Page:The Autobiography of a Catholic Anarchist.djvu/144

CHAPTER 7. DOROTHY VISITS PHOENIX 131 seventh consecutive time. Enclosed find my statement of earnings in 1949. I have instructed my various farm employers that I am working for nothing on the day that you come to garnishee my wages, so that I receive nothing, and so do you. As in the time of Matthew, the tax-gatherer (aside from the hangman) has been the least honorable of the human species. However I hold no ill will against you personally. Your allegiance is to Caesar; mine is to God.


 * I believe that the state is immoral inasmuch as it lives by war and operates by the return of evil for evil in legislatures, courts and prisons.


 * I believe that the church un-Christian and immoral in upholding war and this return of evil for evil by the state, thus denying the Sermon on the Mount.


 * There are millions of well-meaning Christian people who pay taxes for war. How, then, do I set myself up to judge them? In older times prophets came out of the desert who warned the people of certain destruction awaiting them because of their evil ways. Today we cannot wait for leaders, but all of us who pay for the Bomb must take our responsibility. The extreme of the Atom Bomb brings the need for the extreme message of Christ: the Sermon on the Mount. The following ethical analysis leads up to such action as I and a few others have been and are taking; Love without Courage and Wisdom is Sentimentality, as with the ordinary church member. Courage without Love and Wisdom is Foolhardiness, as with the ordinary soldier. Wisdom without Courage and Love is Cowardice, as with the ordinary intellectual. Therefore, one who has Love, Wisdom and Courage is the one in a hundred million who moves the world, as with Jesus, Buddha, Gandhi. The people in this country who approximate this difficult ideal are the leaders of the Catholic Worker movement who publish the Christian Anarchist monthly, the CATHOLIC WORKER.


 * The argument is an old one, old as Jesus driving the money changers out of the Temple and being crucified for His rebellion against the corrupt church of His time. It is as old as Socrates who drank the hemlock rather than cater to the corrupt politicians of his time. It is as old as Tolstoy who defied the Czar and the subservient Orthodox Church which enslaved the Russian people. It is as old as Gandhi, who by his non-violent Satyagraha campaigns overcame the great British Empire and his chief detractor, Churchill, who called him a "naked fakir." I am acting in the tradition which Jefferson, Paine and Emerson gave to this country. I am acting in the tradition of the early Quakers who refused to pay taxes for war and openly broke the law by hiding