Bless Me, Father

By Jay - Ottawa

The following chapter is from a story (fiction) with 9/11 as its backdrop.  A group of priests from the New York City diocese is holding its monthly breakfast meeting at "Ribbons," a fancy restaurant located on the top two floors of the North Tower.

  

BLESS ME, FATHER

A few dozen priests from the archdiocese had reserved a windowless private dining room on the lower level for a prayer breakfast.  They were the canon lawyers of the diocese who had assembled to learn more about the sins of liberation theology.  By now the Eggs Benedict had been disappeared, the whiskey sours drained away, and the speaker’s talk run out of words.  The priests in their dark suits and Roman collars pushed back their chairs to stand mess hall style on both sides of the long linen-covered table.  With heads bowed, they waited for the most senior among them to trigger the recitation of ‘Grace after Meals.’

That would have been Monsignor Reilly:  “We give Thee thanks––”

Everybody chimed in “––for all Thy benefits, O Lord, and may the souls of the faithful departed rest in peace, amen.”

That was the moment the plane struck.  Smoke began to filter into their little dining room.  They waited for a waiter to return to show them the way to safety, but no one came.  The men of God were on their own.  As the smoke thickened, quick thinkers got busy placing wet tablecloths over vents and at the base of doors.  Smoke filtered in less rapidly, and that was good.

“Down on the floor; the air is better,” said one, and these mostly middle-aged and out-of-shape men went down clumsily on their knees and then down on their bellies.  The smoke grew thicker and more poisonous.  Mother of God, it stings!  The floor became uncomfortably warm.  Lord in heaven, this heat!  A few priests pushed themselves back up on their knees but found the smoke worse than the heat.  God help us!  Dry hacking coughs multiplied and grew louder.  O Christ!  The coughing and choking reached a crescendo.  This was the end and they knew it.  As if it were written in the program they began to pair off for last confessions.  Jesu!  The smoke did not hold back until everyone had finished with his last confession.  Several penitents lost consciousness before they came to the end of their declarations.  The loud coughing began to taper off as, one by one, priests lay their heads down on the carpet and quietly expired.

As luck would have it, Monsignor Reilly’s most likely confessor, who had sat at his right hand through the breakfast, happened to be the oldest man in the room.  Father Eusebius Weber’s tired heart gave out before Reilly even finished reciting the sacrament’s opening formula.  Reilly, alas, was very much not in the state of grace.  He had to get clean of something before he stumbled into eternity.  A great fear took hold of him; adrenalin flooded his veins and kept him going.  He began to crawl around on his elbows looking for another priest who was still conscious.  “Hey, Hey! … C’mon!”  He poked one still form after another without success and kept moving.  How many seconds were left to him before he was in eternity looking at the whole of it forever?  And with his record, still unconfessed and unforgiven.

Providentially, he bumped into Father DiSimone.  Anthony DeSimone was the captain of the diocesan golf team and a natural athlete.  That summer, through a careful selection of opponents in the rich suburbs, the diocesan team had won thousands of dollars for the chancery, which was the bishop’s headquarters where Reilly served as chancellor.  DiSimone was now holding a wet napkin over his nose and mouth, but Reilly recognized those eyes, such remarkable pale blue eyes, from the time Reilly had been director of the diocesan seminary and DiSimone a young seminarian.

“Tony, good lad, thank God you’re here,” Reilly rasped in a high-pitched chipmunk voice.  “Quick, hear my confession.”  He put his face down to cough into the carpet only to suck in more smoke.

Father DiSimone’s pale blue eyes looked back over the napkin.  He lowered the napkin when Monsignor Reilly raised his head.  “I can imagine what you want to confess, Monsignor.  I was one of your toy boys at the seminary, remember?  Every day now I wipe the muck off my soul.”

Reilly’s throat burned, his lungs begged for oxygen.  “For the love of Christ, Tony, forgive!”  DiSimone stared back with the flat affect of an athlete, loose and relaxed before the next play.  Reilly, on the other hand, grew more frantic.  “Absolution, Tony, please.  Sign of the cross.  Just say the words.”

 Father DiSimone took a breath to say something but was interrupted by his own fit of coughing.  When it stopped he looked back at the monsignor to whisper in a hoarse but unhurried voice, “Fuck you, Reilly.  And I’m sure I speak for others."

