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

[Charles Hahn]

Hey Randy,
It's been a long time since we have seen each other.  This is a fun and
affirming confluence of quotes you have discovered.  Thanks for sharing it
with all of us.
Charles Hahn

On Wed, Nov 28, 2012 at 1:43 PM, R Williams <rcwmbw at yahoo.com> wrote:

> 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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