There is a story I once read that was originally told by Dorothy Day. It was about a friend of hers from her days with The Masses, Mike Gold. Mike Gold was a prominent radical leader and successful novelist, but in his old age he often fell on hard times. At one point he came to stay at the Catholic Worker House of Hospitality where Dorothy Day worked and lived. She told a story about something that had happened to Gold when he was a small child. He was Jewish, and one day a group of older boys cornered him and beat him up, yelling all the while, “You killed Christ! You killed Christ!” He eventually escaped from them and made his way home. His mother washed him and tended his cuts and bruises, and took him in her arms and held him. He looked up at her and asked, “Who is Christ?” Dorothy Day concluded her story by saying, “Mike Gold sits at the table of Christ (the Catholic Worker soup kitchen) every day, and yet he will never become a Christian because of the way that he first heard the name of Christ.”
Today, people who call themselves Christians continue to beat up on LGBTQ people, Muslims, immigrants, and yes, (perhaps a little more discreetly), Jews, all in the name of Christ.
Leon Bloy once wrote, “The damned in the abyss of their torments have no other refreshment than the spectacle of the devils’ hideous faces. The friends of Jesus see all around them the modern Christians, and thus it is that they are able to picture hell.” (Quatre Ans de Captivité à Cochons-sur-Marne)
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