5 Religion Questions

I am surprised that I am beginning to pray daily. I began because I had to. I just found myself praying. I can’t get down on my knees, but I can pray while I am walking. If I get down on my knees I think, “Do I really believe? Whom am I praying to?” And a terrible doubt comes over me, and a sense of shame, and I wonder if I am praying because I am lonely, because I am unhappy. Then I think suddenly, scornfully, “Here you are in a stupor of content. You are biological. Like a cow. Prayer with you is like the opiate of the people.” And over and over again in my mind that phrase is repeated jeeringly, “Religion is the opiate of the people.” “But,” I reason with myself, “I am praying because I am happy, not because I am unhappy. I did not turn to God in unhappiness, in grief, in despair—to get consolation, to get something from Him.”

It is so hard to say how this delight in prayer has been growing on me. Two years ago, I was saying as I planted seeds in the garden, “I must believe in these seeds, that they fall into the earth and grow into flowers and radishes and beans. It is a miracle to me because I do not understand it. The very fact that they use glib technical phrases does not make it any the less a miracle, and a miracle we all accept. Then why not accept God’s miracles?”

I am going to Mass now regularly on Sunday mornings.

I could not see that love between man and woman was incompatible with love of God. God is the Creator, and the very fact that we were begetting a child made me have a sense that awe were made in the image and likeness of God, co-creators with him… Because I was grateful for love, I was grateful for life, and living with Forster made me appreciate it and even reverence it still the more. He had introduced me to so much that was beautiful and good that I felt I owed to him too this renewed interest in things of the spirit.

But it is impossible to talk to [Forster] about religion or faith. A wall immediately separates us. The very love of nature and study of her secrets which is bring me to faith, separates him from religion.

Our child was born in March at the end of a harsh winter. In December I had to come in from the country and take a little apartment in town. It was good to be there, close to friends, close to a church where I could stop and pray. I read the Imitation of Christ a great deal. I knew that I was going to have my child baptized a Catholic, cost what it may. I knew that I was not going to have her floundering through many years as I had done, doubting and hesitating, undisciplined and amoral. I felt it was the greatest thing I could do for my child. For myself, I prayed for the gift of faith. I was sure, yet not sure. I postponed the day of decision.

A woman does not want to be alone at such a time. Even the most hardened, the most irreverent, is awed by the stupendous fact of creation. Becoming a Catholic would mean facing life alone, and I clung to my family life. It was hard to contemplate giving up a mate in order that my child and I could become members of the Church. Forster would having nothing to do with religion or with me if I embraced it. So I waited.

Then, one afternoon, as I wheeled [Tamar] in her little carriage along the road which led down to St. Joseph’s Home, a former estate of Charles Schwab which had been given to the Sisters of Charity, I met a Sister who was on her way to visit a neighbor of mine. That estate had been one of my stumbling blocks. I could never pass it without thinking of Schwab’s career as head of the Bethlehem Steel Corporation, of his work in breaking the Homestead strike, of how he refused to recognize unions of workers. I could not but feel that this was tainted money which the Sisters had accepted. It was money which belonged to the workers… But I was emboldened by a sense of compulsion to speak to the Sister who was hurrying by me, to ask her how to go about having a baby baptized. I had a warm feeling as I approached her, a feeling that whatever the errors of Charlie Schwab, Sister Aloysia had had no part in them, in her simplicity and poverty… She took me under her protection immediately. She did not make little of my difficulties, nor did she think for a minute that they were insurmountable. There was a hard row to hoe in front of us, was her attitude, but we could get through it. She would hang on to that long, formidable-looking rosary of hers, hang on to it like an anchor, and together we would ride out the gale of opposition and controversy. All we had to do was depend on prayer.

But Sister Aloysia did not neglect me in her anxiety for the baby. “You must be a Catholic yourself,” she kept telling me. She had no reticence. She speculated rather volubly at times on the various reasons why she thought I was holding back… But I was in a state of dull content—not in a state to be mentally stimulated. I was too happy with my child. What faith I had I held on to stubbornly. The need for patience emphasized in the writings of the saints consoled me on the slow road I was traveling. I would put all my affairs in the hands of God and wait.

I had become convinced that I would become a Catholic, and yet I felt I was betraying the class to which I belonged, the workers, the poor of the world with whom Christ spent His life…

During the month of August many of my friends, including my sister, went to Boston to picket in protest against the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti… Throughout the nation and the world, the papers featured the struggle for the lives of these two men… These men were Catholics, inasmuch as they were Italians… the knowledge that these men were soon to pass from this physical earth, were soon to become dust, without consciousness, struck me like a physical blow. They were here now; in a few days they would be no more. They had become figures believed by the workers… The day they died, the papers had headlines as large as those which proclaimed the outbreak of war. All the nation mourned. All the nation, that is, that is made up of the poor, the worker, the trade unionist—those who most keenly felt the sense of solidarity—that very sense of solidarity which made me gradually understand the doctrine of the Mystical Body of Christ whereby we are the members one of another.

