Radical Subsidiarity

In the September/October 2006 Houston Catholic Worker, Geoffrey Gneuhs, who served as chaplain to the New York Catholic Worker near the end of Dorothy Day's life, has an article entitled "Dorothy Day's Unsentimental Spirituality."  Here is an excerpt:  "For Dorothy the works of mercy were the way to incarnate Christ in daily life: she honored the sacramentality of life.  It gave her joy that the little acts in creation bespeak God's eternal love.  And we must not wait.  She maintained that in modernity governments and bureaucracies had usurped - and very inadequately - our responsibility for our brothers and sisters. ... The "servile state," or welfare state, she said, citing Hilaire Belloc, was the breakdown of community, depersonalization, and loneliness.  Our I-poded, blackberryed, self-absorbed culture has no time for the other in need, for the other who might just inconvenience us."