Dorothy Day: diaries of a saint
THE DUTY OF DELIGHT. The Dairies of Dorothy Day. Edited by Robert Ellsberg, Marquette University Press, Milwaukee, Wis. 654 pp. 2008.
David O’Brien wrote in the Catholic magazine Commonweal that Dorothy Day was “the most significant, interesting and influential person in the history of American Catholicism.”
These dairies support that judgment. Indeed, they make a compelling case for her sainthood. Her life shows an extraordinary example of the gospels in action.
Ellsberg, former managing editor of The Catholic Worker, writes in the introduction that Day had an “abiding commitment to social justice.”
That commitment began in 1932 with coverage for Commonweal of the communist-launched hunger march of the jobless in Washington, D.C.
Six months later Day and Peter Maurin started The Catholic Worker, a newspaper for “the man in the street.” It carried Maurin’s essays and Day’s reporting of “poverty and destitution, homelessness and unemployment.”
The two quickly expanded the Catholic Worker Movement, opening the first hospitality house for women. Today there are 185 Catholic Worker hospitality houses in 37 states and 10 nations.
The Catholic Worker still publishes monthly and still charges $1. It is supported by people like me who donate a “widow’s mite” periodically because it really is The Catholic Radical that Maurin wanted to name the paper.
The Catholic hierarchy often disapproved of Day’s Christlike deeds. In 1949 the Catholic Worker supported cemetery workers on strike against the archdiocese of New York. Cardinal Spellman denounced the strikers, declaring that they were under the influence of communist agitators.
In the late 1960s a cardinal was in Vietnam blessing U.S. airplanes. Day was incensed by this pact with the devil. She raged:
“What a confusion we have gotten into when Christian prelates sprinkle holy water on scrap metal to be used for obliteration bombing and name bombers for the Holy Innocents, for our Lady of Mercy. Prelates who bless a man about to press a button which releases death to 50,000 human beings, including babies, children, the sick and the aged.”
Day was arrested at the age of 75 for picketing with the United Farm Workers. She was so often arrested for civil disobedience that a New York City jail kept “a Dorothy Day suite.”
Day spent an unsaintly youth before converting to Catholicism in 1927. Colman McCarthy, a columnist for the National Catholic Reporter, writes:
“She bibbed (drank) with playwright Eugene O’Neill and critic Malcolm Cowley…reveled with Greenwich Village bohemians, had an abortion, gave birth to a daughter and left a common-law marriage.”
But her passion for social justice and Left causes never flagged. McCarthy adds: she “interviewed Trotsky, went to jail with suffragette Alice Paul, was on the barricades with the socialists, read anarchist Peter Kropotkin, Tolstoy and Jack Reed.”
October 1944: “I read St. Teresa’s treatises on prayer…I labored at watering the garden of my soul…the greatness of the Little Flower…She let loose powers, consolations, a stream of faith…How much richer we are because of her.”
Introducing readers to the fifties, Ellsberg writes: “Dorothy’s willingness to stand beside the communists and other targets of the Red Scare was not lost on FBI boss Hoover.
“In a note in her files Hoover observed that Dorothy Day ‘has engaged in activities which strongly suggest that she is consciously or unconsciously being used by communist groups.’ ”
Nov. 13, 1959: “A priest who reviewed my book (“The Long Loneliness”) insinuated that there was something morbid in my love for the poor. Strange criticism.”
All diarists can empathize with Day when she writes: “Always in my life I have found that writing about problems, putting them down on paper, can lift the burden from my heart.” (This columnist has kept a diary since 1947. Diaries are cathartic.)
Sometimes Day’s piety gets excessive. She writes: “Man’s first duty is to praise God, to adore him, to thank him.”
Sometimes Day exasperates by having nothing to say about books, authors or people. “Reading Debs book on prisons.” What does she think about book? About Debs? Nothing.
Oct. 16, 1973: “Kissinger gets Nobel Peace Prize.” Day’s comment? Nothing. The great satirist Tom Lehrer, however, was spot on: “Satire died the day they gave Kissinger the peace prize.”
And sometimes Ellsberg should have edited with a scalpel when the diary descends to trivia. Example: “Lily over tonight and we played Scrabble.”
But Day rightly rages at the ceaseless wars of America. March 5, 1973: “The hideousness of burying thousands of dead in wars.”
If all Catholics, like all believers of any religion, acted like Dorothy Day it would be a far better world.
Day was a socialist and pacifist. A voice of conscience even though often crying in the wilderness. A true servant of God. A saint.
David O’Brien wrote in the Catholic magazine Commonweal that Dorothy Day was “the most significant, interesting and influential person in the history of American Catholicism.”
These dairies support that judgment. Indeed, they make a compelling case for her sainthood. Her life shows an extraordinary example of the gospels in action.
Ellsberg, former managing editor of The Catholic Worker, writes in the introduction that Day had an “abiding commitment to social justice.”
