“A major area of distress for [Dorothy Day] in the 1970’s was what seemed to her the erosion occurring in the spiritual life of her fellow Catholics, including those in the Catholic Worker movement. More than ever Catholics seemed attentive to social issues she had been raising for forty years, but they were increasingly neglectful of the disciplines of the Church that were fundamental to her.
“Penance seems ruled out today,” she noted repeatedly. It pained her to notice co-workers skipping Mass and not taking the time for prayer. “With prayer, one can go on cheerfully and even happily, while without prayer how grim is the journey,” she commented. “Prayer is as necessary to life as breathing. It is drink and food….
She wrote, “I am afraid I am a traditionalist, in that I do not like to see Mass offered with a large coffee cup as a chalice. I suppose I am romantic too, since I loved the Arthur legend as a child and reverenced the Holy Grail and the search for it. I feel with Newman that my faith is founded on a creed, as Rev. Louis Bouyer wrote of Newman in that magnificent biography of his…
We begin the Mass by the confession of sins, admitting our creatureliness, and all the beginnings of disorder that there are in us, and part of our thanksgiving is because of the forgiveness of sin and we do not dwell on falls and failures but go swiftly on to the prayers of praise and adoration and thanksgiving.
“To me the Mass, high or low, is glorious and I feel that though we know we are but dust, at the same time we know too, and most surely through the Mass that we are little less than the angels, that indeed it is now not I but Christ in me worshiping, and in Him I can do all things, though without Him I am nothing. I would not dare write or speak or try to follow the vocation God has given me to work for the poor and for peace, if I did not have this constant reassurance of the Mass, the confidence the Mass gives. (The very word confidence means “with faith.”)
“It is one thing for a Father Ciszek to offer Mass, to consecrate the wine in a coffee cup in the prison camps of Siberia. It is quite another thing to have this happen in New York. And yet–and yet–perhaps it happened to remind us that the power of God did not rest on all these appurtenances with which we surround it. That all over the world, in the jungles of South America and Vietnam and Africa –all the troubled, indeed anguished spots of the world–there Christ is with the poor, the suffering, even in the cup we share together, in the bread we eat. “They knew Him in the breaking of bread.”
“When I spoke to the priest about the coffee-cup incident afterward, (I was not there when this happened though twenty of the family of the Catholic Workers were there), he said, “I was just doing as I was told.” There was another great controversy at the Catholic Worker some ten years ago when Fr. Faley referred to his Mass, and some of the all-out young people, with a terrible lack of charity, railed at him, proclaiming that it was our Mass. They had been well trained in the liturgical movement, but oh the cruelty in the way in which they made their assertions!” —(On Pilgrimage – March 1966″ By Dorothy Day, The Catholic Worker, March 1966, 1, 2, 6, 8. ) This Post Last Updated 9. 26.10
