on these controversies. Herein lies the key to the philosophy of Peter Maurin and Dorothy Day. They were interested in personal acts of mercy and charity, one person to another. They did not necessarily oppose governmental programs, but their ideas centered on the person who was suffering. Large-scale policy was beside the point. The Catholic Worker intended to bring Christ to those who needed Him. They were not interested in bringing the needy to a revolutionary class consciousness. By bringing Christ to the world, Day lived her life as she believed He wished her to. As one commentator wrote upon Day’s death:
What distinguished her passion for justice
and peace was her determination to live out her
moral and political attitudes. She shared the
life of the poor; she fought hard for the victims
of injustice; and she came to know the insides of
prisons in her work for civil rights and against
preparations for nuclear war.[118]
For the 40 years after her death, there has been a movement to have Day
recognized as a saint of the Catholic Church because of her commitment to caring
for the poor, acts of charity and commitment to social justice. Her left leaning
politics as well as her life style choices early in her life have, thus far, block
sainthood.
One offspring of the Catholic Worker was Integrity, a magazine founded by Ed Willock, a former member of the group. Basing its ideas heavily on those of the Catholic Worker, Integrity began its publication in 1947, and lasted until the early 1950s.
The magazine commented on the issues of the day and stressed anti-communism through opposition to capitalism, which according to Integrity, was the cause of communism. The U.S. capitalist system paralleled communism, according to one author, because it worshipped progress and materialism while turning away from religion. “Thus economic gain,” the author wrote, “the law of supply and demand, (and) free enterprise, all of which are economic terms, are used as points of departure in deciding the worth of all personal, institutional, and political policies.”[119] The concept of Western materialism as the cause of communism was a theme frequently pounded home by Integrity.[120]
Not all Catholic leftists of the Cold War era were aligned with Catholic groups. Paul O’Dwyer of New York City was a well-known activist who worked for leftist causes as an individual.
Born in Ireland in 1907, O’Dwyer served as President of the New York Chapter of the National Lawyers Guild in 1947, and as a member of the national board from 1948 to 1951. The National Lawyers Guild lobbied strongly against the anti-communist program, including the Loyalty Oath, of the Truman Administration.[121] O’Dwyer represented Lillian Hellman, Paul Robeson, and various labor union officials at hearings before the House Un-American Activities Committee. He also was the attorney for several New York teachers who lost their jobs under the Feinberg Law, a state statute requiring dismissals of teachers who had belonged to the Communist Party or to “front” groups.
In 1948, as a Democrat, O’Dwyer ran for Congress in northern Manhattan. He lost to Jacob Javits by 1,800 votes. During that campaign, freelance anticommunist the Rev. Edward Lodge Curran, red-baited O’Dwyer for accepting the nomination of the American Labor Party. Curran sent a telegram to O’Dwyer that read:
Your brother Bill O’Dwyer, Mayor of New York
has charged the American Labor Party with
being controlled by communists. Do you still
intend to run for Congress under the American
Labor Party’s label and endorsement?[122]
In response to Curran’s charges, O’Dwyer issued a statement that pointed out that he had been baptized and confirmed a Catholic, and that his children had been baptized, and those old enough had been confirmed. O’Dwyer also offered to supply a list of priests who would vouch for his character. Such was the climate of those times that a candidate for Congress was forced to defend himself against charges of communism by laying out his religious connections. Nevertheless, O’Dwyer’s reputation survived such attacks, and he continued his career as an attorney and public activist. In 1968, he won the Democratic primary for the U.S. Senate nomination on an antiwar platform (losing to Javits in the election) and from 1974 – 1977 O’Dwyer served as New York City Council President.
In spite of his defense of Communists expelled from C.I.O. unions in the 1930s and of Communists and those accused of being Communists in the 1940s and 1950s, O’Dwyer was never condemned by Cardinal Spellman. In fact, toward the end of Spellman’s life, O’Dwyer wrote to him to ask for a contribution for the Mayo (Ireland) Foundation for the Handicapped, an organization that O’Dwyer headed. The Cardinal sent $100.[123]
O’Dwyer had this to say about his spiritual brethren at the Catholic Worker:
I think they were trying to establish an
early concept of Christianity. They were,
in a great measure, basic theoreticians, as
it were, carrying the gospel of the catacombs
into modern day life. And…had to be treated
with a great deal of respect.[124]
The Catholic Left: Conclusion
In spite of the conservatism of the Church, there were some American Catholics who held to a different line during the Cold War. The Catholic left was motivated by a belief in freedom and human progress, and used these measures to judge the issues of the day. Conservative Catholics drew their inspiration from their faith in tradition and authority. The Catholic left, however, was not monolithic in its principles. The left included both those who accepted the Cold War’s anticommunism and those, such as the members of the Catholic Worker, who rejected this worldview.
