Fwd: "Shameful and Culpable Silence” Pope Francis, Dorothy Day and the duty to resist war
Catholic Worker
From: Brian Terrell <brian195...@gmail.com>
Date: Sat, Sep 6, 2025 at 10:09 PM
Subject: "Shameful and Culpable Silence” Pope Francis, Dorothy Day and the duty to resist war
To: Catholic Worker <catholicw...@gmail.com>
“In the Face of this Shameful and Culpable Silence…”:
Pope Francis, Dorothy Day and the duty to resist war
Brian Terrell
The words of Pope Francis when he addressed the Joint Session of Congress at the U.S. Capitol ten years ago in September, 2015, are often cited by Catholic Workers and fans of Dorothy Day:
“In these times when social concerns are so important, I cannot fail to mention the Servant of God Dorothy Day, who founded the Catholic Worker movement. Her social activism, her passion for justice and for the cause of the oppressed, were inspired by the Gospel, her faith, and the example of the saints.”
I was in the crowd on the lawn of the Capitol on that day, hearing and watching the pope’s speech broadcast for us on large screens in real time, holding a small Vatican flag that a stranger handed to me. As one who lived and worked with Dorothy Day in the 1970s, it was nice to hear her name invoked along with Abraham Lincoln’s, Martin Luther King’s and Thomas Merton’s.
I could not help but feel, though, that Dorothy and her legacy were more truly honored by Pope Francis moments later with strong words that have been almost totally overlooked by the media and paid only little more attention by contemporary members of the movement that she and Peter Maurin founded:
“Here we have to ask ourselves: Why are deadly weapons being sold to those who plan to inflict untold suffering on individuals and society?” Pope Francis answered his own question, “Sadly, the answer, as we all know, is simply for money: money that is drenched in blood, often innocent blood. In the face of this shameful and culpable silence, it is our duty to confront the problem and to stop the arms trade.”
While the U.S. Congress was a most appropriate venue to confront the arms trade and money drenched in innocent blood, his admonition was not addressed exclusively to the members of congress and other high government officials present there. I suspect that what Pope Francis offered that day was not so much an accusation as the articulation of a universal duty binding on each of us in conscience.
Whether he knew it or not, by holding us all accountable, Pope Francis was echoing what Dorothy Day wrote in her April, 1954, column in The Catholic Worker newspaper, “Are the Leaders Insane?”:
“When it is said that we disturb people too much by the words pacifism and anarchism, I can only think that people need to be disturbed, that their consciences need to be aroused, that they do indeed need to look into their work, and study new techniques of love and poverty and suffering for each other. Of course, the remedies are drastic, but then too the evil is a terrible one and we are all involved, we are all guilty, and most certainly we are all going to suffer. The fact that we have ‘the faith,’ that we go to the sacraments, is not enough. ‘Inasmuch as ye have done it unto the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me’ with napalm, nerve gas, our hydrogen bomb…I write thus frankly to let our readers know that we realize that we are all involved, that we are not trying to place on the shoulders of others the heavy burdens of knowledge and responsibility and are not bearing them ourselves. This is the greatest of problems today. This problem of war and peace, and involves every man, woman and child in the country”
“It is time again to cry out against our ‘leaders,’” Dorothy insisted seventy-one years ago, “to question whether or not, since it is not for us to say that they are evil men, they are sane men.”
Since Dorothy wrote in 1954 and Pope Francis addressed Congress in 2015, the weapons manufacturers’ and politicians’ money is all the more drenched in innocent blood. The nuclear weapons program that Dorothy said constitutes “mass suicide” has brought us ever closer to the brink of global destruction. Shameful and culpable silence on these matters continues to dominate the discourse, not only in Congress but in the media and in the churches as well.
Some Catholic Workers and students of the movement today regard antiwar protest as optional, as less than essential and some even name it a distraction detrimental to our calling. Some of these critics of the contemporary movement propose that protest and nonviolent direct action had no place in the Catholic Worker’s original vision but is the unfortunate accretion of time. It is sometimes said that those communities today who have little or nothing to say on matters of war and systemic violence, focusing instead on meeting the needs of their impoverished neighbors, building a local economy and praying, have chosen the path more faithful to the spirit of the Catholic Worker and its founders and are quietly revitalizing the movement and returning it to its roots.
Agitation against war and for peace and justice, however, has its roots in the very origins of the movement.
In 1934, a year after the Catholic Worker was founded, Dorothy wrote a letter to a “Fellow Worker” urging them to listen to Catholic Worker co-founder Peter Maurin “when he tells you to picket with him in front of the Mexican Consulate,” protesting violent persecution of Catholics in Mexico. “Don’t think that it is just a notion of his. We are serious.”
