By Declan Leary & John Hirschauer
Tuesday, July 30, 2019
No sensible person has, of this writing, ever alleged
that Dorothy Day was insufficiently amenable to Communism. So, that the Jesuit
magazine America published a piece titled “The
Catholic Case for Communism” — which asserts that Day, despite her relative
sympathy for the movement, ends up unfairly dismissing the compatibility of a
fully-realized Communism with a Catholic social order — suggests something
unfortunate about its editors.
Day’s conclusion is antiquated, in the eyes of author
Dean Dettloff. “A whole Cold War has passed since her reflection,” he writes,
“and a few clarifying notes are now worthwhile.” It is either a baffling
display of historical illiteracy or a dazzling display of commie bravado that
Dettloff presumes that the Cold War will aid him in facilitating a positive
understanding of his preferred philosophy.
Apparently oblivious to the brutal realities that forced
the Cold War in the first place, he praises Day for “affirming the goodness
that drives so many communists then and now.” In this, she “aimed to soften the
perceptions of Catholics who were more comfortable with villainous caricatures
of the communists of their era than with more challenging depictions of them as
laborers for peace and economic justice.” Does he honestly believe that in 1933
— 1933, when Comrade Stalin was deliberately starving millions of
Ukrainians in pursuit of peace and economic justice — Westerners were unduly
harsh in their “caricatures of the communists of their era”? What exactly were
they supposed to think of the Holodomor?
Dettloff almost cedes this point, admitting that “communism
in its socio-political expression has at times caused great human and
ecological suffering.” But that Dettloff, without a hint of irony or
self-awareness, invokes the “suffering” of the environment in the same breath
as the 100 million human deaths that Communism cost in the past century
gives the lie to his pretensions at high-minded contrition for the sins of his
comrades.
He goes on: “Any good communist is quick to admit as
much, not least because communism is an unfinished project that depends on the
recognition of its real and tragic mistakes.” If Communism is an unfinished
project, how many more Holodomors does Dettloff anticipate? These crimes
against humanity are not, as Dettloff and other Communists would have us think,
accidents of historical circumstance that do not indict Communism itself. They
are fundamental and inevitable elements of a materialist eschatology that
renders man the object of the abstract, unintelligent forces of History,
progress, and macroeconomics and elevates those forces to the proper place of
God — thereby tearing out the roots of the moral tradition (and of any
tradition, for that matter) and justifying all manner of horrors in order to
“immanentize the eschaton.”
Undeterred by this “great human and ecological
suffering,” Dettloff bloviates: “Communism has provided one of the few
sustainable oppositions to capitalism, a global political order responsible for
the ongoing suffering of millions.” Never before in the history of political
writing has a clumsily placed modifier drunkenly stumbled into such plain
truth. But that the “global political order responsible for the ongoing
suffering of millions” (read: Communism) is a sustainable opposition to
capitalism is hardly supported by the evidence. We would suggest Dettloff move
to the Soviet Union to gauge the relative sustainability of his philosophy for
himself, but, alas . . .
Railing against the excesses of capitalism (to which
Dettloff sees no solution but Communism), he points out that “global inequality
and the abuse of workers . . . are symptoms of a specific way of organizing
wealth, one that did not exist at the creation of the world and one that
represents part of a ‘culture of death,’ to borrow a familiar phrase.”
Dettloff, as a Catholic, should know the obvious reason why our current social
order is “one that did not exist at the creation of the world”: We would direct
him to the third chapter of Genesis to clear up his confusion. The consequence
of original sin, in Catholic etiology, is nothing short of a complete
reordering of man’s role in the world and his relationship to it. Any attempt
to model a modern order on prelapsarian Eden ignores the plain and unbroken
teaching of the Catholic magisterium on the fallibility of man. A correspondent
for so prestigious a Catholic publication should not be prone to such naïve
Pelagianism.
Dettloff then restates the claim in even bolder terms:
“We already live in a world where wealth is redistributed, but it goes up, not
down or across.” The type of error to which Dettloff falls victim in both of
these excerpts was brilliantly addressed by Joseph Sobran, who, despite his
later descent, wrote in a landmark 1985 essay, “Pensées”:
The naïve mind sees capitalism as
anarchy, “unbridled competition,” in which desire distorts the pattern of
distribution. It reasons that the earth is abundant enough to provide for
everyone, but that the price system prevents the equal satisfaction of
universally felt needs. Supply follows demand. Control demand, and supply will
reach its proper recipients.
What this view overlooks is that a
price system itself is a way of taming desire. Desire exists in any case; it
can be satisfied by rape and pillage, or even stimulated by the opportunity of
rape and pillage. The rule of law forces desire to find satisfaction in
compromise and consent. . . .
The naïve socialist imagines an
abstract humanity in which all desires are more or less identical, and people
produce more or less steadily, without such varying motives as the striving for
status, revenge, worship, diverse forms of lust, envy — all the things that
make this world so messy. The socialist is obsessed with only one motive,
greed, which in any case he misconceives and thinks can be both blamed for what
ails us and controlled by imposing a certain kind of order. He fails to see
that these random motives are here to stay; furthermore, he fails to see that
socialist systems actually give some of the worst motives new scope.