There were, of course more common elements than differences among the various factions on the Catholic left. The left constantly tried to justify its positions on the basis of Church teachings, such as early Christian myths and doctrine as expressed in papal encyclicals. Rerum Novarum and Quadragesimo Anno were particular favorites of the Catholic left because these encyclicals attempted to define the proper role of owners and workers in the modern world. Although they were essentially conservative documents, both encyclicals at least addressed the problems of labor, and if nothing more, called for decent wages and working conditions.
The A.C.T.U. was founded on the principles expressed in the papal encyclicals, and the group adhered fairly closely to the Church line on most issues. Like Rerum Novarum, the ACTU’s opposition to socialism, and especially to Communists in unions was probably the main reason for its existence. As the issue of Communists in American life faded in the early 1960s, so did the ACTU.
During the Cold War, the ACTU, while opposed to communism, was also generally against the era’s more repressive measures, such as anticommunist oaths. While accepting the principle of the Cold War, the ACTU believed that McCarthyism and other excesses were dangerous and unnecessary in a free society.
The Catholic Worker, however, did not accept the premises of the Cold War. A struggle between superpowers for influence and domination of the world was not high on the agenda of a group that saw the modern state as the greatest threat to individuals. The Catholic Worker’s advocacy of a return to the land, its medieval vision of small communities and its lack of faith in material progress and technology ran counter to the prevailing trends of the increasingly industrial modern state with its international alliances and increasing use of science and technology to create even more destructive weapons.
The Catholic left can be divided into gradualist (labor) and radical (Catholic Worker) wings. Of the two, the group represented by the Catholic Worker is more historically significant. This group and its progeny had an all-encompassing view of society, as did the Communists. While the ACTU advocated certain reforms within the context of industrial society, the Catholic Worker saw industrial society, itself, as the problem. Thus, communism and capitalism were two sides of the same modern coin — materialism and greed. Members of the Catholic Worker, especially its founders, Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin, sought a society without capitalism’s greed and communism’s repression. Their solution was the voluntary communism of personalism — sharing and cooperation motivated by Christian love. An impossible vision, no doubt. Yet, Day made this small-scale society work, and in the process, gave a generation of Catholic leftists an alternative to the sterile, negative anticommunism that permeated so much of the Catholic Church during the Cold War era.
Footnotes
[1] William P. Clancy, “The Liberal Catholic,” Commonweal, July 11, 1952, page 335.
[2] William J. Sullivan, S.J., “The Catholic Liberal,” The Catholic World, June 1956, p. 184; letter published December 1956.
[3] George Gent, “Liberal, Conservative, Catholic,” The Catholic World, November 1957, p. 99.
[4] The Catholic World, December 1956 and November 1957.
[5] Anne Freemantle, Ed., The Papal Encyclicals in their Historical Context (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, New York: 1956), p. 166
[6] Freemantle, p. 166.
[7] Freemantle, p. 166.
[8] Freemantle, p. 169.
[9] Freemantle, p. 168.
[10] See, for example, Lochner v. New York, 198 U.S. 45 (1905).
[11] Freemantle, p. 170.
[12] Freemantle, p. 169.
[13] Freemantle, p. 174.
[14] Freemantle, p. 183.
[15] Freemantle, p. 192.
[16] Freemantle, p. 228.
[17] Freemantle, p. 233.
[18] Freemantle, p. 234.
[19] Freemantle, p. 235.
[19a] See Encyclical Letter, On Social Reconstruction, Pope Pius XI (St. Paul Edition), pp. 44-48.
[19b] Charles A. Fracchia, Second Spring (Harper & Row, San Francisco: 1980).
[20] James Hennessey, S.J., American Catholicism (Oxford University Press, New York: 1981), p. 188.
[21] Maurice Berube,] Catholics and the CIO, unpublished master’s thesis, New York University, p. 2.
[22] Freemantle, p. 191.
[22a] Douglas P. Seaton, Catholics and Radicals (Bucknell University Press, Lewisburg: 1981), p. 18.
[23] See Mary Fox, Peter Dietz, Labor Priest (University of Notre Dame Press, South Bend: 1953), pp. 34 – 42.
[24] See generally, Philip Taft, Organized Labor in American History (Harper & Row, New York: 1964).
[25] The Catholic Worker, March 1937, p. 1
[27] The Labor Leader, April 30, 1938, p. 2,
[28] Berube to Author, October 7, 1980
[29] The Labor Leader, August 1, 1938, p. 2
[31] The Daily Worker, August 1, 1948.
[33] Michael Harrington, “Catholics in the Labor Movement: A Case Study,” Labor History, Fall 1960, p. 231.
[34] Letter to Edward Redmond, January 21, 1949, from ACTU files, reported by Berube, p. 70.
[35] New York Times, February 11, 1949, p. 29.
[37] John McKeon, “Picket Lines and the Cardinal,” The Catholic Worker, April 1949.
[39] The Labor Leader, January 17, 1948, p. 2.
[40] The Labor Leader, April 26, 1948, p. 1.
[41] The Labor Leader, June 14, 1948, p. 1.
[42 The Labor Leader, October 31, 1952, p. 2.
[43] The Labor Leader, February 14, 1949, p. 2.
