A saintly debate
The question arises again and again — why this saint and not that one? When it comes to Oscar Romero and Dorothy Day, the debate seems perpetual. This blog picks up the argument, noting:
“Tonight we discussed both Oscar Romero and Dorothy Day, the process of canonization and whether or not they might be canonized. Is this what his life was for? What about Dorothy’s since she actively expressed distaste in the thought of her being a saint; yet she had an incredible devotion to some saints. She was quoted saying, “Don’t call me a saint; I don’t want to be dismissed so easily.” The process of canonization is costly and strange. Shouldn’t the money be given to the many Catholic Worker houses or to pacifist organizations?”
The whole post is here.
Tags: canonization, Catholic church, controversy, Dorothy Day, faith, John Paul II, miracles, Oscar Romero, Pope John Paul II, Saints, Vatican
July 10th, 2008 at 3:53 am
Here is an extract from a talk I gave about Dorothy Day at a gathering on European Catholic Worker groups in May. This section touches on the question of her possible canonization.
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…. I doubt there has ever been an article written about Dorothy since she died that didn’t include what has become her best known quotation: “Don’t call me a saint. I don’t want to be dismissed so easily.”
There is a real bite in those few words. Mainly the text draws our attention to the problem that canonization has often functioned as a way of distancing ourselves from those who follow Christ too wholeheartedly. We feel less threatened if we can see such people as a race apart with hardly any connection to ordinary human beings. We like to think that saints are possessors of a rare sort of DNA that the rest of us, rank-and-file human beings that we are, didn’t happen to receive.
But, if you focus just on the first five words, “don’t call me a saint,” bear in mind that Dorothy had intensely felt private reasons for regarding herself as totally unworthy of having an exalted place in the memory of the Church.
Even so, she strongly believed sanctity is what each of us is called to. In 1968, when Tom Cornell and I were editing the first edition of A Penny a Copy, an anthology of Catholic Worker writings, we read through 35 years of back issues, roughly 400 in all. The front page that most impressed me had a banner headline — the kind of ultra-bold, all-caps headline that in a conventional newspaper would be used only for the assassination of a president or the outbreak of war — that declared “WE ARE ALL CALLED TO BE SAINTS.”
The headline sums up something Dorothy regarded as absolutely basic. Why else would anyone receive communion? Why receive Christ unless you hope to become more Christ-like? Why call yourself a Christian if you have no interest in trying to live the Gospel?
Yet Dorothy also knew that the word “saint” is a damaged word. Many saints had been stripped of a large part of their humanity by well-meaning hagiographers who were more creative writers than historians. They felt it was their religious duty to fictionalize the lives of their subjects, adding edifying tales while removing any mention of sins the saint had to repent of or temperamental characteristics he or she had to fight against day by day. For the most pious of motives, saints have been made into a remote race of people who are far less subject to temptations than Jesus was, people able to perform miracles that make the miracles in the Gospels look like minor achievements. The saint is often thought of as someone who never knew a moment of doubt and never committed a sin from infancy to the grave.
If some day Dorothy is added to the church’s calendar, one benefit is that we will have a saint whose sins and shortcomings will be hard to airbrush out. She will be a saint who really bears witness to the possibility of flawed people with pasts that embarrass them nonetheless never giving up in their efforts to stumble along in the general direction of the kingdom of God….
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The full text of the talk is here.
http://incommunion.org/forest-flier/jimsessays/dorothyday/
Jim Forest
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July 10th, 2008 at 7:36 am
JIm — Thank you for this long, thoughtful post. Your words resonate with me in many fundamental ways. When I was researching the life of my relative, Padre Gaetano Catanoso, I struggled hard to find bits of his humanity that showed him, ever, in a less favorable light. In the written record, there was virtually nothing. I came to feel, as you note about hagiographers, that they weren’t taking any chances, that somehow an example of a moment of doubt, or flare-up of anger would somehow reduce his chances for sainthood. Nonsense. It is the humanity in these people that we are drawn to — whether it’s the urban grit of Dorothy Day, the dark nights of doubt of Mother Teresa, or as I finally came to learn, the occasional bouts of temper of Padre Gaetano. If he knew Dorothy Day, he would’ve nooded along with her comment — don’t clal me a saint. He would not have wanted that for himself. But as my relatives in Italy told me time and again, they didn’t need papal proclamations to tell them what they already knew. And neither do the followers of Dorothy Day.
July 11th, 2008 at 10:16 am
Great post all around. Ah. Dorothy. She’s a saint to cigarette pulling, truth-seeking, Catholic girls everywhere.
Found this short little You Tube video on her. Love her.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKiLCDaCAOU
July 11th, 2008 at 10:19 am
A remarkable woman. Great video, too. Thanks for posting it. It’s short and well worth watching.