Rending the Mystical Body of Christ

U.S. News and World Report has a story today about Pope Benedict's upcoming visit to the U.S. and the tensions in the American Catholic church between liberals and conservatives. In some dioceses and some churches, the status of things is more than tense. Forty years ago, Dorothy Day wrote about fear and how it divides us.

I have seen two mental hospitals where people rend themselves; it is a horrible sight. Our conscientious objectors worked in one, a place without hope where one man had to be permanently tied down to his bed because he tore at his own flesh. He had already put out his own eyes. The Mystical Body of Christ [is] rending itself in this way. It seems to me that these are the kind of things we must meditate on.

It is not worthwhile writing or speaking unless you say what is in your heart and say it as you see things. This is the way. This is what converts expect when they come into the Church and they find it in the lives of the saints who accept the idea of death in whatever form it takes. We say all these things in our prayers and don't mean them. And God takes us at our word, fortunately, and so we are saved in spite of ourselves; we are just dragged in by the hair of the head. But this is the message that we try to give at the Catholic Worker. It is painful to speak of and that is one of the reasons we rejoice in tribulation, we rejoice in suffering and so we can speak in those terms.

- Originally published as "Fear in Our Time" by Dorothy Day,
The Catholic Worker, April 1968, 5, 7. Available in full (DOC #253) at the Dorothy Day Library on the Web at http://www.catholicworker.org/dorothyday/