[44] The Labor Leader, February 14, 1949, p. 2.
[45] The Labor Leader, February 14, 1949, p. 2.
[46] The Labor Leader, March 31, 1954, p. 1.
[47] The Labor Leader, November 1958, p. 1.
[48] Work, October 1947, p. 4.
[49] Work, January 1948, p. 2.
[50] Work, August 1948, p. 6.
[51] Work, September 1951, p. 2.
[51a] Work, July 1955, p. 2.
[52] Work, August 1949, p. 1.
[53] Work, August 1949, p. 1.
[57] Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness (Harper & Row, San Francisco: 1981), p. 36.
[57a] William D. Miller, Dorothy Day (Harper & Row, San Francisco: 1982), p. 92.
[58] Day, p. 135.
[62] Bella Dodd, Eugene Lyons and John Dos Passos, respectively, are illustrative.
[64] Miller, Dorothy Day, p. 159.
[65] Miller, Dorothy Day, p. 247.
[66] William Miller, “Dorothy Day, 1]897 – 1980: All Was Grace,” America, December 13, 1980, p. 382.
[67] Peter Maurin, Easy Essays (Franciscan Herald Press, Chicago: 1977).
[70] Maurin, Introduction by Dorothy Day.
[71] The Catholic Worker, May 1, 1933, p. 4.
[72] The Catholic Worker, October 1933, p. 4.
[73] William D. Miller, A Harsh and Dreadful Love (Liveright, New York: 1973), p. 86.
[74] Miller, A Harsh and Dreadful Love, p. 142.
[75] Miller, A Harsh and Dreadful Love, p. 149.
[76] Miller, Dorothy Day, p. 428.
[77] Miller, Dorothy Day, pp. 284 and 332.
[78] Miller, Dorothy Day, p. 377
[80] Wayne Labue, “Public Theology and The Catholic Worker,” Cross Currents, Fall 1976, p. 200.
[81] Peter Kropotkin, Mutual Aid (Extending Horizons Books, Boston: 1914), p. 88.
[83] Francine Du Plessix Gray, “The Ordeal of Thomas Merton,” The New York Times Book Review, October 19, 1980, p. 3.
[84] See Edward Rice, The Man in the Sycamore Tree, (Doubleday, Garden City: 1970).
[85] Thomas Merton, The Seven Story Mountain (Harcourt, Brace and Company, Inc., New York: 1948) (Signet Edition, New American Library).
[87] The Catholic Worker, May 1947, p. 3.
[88] The Catholic Worker, December 1947, p. 1.
[89] Robert Ludlow, “Revolution and Compassion,” The Catholic Worker, May 1948.
[90] The Catholic Worker, July 8, 1953, p. 2.
[91] The Catholic Worker, November 1964.
[92] The New York Times, July 27, 1949.
[93] Miller, A Harsh and Dreadful Love, p. 232.
[94] The Catholic Worker, July and August 1949.
[95] The Catholic Worker, July 8, 1949, p. 1.
[96] The Catholic Worker, June 1952, p. 5.
[97] George Patrick and Michael Carlin, “McCarthyism Breeds Spiritual Paralysis,” The Catholic Worker, January 1954, p. 2.
[98] Michael Harrington, The Other America, (Macmillan, New York: 1962).
[99] The Catholic Worker, September 1954, p. 1.
[100] The Catholic Worker, September 1954, p. 8.
[101] William Worthy, “Cuba As I See It,” The Catholic Worker, July 8, 1960, p. 1.
[102] Worthy, “Cuba As I See It.”
[103] Worthy, “Cuba As I See It.”
[104] David Dellinger, “America’s Lost Plantation,” The Catholic Worker, February 1961, p. 1.
[105] Dellinger, “America’s Lost Plantation.”
[106] Dorothy Day, “About Cuba,” The Catholic Worker, July 8, 1961
[108] Miller, Dorothy Day, p. 469.
[109] Miller, Dorothy Day, p. 478.
[110] Miller, Dorothy Day, p. 482.
[111] The New York Times, December 1, 1980.
[112] Miller, Dorothy Day, p. 500.
[113] David J. O’Brien, “The Pilgrimage of Dorothy Day,” Commonweal, December 19, 1980, p. 711.
[114] Newsweek, December 15, 1980.
[115] John C. Cort, “Our Debt to Dorothy Day,” The Labor Leader, April 30, 1952.
[116] O’Brien, “The Pilgrimage of Dorothy Day.”
[117] Dwight MacDonald, The New Yorker, October 11, 1952, p. 37.
[118] J.M. Cameron, “Dorothy Day (1897 – 1980),” The New York Review of Books, January 22, 1981.
[119] Ed Willock, Integrity, October 1947, p. 27.
[120] See also Integrity, October 1948, p. 17; June 1951, p. 2.
[121] Paul O’Dwyer, Counsel for the Defense (Simon and Schuster, New York: 1979), p. 118.
[123] Paul O’Dwyer to author, April 29, 1980.
[124] Paul O’Dwyer to author, April 29, 1980.