Page:The Autobiography of a Catholic Anarchist.djvu/143

CHAPTER 7. DOROTHY VISITS PHOENIX 130 that what changed me from being a Socialist and an atheist was the example of that true rebel Jesus. That thus my sanity had been saved and I had emerged from prison an anarchist. That I was associated with the CW because of its brave stand in publicizing my anti-tax campaign when anarchist and pacifist papers said very little about it. That my idea of God was not an authority whom I obeyed like a monarch but a principle of good as laid down by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount, which I interpreted in day by day decisions as the forces of the state came in conflict with these ideals. And that in the same manner every person had to make a choice between his conception of good and of evil. The anarchist leader still felt that religious people had no right to use the word anarchist, although we knew that he as an anarchist could not go to law and prevent it. I replied that the atheistic anarchists were more atheistic than they were anarchistic so he should not be adverse to allowing Christians or Catholic Christians to be at least as religious as they were anarchistic, if not more so.

That the atheistic anarchist should be glad that the CW had left the state worship of ecclesiastical authorities and were anarchists. I said that the atheistic anarchists did not realize that it was possible for a Catholic to accept spiritual authority and not—like most Catholics, accept the state and temporal authority; that the atheistic anarchist should be glad that someone was fighting authority in one sphere—and the most difficult sphere at that—where the atheistic anarchist stood no chance of being heard. Dorothy told of losing over half of the CW subscribers because the CW opposed Franco and World War II. The summary of Bob Ludlow on this subject seems conclusive: "There is an incompatibility between anarchism and religion only if the Christian insists on transforming the authoritarian set up of the Church to the temporal field or the anarchist insists in rejecting authority in religion. In both cases it comes from a confusion of the supernatural with the natural."

As two of those present were vegetarians, our Italian hosts gave us all that diet. Despite the excitability of the Italian temperament there was good humor and goodwill present at all times. I felt that a fair summary of the question would be that whenever we of the CW became cowardly because of pressure from the Pope, then it would be time for atheistic anarchists to decry our use of the name anarchism. And that as long as they had no Pope to tell them what to do they ought to assert their native anarchism and come out and be as brave fighters against war and capitalism as were Bakunin, Berkman and Goldman, whom they revere.

Now on Jan. 14, 1950 I mailed a statement to Mr. Stuart, Collector of Internal Revenue in Phoenix explaining why I was refusing to pay my income tax. It said:


 * As a non-church Christian Anarchist and a follower of Gandhi the man of the Half-Century, I refuse to pay my income tax for the