It is this last point — that this ideology enables and
elevates the worst in humanity — that makes Dettloff’s piece (and America’s
publication of it) not only ignorant but appalling. Rod Dreher, who has done
yeoman’s work studying and recounting the suffering of Christians under
Communism, wrote a
scathing response to Dettloff detailing some of the stories of Communism’s
victims. If there is any sufficient response to the heartbreaking reality
Dreher presents, it cannot be found in Dettloff’s blithe, cursory admission of
“human and ecological suffering.” Nor can it be found in the explanation of
America editor-in-chief Matt Malone, S.J., who simply claimed a “willingness to
hear views with which we may disagree but that we nonetheless think are worth
hearing” as the reason for the piece’s publication.
Day’s ignorance is understandable; she lived and wrote in
a time when Stalin’s and Castro’s propaganda machines were still functioning in
full force. But “a whole Cold War has passed since her reflection, and a few
clarifying notes are now worthwhile.” Dettloff and Malone have no such excuse
for favorable invocations of Fidel Castro or the philosophy he and Stalin
shared. Is Malone, the Jesuit editor of a Jesuit publication, aware that Castro
literally expelled
the Jesuits from his country when he took power? And compared with the
numerous, abhorrent human-rights violations Castro perpetrated against his own
people, even this outright persecution of the Church and Father Malone’s
once-noble Society is relatively insignificant.
Despite this persecution, some Catholic priests have been
foolish enough to participate in Communist revolutions. Dettloff cites, among
others, the priests Ernesto and Fernando Cardenal — the latter a Jesuit himself
— who were leaders of the 1979 Sandinista Revolution in Nicaragua, and later
served as cabinet officials in dictator Daniel Ortega’s junta. But it hardly
helps Dettloff’s case to cite the Cardenal brothers, who, along with other
priests participating in Ortega’s government, were very strongly and very
publicly rebuked by Saint John Paul II for their political actions. The pope
had been pushing at the time for all priests to refrain from seeking or
accepting political office and to withdraw from any they already occupied.
Presumably, he sought to avoid cases such as this — and that of the infamously
pro-abortion-rights Jesuit and U.S. congressman Robert Drinan — in which
priests forcefully and actively placed themselves in direct opposition to
Catholic social order.
Dettloff, in an unconvincing attempt to justify the moral
compromise of these Christians, insists that “what communists desire is an
authentically common life together, and they think that can only happen by
relativizing property in light of the good of everyone.” It’s reassuring to
know that Commissar Dettloff thinks that reorienting our societal views about
property is the only thing that Communists desire, but two people who knew a
bit more about Communism than he felt otherwise. Vladimir Lenin famously said
that “atheism is a natural and inseparable part of Marxism, of the theory and
practice of scientific socialism.” Karl Marx himself stated that “the abolition
of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their
real happiness.”
Marx and Lenin, presumably, got Communism wrong. Dettloff
intends to get it right this time. He admits that his suggestion is “radical
indeed, but certainly not all that shocking to people who remember when the
Virgin Mary sang that God has filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich
away empty” (Luke 1:53).
Radical indeed, and certainly shocking to the people who
remember when the Virgin
Mary warned that Russia might spread its “errors throughout the world,
causing wars and persecutions of the Church. The good will be martyred; the
Holy Father will have much to suffer; various nations will be annihilated.”
Dean Dettloff, in a disgusting attempt at wit, ends his
essay with something bordering on a threat: “Dorothy Day was right when she
said it is when the Communists are good that they are dangerous. . . . We must
also add: It is when the Communists are dangerous that they are good.” In
saying this, Dettloff probably imagines himself as some romantic revolutionary,
plotting the overthrow of the tsar in some underground Russian salon circa
1915. (You know, before those romantic revolutionaries lined up the tsar’s
defenseless children and shot them.) But he fails to recognize that the two are
inseparable — that the kind of fairy-tale, revolutionary romanticism that
Dettloff clings to was the foundation of the most vicious tyranny in the
history of mankind; that nowhere has it been tried without rapidly descending
into such horror.
Yes, Communism is dangerous. People acting under its
banner have killed millions upon millions of people, many of them martyrs for
the Christian faith. It is not the whitewashed, heroic “danger” of revolution
that Dettloff seems to imply; it is the danger of wars, of persecutions, and of
nations annihilated — a danger that necessitated the literal reappearance of
the Mother of God on Earth to warn the Church and the world. It is a danger
so real and so vile that Dettloff should be utterly ashamed that he had the
gall to call it “good,” just as the editors of America should be ashamed
to have published this piece in a Catholic magazine.
In 1960, William F. Buckley marveled at the fact that Commonweal
(the other leading American Catholic periodical on the left) would “not
criticize, let alone anathematize, the slovenly, reckless, intellectually
chaotic, anti-Catholic doctrines of this good-hearted woman [Dorothy Day] — who
did she have her way in shaping national policy, would test the promise of
Christ Himself, that the gates of Hell shall not prevail against us.” He
observed that “Miss Day is off to the left almost out of sight.”
If Dorothy Day was out of sight, we can only imagine the
aquiline powers Buckley would have needed to spot Dean Dettloff on the leftern
horizon. And if Commonweal was mind-boggling in 1960, America in
2019 must have Buckley rolling in his grave.
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