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

[LAURELCG at aol.com]

Thank you, Randy. Great minds, indeed.
Jann
 
 
In a message dated 11/28/2012 10:43:57 A.M. Pacific Standard Time,  
rcwmbw at yahoo.com writes:

 
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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