Bernie Rising

One of the media and Democratic establishments' favorite reasons for why Bernie Sanders cannot possibly win the party's nomination is because he lacks African-American support. 

Ever since there has been a Clintonland, there has been the ironclad conventional wisdom that Black voters just l-o-o-o-ve Bill and Hill. It was only the emergence of Barack Obama that temporarily redirected the love away from them.

That this has largely been a myth of their own making is evidenced by a brand new poll showing Hillary's support among Black voters in a virtual free-fall, while Bernie's numbers are soaring. They are rising far more precipitously than the Establishment could ever have dreamed, predicted -- or, to be honest, dreaded:

Suffolk/USA Today Poll

Bernie's favorability rating among black Democrats is 31 points up, while Hillary's numbers are 31 points down. This is triple the increase in her negatives among white Democrats. Bernie's drastically improved numbers also mesh nicely with the fact that a lot more voters know about him now than they did three months ago. (thanks in large part to the obvious corporate news blackout of his campaign.)

As Philip Bump of the Washington Post notes, this is only one poll and the numbers might also be reflective of that netherworld where voters are still trying to make up their minds. But this poll has got to be making the Clintonites nervous and Sanders supporters elated.

And now that Sanders' fundraising has outpaced even that of Obama's 2008 race during the same pre-primary quarter, the mighty New York Times has been forced to begin taking him seriously. Because money talks, even if the corporate media still religiously avoid talking about his actual platform and policy ideas in anything close to a detailed, positive and respectful manner.

Their backtracking/feigned innocence is pretty hilarious. For example, the Times' Patrick Healy disingenuously wrote yesterday: 

Mr. Sanders was initially dismissed by political insiders as a fringe candidate running only to push Hillary Rodham Clinton to the left. But he has now demonstrated that he has the resources and the supporters, whom he has only begun to tap financially, to compete for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Notice the self-serving passive voice. Notice the lack of the Times' ownership of its own complicity in the orchestrated denigration of Bernie Sanders. That they are now according him a modicum of respect based solely on the money he has in the bank is a testament to their own corruption and shallowness.

And the hit jobs will still keep coming, of course. The most egregious piece has got to be the one this week by the Washington Post's David Farenthold, who claims that not only would a President Sanders be a runaway big spender: He would be an authoritarian control freak aiming to shove universal health care and free college tuition down our throats. Did I mention that Farenthold is employed as a putative reporter, not as a columnist? (I wrote about this right-wing slimeball hack a year ago, after his hit job on Job Corps led to the closure of one of its training sites by the Obama Labor Department.)


Maybe we won't even need to repeal Citizens United if Bernie Sanders is elected president. Maybe Money-Speech will just crawl into a dusty corner somewhere and die of its own loathsome, misbegotten accord. Maybe the plutocrats will realize that their cash can't buy everything and everybody after all.

The Pope and the Predators

My Pope balloon had already begun to deflate days before the news burst that Pope Francis (or his Vatican minions, or his Vatican enemies) sneaked homophobia poster girl Kim Davis across a phalanx of armed militia guarding his Washington embassy digs for a private, top-secret embrace with him.

At first it looked as though the story of the Pope's meeting with the Kentucky clerk who went to jail rather than issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples was either made up out of holy cloth, or wildly exaggerated by her own handlers. But then the Vatican grudgingly admitted that not only had a private meeting indeed taken place, but that the Pope himself had reached out to Kim Davis. And that everybody was sworn to secrecy until Francis was safely back home in Rome.

Holy Hypocrisy!

But what had really precipitated my own descent from the national Papal High was his meeting on Thursday with Stephen Schwarzman in a Harlem parochial school. This multibillionaire vulture capitalist -- whose own personal dogma is More Money, More Power, More-ality -- had awarded millions of dollars (chump change for him) in scholarships to students, and thus bought himself a post-modern plenary indulgence in the form of a greedwashing photo-op of himself being personally blessed by the People's Pope.

If Kim Davis is the poster girl for homophobes, Shwarzman is the poster boy for plutocratic supremacists. He's as much a self-dealing martyr as she is, whining regularly that billionaires like him are the real victims of the class war. He is infamous for having once compared tycoons too-mildly taxed by the government to Jews persecuted by the Nazis.

" Back in 2010," wrote Paul Krugman last year in a column called Paranoia of the Plutocrats, "Stephen Schwarzman, the chairman and chief executive of the Blackstone Group, declared that proposals to eliminate tax loopholes for hedge fund and private-equity managers were 'like when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939'".

