Page:The Autobiography of a Catholic Anarchist.djvu/148

CHAPTER 7. DOROTHY VISITS PHOENIX 135 would not seek a divorce. I remembered the good times we had when hiking those four years, and of the early days in the woods where the girls were born in Wisconsin. If she was happy with this patriotic and materialistic religion I had no right and, I felt now, no purpose, in bothering her. So I wrote to the girls each week but not directly to her. With my Life at Hard Labor, vegetarian diet, and mind on The One Man Revolution, I did not have to have physical contact with any woman: I had work to do, and despaired of finding any woman who could stand the pace and who would not seek to tame me.

This did not mean that emotionally and in a platonic manner I had no attachment in my mind toward a certain woman. I had not seen her for nine years and had written often but received a reply only a few times a year. In a few days of conversation we had been able to understand that we had a common devotion to both pacifism and anarchism; and, sad necessity or undue asceticism as it might appear to others, a common practice of a celibate life. She had helped me to formulate my ideas on tax refusal more clearly and, almost alone, had publicized them. She had never once mentioned the subject of joining the Catholic church to me: simply saying that she always prayed for me along with many others. I also included her in my non-church prayers for years. So when Dorothy left, I felt a new reason for continuing my One Man Revolution.

I had become a radical the same year that Tolstoy died. I had a letter and a card from Gandhi in 1934 when he was in prison. I had written to him, "Gandhi. India" and he received it. I had never met these great spiritual leaders yet loved them. How much more then should I appreciate one such leader who was a contemporary and whom I had known for thirteen years. At any age in life the fact that she was a woman did not make as much difference as it would have twenty years before. The men I had known in my radical life had either all turned bourgeois, married women who had tamed them, or had died. So it was natural that I should enjoy the companionship of the one person I knew who lived the ideals which I believed. In 1941–42 I had walked ten miles each Sunday evening to attend a Quaker meeting. Here in Phoenix the Quaker meeting was held in the morning when I would normally be selling CWs. If there had been one at night I would have attended. As it was I felt the need of spiritual strength in my picketing so attended mass and prayed for peace and wisdom before picketing. In the spring of 1949 the scabbing of seminarians per orders of Cardinal Spellman in the graveyard strike in N. Y. City aroused me. The opposition of the CW to this disobedience of the famous Encyclicals of the Pope, and their picketing of St. Patrick's Cathedral caused me to wish to praise God for such brave action. The best place to praise God was in the Catholic Church so from that time forward I prayed for grace and wisdom at mass, wherever I was selling CWs. But I still had the regular Protestant attitude toward the Catholic church, as being the worst of them all.

Around this time there was a Brotherhood meeting in the first Methodist Church down town. Levi Udall, Chief Justice of the Arizona Supreme Court was