Anarchist Saints And The Folly Of The Cross

Anarchy in the USCCB…

I am a notorious political waffler. In early high school, I considered myself an anarchist. Later, I became obsessed with Ayn Rand’s Objectivism. After college, I attended Quaker meetings and my political views were influenced by Quaker values. I have voted for Republican, Democrat and third party presidential candidates.

And most recently, I found myself reading First Things, an amazing magazine, and surprised myself by exclaiming loudly, “Maybe I am a conservative!” (Reading articles by R.R. Reno can do that to you…)

I have hopscotched from ideology to ideology, looking for the right fit, the magic bullet that will be the answer to all of the world’s problems. I see the good and true in different political thought but then, after a honeymoon phase, I lose hope in its potential to change the world and I move on to the next thing. I have been in serial relationships with political ideologies.

Predictably, after this year’s election, there have been articles suggesting that the bishops change their political “strategies.” It strikes me when I read these articles that there is a tendency to speaks about the bishops as if they were any other organization, following the same rules and strategies as the rest of the world.

What many people do not seem to get is that the Church does not choose what to speak out about based on data and political polls. We are not in a popularity contest. If we were, we would be losing badly, even among our own.

Right now, the Church is vilified in the Western world as the big bad conservative monster under the bed that wants to tell people who they should have sex with and when they should have babies. People, including many Catholics, want to put our bishops in a box with other conservative politicians and dismiss them as out of touch, white males obsessed with power.

We might have an anarchist Saint people!

But I just want to point out that our big bad conservative bishops just unanimously promoted the sainthood cause of a self proclaimed Christian anarchist, Dorothy Day, known for her tireless work for social justice and founding the Catholic Worker Movement.

When Robert Ellsberg, a friend and editor of much of Dorothy’s writings, first met Dorothy, he asked: “Miss Day, how do you reconcile your Catholicism with your anarchism?” She looked at him and said, “Well, it’s never been a problem for me.” Dorothy, while a radical tirelessly working for social justice also remained a loyal daughter of the Catholic Church. In her, I think, is a model of the mind boggling and paradoxical message of Gospel and therefore of the Catholic Church, (although Catholics, of course, do not have to claim anarchist as their political identification).

Another example is Pope Paul VI. In some circles he is known as the now infamous, conservative pope for writing the encyclical HumanaeVitae, which taught against the use of birth control. Not as many people know that he also wrote an encyclical called Populorum Progressio. When the encyclical came out, Time magazine wrote that parts of Populorum Progressio “had the strident tone of an early 20th century Marxist polemic.”

Yes, we Catholics like to confound the world.

We are a Church that is seemingly backwards thinking on social issues and far too forward thinking on issues of justice. We are seen as conservative fuddy-duddies on the one hand and are accused of being Marxist radicals on the other. There is no box you can put Catholic teaching in. As much as people try to wedge us in with the Republicans (or the Marxists), we aren’t going to be wearing elephant or hammer and sickle pins anytime soon.

As Catholics, we cast our votes but (hopefully) our votes don’t cast us.

We are a faith of paradox because the Gospel is a paradox. I know a man who converted from Hinduism who told me that after reading the Gospels he thought, “This is so crazy, humans could not have made this up.”

It’s true, we have not made this up. The Holy Spirit has entrusted these truths to us as a Church.

Many Catholics are suggesting different ways to deal with the issues that face our Church today. A lot of them involve circling our wagons and protecting ourselves, or giving in on those issues that seem so backwards to many people. We understandably want to avoid being crucified in the arena of public opinion and getting rights and privileges taken away from the Church we all love.

But the thing is – we serve a Savior who did not avoid crucifixion. The Gospel confounds. The Gospel enrages. The Gospel inspires. If we choose to continue following the Gospel, we will continue confounding the world.

And yes, we just might be crucified. But, as Dorothy Day once wrote, “The most effective action we can take is to try to conform our lives to the folly of the cross.”

Which, I have been thinking, might be my new (and permanent) political ideology – the folly of the cross.

Anarchist Saints and the Folly of the Cross