And from a profile of Schwarzman in New York magazine:

Steve Schwarzman is a perfect poster boy for this age of greed, sharklike, perpetually grinning, a tiny Gordon Gekko without the hair product. In Palm Beach (where he bought a historic landmark house for $20.5 million and tore it down), he eats his three-course lunches (including $400 stone crabs) in less than fifteen minutes and complains about the squeaky rubber soles of a servant’s shoes. Once, in the presence of a Times reporter, he buzzed a man to bring coffee, then stalked off to dress down the servant—“I called you six times.”

The Pope and the Plute (Instagram Photo by #scentfully sue)

  As if pandering to and blessing a financial predator was not enough of a slap in the face of decency, Pope Francis then proceeded to inform the students that the biggest threat to their happiness is not the wealth inequality engendered by robber barons like Schwarzman -- but an invisible demon.

Mephistopheles Flying over Wittenberg (Delacroix)

From the translated transcript of his talk to the assembled poor students, parents, politicians, potentates and plutocrats:

 “Who is the one who sows sadness, who sows distrust, who sows envy, who sows evil desires? What is his name? The devil, the devil! The devil always sows sadness because he doesn't want us happy, he doesn't want us to dream."

Holy Hell!  It brings a whole new meaning to Feeling the Bern. Schwarzman must feel so happy to have been absolved, his guilt deflected to a make-believe boogeyman.

From my feeling of euphoria that this new Pope was someone refreshing and different, it was a jolting downer of a deja vu trip back to my days in Catholic school when Sister Mary Mean would regularly warn us that chewing the communion wafer instead of gagging it down whole was a mortal sin punishable by eternal damnation and third degree burns. Listening to the Pope's spiel at Our Lady Queen of Angels suddenly revived memories of all the hellish episodes that had caused me to become a born-again Lapsed Catholic in the first place.

So regardless of whether the Pope's meeting with Kim Davis turns out to have been a vast right wing media conspiracy, or a set-up job by conservative clerics designed to deliberately harsh his mellow among liberals, I am still sticking with secular humanism. Pope Francis knew full well that the well-dressed oligarchs sitting in the front rows at all his gigs were not ordinary folk.

I've since learned that besides rightly calling capitalism "the dung of the devil," Pope Francis is a die-hard believer in Satan as an actual, living being capable of physically possessing actual, living beings. (Right up there with the belief of the majority of the American people, I might add.) Even some Catholic scholars think that he goes a bit too far with the hell fetish, as he blames everything from the Mexican drug wars to the Middle East conflagrations on Old Nick instead of on Wall Street, the pharmaceutical industry and the military-industrial complex. His ascension to the throne of Saint Peter has also sparked a steep rise during the past few years in the number of people seeking exorcisms.

The next thing you know, we'll hear that he had a secret meeting with Linda Blair while he was in town.

Meanwhile, the  establishment has seized upon the Pope's meeting with Kim Davis as the latest political chapter in the Culture Wars saga. New York Times editorialist Francis X. Clines writes,

 In his address to Congress, the pope was diplomatic in alluding to the church’s firm and well known opposition to same-sex marriage, maintaining, “fundamental relationships are being called into question, as is the very basis of marriage and the family.” But in his decision to seek out Ms. Davis, Pope Francis seemed to suggest the Vatican was willing to get more involved in the politics of the issue. The papal invitation will hardly diminish Ms. Davis’s standing as a national celebrity and rallying figure for those opposed to the legalization of same-sex marriage, including some Republican candidates for president who sought to share her spotlight. While in Washington, she confirmed that she had left the Democratic party and become a Republican. Her attorney said they eagerly awaited a photographic record of the papal meeting from the Vatican.

My published response:

 Not only did the Pope meet with Kim Davis, the Vatican decreed that the visit be kept secret until he was safely gone. The cover-up is just as bad as the meeting itself. It makes the Pope look like just another self-interested politician with a hidden agenda. It makes the Church look like just another corporation more concerned about forging a new public image than in rooting out its own greed and corruption and entrenched hypocrisy.

My Pope balloon had already begun to deflate when Francis visited a Harlem school and warned little children about "the devil" instead of warning them about the vulture capitalists and politicians standing right next to them in the room. Too many rich and influential people were able to buy themselves their own P.R. camera time and co-opt the same poor people they regularly ignore or blame in their capacity as power brokers. The Pope should have chased those money changers right out of that school and performed an exorcism of the real-life demon of Wall Street while he was in town. Instead, he sold medieval superstition to little kids. It was cringe-worthy, and anti-Enlightenment.

