[Oe List ...] Dorothy Day and Joe Mathews on the Same Track

[R Williams]

Friends and Colleagues,
 
One of Joe's quotes, I think from the RS-1 Church Lecture, which many of you may have used from time to time, as I have, to express your frustration with the church, was "The church is a whore but she's my mother."
 
Dorothy Day, cofounder of the Catholic Worker Movement, would have been 115 years old this month.  The Catholic Church is currently in the process of canonizing her.  Today I ran across an article which she wrote and published in The Catholic Worker in January of 1967 entitled "In Peace Is My Bitterness Most Bitter."  In this article she is chastising some of those in the church who, among other things, had called for a "total" U.S. victory in the Viet Nam War.  In that article I discovered this quote from Dorothy Day.  "As to the Church...  Though she is a harlot at times, she is our Mother."  (Joe may well have placed the comma after the word "harlot.")
 
Having imagined all these years that this was one of the more brazen statements Joe Mathews ever uttered, I was amazed to run across the same statement, from about that same time, from a Catholic nun.
 
I'm not sure why this struck me as such an interesting discovery.  Perhaps it is that, as I continue in the midst of my life-long love/hate relationship with institutional Christianity, I found new justification that it is a struggle worth having.  Whether Joe got the quote from Dorothy Day or vice versa, or whether it was a case of two great minds using the same analogy, I thought it worth sharing with you.
 
If anyone knows more about the history of this statement, I would interested to hear.
 
Be well,
Randy
 
 

"Whatever the problem, community is the answer.  There is no power greater than a community discovering what it cares about."  Margaret Wheatley
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