Dear Editor: I thank The Tablet for allowing a critique of its recent coverage of the Plowshare Movement. I also appreciate the editor’s note in clarifying that the Church’s Magisterium takes no stance on the wisdom of the Movement’s tactics, namely, the trespassing and defacing of government property as a means to abolish nuclear weapons and war.
As a follow-up to this last point, it is interesting to note that Dorothy Day (1897-1980) who was a Catholic convert, Benedictine oblate and social activist, distanced herself from the actions of the Berrigans (who eventually founded the Plowshares Movement) once their tactics intensified to infringe upon the property of others.
As many of your readers know, Dorothy Day presently holds the title of “Servant of God” as her cause for canonization is under review after being introduced in 2000 by the late Cardinal John O’Connor of New York. Day was the co-founder of the Catholic Worker Movement (communities which attend to the marginalized of society), and practiced non-violent direct action along the tradition of Gandhi.
Acts of civil disobedience which earned Day jail-time included: protesting at the White House with other suffragists in favor of women voting rights in 1917; refusing to take shelter during nuclear attack drills in NYC during the mid-late 1950s; and demonstrating with Cesar Chavez (the Mexican-American civil rights leader) in support of the United Farm Workers in California in 1973.
Yet despite her impressive notoriety for social activism, according to a recent article entitled “Christian Nonviolence: Theory and Practice” by Deacon Tom Cornell (a deacon in the Catholic Church and longtime associate editor at the Catholic Worker newspaper), Dorothy Day was not at all enthusiastic about the escalation of tactics used by the Berrigans whom she knew well, when they raided a Selective Service Office in Catonsville, Md., in 1968.
Deacon Cornell states that while she did not publicly condemn Father Daniel Berrigan or his younger brother Phillip (a priest also at the time), Dorothy Day pointedly commented: “These acts are not ours.” (Incidentally, May 17 marked the 50th anniversary of the Catonsville Nine raid in which the Berrigans and seven others carted away hundreds of draft files to the parking lot before incinerating them with homemade napalm.)
Although Day did not speak for the Magisterium of the Catholic Church in her time any more than Sister Megan Rice could in the present, Dorothy Day’s silence with regards to the means employed by the Berrigans in my estimation was nonetheless deafening.
As Deacon Cornell noted, from Dorothy Day’s perspective, damage to the property of others crossed-the-line and had no place in the non-violent arsenal.
DENNIS TORRE
Maspeth
