Explore "Dorothy Day: Dissenting Voice of the American Century" by John Loughery on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
JESUS'S OBSERVATION IN MATTHEW 19: 24, in which we are told that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of the needle than for a rich man to find his way into heaven, might well be taken more as metaphor than literal truth (most Americans certainly hope it is a metaphorical statement), but the sentiment behind it is one that Dorothy had come to believe. She had always been unwilling to brush aside biblical admonitions about wealth too quickly or too easily, though in the midst of an economic crisis an emphasis on doing without struck many of her countrymen as bizarre.
Faint glimmerings of that line of thought had not gone entirely unstated in earlier American religious contexts. In 1849, Archbishop John Hughes had delivered to his New York City parishioners one of his most important homilies from the pulpit of St. Patrick's Cathedral. He spoke on the theme of earthly success as potentially at odds with the deepest spirituality. He was addressing men and women who had been told, as Americans who had come of age under Andrew Jackson and James K. Polk, that it was their manifest destiny to prosper-to use all, to take all, to feel pride in their dominance-and to grow rich by the fruit of their ambition and acquisitive labor. Hughes speculated that any individual's attainment of his or her desires to their fullest extent might actually be better taken as a sign of God's disfavor, that some conscious inhibition of one's material success might be essential to a meaningful communion with the Creator. Quakers, Mennonites, Isaac Hecker's Paulist Fathers, and others, of course, had always shared that concern.