Canonizing Socialism Edition!

A couple of weeks ago, leftist theologian Rich Raho posted on 𝕏 celebrating the advancement of Dorothy Day’s cause for canonization, linking to an article by Michael Fox at Catholics for the Common Good. Upon seeing his post, I reposted his statement and wrote one of my own: “There is only one reason her cause for sainthood is being pushed.” When asked to clarify what that reason was, I answered in four words: “The canonization of socialism.”

I stand by that.

The pushback was immediate; even normally conservative Catholics took issue with my statement. Cries that “she wasn’t a socialist, she renounced her communism,” and “she was for decentralization,” and even the completely unsubstantiated claim that “she called the state the greatest enemy of the church today,” reverberated first on 𝕏 and then in private emails. But here’s the problem: I didn’t call her a socialist. What I said was that her cause was being pushed as a means of canonizing socialism. These are two very different and very distinct things.

In truth, Dorothy Day was a very complex and controversial figure with a long history of denouncing Communism while praising its thinkers, leaders, and revolutionists—and the majority of those longing to see her canonized lean ideologically toward a socialist worldview. We’ve seen this dance before. The elevation of Pope John XXIII and Pope Paul VI was pressed, in no small part, as a way to lock the Second Vatican Council into the Church’s official memory as an unquestionable good. To raise a man to the altars is to raise his project with him.

Oscar Romero’s cause was handled in the same spirit: not merely as the recognition of a murdered bishop but as the sacralization of liberation theology. The same thing is happening now with Dorothy Day. The current zeitgeist in the Church is intent upon pushing a humanist, globalist, socialist paradigm, working hard to assemble its own canon of saints to further the effort.

Until the 1983 revision of the Code of Canon Law, a cause for canonization could not proceed in Rome until 50 years after death, and a devil’s advocate would present counter arguments against the cause. Now the wait is a mere five years, and there is no devil’s advocate anymore. The result is devastating, as the process now reflects an act of institutional will rather than a trial of truth—and what comes out in the end is often the elevation of an “ism” rather than an individual. 

Dorothy Day was a mixed bag replete with couched language, ambiguous ideologies, and contradictory statements. Though her supporters can point to her stated rejection of Communism, her connection to and public support of Marxists, revolutionists, communists, and socialists—even to the point of speaking of a Christian communism and blessing a Marxist revolution—is cause enough for scandal that she should not be considered for sainthood.

This has nothing to do with her personal sanctity. I have no opinion on that. But canonization is not a private verdict on a soul. It is a public act of the Church, proposing a life as worthy of imitation and a teaching as safe for the faithful. On that public standard, her writings are disqualifying.

Day’s defenders recite a familiar litany. She left the Communist milieu after her conversion. She called Communism a heresy. She rejected class war and atheistic materialism. She even said, in 1961, “We are certainly not Marxist socialists nor do we believe in violent revolution.” That’s all well and good, but in the very next line she endorsed the violent revolution of the Marxist Fidel Castro! She wrote:

Yet we do believe that it is better to revolt, to fight—as Castro did with his handful of men; he worked in the fields with the cane workers and thus gained them to his army—than to do nothing.

She added that “we are on the side of the revolution,” that she would be “happy to see how they work out in Cuba”—speaking of the farming communes and cooperatives of the new order—and she closed with a benediction that should never have been printed under a Catholic masthead: “God bless Castro and all those who are seeing Christ in the poor.” She never took that blessing back. In fact, the next year, she traveled to Cuba and spoke glowingly of a speech delivered by Fidel Castro. Without a single word of criticism for the dictator, his bloody revolution, or his Communist ideologies, Day wrote:

I heard this leader of revolution, Fidel Castro, speak for the first time, and his talk was all directed to the youth of the country, for whom, he said, the revolution had been fought.

“Children are born to be happy,” is a slogan one sees over and over again, and he pointed out that youth could best help the revolution by perfect attendance at school, by devotion to their studies, by emulating others who led, by self-sacrifice, discipline, self-abnegation. I heard these religious words, spoken with fervor, with passion even, and I kept thinking, “To seek for wisdom is to seek for God. The more we know of the natural world around us, in science as well as in philosophy, the more we know of God.”

She followed this up by endorsing another Castro speech she claimed, “seems to guarantee freedom of religion.” With high praise for the Communist dictator, Day compared “the sound of his voice, his manner of oratory, his constant repetitions,” with her Catholic Worker Movement co-founder, Peter Maurin. And without a single hint of condemnation or criticism, Day provided the following quote from Castro’s speech:

If we constantly speak of this, it is because we have faith in the people, because we believe in revolutionary ideas, because we know that our people are a revolutionary people, and because we know that our people will be more revolutionary each day, because we believe in Marxism-Leninism, because we believe that, Marxism-Leninism is an undeniable truth. It is simply because of this, because we have faith in our ideas and in the people that we are not so cowardly as to be able to accept such a thing.