We both suffered in body as well as in soul and mind. He would not talk about the faith and relapsed into complete silence if I tried to bring up the subject. The point of my bringing it up was that I could not become a Catholic and continue living with him, because he was averse to any ceremony before officials of either Church or State. He was an anarchist and an atheist, and he did not intend to be a liar or a hypocrite. He was a creature of utter sincerity, and however illogical and bad-tempered about it all, I loved him. It was killing me to think of leaving him…

It ended by my being ill the next summer. I became so oppressed I could not breathe and I awoke in the night choking. I was weak and listless and one doctor told me my trouble was probably thyroid. I went to the Cornell clinic for a metabolism test and they said that my condition was a nervous one. By winter the tension had become so great that an explosion occurred and we separated again. When he returned, as he always had, I would not let him in the house; my heart was breaking with my own determination to make an end, once and for all, to the torture we were undergoing.

The next day I went to Tottenville… I too was baptized conditionally, since I had already been baptized in the Episcopal Church. I made my first confession right afterward, and looked forward the next morning to receiving Communion. I had no particular joy in partaking of these three sacraments… I proceeded about my own active participation in them grimly, coldly, making acts of faith, and certainly with no consolation whatsoever. One part of my mind stood at one side and kept saying, “What are you doing? Are you sure of yourself? What kind of an affectation is this? What act is this you are going through? Are you trying to induce emotion, induce faith, partake of an opiate, the opiate of the people?” I felt like a hypocrite if I got down on my knees, and shuddered at the thought of anyone seeing me.

I speak of the misery of leaving one love. But there was another love too, the life I had led in the radical movement… I was just as much against capitalism and imperialism as ever, and here I was going over to the opposition, because of course the Church was lined up with property, with the wealthy, with the state, with capitalism, with all the forces of reaction. This I had been taught to think and this I still think to a great extent… But I wanted to be poor, chaste, and obedient. I wanted to die in order to live, to put off the old man and put on Christ. I loved, in other words, and like all women in love, I wanted to be united in my love. Why should not Forster be jealous? Any man who did not participate in this love would, of course, realize my infidelity, my adultery. In the eyes of God, any turning toward creatures to the exclusion of Him is adultery, and so it is termed over and over again in Scripture.

I loved the Church for Christ made visible. Not for itself, because it was so often a scandal to me. Romano Guardini said that the Church is the Cross on which Christ was crucified; one could not separate Christ from his Cross, and one must live in a state of permanent dissatisfaction with the Church…

Not long afterward a priest wanted me to write a story of my conversion, telling how the social teaching of the Church had led me to embrace Catholicism. But I knew nothing of the social teaching of the Church at the time, I had never heard of the encyclicals. I felt that the Church was the servant of the poor, that St. Patrick’s had been built from the pennies of servant girls, that it cared for the emigrant, it established hospitals, orphanages, day nurseries, houses of the Good Shepherd, homes for the aged, but at the same time, I felt that it did not set its face against a social order which made such charity in the present sense of the word necessary.

From Loaves and Fishes, ch. 2

I felt keenly that God was more on the side of the hungry, the ragged, the unemployed, than on the side of the comfortable churchgoers who gave so little heed to the misery of the needy and the groaning of the poor. I had prayed that some way would open up for me to do something, to line myself up on their side, to work for them, so that I would no longer feel that I had been false to them in embracing my new-found faith.

The appearance of Peter Maurin, I felt with deep conviction, was the result of my prayers. Just as the good God had used the farmer Habakkuk to bring the mess of food intended for the reapers to Daniel in the lions’ den, so had He sent Peter Maurin to bring me the good intellectual food I needed to strengthen me to work for Him.

I learned shortly after how he had happened to come to see me. He had heard of me on a visit to Commonweal, our famous New York weekly edited by laymen. It had been started by Michael Williams, a veteran journalist, who had worked in San Francisco on the same paper with my father years before. Peter had also been told of my conversion by a redheaded Irish Communist with whom he struck up a conversation on a bench in Union Square. The Irishman told Peter that we both had similar ideas—namely, that the Catholic Church had a social teaching which could be applied to the problems of our day. So Peter set out to find me.

I don’t think we even consulted Peter as to whether he liked the title we had given to his writings in the paper, “Easy Essays.” He was so happy over the coming incarnation of his ideas in print that he never expressed himself on the subject. But he well knew that, in spite of the title, his essays were anything but easy. Like those in the Gospel, his were hard sayings—hard to work out in everyday life.

One day, when looking over some fresh proofs [of the paper], he shook his head. His expression was one of great sadness. “It’s everyone’s paper,” he said. I was pleased. I thought that was what we both wanted. “And everyone’s paper is no one’s paper,” he added with a sigh.

It was only gradually, through many conversations, that I came to understand enough of his thinking to realize why he considered the stories in the first issue of The Catholic Worker inadequate. He often spoke of what he called “a philosophy of work.” “Work, not wages—work is not a commodity to be bought and sold” was one of his slogans… much later, when I had a look at that first issue, I could see more clearly what bothered Peter. We had emphasized wages and hours while he was a trying to talk about a philosophy of work.

Even now I often think, “What an inspired attitude Peter took in his patient and painful indoctrination—and what a small part of it we accepted.” He had the simplicity of an Alyosha, a Prince Mishkin. He accepted gratefully what people offered, finding plenty of work to do, always taking the least place—and serving others.

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