Dorothy Day on Celebrating Christmas in a Year of War

Art: Nativity, by Rita Corbin

Stephen G. Adubato’s opinion piece in the December 21 issue of Newsweek, ‘The ‘War on Christmas’ Distracts From the Holiday’s Real Religious Meaning’ effectively addresses how the metaphorical war on Christmas misses the point:

Insisting on replying “Merry Christmas” to those who say “Happy Holidays” will do little to counter the prevailing American spirit. Something more powerful is needed than to sprinkle “Christian values” on top of the already existing neoliberal ones. The time has come for believers to develop a new narrative that—in the spirit of Christmas—is “incarnational,” that takes belief in the Savior seriously as the most concrete of realities. More impactful than banking on culture war polemics to witness to our beliefs would be to bank on our example of hospitality, of welcoming both God and neighbor into our hearts and lives with gusto.

To accomplish this, he says

we can start by looking at the example set by Dorothy Day and the followers, past and present, of her Catholic Worker Movement, for whom the Christmas spirit is neither sentimental nor polemical. As their works of charity and hospitality demonstrate, the Christmas spirit is tangible, carnal—an “event” as concrete and dynamic as the first Christmas two millennia ago in Bethlehem.

As an example, Adubato offers a link to a Catholic Worker column that Dorothy Day wrote in January 1942 describing the Christmas just past, “of having been overwhelmed ‘with gifts, and there was plenty of food for the feast days, and also many gifts of clothes came in. If shelter were only as easy to get!’ …Eighty-one years later numerous Catholic Worker houses around the world will continue to welcome those in need this Christmas season, providing food, lodging, gifts, and above all, the warm, hearty spirit of hospitality.”

Adubato’s admiration for Dorothy Day, who died in 1980 and whose cause for canonization as a saint is being considered in Rome, is genuine and well placed and his praise for the contemporary Catholic Worker movement is more than generous.

Yet, for Day and for many Catholic Workers today, the Christmas event is even more incarnational, tangible, carnal, concrete and dynamic than Adubato might admit.

It should be noted the Christmas in Day’s column is the Christmas of 1941, only weeks after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the United States’ declaration of war. Day was clearly overwhelmed by more than the demands of providing hospitality to the poor on a holiday! She wrote:

It has been a month terrible in the history of our country and even now as we listen to the radio, and read the newspapers, it is hard to believe that we are in the grip of such a gigantic struggle. It is not only a colossal battle over the face of the earth, against other nations, but it is also the slow beginning of the toppling of the finance capitalist system.

It is not unusual for admirers of Day and sometimes even among people committed to the Catholic Worker to conflate “works of charity and hospitality” and to dwell on her deep spirituality and love for “the least of these,” ignoring her opposition to war and to capitalism as if they could be separated out.

Day had little patience for works of charity devoid of the demands of justice.

Day, however, had little patience for works of charity devoid of the demands of justice. In her autobiography, The Long Loneliness, Day wrote about her impressions of Catholic charities as a new convert:

I felt that the Church was the Church of the poor… but at the same time, I felt that it did not set its face against a social order which made so much charity in the present sense of the word necessary. I felt that charity was a word to choke over. Who wanted charity? And it was not just human pride but a strong sense of man’s dignity and worth, and what was due to him in justice, that made me resent, rather than feel proud of so mighty a sum total of Catholic institutions.

The January 1942 column that Adubato cites about Day and the Catholic Worker providing a Christmas “example of hospitality, of welcoming both God and neighbor into our hearts and lives with gusto” begins with these words: “Since ours is the only paper published by a group of Catholic pacifists in the world, and since we are trying to print as much material as possible which throws light on our point of view, we may seem to be overly crowded with one subject.”

As if to prove her point, in that same issue of The Catholic Worker is another article written by Day, “Our Country Passes from Undeclared War to Declared War; We Continue Our Christian Pacifist Stand.” Addressed to her “FELLOW WORKERS IN CHRIST,” she asks as an editor and publisher, “What shall we print?” and answers:

We will print the words of Christ who is with us always, even to the end of the world. “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who persecute and calumniate you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven, who makes His sun to rise on the good and the evil, and sends rain on the just and unjust.” … We are still pacifists. Our manifesto is the Sermon on the Mount, which means that we will try to be peacemakers.

The price paid by a fledgling and marginal Catholic movement in 1941, objecting to a popular war, even to the point of encouraging readers of The Catholic Worker not to buy war bonds or work in armament factories and calling on young men to resist the draft and go to prison rather than take up arms, was drastic. Most of the Catholic Worker houses that sprang up in the previous decade closed, subscriptions to the paper and donations plummeted. Some who supported the Catholic Worker before Pearl Harbor were burning its paper in the streets after it.

Adubato cites a metaphorical “war on Christmas” as one “battle” in a larger metaphorical culture war and he rightly names it a distraction. He is correct that ”the campaign to keep Christ in Christmas—namely by refusing to utter the phrase ‘Happy Holidays’—seems to misunderstand the nature of the ‘battle’ at hand.”

This Christmas, in 2023, in the midst of real wars of genocidal proportions, the destruction of the environment, a global refugee crisis and unprecedented threat of nuclear destruction, this distraction is particularly egregious, a dangerous waste of precious time. As Pope Francis noted again a few months ago, “our world continues to be in the grip of a third world war fought piecemeal, and, in the tragic case of the conflict in Ukraine, not without the threat of recourse to nuclear weapons.”

Celebrating the incarnational spirit of Christmas today as Dorothy Day did in a “spirit neither sentimental nor polemical” will necessarily require untiring, unequivocal and vocal resistance to war and to the racism and the economic systems that enkindle it.

“It grows ever harder to talk of love in the face of a scorning world,” Day wrote in another Christmas message in 1950, condemning the United States’ aggression in Korea. Her words can be applied at least as well to the destruction of Gaza on Christmas 2023:

Forty thousand bombs were dropped on a city of 45,000. Who made up that city? Men, women and children, the old and the sick and the crippled. The innocent, the noncombatant in other words…. God have mercy on them all and those who killed them as well as those who died!… We have not begun to learn the meaning of love, the strength of it, the joy of it… Lest these words which I write on my knees be scorned, know they are St. John’s words, the apostle of love, who lived to see “charity grow cold” and who never ceased to cry out “my children, love one another.” It is the only word for Christmas when love came down to the mire, to teach us that love.