I always loved the message of the Catholic Worker. It is in no small measure the message of the Gospel itself. We are called by Christ the Lord himself to be peacemakers.

But years ago I discovered why (*) Dorothy Day, the Catholic Worker’s famous co-founder, asked us not to put a halo on her or them yet.

I visited the main House of Hospitality, Dorothy’s home, in the early 1980s just a couple of months after both Dorothy and my beloved father passed away. I was impressed, as most visitors were and are. But my father was a conservative Navy man. He came from a long line of lively Irish Democrats.

After the cities began to burn in the political riots of the 1960s, he left the Democrat Party. He preferred Law and Order to Maoist Utopianism and torches in knapsacks.

As more time passed, I began to realize that I was a little like Dorothy in intention, and a little like my father in the same. Both were Catholic, both were on the side of the workers and in favor of Unions; both were “for the little guy”.

However, my father and Dorothy split at the crossroads of Dorothy’s pacifism, which my father would have thought to be impractical madness, after World War II. And it hurt me to break with that part of my soul that stood with Dorothy in so many other ways. But I did come to think she was naive in this. And unbiblical.

Dorothy Day was right to seek for peace in a nuclear world. But if she were alive today what would she think of Kibbutz Be’eri where so many were murdered, raped and kidnapped on October 7, 2023? A most terrible war began that day.,  precisely what Hamas wanted. They used Israel’s two year Gazan ceasefire as an opportunity to reignite war.

The Bible does not say that war is always evil in its ends. If I attack your mother, or your babies, with a gun and a knife, most Christians would expect you to shoot straight.

Why? Because as Romans 13 and Amos 4 tell us, war, an evil in itself, is sometimes necessary.

“I struck you with blight and mildew; your many gardens and your vineyards, your fig trees and your olive trees the locust devoured; yet you did not return to me,” declares the Lord. “I sent among you a pestilence after the manner of Egypt; I killed your young men with the sword, and carried away your horses, and I made the stench of your camp go up into your nostrils; yet you did not return to me,” declares the Lord…” (Amos 4)

As for proportionality, it is always to be desired, but it can never be commanded by the protagonist losing side.  World War II showed this. There was precious little proportionality to show for some 60+ million dead in that global war.

But all of this is not to glorify war but to lament it! God help the peoples who would deliberately start a war.  Such are not the kind of persons who will ever hear the word of true peace:

“Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace among men with whom he is pleased!”

The Lord will not be pleased when bad will is indulged, as with those who, during the two year negotiated ceasefire, between 2021 and 2023, continued to launch incendiary balloons across the border, intent on murder and mayhem.

The LORD says,

“…do what is good, and you will receive his approval, ⁴ for he (the Roman governer) is God’s servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword in vain; he is the servant of God to execute his wrath on the wrongdoer.” (Romans 13)

All war ends in horror. We pray for Gaza, Israel, and for lasting peace. SH.

(*) Cf. The Real Dorothy Day