On November 6, 1965, Dorothy Day joined protesters in New York City’s Union Square. The activists, a group of Catholic workers, were burning draft cards, in direct defiance of the 1965 amendment to the 1948 Universal Military Service and Training act which made modifying Selective Service certificates (a.k.a. draft cards) in any way illegal. While this type of resistance is now a well-established part of pacifist protestors’ demonstrations, oft-deployed by  the anti-Vietnam movement, it was considered incredibly transgressive during the early Sixties. Tom Cornell, a Catholic Worker who participated in the draft curd burnings,  explains why the act was so radical:

In psychological terms it’s a kind of castration symbol and an Oedipal thing. Your kid is flying in the face of authority. . . . There is a kind of civil or state religion which has subsumed large elements of Christianity, Judaism, whatever else there is, and it has its symbols, obviously secular symbols like the flag, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln. It’s subsumed a good part of our traditional real religion. And the draft card then becomes a sacrament. And there’s nothing worse that you can do in sacramental terms than defile a species of the sacrament. And this was a defilement, a real blasphemy against the state (Nancy Zaroulis and Gerald Sullivan, Who Spoke Up? American Protest Against the War in Vietnam, 1963-1975 (Garden City: Doubleday & Company, 1984), 51-58.) 

Against this backdrop of civic blasphemy, Day assumed the podium and spoke to show her

solidarity of purpose…and to point out that we too are breaking the law, committing civil disobedience, in advocating and trying to encourage all those who are conscripted, to inform their conscience, to heed the still small voice, and to refuse to participate in the immorality of war. It is the most potent way to end war.

The speech, though almost inaudible over the noise of the crowd, was reprinted in The Catholic Worker and inspired many of its readers. Day’s work, both before and after this period, inspired a sea change in how Catholics thought of pacifism. Despite Jesus of Nazareth’s directive to turn the other cheek, the Church has a history of sponsoring violence of all types. Due to the Church’s involvement in statecraft, it has actively prosecuted wars (think of the Crusades beginning in 1096) and supported states as they have engaged each other in conflict. During Vietnam, the Church’s hierarchy towed the U.S. government’s line through much of the war’s prosecution, insisting that it was justified by the Augustinian doctrine of just war. Its support for the conflict can be explained to some extent by its desire to see communism wane globally. As much as it represented a threat to capitalism, communism is also highly critical of religion, deriding it as an “opiate of the masses” and tool of imperialism.

Though one of the group’s most supportive of the Vietnam War at its initiation, Catholics would become increasingly skeptical of the United States’ efforts in Asia. By the war’s end, they were the least committed to its cause.

More than simply shaking the Catholic American world, Day’s Union Square speech created a dialogue between the Catholic Workers and other radicals committed to peace of the era. The young and politically-engaged, though undoubtedly at odds with much of Day’s social platform informed by traditional Catholic values, respected her pacifism.