That being said, I do champion Kim Davis's right to stay strong and believe in whatever she wants. But instead of complaining and making a martyr out of herself, she should resign her public post and find a job where she doesn't have to be in contact with the good people she seems to find so distasteful. A cloister and a vow of silence might be just the ticket.

Thanks to the Pope, the miscreants of politics and finance and war can exorcise themselves of those tired old minima culpas known as "mistakes were made" and "nobody could ever have predicted."  

Now they can just shrug their shoulders, claim that the Devil made them do it, and condemn the rest of us to a living hell while they bribe and stampede their own way into Paradise.

Blessed Steve Schwarzman's $42 million estate (Mephistopheles-eye view)

Down and Out in the Homeland

Morale has gotten so bad over at DHS, they should probably make the initials stand for Depressed Hacky-Sacks.

Jeh Johnson, chief of the Department of Homeland Security, says he is very dejected about the low happiness scores of his minions, who scored the lowest of the low in job satisfaction among all federal government agencies. He has therefore announced a brand new initiative designed to instill some gladness into his airport gropers as well as putting all that lost disaster fun back into FEMA.

Only half the DHS workers surveyed scored well in the "engagement" category, with about the same percentage proclaiming themselves less than "globally satisfied." This is 10 percent lower than 2010's globally satisfied engagement scores. 

Do you suspect that the low scores might have as much to do with respondents not knowing what the hell these questions even mean as with how happy they are making $10 an hour patting down passengers in Airport Security Theater?  Do you ever even have the time to stop and ponder about how engaged and globally satisfied you are as you schlep through your own crappy job?

The Washington Post has the whole sorry scoop:

Even worse, DHS fell 1 percent in both categories this year, despite a frenzy of morale-boosting efforts including an employee steering committee dedicated to fairness in hiring and promotions, enhanced employee training programs and Johnson’s department-wide “Unity of Effort” initiative, designed to tackle the department’s management challenges. DHS’s struggles with employee morale date back to its creation during the George W. Bush administration, when 22 autonomous agencies were plucked from across the government and welded into one department.

That pretty much explains the morale issues. Who wouldn't be disgruntled after being plucked like a free-range chicken and then welded into one hot stinking cage on a factory farm? The CIA is not the only agency that knows how to "torture some folks." I suppose that we, the public, can at least gain some satisfaction knowing that the fine folks spying on our Occupy protests from their DHS fusion centers feel as miserable and down and out as the rest of us. Maybe they should just join us after they finish beating us. 

Maybe their global satisfaction scores will improve if Jeh Johnson gives them cuddly global hacky-sacks to kick around during breaks from operating their Rapiscan machines at the airport.

Better yet, Congress might disband Homeland Security, declare the War on Terror over, take its multi-billion dollar budget and reallocate it for health care, education and infrastructure. Sad DHS workers would get retrained for other jobs -- say, as teachers and nurses and architects and construction workers.

But Jeh Johnson apparently likes his own job title, and is not giving up. The Boss is going to shove the morale down their throats whether they like it or not:

Johnson, who took over the sprawling domestic security agency in December 2013, pronounced himself “disappointed that our efforts to improve employee satisfaction at DHS were not reflected Department-wide in this year’s results of the Federal Employee Viewpoint survey. ”But the former Pentagon General Counsel said he was “not discouraged.” In a public statement and a department-wide email, he told employees that he and Deputy DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas “will not give up.  We know that improving employee satisfaction across a 22-component, 240,000-person department takes time. ”

He proudly noted, moreover, that the people working in his own office are 85 percent globally satisfied with their jobs. Their jobs depend upon their satisfaction. Jeh Johnson is not about to allow any sad-sack hacks within an inch of his own joyful presence.

CBS vs. Social Security

Scott Pelley of CBS seemed just as flabbergasted at Donald Trump's vow to protect Social Security as he was at the candidate's vow to deport 11 million people and build a cheap but gorgeous border wall the likes of which you've never seen.

Here's the snippet of last night's 60 Minutes interview with Trump that you might have missed in all the frenzied back-and-forth between one billionaire and one media representative of many billionaires:

Scott Pelley: In your book, "The America We Deserve" you proposed raising the social security retirement age to 70. Is that still your plan?

