[Continued from Chapter Two, Pt.1]
As Neil J. Young notes —
…evangelicals routinely cited Mother Teresa as a model for the Christian life and a living embodiment of the scriptural injunction that ‘faith without works is dead.’1
This was a phenomenon that included the names of famous evangelical scholars like John R.W. Stott,2 perhaps “the most prominent leader of the evangelical movement in England and remarkably influential in evangelical circles in the United States and in many parts of the developing world”3 at the time.
The ubiquity of Mother Teresa’s influence during this time is further noted by Young who explains that during this time period
…evangelicals especially praised Mother Teresa for her unflinching voice against abortion to the world’s secular elites who honored her charitable endeavors, such as when she used her 1979 Nobel Peace Prize address to condemn abortion as the world’s “greatest destroyer of peace” to a flummoxed audience in Stockholm.4
Mother Teresa was an example of how Christians ought to not only show hospitality to those in need, but also oppose social injustice. This was in keeping with her Roman Catholic interpretation of Matt 25:31-46, which she learned early in life from her mother. Tommy Tighe relays the story as follows —
As a young child, Anjezë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu (Mother Teresa) was learning about the Gospel from her mother, and was given a simple reminder about how the entire Gospel can be summarized on five fingers. Her mother held up her five fingers and counted off a word on each one:
“You. Did. It. To Me.”
These five simple words, taken from Chapter 25 of the Gospel of Matthew, contained everything young Anjezë’s mother felt she needed to know in order to live a life in accordance with the teaching of Jesus: “Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did it to me.”5
Mother Teresa’s belief in the “five-finger gospel” persisted through her childhood, into her young adult years when she, at eighteen years old, left home to join “the Sisters of Loreto, an Irish community of nuns with missions in India.”6
Yet at this time, Mother Teresa was not only the majorly influential Roman Catholic who had also come to understand Matt 25:31-46 as teaching the “five-finger gospel.” Among Mother Teresa’s contemporaries, we find Roman Catholic social justice advocate Dorothy Day, a woman who, like Mother Teresa, “from a young age…was connected to the plight of those facing social injustice.”7 Day and Teresa met “one another on different occasions and developed a longstanding relationship,”8 according to Nicholas Rademacher, which entailed sharing the stage at speaking engagements touching upon the issues of social justice, women and the liturgy, and devotion to the Eucharist.9
Yet unlike Teresa who joined a convent very early into her adult life (18 yrs old), Tighe notes, as a young woman Day first attempted to fight “social injustice” by joining the communists, as her “drive to help the least of her brothers and sisters defined her existence.”10 After her conversion, this drive “only intensified…Her dedication to the Sermon on the Mount and helping Jesus in the least of these transformed her life.”11
Day sought to help “the least of these” by “starting the Catholic Worker Houses of Hospitality alongside [her mentor] Peter Maurin in the 1930s.”12 For many who would follow in her footsteps — evangelical and catholic alike — she “provided a road map for giving up one’s entire life in order to help Jesus Himself, finding Him in all the poor and suffering who came to her for help.”13 Strongly committed to using “radical hospitality” in this manner, Day eventually became a Benedictine oblate in 1955, promising to “live out the spiritual values reflected in the Rule of St. Benedict in so far as” her life permitted.14
Like Teresa, whose practice of “radical hospitality” to “the least of these” primarily consisted in showing “love and care for those persons nobody was prepared to look after,”15 Day sought to change the existing social order through the establishment of “Houses of Hospitality,” places where “works of mercy could be performed”16 for “the poor, the dispossessed, the exploited.”17 As Day explains, in order for her and her constituents to change the existing social order
