Aims and Purposes
By Dorothy Day (1943)
“Let us therefore love God because God hath first loved us. If
any man say, I love God, and hateth his brother, he is a liar.
For he that loveth not his brother whom he seeth, how can he
love God whom he seeth not?”–St. John
It is because of this invitation that we are engaged in the work
of getting out the Catholic Worker. “Love is an exchange of
gifts,” St. Ignatius said. And we want to show our love for our
brother, so that we can show our love for God; and the best
way we can do it is to try to give him what we’ve got, in the
way of food, clothing and shelter; to give him what talents we
possess by writing, drawing pictures, reminding each other of
the love of God and the love of man. There is too little love in
this world, too little tenderness.
Not a Liberal
They say that I am a radical. If I am a
radical then I am not a liberal. The
future will be different if we make the
present different. But to make the
present different one must give up
old tricks and start to play new tricks.
But to give up old tricks and start to
play new tricks one must be a
fanatic. Liberals are so liberal about
everything that they refuse to be
fanatical about anything. And not
being able to be fanatical about
anything, liberals cannot be
liberators. They can only be liberals.
Liberals refuse to be religious,
philosophical or economic fanatics
and consent to be the worst kind of
fanatics, liberal fanatics.
Not a Conservative
How can we love God and kill our brother? How can we love
our brother and kill him? How can we fulfill the Gospel
precept to be perfect as our heavenly father is perfect; how
can we follow the precept to love God when we kill our fellow
man? How can war be compatible with such love?!
!
To kill, to destroy, to starve, to inflict all these sufferings with
love–that is sadism of the most hideous kind. That is
perversity. It has long been said that religion is the opiate of
the people. Pope Pius XI said that the workers of the world
are lost to the church. If that is true, if the poor of the world
are turned from the Bride of Christ, it is because there is no
relation between the spiritual and material. We are not trying
to put into effect our Christianity, our Christian principles.
They are not animating our lives.!
!
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If I am a radical, then I am not a
conservative. Conservatives try to
believe that things are good enough
to be let alone. But things are not
good enough to be let alone.
Conservatives try to believe that the
world is getting better every day in
every way. But the w