Donald Trump: Yeah, not anymore because now what I want to do is take money back from other countries that are killing us and I want to save social security. And we're going to save it without increases. We're not going to raise the age and it will be just fine.

Scott Pelley: How are you going to do that? It is a basket case.

Donald Trump: Through capability. We will set it set it up by making our country rich again.

This is not the first time CBS has gone after Social Security. Although Pelley never bothered to back up his specious claim that our national retirement program is "a basket case," his network (and to be fair, the other five media conglomerates that control 90 percent of all publicly broadcast information in this country) have long hawked the same line that not only is the Social Security trust fund going broke, but the whole system is riddled with incompetence, fraud, and abuse.

Just last March, Pelley and CBS aired a hit job accusing the Social Security Administration of being so inept and evil that its flawed master list is composed of zombie hordes of dead people still collecting benefits, as well as living people who have falsely been declared dead. To bolster his case, Pelley dug up four fine, upstanding (and white ) taxpayers who had inadvertently made the Dead List. These fine people became subject to credit checks, Homeland Security terror watch lists and false arrests all because of some stupid New Deal entitlement program that Wall Street has a mean hankering to become entitled to.

Pelley implied that the clerical errors popping up every now and then within a database of about half a billion citizens were more than simple, rectifiable clerical errors. He implied that his "news" program came up with the mistakes based upon its own relentless digging and muckraking -- even though the occasional individual horror story about a Social Security mistake has been about as common as the inevitable clerical error. Moreover, one of the undead victims he showcased had already been slated to testify before a congressional Homeland Security panel made up of some of the same right-wing politicians who look for any excuse to cut benefits and raise the retirement age.

As Michael Hiltzik of the Los Angeles Times wrote about that segment, Pelley's reactionary political agenda became all too clear when he never bothered to tell viewers how to rectify things should they ever find themselves wrongfully plunked on the Death List: 

The tax policy and regulatory expert David Cay Johnston further suggests that any institution using the DMF to make consumer decisions be automatically informed if a customer files a protest with Social Security and be made responsible for updating the information once Social Security makes its ruling, with stiff fines for delay or inaction. Any consumers who run into problems with banks or card issuers should have an absolute right to inspect the institution's DMF file on them, at no cost.

That should solve the problem for the relatively small percentage of people caught in this net. "60 Minutes" could have performed a real service by asking its sources in the Senate why Congress hasn't taken these steps in the six or seven years since news organizations started reporting on it.

Two years ago, 60 Minutes' Steve Kroft (with the help of another right-wing zombie politician, Republican Tom Coburn) broadcast a particularly loathsome hit job on the alleged fraud and abuse within the Social Security disability benefits program. The gist of it was that a huge cabal of malingerers and corrupt doctors and lawyers are all in cahoots to bilk the taxpayers who actually contribute to society.  As a result, the whole disability system is a "basket case."

Although this 60 Minutes report was widely debunked and castigated at the time that it aired, it served its purpose. It planted the seed in the public's mind that sick and disabled people are a confederacy of fakers. It divides and conquers, setting up yet another front in the battle of the Makers vs. the Takers.

The contrived division between the Deserving Poor and the Undeserving Poor is as old as plutocracy itself. This deflects attention away from the undeserving rich, who derive most of their incomes from rents, interest, investments, the labor of the poor... and government welfare and deferred prosecution agreements.

Only four months before the disability hit job aired, Scott Pelley and CBS gave the unindicted Wall Street billionaire and "thought leader" Lloyd Blankfein a free platform from which to inform the masses that their "entitlements must be contained."

The smarmy Pelley was suitably awed and humbled as he was allowed into the man-cave of Goldman Sachs, gushing during the segment: "An interview with Lloyd Blankfein is as rare as a look inside the Goldman Sachs money machine. He showed us one of seven trading floors at his Manhattan headquarters. Goldman is one of America's most successful investment banks. It had net earnings of $4.4 billion dollars last year. When we asked Blankfein how to reduce the federal budget deficit, he went straight for the subject politicians don't want to talk about."

BLANKFEIN: You're going to have to undoubtedly do something to lower people's expectations -- the entitlements and what people think that they're going to get, because it's not going to -- they're not going to get it.

PELLEY: Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid?

