From Union Square to Rome - Softcover

Dorothy, Day

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1626985596 ISBN 13: 9781626985599

Verlag: Orbis Books (USA), 2024

Inhaltsangabe

“‘Praise God’ is the title of this letter. For when human beings claim to take God’s place, they become their own worst enemies.”

In Laudato Si’, his historic encyclical of 2015, Pope Francis firmly established ecological concerns as central to the agenda of Catholic Social Teaching. Along with a spiritual framework on care for creation, he outlined such issues as climate change, biodiversity, and the peril facing our oceans, and offered a comprehensive guide to integral ecology.

Now, comes a shorter but even more urgent call: Laudate Deum, which focuses specifically on the climate crisis. As Erin Lothes Biviano writes in her introduction, Pope Francis here writes as a prophet, priest, poet, and most of all “a pastor, deeply concerned for people throughout the world, and above all for the poor.” Disappointed that not enough has been done in the intervening years, Francis addresses the irreversible effects of increasing global temperatures, the decrease in ice sheets, and other signs of the times. He critiques the “technocratic paradigm,” the ongoing addiction to a fossil-fuel economy, and the “weaknesses of international politics,” while leveling particular criticism at those who sow resistance and confusion.

With selections in this edition from Laudato Si’ that focus on pastoral, theological, and spiritual themes, Laudate Deum is a call to face the preeminent crisis of our times and to draw on all our spiritual wisdom, scientific knowledge, and political will to meet the challenge.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Dorothy Day (1897-1980), founder of the Catholic Worker movement, was singled out by Pope Francis in his address to Congress, as one of four “great Americans” who offer us a new way of seeing and interpreting reality. Her cause for canonization is in process. Her Orbis titles include Dorothy Day: Selected Writings, Loaves and Fishes, From Union Square to Rome, (with Peter Sicius) Peter Maurin: Apostle to the World; and On Pilgrimage: The Sixties.

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Chapter One

Why

It is difficult for me for me to dip back into the past, yet it is a job that must be done, and it hangs over my head like a cloud. St. Peter said that we must give a reason for the faith that is in us, and I am trying to give you those reasons.

This is not an autobiography. I am a woman forty years old and I am not trying to set down the story of my life. Please keep that in mind as you read. While it is true that often horror for one’s sins turns one to God, what I want to bring out in this book is a succession of events that led me to His feet, glimpses of Him that I received through many years which made me feel the vital need of Him and of religion. I will try to trace for you the steps by which I came to accept the faith that I believe was always in my heart. For this reason, most of the time I will speak of the good I encountered even amid surroundings and people who tried to reject God.

The mark of the atheist is the deliberate rejection of God. And since you do not reject God or deliberately embrace evil, then you are not an atheist. Because you doubt and deny in words what your heart and mind do not deny, you consider yourself an agnostic.

Though I felt the strong, irresistible attraction to good, yet there was also, at times, a deliberate choosing of evil. How far I was led to choose it, it is hard to say. How far professors, companions, and reading influenced my way of life does not matter now. The fact remains that there was much of deliberate choice in it. Most of the time it was “following the devices and desires of my own heart.” Sometimes it was perhaps the Baudelairean idea of choosing “the downward path which leads to salvation.” Sometimes it was of choice, of free will, though perhaps at the time I would have denied free will. And so, since it was deliberate, with recognition of its seriousness, it was grievous mortal sin and may the Lord forgive me. It was the arrogance and suffering of youth. It was pathetic, little, and mean in its very excuse for itself.

Was this desire to be with the poor and the mean and abandoned not unmixed with a distorted desire to be with the dissipated? Mauriac tells of this subtle pride and hypocrisy: “There is a kind of hypocrisy which is worse than that of the Pharisees; it is to hide behind Christ’s example in order to follow one’s own lustful desires and to seek out the company of the dissolute.”

I write these things now because sometimes when I am writing I am seized with fright at my presumption. I am afraid, too, of not telling the truth or of distorting the truth. I cannot guarantee that I do not for I am writing of the past. But my whole perspective has changed and when I look for causes of my conversion, sometimes it is one thing and sometimes it is another that stands out in my mind.