In 1935, Dorothy participated in a protest organized by the Communist Party in New York where the German ship, The Bremen was docked. Afterward, she wrote to the New York City Police Commissioner: “I am writing to protest against unexampled brutality of a few of the police on that occasion.” “As Catholics we too feel called upon to protest against the Nazi persecution of Catholics and Jews by demonstration and distribution of literature,” she wrote. “We feel that we would be neglecting our duty as Catholics if we did not do this.” Fourteen years later, in her July, 1949 column, Dorothy remembered that event: “A few of the Communists group went on board the Bremen and tore down the swastika from the mast and one of the group was shot by a ship’s policeman. The men were arrested and taken to the 47th Street station and the crowd was afterwards dispersed by policemen’s clubs and fists. Nina Polcyn, Frank O’Donnell and I were in the midst of that, and the violence was all on one side. The next day the men who were arrested announced themselves as Catholic Workers. I wish we had pulled down the swastika.”
In her 1952 autobiography The Long Loneliness, Dorothy noted how “one Christmas at the close of World War II, we received a card from the Rochester group saying that they had liked The Catholic Worker much better before the pacifists got hold of it. Another letter came from Boston, from an elderly worker who had been responsible for the first house of hospitality in Boston. She reproached me for the extremism of our revolutionary pacifist position…It struck me then how strange a thing it was; here we have been writing about pacifism for fifteen years and members of two of our groups were just beginning to realize what it meant.”
In her July, 1957, column she reported "the usual complaint of some of the older readers who also drop in to call, that the (Catholic Worker) paper is not what it used to be. Too much stuff about war and preparation for war, and the duty of building up resistance.”
By this time, the movement’s pacifism had endured significant trials. The top of the fold headline of the January, 1942, issue of The Catholic Worker, published after the attack on Pearl Harbor, boldly proclaimed “Our Country Passes from Undeclared War to Declared War; We Continue Our Christian Pacifist Stand.” While reiterating the Catholic Worker’s resistance to the war, Dorothy recognized that “there will be many continuing to work with us from necessity, or from choice, who do not agree with us as to our position on war, conscientious objection, etc. But we beg that there will be mutual charity and forbearance among us all.”
Some of the men prominent in the movement subsequently entered the military, just as others went into conscientious objector camps. This attrition, along with a significant loss of readership and of donations, caused most of the Catholic Worker houses in the country to close.
In her time Dorothy protested the manufacture of weapons for war, but today it might better be said that wars are manufactured in order to sell weapons. It is clearer now than ever that the poverty in our cities’ streets and the devastated countryside has its roots in the arms trade that Francis and Dorothy deplored. One of the driving forces destroying the environment, we are learning, is war and preparation for war. We know that even a most limited nuclear weapons exchange would murder millions and likely make huge parts of the planet uninhabitable.
If Dorothy’s question, “Are the Leaders Insane?” could be reasonably have been asked in the middle of the Eisenhower administration, can we avoid asking that same question in the age of Trump? If in 1954, it was “time again to cry out against our ‘leaders,’” can we responsibly stifle that cry within ourselves today? Ninety years ago, Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin publicly marched in the streets in protest of rising fascism in Europe- are we being more faithful to their vision by keeping quiet about fascism rising in our own streets today?
One of the other exemplary Americans whom Pope Francis cited before Congress ten years ago was Martin Luther King, Jr, who in his 1967 speech at New York’s Riverside Church, Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence, said “Some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak. We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak.” “A time comes” he noted, “when silence is betrayal.”
In 1954, Dorothy Day wrote, “It is not for anyone to judge his fellow man on how far he can go in resisting participation in preparation for war,” and “each one of us must make our decisions as to what he should do, each one must examine his conscience and beg God for strength.” In 1967, Dr. King preached, “Every man of humane convictions must decide on the protest that best suits his convictions, but we must all protest.” In an article on the front page of the December, 1966, issue of The Catholic Worker, Thomas Merton, another American commended by Francis, quoted Albert Camus concerning the silence from the Catholic Church that he perceived about crimes committed during World War II: “What the world expects of Christians is that Christians should speak out, loud and clear, and that they should voice their condemnation in such a way that never a doubt, never the slightest doubt, could rise in the heart of the simplest man. That they should get away from abstraction and confront the blood-stained face history has taken on today. The grouping we need is a grouping of men resolved to speak out clearly and pay up personally.”
Pope Francis did not, nor did the notable Americans that he commended, not Dorothy Day, not Martin Luther King, not Thomas Merton (let’s leave Abraham Lincoln aside, for now) prescribe how any one person or community is to resist, what risks they are to undertake, what other good works need to be set aside for the sake of being heard. But all of them agreed that silence or ambiguity in time like ours, however prudent or necessary it may seem, is not an option.
On several occasions in the last years of his life, Pope Francis suggested that World War III had already begun, “spread out in small pockets everywhere… fought piecemeal, with crimes, massacres and destruction.” This time of genocide and calculated famine abroad, of mass deportations and concentration camps at home, when schools and hospitals are bombed abroad and plundered for the sake of billionaires and banks here, a time of undisguised racism, calls each of us to respond. Those who bear “heavy burdens of knowledge and responsibility” in Dorothy Day’s words, and have the privilege of association with a movement with so rich a heritage of resistance as the Catholic Worker, have a clear and unequivocal duty to speak out and resist.
September 6, 2025
Strangers and Guests Catholic Worker Farm
Maloy, Iowa