Dorothy Day on Obama at Notre Dame

Barack Obama got down with the Catholic Social Justice lingo in the Notre Dame commencement speech.

However, as you might expect, it was a much different speech than the one he gave to Planned Parenthood on July 17, 2007:



Is the man who denigrated pro-life advocates as being unhip nitwits in the culture wars “which are so 1990” the same tolerant guy who said this to the Notre Dame graduating class of 2009?

“ Each side will continue to make its case to the public with passion and conviction. But surely we can do so without reducing those with differing views to caricature.”

Maybe he's had a change of heart. But just the same, if anyone wants to be lectured on Catholic Social Justice Doctrine , rather than pondering Barack Obama's half-baked collection of buzz words and key phrases at Notre Dame----they would be better off spending some time with the works of Dorothy Day, or stopping by one of the Catholic Worker Houses and talking with some of the staff or volunteers.

Dorothy Day was a radical pacifist who had been a member of the I.W.W., the communist party, was a pal of Leon Trotsky, had an abortion, was a suffragette and a lifelong socialist (though later rejecting Marx's dialectics),a 1920's bohemian, raised a daughter as a divorced single mother, and was the co-founder of the Catholic Worker Movement.

Dorothy Day may also be the next American canonized a saint in the Roman Catholic Church—even though she once said "Don't call me a saint. I don't want to be dismissed that easily."

For the Anarcho-Catholic didn't want recycling food from dumpsters, sleeping on a stinky prison cell floor, civil rights/anti-war marches and getting to mass every morning to be dismissed as being only for special people. She had no time for halos without hard work. She practiced the Pauline understanding that all people of God are called to be saints - not just those with a Vatican imprimatur.

Dorothy Day was the recipient of the Laetare Medal at the 1973 Notre Dame commencement. If it had been 2009 it is almost a certainty that, like Mary Ann Glendon, she would have refused to share the stage with Barack Obama, or at the very least would not have been silent—for she believed, as a result of her personal experience, conversion and faith, that abortion was nothing less than genocide.

At a Women's Rights Day rally in 1971 a young woman, bubbling with newbie feminist enthusiasm, was introducing Ms. Day. She announced that Day understood a woman's right to choose, and that abortion was very much at the heart of empowering women. The leftist heroine got up and angrily lectured the woman on the falseness of such a belief, on the dignity of women and a child's right to life.

Barack Obama is a masterful pretender, and the Notre Dame administration which invited him, the “Yes, we can” robotons and those who defend his “pro-life” record on their misunderstanding of Catholic Social Justice doctrine are, what Lenin called, “useful fools”.

I would not have wanted to be there to witness the Church's shame.

Dorothy Day was not a virgin, martyr, or nun. She was a lay Catholic woman with radical politics, a deeply rooted faith, and a phenomenal amount of courage.

Despite my differences with a lot of her politics, I hope to live long enough to be in Rome the day she is formally added to the roll call of saints.