Much as we want to know ourselves, we do not really know ourselves. Do we really want to see ourselves as God sees us, or even as our fellow human beings see us? Could we bear it, weak as we are? You know that feeling of contentment in which we sometimes go about, clothed in it, as it were, like a garment, content with the world and with ourselves. We are ourselves and we would be no one else. We are glad that God made us as we are and we would not have had Him make us like anyone else. According to the weather, our state of health, we have moods of purely animal happiness and content. We do not want to be given that clear inward vision which discloses to us our most secret faults. In the Psalms there is that prayer, “Deliver me from my secret sins.” We do not really know how much pride and self-love we have until someone whom we respect or love suddenly turns against us. Then some sudden affront, some sudden offense we take, reveals to us in all its glaring distinctness our selflove, and we are ashamed. . . .

I write in the very beginning of finding the Bible and the impression it made on me. I must have read it a good deal, for many passages remained with me through my earlier years to return and haunt me. Do you know the Psalms? They were what I read most when I was in jail in Occoquan. I read with a sense of coming back to something that I had lost. There was an echoing in my heart. And how can anyone who has known human sorrow and human joy fail to respond to these words?

“Out of the depths I have cried to thee, O Lord: Lord, hear my voice. Let thy ears be attentive to the voice of my supplication. If thou, O Lord, wilt mark iniquities: Lord, who shall stand it. For with thee there is merciful forgiveness: and by reason of thy law, I have waited for thee, O Lord. My soul hath relied on his word: my soul hath hoped in the Lord. From the morning watch even until night, let Israel hope in the Lord. Because with the Lord there is mercy; and with him plentiful redemption. And he shall redeem Israel from all his iniquities.” “Hear, O Lord, my prayer: give ear to my supplication in thy truth: hear me in thy justice. And enter not into judgment with thy servant: for in thy sight no man living shall be justified. For the enemy hath persecuted my soul: he hath brought down my life to the earth. He hath made me to dwell in darkness as those that have been dead of old: And my spirit is in anguish within me: my heart within me is troubled. I remembered the days of old, I meditated on all thy works: I meditated upon the works of thy hands. I stretched forth my hands to thee: my soul is as earth without water unto thee. Hear me speedily O Lord; my spirit hath fainted away. Turn not away thy face from me, lest I be like unto them that go down into the pit. Cause me to hear thy mercy in the morning; for in thee have I hoped. Make the way known to me, wherein I should walk: for I have lifted up my soul to thee.”

All through those weary first days in jail when I was in solitary confinement, the only thoughts that brought comfort to my soul were those lines in the Psalms that expressed the terror and misery of man suddenly stricken and abandoned. Solitude and hunger and weariness of spirit—these sharpened my perceptions so that I suffered not only my own sorrow but the sorrows of those about me. I was no longer myself. I was man. I was no longer a young girl, part of a radical movement seeking justice for those oppressed, I was the oppressed. I was that drug addict, screaming and tossing in her cell, beating her head against the wall. I was that shoplifter who for rebellion was sentenced to solitary. I was that woman who had killed her children, who had murdered her lover.

The blackness of hell was all about me. The sorrows of the world encompassed me. I was like one gone down into the pit. Hope had forsaken me. I was that mother whose child had been raped and slain. I was the mother who had borne the monster who had done it. I was even that monster, feeling in my own heart every abomination.

As I read this over, it seems, indeed, over-emotional and an exaggerated statement of the reactions of a young woman in jail. But if you live for long in the slums of cities, if you are in constant contact with sins and suffering, it is indeed rarely that so overwhelming a realization comes upon one. It often has seemed to me that most people instinctively protect themselves from being touched too closely by the suffering of others. They turn from it, and they make this a habit. The tabloids with their presentation of crime testify to the repulsive truth that there is a secret excitement and pleasure in reading of the sufferings of others. One might say there is a surface sensation in the realization of the tragedy in the lives of others. But one who has accepted hardship and poverty as the way in life in which to walk, lays himself open to this susceptibility to the sufferings of others.

And yet if it were not the...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Orbis Books (USA)
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2024
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1626985596
• ISBN 13: 9781626985599
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 179
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Logos Europe; contact@logoseurope.eu; ; 9 Rue Nicolas Possin; La Rochelle; 17000; Frankreich