BLANKFEIN: You can look at history of these things, and Social Security wasn't devised to be a system that supported you for a 30-year retirement after a 25-year career. ... So there will be things that, you know, the retirement age has to be changed, maybe some of the benefits have to be affected, maybe some of the inflation adjustments have to be revised. But in general, entitlements have to be slowed down and contained.

PELLEY: Because we can't afford them going forward?

BLANKFEIN: Because we can't afford them.

Notice the stark difference in tone between Pelley's interview with Trump (scolding, confrontational) and Blankfein (admiring, obsequious).

Actually, what we really can't afford are super-rich people like Lloyd Blankfein and groveling propagandists like Scott Pelley who swallow whole the specious claim that the undeserving hordes are retiring in their forties and living large on the Social Security dime.

Of course, Pelley operates neither independently nor in a vacuum. His continued employment as publicist for the elites hinges upon sucking up to the rich and powerful.

His own boss, CBS chief Les Moonves (net worth a mere $300 million) recently found himself in the awkward position of refusing to tip a parking valet at the birthday bash of his boss (billionaire Sumner Redstone) because all he had in his wallet were $100 bills. And guess who was forced to apologize for the awkwardness? The valet, of course. Because his continued employment as a servant paying into the Social Security trust fund depends upon how well he has mastered the fine art of groveling.

The racketeers of the ruling class ignore the reality that over the course of a lifetime, most people do become physically vulnerable. It's nature. It's called being human. It is called being a child. It is called getting sick or injured in early adulthood or middle age. It is called getting old. Yet CBS hacks and flacks and the oligarchs they serve  all selfishly ignore the reality that Social Security is a program that ordinary people have contributed to all their working lives. 

Contrary to all the Randian propaganda, the government safety net is not a handout or an entitlement. It is a basic human right. 

And Social Security is not broke. What the plutocrats are trying to break into pieces is the social contract itself. Social Security could be rendered solvent into perpetuity and benefits could be expanded if  wealth is taxed at the same rate as work. If Lloyd Blankfein and the Forbes 400 were required to pay FICA taxes on their entire incomes instead of just the first $100,000 or so, any minor shortfall problem could be solved within a New York minute.

"What thoughtful rich people call the problem of poverty, thoughtful poor people call with equal justice a problem of riches." -- R.H. Tawney.

What a Difference a Day Makes

Dorothy who? the pundits asked after Pope Francis included Dorothy Day in his most admired quartet of US citizens in his speech to Congress. (the others are Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr and Thomas Merton.)

Having just briefly mentioned Dorothy Day myself in the blog comments the other day, I was pleased, but not at all surprised, to learn that the radical Pope is also a huge fan of the radical social justice crusader.

 She started her professional life in the early 20th century as a novelist, Hollywood screenwriter, intellectual, anarchist, muckraking  journalist, and feminist. She underwent one abortion and also gave birth to an out-of-wedlock child whom she raised as a single mother among the destitute and anguished and sometimes dangerous in various makeshift "hospitality houses" in New York City after her conversion to Catholicism at the eve of the Great Depression. She combined a more than half-century career in direct social work and pacifism and labor organizing and communal farming with the founding of the Catholic Worker movement and running its newspaper. She was often out of favor with the Catholic Church hierarchy and the political establishment, particularly when she opposed the USA's entry into World War Two. She was arrested and jailed numerous times after such acts of civil disobedience as draft card burnings and blockades of Selective Service buildings during the Vietnam war.

The Catholic Worker, published to this very day, is still anti-war in the age of public acquiescence to perpetual war. It still sells for only one penny per copy plus postage, or 25 cents for a year's subscription.

A compilation of personal diaries spanning Dorothy Day's career during the Catholic Worker movement years was recently published, after having been kept under wraps, at her own request, for 25 years following her death in 1980. She was far from a perfect person, and was the first to admit that she often felt like a shrew and a slattern. She suffered from bouts of depression. She was totally human. She is still eminently "relatable".

To give you an idea of the woman, I've gathered together several particularly striking passages from her diary, the book version of which is called The Duty of Delight from a quote by the great British critic and humanist John Ruskin. Compare Dorothy Day's writings to those of MLK, Pope Francis, Gandhi and other great moral leaders of the modern world, and you will see a very common thread of humanity and empathy that transcends dogma and denomination. A fire and brimstone, holier-than-thou control freak she definitely was not.

