Dorothy Day did not believe in state sovereignty or just war theory.
Day’s attitudes toward the state remained rooted in their anarchist origins. She felt the state and the market economy inevitably served the interests of the wealthy and powerful, and she rejected them totally as a means for societal progress. A flavor of these attitudes is contained in this quote from 1954: “We need to change the system . . . this rotten, decadent, putrid industrial capitalist system which breeds such suffering in the whited sepulcher of New York.” Most important, Day backed up these sentiments with citizenship-defying actions. She never voted. She refused to pay taxes.
Day’s rejections of just war doctrine and the right of self-defense were even more dramatic. This came into sharp relief following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Shortly thereafter, Day editorialized: “We must make a start. We must renounce war as an instrument of policy. . . . Even as I speak to you, I may be guilty of what some men call treason. But we must reject war. . . . You young men should refuse to take up arms. Young women tear down the patriotic posters. And all of you—young and old—put away your flags.”
This call for non-cooperation was followed by Day actively promoting the widest possible conscientious objection as a response to WWII conscription. This position continued through the Korean conflict and especially during the Vietnam War, when Day publicly praised those burning their draft cards.
The curious thing about Day’s pacifist stance was its insensitivity to the grave moral evil invited by giving up the right of self-defense. Day never seemed to care about who or what was on the other side of an existential conflict. If widely adopted, Day’s stance of non-resistance to Nazis, Japanese imperialists, and Soviet communism would likely have resulted in the Nazification of Europe, the complete extermination of Jews on that continent, the subjection of much of Asia, and the later extension of totalitarian rule to Western Europe. Nuclear deterrence would have been discarded as a national security policy. Day’s willingness to surrender the right of self-defense reached its epitome in an April 1948 editorial when she wrote: “It is better that the United States be liquidated than that she survive by war.”
The starkness of Day’s pacifist position, and its conflict with the centuries-long Church doctrines, should pose the gravest obstacle to her sainthood cause. Day’s combination of extreme advocacy, its persistence across decades, and her acting to cause others to refuse national service amounts to a practical nullification of the Catechism teachings quoted earlier. How is this orthodoxy and obedience to the magisterium?