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Sister Aloysia knew her by reputation, and that reputation wasn’t good. Dorothy Day was living with a man to whom she wasn’t married, who was even more left-wing than she was, and they had a baby, and they were living in the country among people who disapproved of everything they were and did.
“All the neighborhood knew that we and our friends were either Communist or Anarchist in sympathies,” Day wrote in “From Union Square to Rome.” “But those same dear Catholic neighbors who heard sermons excoriating ‘the fiendish and foul machinations of the Communists’ were kindly people who came to use our telephone and bring us a pie now and then, who played with us on the beach and offered us lifts to the village in their cars. Sister Aloysia, too, had no fear, only a neighborly interest in us all.”
Early motherhood forms an ideology-free zone. There’s that. It’s easy to be kind to someone who’s pushing a baby in a stroller. But the “we” to whom the neighbors were kind included her Communist and atheist common-law husband, who seems to have been publicly difficult about these things, and others like them. The neighbors crossed hard boundaries in their kindness.
Not everyone would do this. Day doesn’t say every neighbor was like that, or that the neighbors who were like that were always like that. But they were unexpectedly kind enough for her to notice, and remember. They simply treated these odd people as men and women loved by God, and did not identify them first by their politics or their morals, or even their manners.
Many people like that wouldn’t be kind to a commie mother and her baby or a fill-in-the-name-of-hated-ideology mother and her baby. A young friend has suffered being ostracized by the good Catholic women nearby for her poverty and her politics, and I know other stories of the same sort, just within Catholic circles, never mind secular and ideological circles. It’s what happens when politics becomes identity.
Day’s neighbors acted like neighbors and the sister like a friend, though they must have felt communism and anarchism to be the blackest evils, and strongly disapproved of people living in sin. We approve of their overlooking their political disagreements to be kind to this young woman with her baby and her difficult husband. We look back 100 years and admire their kindness, but being kind would not have been easy.
Continued below.
Be friends with the radicals: Dorothy Day and what it means to love our neighbors - Our Sunday Visitor
“All the neighborhood knew that we and our friends were either Communist or Anarchist in sympathies,” Day wrote in “From Union Square to Rome.” “But those same dear Catholic neighbors who heard sermons excoriating ‘the fiendish and foul machinations of the Communists’ were kindly people who came to use our telephone and bring us a pie now and then, who played with us on the beach and offered us lifts to the village in their cars. Sister Aloysia, too, had no fear, only a neighborly interest in us all.”
Early motherhood forms an ideology-free zone. There’s that. It’s easy to be kind to someone who’s pushing a baby in a stroller. But the “we” to whom the neighbors were kind included her Communist and atheist common-law husband, who seems to have been publicly difficult about these things, and others like them. The neighbors crossed hard boundaries in their kindness.
Not everyone would do this. Day doesn’t say every neighbor was like that, or that the neighbors who were like that were always like that. But they were unexpectedly kind enough for her to notice, and remember. They simply treated these odd people as men and women loved by God, and did not identify them first by their politics or their morals, or even their manners.
Many people like that wouldn’t be kind to a commie mother and her baby or a fill-in-the-name-of-hated-ideology mother and her baby. A young friend has suffered being ostracized by the good Catholic women nearby for her poverty and her politics, and I know other stories of the same sort, just within Catholic circles, never mind secular and ideological circles. It’s what happens when politics becomes identity.
Day’s neighbors acted like neighbors and the sister like a friend, though they must have felt communism and anarchism to be the blackest evils, and strongly disapproved of people living in sin. We approve of their overlooking their political disagreements to be kind to this young woman with her baby and her difficult husband. We look back 100 years and admire their kindness, but being kind would not have been easy.
Continued below.
Be friends with the radicals: Dorothy Day and what it means to love our neighbors - Our Sunday Visitor