Her off-the-cuff 1930s Great Depression jottings are particularly apt for our own times:

"As I came down the street afterward, (from visiting a friend in jail) a well dressed priest drove by in a big car. Then I passed another - also well dressed, comfortable.... Then still another out in front of most luxurious mansion, the parish house, playing with a dog on a leash. All of them well fed, well housed, comfortable, caring for the safe people like themselves. And where are the priests for the poor, the down and out, the sick in city hospitals, in jails. It is the little of God's children who do not get cared for. God help them and God help the priest who is caught in the bourgeois system and cannot get out."  

"In this groaning of spirit everything is irksome to me. The dirt, the garbage heaped in the gutters, the flies, the hopelessness of the human beings around me, all oppress me." 

"Toothaches, bruised faces even, received in street fighting, are ugly and grotesque. It is hard to heroically receive blows in the face from a policeman, for instance, and take it like a Christian, in the spirit of non-resistance. A spirit of hatred and a fierce desire for retaliation seems more manly, more human. Moral force being hard to see, is a thousand times harder than physical force. Strength of spirit is not so often felt to be apparent as strength of body. And we in our vanity wish this strength to be apparent. Human respect again. And yet moral force is always felt."

"I was thinking afterward how everyone dwells on our poverty. But we are not nearly poor enough. Read Steinbeck's article on squatters in California. It is not enough to present a picture of conditions. One must go there to share that poverty. Then others will help. Immediate works of mercy shows what can be done now, not waiting for the revolution or for the state. Strip oneself here first. We are going to the bean fields this summer."

"I sat up late reading a detective story. Rather depressed at first what with dirty dishes, children, Mrs. B (a complaining client) and general effusiveness.... The poor. To love to be with the poor is of course hard. There are not all poor among us, and only one poor family. Of course, dirt, inefficiency, dullness, lack of taste, beauty, culture - all these are a part of poverty. Are they poor because of this lack in them, or do these characteristics grow out of their poverty? Who can say? It will be hard to change them because we are poor now ourselves. Are we letting it get us? Are there those among us who are becoming dull, dirty, lethargic, listless, indolent, slothful?"

As Robert Ellsberg, the editor of her diaries, writes in the introduction,

Dorothy Day's life at the Catholic Worker was marked by a number of remarkable episodes, and she was a witness or participant in many of the most significant social movements of the 20th century. But by and large, her life was spent in very ordinary ways. Her sanctity -- if one wishes to call it that -- was expressed not just in heroic deeds but also in the mundane duties of everyday life. Her 'spirituality' was rooted in a constant effort to be more charitable toward those closest at hand.

A prisoner rights advocate and a staunch opponent of racism, Dorothy Day would have been right at home in today's social justice movements. She would also be against the man-made pollution causing climate change and the war on terror with its transformation of the world into a permanent battlefield. She would have been right up there with the only non-applause line in Pope Francis's speech to Congress:

Being at the service of dialogue and peace also means being truly determined to minimize and, in the long term, to end the many armed conflicts throughout our world. Here we have to ask ourselves: Why are deadly weapons being sold to those who plan to inflict untold suffering on individuals and society? Sadly, the answer, as we all know, is simply for money: money that is drenched in blood, often innocent blood. In the face of this shameful and culpable silence, it is our duty to confront the problem and to stop the arms trade.

An Inconvenient Pope

Corporate media coverage of the Pope's visit to the USA is being framed around two main issues: how it will impact the artificial, wedge issue-based political gridlock in Washington, and how it will cause traffic gridlock in New York City.

News that the world's second largest car maker has engaged in an epic criminal conspiracy to bypass anti-pollution emissions laws is vying with news about how much cars themselves will be inconvenienced during this historic visit. For days on end, traffic and shopping will come to a screeching halt. The very atmosphere will be forced to take a breather. For one brief shining moment, the rights of humans to walk will take precedence over the rights of machines to drive.

I'm sure that all the rich irony surrounding his visit to El Norte is not being lost on Pope Francis.

His message that turbo-charged capitalism is destroying all living things on land, sea and air is being drowned in the American shallows of media spectacle for the sake of media spectacle. As he wrote in his recent encyclical:

The continued acceleration of changes affecting humanity and the planet is coupled today with a more intensified pace of life and work which might be called "rapidification." Although change is part of the working of complex systems, the speed with which human activity has developed contrasts with the naturally slow pace of biological evolution. Moreover, the goals of this rapid and constant change are not necessarily geared to the common good or to integral and sustainable human development. Change is something desirable, yet it becomes a source of anxiety when it causes harm to the world and to the quality of life of much of humanity.

