‘Homeless and Heartless’

I read the essay with considerable admiration for Dietrich’s eloquence. Nevertheless, I finished the article with the conviction that all his fine statements are an exercise in vanity unsuitable to a follower in the steps of St. Francis.

If the “situation is hopeless” and the “system is rotten,” what is the point of your article, Jeff? Are you merely flaunting your moral superiority before your perceived audience of smug, middle-class Americans?

I don’t believe the world is any kinder of gentler now than it was a generation, a century, or a millennium ago. Neither is it significantly crueler or harsher. The human spirit is eternal, and is composed of varying parts avarice and tenderness, mean-spiritedness and saintliness. Dietrich charges that America worships the “religion of consumerism.” When has society not been composed, for the most part, of a majority who are “of this world,” and a select few who sacrifice themselves for others?

The compassionate acts of Dietrich and his fellow Catholic Workers deserve the greatest admiration. Their guiding spirit, however, appears to be a contempt for this world and a longing for an imagined spirit of monastic communalism which never existed. Dietrich’s true complaint is that people aren’t saints. He thinks America is “rotten to the core” because its people are human beings.

PAUL McBRIDE

Irvine