"The Opposite of Poverty is Not Plenty, but Friendship:" Dorothy Day's Pragmatic Theology of Detachment
Date
2011
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Producer
Director
Performer
Choreographer
Costume Designer
Music
Videographer
Lighting Designer
Set Designer
Crew Member
Funder
Rehearsal Director
Concert Coordinator
Advisor
Moderator
Panelist
Alternative Title
Department
Haverford College. Department of Religion
Type
Thesis
Original Format
Running Time
File Format
Place of Publication
Date Span
Copyright Date
Award
The Religion Prize
Language
eng
Note
Table of Contents
Terms of Use
Rights Holder
Access Restrictions
Open Access
Terms of Use
Tripod URL
Identifier
Abstract
The following essay argues that Catholic Worker co-founder Dorothy Day's ultimate concern is to bring together in relationship the poor and the wealthy, who stood alienated from one another within the capitalist culture of the United States, and how she integrates Catholicism's tradition of detachment into her work as an activist in order to realize this goal. Adam Smith's theory of sympathy serves as a framework to explain the capitalist's perception of the poor, and why it degrades the poor and excludes them from society. Smith's theory of sympathy is inherently social because sympathy cannot be bestowed upon oneself. The impartial spectator, a metaphor for a psychological mechanism which all people possess, determines one's sympathetic or unsympathetic response to another's emotions by allowing the observer to imagine himself in the other's position in an effort to understand why one feels a certain way. Because one can more naturally imagine another's joy than pain, one more readily sympathizes with the joyous than those in pain. The wealthy exhibit joy more often than the poor; hence, people seek wealth because of its association with joy. Smith's theory of sympathy makes it difficult, if not impossible, for an observer to sympathize with the poor, instead making the poor appear contemptible and pathetic. Because of sympathy's social character, its absence serves to distance the wealthy and the poor from one another. Day hopes to change the negative perceptions the poor and the wealthy hold of one another in order to foster relationship between them. Day employs detachment in three principle ways in order to achieve this end. Focusing on the wealthy's need to understand the realities of poverty, Day advocates detachment from material goods through voluntary poverty. The lived experience of poverty exposes the wealthy to the pain of poverty. Knowing that few would change their lives in such a drastic way, Day also writes prolifically about poverty for The Catholic Worker newspaper, granting her readers an imaginative detachment from their wealth through the knowledge of the hardships of poverty. In Smith's framework, to understand another's situation leads to greater sympathy between peoples. Day adds her own gloss to Smith by saying such understanding, achieved through detachment, ultimately leads to love of God and others. Both voluntary poverty and reading serve to bring the wealthy into relationship with the poor. Day reestablishes the poor's relationship with the wealthy by guaranteeing the poor's privacy through the satisfaction of their immediate needs such as food and shelter. In doing so, Day creates time for the poor to build relationships with others, which are predicated on privacy. Privacy relies on the voluntary relinquishment of information about oneself in order to form relationships. While the detachment of privacy is unlike that of voluntary poverty in that it does not involve bodily deprivation, detachment in both privacy and voluntary poverty work toward the cultivation of relationships. Whereas the poor's attention and time was once dedicated to securing their basic needs for survival, now it is spent satisfying their need for privacy, which is also to say their need for relationship and community. Final reflections consider the Catholic Worker's legacy and its empowerment of the laity within the Roman Catholic Church.