Dorothy Day
Franz Jägerstätter
“To blow the dynamite of a message is the only way to make the message dynamic.” Peter Maurin, co-founder of the Catholic Worker Movement
Today two emails came from a Catholic Worker in Iowa who maintains his own list of Catholic Worker houses and interested persons like me. One was a lost manuscript from Dorothy Day, an article she sent in 1933 to “America” magazine that went unpublished. It was called ”Our Brothers, the Jews and called for solidarity with the Jews. Unlike any other Catholic writer at the time, Dorothy Day saw Adolf Hitler’s emerging policy toward the Jews as a moral problem for Catholics, “two years before he combined the office of chancellor and president to become Führer and almost four years before Germany adopted the Nuremburg Laws that stripped German Jews of their citizenship and human rights.”
In doing research for Catholic Workers and Military Training on Catholic Campuses I ran across a statement how Dorothy Day, co-founder with Peter Maurin of the Catholic Worker movement, admired Franz Jägerstätter. Franz went unnoticed until Gordon Zahn discovered his heroic act when he was doing research for a book on “German Catholics and Hitler’s Wars.” Publication of this book, which concluded that the church had provided moral support to the German war effort while rejecting the evils of the Nazi regime, forced him from his tenured position at a Catholic university. However, he went out to write the work on Franz, “In Solidarity Witness”, and to become close friend and an advisor with the Catholic Worker and the peace movement.
I did not get to know Gordon until he was beginning to suffer from Parkinson’s disease and started to lose his memory. He was at an assisted living center where some of my elderly Jesuit friends lived. He did not remember his books but did remember Catholic Workers and the fact that he was a conscientious objector from Milwaukee in World War II. He was truly a man of conscience and it made sense that he had written about other persons who believed in the priority of conscience and persons like Dorothy Day who professed the same belief.
The second email from the same Catholic Worker was a link to a 20 min. audio interview with Robert Ellsberg, the editor of The Duty of Delight, the Diaries of Dorothy Day. It was in reading this book that I first made the connection between Dorothy Day and the resistance to military training on a Catholic Campus.
Marquette University, which has been the focus of our resistance to placing military values over conscience, was where the unpublished manuscript of the America article by Dorothy Day was found in the archives.
In 2007, on the day of the beatification by the Catholic Church of Franz Jägerstätter we renewed our nonviolent struggle for Marquette to Be Faithful to the Gospel and No Longer Host the Army, Navy/Marines and Air Force training bases.
It has been only recently that we have connected Dorothy Day’s resistance to the military on Catholic campus with our nonviolent struggle at Marquette.
We had planned the “Sit Down to Stand up for Conscience” nonviolent action for November 6th, honoring Dorothy Day and Franz Jägerstätter, before we found out that November 8th would have been Dorothy’s 112th birthday. Also a friend with the People Breaking the Silence – Franz Jägerstätter movement had just written me that there would be a movie and workshop at SOA Watch in Columbus, Ga. this year, at this other and much larger resistance movement to an Army military training base.
So today we got emails connecting Dorothy Day to efforts to break the silence of German Catholics in 1933 toward treatment of Jews, and an email reminding me how strongly Dorothy Day felt that there should be no military training on a Catholic campus — I was overwhelmed. It was like Peter said, the dynamite of our message to Marquette was blown.
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