One cannot oppose violent revolution as a theory and still baptize a particular revolution in practice. That is not discernment, it’s a double mind. That is Dorothy Day.

While her support for the Communist Revolution in Cuba is bad enough, her remarks on Communist China are even worse because they came after the record of Maoist famine, work camps, and the Cultural Revolution became well known. In a 1976 Sojourners interview, Day again spoke glowingly of the Communist-controlled Cuba while praising Communist China:

I think China is fascinating, also. It always has been. China seems to me to be one country where there’s no hunger, there’s no unemployment, and there can be planning for a different social order. I have the greatest admiration for the Chinese.

Thomas Merton says we need to pay more attention to these Marxist revolutions that are going on in the world. I was in Cuba in September of ’62, right after the Castro revolution. It was after the Bay of Pigs. The Cubans told me to go back to America and tell them how good it was in Cuba. There was a feeling about the whole place—the real good feeling of cleaning it up.

This is not a slip of the tongue; it’s the old pilgrimage-tourism of the Western Left: the regime that starved tens of millions is credited with abolishing hunger; the command economy that assigned labor by force is credited with abolishing unemployment. Day had seen enough poverty in New York to know what hunger looks like. She had no excuse for taking Peking’s brochures as gospel. She also never issued the kind of retraction that would have cost her standing among the people who still needed her as a mascot.

This is the difference between Dorothy Day and the converts who actually broke with Communism. Bella Dodd did not spend her Catholic years blessing the revolution she had served. Whittaker Chambers did not tour the workers’ paradise and come home gushing that there was no hunger there. They named the lie and accepted that former comrades would call them traitors.

Day kept one foot in the sanctuary and one foot in the radical milieu that had formed her. She would call Communism “a heresy” while treating Communist revolutions as rough instruments of the works of mercy. She would quote Marx and Engels on “each according to his ability, to each according to his need” as if St. Paul had merely anticipated the Manifesto. She would denounce industrial capitalism as “rotten, decadent, putrid” and then refuse to apply the same moral clarity to the police states built to replace it.

Simply put, you do not denounce Nazism while praising Hitler! You do not get credit for rejecting “Marxist socialism” while asking God to bless Castro and announcing that Communist China has solved hunger and unemployment. The second statement empties the first of meaning! If the Church places that life on the altars, the message to the faithful is that personal piety plus revolutionary sympathy, soup kitchens plus a soft spot for men who shot priests, is somehow holy.

This doublespeak is why her cause is being pushed now. It’s not because the poor have no other intercessors; the poor have always had the Gospel, the works of mercy, and a long line of saints who never confused St. Joseph the Worker with the dictatorship of the proletariat. Her cause is being pushed because it is useful. It baptizes an ideology of revolution. It tells a generation of Catholics that the preferential option for the poor is safest when it speaks of planning, global solidarity, suspicion of property, and a romance for revolutions. 

Had the position of the devil’s advocate still been in place, Dorothy Day’s cause would not be going anywhere. He would put the Cuba column on the table next to the photographs of Cuban prisons. He would put the 1976 interview next to the body counts of the Great Leap Forward. He would ask whether a model of holiness may leave the impression that Marxist revolution is a tolerable, even admirable, shortcut to the common good. He would ask why the Church should propose as imitable a woman who never completed the break that Dodd and Chambers completed. He would note that personal kindness to drunks on the Bowery, however real, does not cancel public scandal given to the doctrine of the Church on the errors of socialism.

Pius XI was not confused on this point. Quadragesimo Anno warned that even a “mitigated” socialism, dressed in Christian language, remains incompatible with Catholic truth if it retains the socialist idea of society. Day’s project lived in that dangerous borderland: Christian personalism on one page, blessing of Castro on another, and admiration for the Chinese social order on a third. A Church that is serious about the social encyclicals cannot pretend that borderland is the high road to the altar.

I’m not asking anyone to despise Dorothy Day, but I do ask the Church not to use her. The poor do not need a patroness whose most famous political affections run toward regimes that made new poor by the millions. The faithful do not need another saint whose cause is, in practice, a referendum on the Council’s aftermath and on the politics of the present moment. If Rome wishes to honor charity to the destitute, the calendar is already full. If Rome wishes to teach that socialism can be baptized, provided the soup is thick enough, then Day’s cause will proceed exactly as I said it would.

There is only one reason it is being pushed. I named it on 𝕏. I name it here. It is the canonization of socialism. That is not a motive the Church should bless, and it is not a motive that can produce a saint the Church can safely imitate.