Servant of God Dorothy Day: "What is the connection between liturgy and sociology?"

Servant of God Dorothy Day

The Church has an obligation to feed the poor, and we cannot spend all our money on buildings. However, there are many kinds of hunger. There is a hunger for bread, and we must give people food. But there is also a hunger for beauty – and there are very few beautiful places that the poor can get into. (The Cathedral in San Francisco) is a place of transcendent beauty, and it is as accessible to the homeless in the Tenderloin as it is to the mayor of San Francisco. The Cathedral in San Francisco is one of the few places where the poor can go and sit down and be with God in beauty… .— Dorothy Day, in response to Cesar Chavez.

Those who describe themselves as Progressive Catholics—a term which most often refers to Catholics who, whether they realize it or not, are more socialist and more pelagian than they are Catholic, and who more often than not fail to consider the necessity of liturgical prayer to living faithfully as a Catholic Christian in the public square—would do well to weigh the thought of (Servant of God) Dorothy Day, ex-communist and co-founder of the Catholic Worker Movement, who on December 28, 1927, at age 30, was baptized in the Catholic Church.

While too many at the time were enamoured of a different woman preaching an ideology of death masquerading as compassion, Dorothy diligently kept hope and true compassion and service alive. She correctly acknowledged that the Church's liturgical prayer is not merely a support to the mission of saving souls. The Mass especially is at the core of the mission of the Church: the Eucharist is the source and summit of the Christian life (CCC1324/LG 11: the fount and apex of the whole Christian life). The Church is mission; we are reminded of that every Mass—Ite missa est; Go, the Mass is ended. Or, "Go, you are sent!" We are sent by God to participate in the Great Commission (St. Matthew 28:16–20).

Dorothy Day's particular charism manifests by having allowed herself to be sent by God into the trenches to: feed the hungry—with material and spiritual sustenance; clothe the naked—by covering every person with dignity; visit those held hostage to ignorance and sin—by offering the liberating message of the Holy Gospel; give shelter to the homeless—by providing physical accommodation and moral structure. She, herself, was a prisoner to an emerging culture of death. But then!—God entered her life, slowly transforming her heart until, eyes opened, she caught sight of Jesus and His Church as the only true way to save man from his descent into madness. She saw the downward trajectory clearly because she had been and seen where society was going. God rescued her; she became His hands to rescue those from the darkness of indifference, to help raise up those in most need of God's mercy.

https://www.wordonfire.org/resources/blog/dorothy-day-the-bothand-servant/4547/

Liturgy and Sociology

by Dorothy Day

The Catholic Worker, January 1936, 5.

Summary: Through the Church’s liturgical prayer we can overcome individualism and experience universal brotherhood in the Mystical Body of Christ. Once this relationship has been understood, we cannot ignore the suffering of our fellow man. The liturgy is the foundation of the apostolate of the laity. (DDLW #296).

What is the connection between liturgy and sociology?

Why do we stress the importance of the liturgical movement?

Here is our simple explanation: Individualism has been discredited. Catholics cannot go the other extreme of collectivism. We must uphold personalism (see note on personalism) as a philosophy.

The basis of the liturgical movement is prayer, the liturgical prayer of the Church. It is a revolt against private, individual prayer. (Day is not so much denying the value of private devotions that deepen appreciation for the Church's public prayer as critiquing the privatization of prayer that eliminates that sense of solidarity which finds expression in the Corporal and Spiritual Works of Mercy.) St. Paul said, “We know not what we should pray for as we ought, but the Spirit Himself asketh for us with unspeakable groanings.” When we pray thus we pray with Christ, not to Christ. When we recite prime and compline we are using the inspired prayer of the church. When we pray with Christ (not to Him) we realize Christ as our Brother. We think of all men as our brothers then, as members of the Mystical Body of Christ. “We are all members, one of another,” and, remembering this, we can never be indifferent to the social miseries and evils of the day. The dogma of the Mystical Body has tremendous social implications (cf CCC 791 & 809; see also: Mystici corporis christi (1943); Lumen Gentium (1964), especially sections 8, 23, 26, 50, 54).

All the work of the Campion Propaganda Committee, its study and its activities against extreme nationalism, against racial hatreds, against social injustice has its basis in an understanding of the liturgical movement and a participation in it.

Once we heard a woman at a Catholic Action convention say, “Are you going to the liturgical lecture?” and her friend replied, “I am not interested in music.” Many people confuse liturgy with rubric – with externals. (To be Catholic is to participate in the saving mission of the Church. It is difficult to imagine that Day is advocating here a liturgical free-for-all. "Alongside her activism in support of the poor, Dorothy also displayed an intense spiritual commitment. Each day she attended Mass, prayed her Rosary, and prayed the divine office. She staunchly opposed contraception and abortion, neither of which were popular positions in the mid-twentieth century. She regularly credited the intercession of saints and her reliance on the Mystical Body of Christ for any success she had. For Dorothy, worshipping God and serving the poor were intertwined. Right worship leads to right service." — Brandon Vogt, Dorothy Day: The Both/And Servant, Word On Fire blog, November 10, 2014.)

Again we urge the Campions, and with them our readers, to join with us in liturgical prayer. When we pray in this way we recognize the universality of the Church; we are praying with white and black and men of all nationalities all over the world. The Communist International becomes a pale thing in contrast.

Living the liturgical day as much as we are able, beginning with prime, using the missal, ending the day with compline and so going through the liturgical year we find that it is now not us, but Christ in us, who is working to combat injustice and oppression. We are on our way to becoming “other Christs.”

We cannot build up the idea of the apostolate of the laity without the foundation of the liturgy.

http://www.catholicworker.org/dorothyday/articles/296.html

Further Reading: Catholicism and Socialism? Incompatible, by Kate Fugate, Feb. 10, 2016.

https://fee.org/articles/socialism-is-not-built-on-compassion-its-built-on-dehumanizing-others/

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Personalism: the personalistic norm.

This norm, in its negative aspect, states that the person is the kind of good which does not admit of use and cannot be treated as an object of use and as such the means to an end. In its positive form the personalistic norm confirms this: the person is a good towards which the only proper and adequate attitude is love. — Karol Józef Wojtyła (Pope St. John Paul II), Love and Responsibility, Ignatius Press, 1993, pg. 41.

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The Liturgical Movement: Bishop Thomas Dowd.

https://bishopdowd.net/home/node/44

The Liturgical Movement began in the mid-19th century as an attempt to rediscover the richness of the liturgy as a source for Christian life. It began with the Benedictine monks of France and their abbot, Dom Guéranger, who placed liturgical worship and Gregorian chant at the centre of their spirituality. The movement began to spread to parish life through the publication of translations of the liturgical texts in the language of the people, allowing people to understand better what was actually going on. This eventually led here and there to greater participation by the people in the liturgy itself, particularly through offering the various responses (which until then was only done by those around the altar, such as the altar boys).

The Liturgical Movement was encouraged by the leadership of the Church, particularly by Saint Pope Pius X and Pope Pius XII, who undertook certain limited and cautious reforms. But it was the Second Vatican Council, called by Blessed Pope John XXIII, that undertook the task of spreading positive liturgical reform throughout the Church everywhere in the world. Vatican II met from 1962-1965, and gathered over 2000 Catholic bishops from every continent. And its very first published document, promulgated on December 4, 1963, was the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, which crowned, in a sense, the efforts of the Liturgical Movement up until that time.