There's an interesting, and almost throwaway line at the end of one of Dorothy Day's columns from 1966. She's sharing examples of people with radical visions for transforming society from the bottom up. She references an Italian social activist, Danilo Dolci, who organized something called 'reverse-strikes' in which he had over 100 unemployed men fix a public road and was arrested for it. She then closes saying,

"The sacredness of private property is not yet challenged by any but the Marxist."

So what did Day mean by this? It's hard to know for sure, but I can try and extrapolate a bit by first digging into what Marx meant when he wrote about the abolition of private property. It's important to note that what Marx is getting at is not the individual ownership of things; but the seizure of property by the bourgeoisie class to control the means of production and create capital for themselves. This turned workers into wage-labourers. When Marx talks about abolishing private property, he means abolishing bourgeoisie property and restoring it to being the commons.

Coming back to Day's comments around the sacredness of private property, I can't help but think of Hannah Arendt's idea that the modern social era would see the collapse of the public and private realms into one another—describing what would emerge as a sort of "collective house keeping" in which the protection of private interests would dominate the public sphere. Is this not what is happening when pipelines, factories, or vehicles are seemingly afforded more rights and dignity than (certain) humans or the protection of the natural world? What is sacred is what we value above all else.

I also can't help but hear a subtle rebuke to the church when she says only the Marxist has challenged this. Though in typical Day fashion, she extends an opportunity and a challenge to the church with the use of 'yet'. It's never too late.

In another column from 1965, Day quotes St Gertrude, a 13th Century nun, who said, "property, the more common it becomes, the more holy it becomes." For Day, this is of course a call for each of us to do our part. Like the loaves and fishes of the gospels, to share what we have with others and see how in becoming common it becomes sacred. It's about how it is used—and for whom—that makes it so.