So, who did Barack and Michelle invite to their White House reception? Who will she be wearing? Will she "stun" as she greets the Pope at the airport? Will LGBT  activists and right-to-die reformers be given front row seats on the South Lawn just so that President Peace Prize can one-up the Pope in progressive bona fides? How will stocks react as the Pope shuts down entire miles of Big Apple asphalt?  What's the price of a scalped ticket to get close to him as he parades through Central Park? How many scents of Pope Soap-on-a-Rope are available at Macy's? Is the Pope Catholic?

Even when more enlightened media outlets dare to "go there" and write in-depth pieces about the Pope's environmental and social justice messages, unbridled capitalism still gets in the way. When I went to read an online article about his exhortation Laudato Si': On Care of Our Common Home at the New York Review of Books, the very first thing confronting me was an ad exhorting me to purchase a custom-framed cartoon drawing of Pope Francis for $150.

The reviewer, Yale climate economist William D. Nordhaus, is not only disappointed that Francis's core message is being ignored by the media, he is disappointed that the Pope himself is against market-based "cap and trade" and other gimmicks to supplement his anti-consumerism message of environmental conservation and care for the poor. The Pope is not neoliberal enough, apparently. All that the climate needs, according to Nordhaus, is a more "moral market"  -- an oxymoron if there ever was one. He writes:

But the growing peril of climate change and many other environmental problems arises primarily not from unethical individual behavior such as consumerism or cowardice, bad conscience or excessive profiteering. Rather, environmental degradation is the result of distorted market signals that put too low a price on harmful environmental effects.

I guess that Nordhaus missed the news that Volkswagen's altruism and beneficence caused it to deliberately tinker with the pollution-detecting device in at least half a million 11 million of its cars. Those market distortion signals will get you every time. Mistakes get made, but crimes against the biosphere are never committed.

"We have totally screwed up," the aptly named Michael Horn, CEO of Volkswagen of America, humble-bragged at a lavish event this week to introduce the company's latest model. He offered the standard explanation given by the rich and powerful and unaccountable whenever they get caught doing the nasty. The crime "was not consistent with our core values," he abjectly schmoozed.

After all, it pales in comparison to Volkswagen admitting decades after the fact that it had used Nazi concentration camp slaves to manufacture its cars for the Folk. Luckily for them, no car officials went to jail for that one. All they had to do was to make some token reparations to their mainly Jewish victims. So they probably hope that this latest scandal will be swept under the rug just as efficiently.

The real test of our political class's seriousness about reducing global warming and combating climate change is how it will treat the Volkswagen crimes. If the company gets the usual financial slap on the wrist, as General Motors recently did despite their officials being, at the very least, accessories to murder, our government officials will have proven themselves irredeemable hypocrites, once and for all.

As the Pope's late, great fellow Latin American leftist Eduardo Galeano put it, the United States is the Vatican of the Church of the Sacred Car. And the depraved religion has spread all over the globe. "The imported faith in the four-wheeled god and the confusion of democracy with consumption have been more devastating than any bombing campaign. Never have so many suffered so much for so few," he wrote in Upside Down.
 
In Nordhaus's neoliberal view, meanwhile, the problem is not that water is scarce. It's that it is underpriced. The problem is not the number of polluting particulates in the air that we breathe and the ensuing damage to our lungs. It is that the poisons are underpriced. What this planet, and the people and animals and plants residing on it need is not health and conservation of resources and clean-up. What it needs are plutocrats making more money by finding more efficient ways to use their poisons.

Pope Francis has his work cut out for him with such thinking from the allegedly enlightened side of the climate "debate." (Yes, the media conglomerate is still framing the death of the earth as a debate instead of a reality.)

As he puts it in his encyclical, "Obstructionist attitudes, even on the part of believers, can range from denial of the problem to indifference, nonchalant resignation, or blind confidence in technical solutions. We need a new and universal solidarity." 

Meanwhile, even though Laudato Si' is readily available free of charge all over the Internet, billionaire Jeff Bezos is charging people $5.95 to download a Kindle copy from his own Amazon website marketplace. Because the rich rentiers will always parasitize the poor. Commodified humanity is their main course.

We all have got our work cut out for us.