Dorothy Day on the masses vs. the people
It's people who are important
The founder of the Catholic Worker movement in the early thirties with her friend and mentor Peter Maurin, Dorothy Day was an anarchist very skeptical of political power and mass movements. The Vatican has declared her a Servant of God, the first step in the process of canonization. The quote is taken from a December 1944 entry in her diaries, published as The Duty of Delight.
The pope has pointed out in his Christmas message this year the distinction between the masses and the people and these words called down the wrath of Stalin. The masses, insensate, unthinking, moved by propaganda, by unscrupulous rulers, by Stalins and Hitlers, are quite a different thing from the people, temples of the Holy Ghost, made to the image and likeness of God.
But the term “the masses” had become a holy term, part of the opiate of the people. It was a holy idea, the dictatorship of the proletariat. The masses had the idea of the masses — something which moved this insensate mass to emotion, to holy wrath, to zeal, frenzy.
It gave them faith in themselves — a belief that representatives of that inchoate mass were representing them, a living, breathing, collective soul. The idea dispelled the loneliness with which each one of us is afflicted, it dispelled the sense of our helplessness, our hopelessness.
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