It was not enough just to publish a monthly paper, pamphlets and leaflets. It was not enough to convey by word of mouth in round table discussion the program of a new social order. It was necessary to embrace voluntary poverty and the Works of Mercy, to feed, clothe and shelter people who were in need.18
Moreover, like Mother Teresa, Day influenced many professing Christians (Evangelicals and Catholics alike). Casey Cep notes that “by the time she died, in 1980,” four years after the publication of Mains’ Open Heart, Open Home, “Day had become one of the most prominent thinkers of the left and doers of the right.”19 Indeed, her influence is still being felt today. Cep writes —
The Catholic Worker Movement still exists, with nearly two hundred houses of hospitality around the world and a newspaper that is still published and sold for a penny (plus postage if you take it by mail), and it still evangelizes for the “personalist” approach—those revolutions of the heart. But Day’s influence is also felt in the Democratic Socialists of America, the insurgent political organization that was founded in the nineteen-seventies by Michael Harrington, who had been an editor at the Catholic Worker in the early fifties, but who left after losing his faith.20
Day also influenced TGH, albeit indirectly, through the writing of Christine D. Pohl, whose book Making Room: Recovering Hospitality as a Christian Tradition is also recommended by Butterfield. Pohl references Day’s ideas and practices numerous times throughout the book, and explicitly notes the great impact Day has had on the “recovery” of the traditional understanding of Christian hospitality. Pohl writes —
The extensive wisdom gained from Catholic Worker experience and the gifted persons attracted to the movement have helped to generate a very significant literature on the practice and meaning of Catholic Worker hospitality. In fact, the recovery of the richer, moral meaning of the term “hospitality” and its place within the ancient Christian tradition is most connected with the writings and witness of the Catholic Worker movement.21
Teresa and Day’s utilization of “radical hospitality” as means of converting individuals to Catholicism and, consequently, transforming the structure of society was rooted in a common source, namely Catholic Social Teaching, which Day learned from French thinker and activist Peter Maurin.
[Continued in Chapter Two, Pt.3]
We Gather Together: The Religious Right and the Problem of Interfaith Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 187.
See Stott, John R.W. “Setting the Spirit Free,” in Christianity Today, June 12, 1981, 17–21.
Chapman, Allister. “The Educated Evangelicalism of John Stott”, Westmont Magazine, Oct 2008, https://www.westmont.edu/educated-evangelicalism-john-stott.
Young, We Gather Together, 187.
Tighe, Tommy. “Dorothy Day, Mother Teresa, and the 5-Finger Gospel”, Aleteia, April 21, 2017, https://aleteia.org/2017/04/21/dorothy-day-mother-teresa-and-the-5-finger-gospel/. (emphasis added)
“Mother Teresa — Biographical”, The Nobel Prize, https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/1979/teresa/biographical/.
Tighe, Dorothy Day, Mother Teresa.
“‘To Relate the Eucharist to Real Living’: Mother Teresa and Dorothy Day at the Forty-First International Eucharistic Congress, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania”, in U.S. Catholic Historian, Vol. 27, No. 4, (Fall, 2009), 59-60.
ibid., cf. 60-61ff. See also Moore Cecilia A. “To Serve Christ Serve Through Compelling Love”: The Society of Christ Our King and the Civil Rights Movement in Danville, Virginia, 1963”, in U.S. Catholic Historian Vol. 24, No. 4, (Fall, 2006), 83-103.
Dorothy Day, Mother Teresa.(emphasis added)
ibid. (emphasis added)
ibid.
ibid. (emphasis added)
“Dorothy Day & the Catholic Worker Movement: Dorothy Day: Benedictine Oblate”, Benedictine University Library, https://researchguides.ben.edu/day/abbey.
The Nobel Prize, Mother Teresa.
Amato, Rebecca. “Why are we interested in Dorothy Day?”, The Cooper Square Community Land Trust History Project, May 4, 2018, https://wp.nyu.edu/land/2018/05/04/who-was-dorothy-day/.
ibid.
House of Hospitality, Catholic Worker, 1, https://www.catholicworker.org/dorothyday/articles/342.pdf.
“Dorothy Day’s Radical Faith”, The New Yorker, Apr 6, 2020, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/04/13/dorothy-days-radical-faith. (emphasis added)
ibid. (emphasis added)
Making Room: Recovering Hospitality as a Christian Tradition (United Kingdom: Eerdmans, 1999), 192. (emphasis added)