That commitment began in 1932 with coverage for Commonweal of the communist-launched hunger march of the jobless in Washington, D.C.
Six months later Day and Peter Maurin started The Catholic Worker, a newspaper for “the man in the street.” It carried Maurin’s essays and Day’s reporting of “poverty and destitution, homelessness and unemployment.”
The two quickly expanded the Catholic Worker Movement, opening the first hospitality house for women. Today there are 185 Catholic Worker hospitality houses in 37 states and 10 nations.
The Catholic Worker still publishes monthly and still charges $1. It is supported by people like me who donate a “widow’s mite” periodically because it really is The Catholic Radical that Maurin wanted to name the paper.
The Catholic hierarchy often disapproved of Day’s Christlike deeds. In 1949 the Catholic Worker supported cemetery workers on strike against the archdiocese of New York. Cardinal Spellman denounced the strikers, declaring that they were under the influence of communist agitators.
In the late 1960s a cardinal was in Vietnam blessing U.S. airplanes. Day was incensed by this pact with the devil. She raged:
“What a confusion we have gotten into when Christian prelates sprinkle holy water on scrap metal to be used for obliteration bombing and name bombers for the Holy Innocents, for our Lady of Mercy. Prelates who bless a man about to press a button which releases death to 50,000 human beings, including babies, children, the sick and the aged.”
Day was arrested at the age of 75 for picketing with the United Farm Workers. She was so often arrested for civil disobedience that a New York City jail kept “a Dorothy Day suite.”
Day spent an unsaintly youth before converting to Catholicism in 1927. Colman McCarthy, a columnist for the National Catholic Reporter, writes:
“She bibbed (drank) with playwright Eugene O’Neill and critic Malcolm Cowley…reveled with Greenwich Village bohemians, had an abortion, gave birth to a daughter and left a common-law marriage.”
But her passion for social justice and Left causes never flagged. McCarthy adds: she “interviewed Trotsky, went to jail with suffragette Alice Paul, was on the barricades with the socialists, read anarchist Peter Kropotkin, Tolstoy and Jack Reed.”
October 1944: “I read St. Teresa’s treatises on prayer…I labored at watering the garden of my soul…the greatness of the Little Flower…She let loose powers, consolations, a stream of faith…How much richer we are because of her.”
Introducing readers to the fifties, Ellsberg writes: “Dorothy’s willingness to stand beside the communists and other targets of the Red Scare was not lost on FBI boss Hoover.
“In a note in her files Hoover observed that Dorothy Day ‘has engaged in activities which strongly suggest that she is consciously or unconsciously being used by communist groups.’ ”
Nov. 13, 1959: “A priest who reviewed my book (“The Long Loneliness”) insinuated that there was something morbid in my love for the poor. Strange criticism.”
All diarists can empathize with Day when she writes: “Always in my life I have found that writing about problems, putting them down on paper, can lift the burden from my heart.” (This columnist has kept a diary since 1947. Diaries are cathartic.)
Sometimes Day’s piety gets excessive. She writes: “Man’s first duty is to praise God, to adore him, to thank him.”
Sometimes Day exasperates by having nothing to say about books, authors or people. “Reading Debs book on prisons.” What does she think about book? About Debs? Nothing.
Oct. 16, 1973: “Kissinger gets Nobel Peace Prize.” Day’s comment? Nothing. The great satirist Tom Lehrer, however, was spot on: “Satire died the day they gave Kissinger the peace prize.”
And sometimes Ellsberg should have edited with a scalpel when the diary descends to trivia. Example: “Lily over tonight and we played Scrabble.”
But Day rightly rages at the ceaseless wars of America. March 5, 1973: “The hideousness of burying thousands of dead in wars.”
If all Catholics, like all believers of any religion, acted like Dorothy Day it would be a far better world.
Day was a socialist and pacifist. A voice of conscience even though often crying in the wilderness. A true servant of God. A saint.
posted by Jake Highton | 2:14 PM
2 Comments:
This comment has been removed by the author.
Very interesting quotes from a person who always remains mysterious, but is really one of the most interesting and influential people in all of twentieth-century America.
To people born since she died, it is impossible to comprehend how someone who even after her conversion influenced the Beats and hippies (Abbie Hoffman was an admirer) and mixed with Ginsberg and Miles Davis could be canonized by the Vatican. Jonathan Leaf's misfiring The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Sixties does not mention Day once. However, her intense and conservative piety is proof that the aims of the original counterculture were quite different, even opposite to, what I associated with the word as an adolescent dissecting AC/DC and N.W.A. Leaf may be right that the counterculture was born out of opposition to bourgeoise America, but that it immediately took the form people in the radically libertine Bush Senior era knew is utterly wrong. (Leaf does not mention William Burroughs, the 1950s ancestor of this libertinism, either)
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