Dorothy Day on the masses vs. the people
It's people who are important
The founder of the Catholic Worker movement in the early thirties with her friend and mentor Peter Maurin, Dorothy Day lived an intensely communal life, which had its joys as well as great trials, which she describes in her diaries, published as The Vatican has declared her a Servant of God, the step in the process of canonization. The first quote is taken from her diaries (December 1944), published as The Duty of Delight, the second from her autobiography The Long Loneliness.
I.
The pope has pointed out in his Christmas message this year the distinction between the masses and the people and these words called down the wrath of Stalin. The masses, insensate, unthinking, moved by propaganda, by unscrupulous rulers, by Stalins and Hitlers, are quite a different thing from the people, temples of the Holy Ghost, made to the image and likeness of God.
But the term “the masses” had become a holy term, part of the opiate of the people. It was a holy idea, the dictatorship of the proletariat. The masses had the idea of the masses — something which moved this insensate mass to emotion, to holy wrath, to zeal, frenzy.
It gave them faith in themselves — a belief that representatives of that inchoate mass were representing them, a living, breathing, collective soul. The idea dispelled the loneliness with which each one of us is afflicted, it dispelled the sense of our helplessness, our hopelessness.
II.
There is so much more to the Catholic Worker Movement than labor and capital. It is people who are important, not the masses. When I read Pope Pius XII’s Christmas message, in which he distinguished between the masses and the people, I almost wished I had named our publication The People, instead of The Catholic Worker.
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