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Dorothy Day: Dissenting Voice of the American Century
“A good biography holds your attention; a great one transcends its subject and sheds light on the myriad forces bearing down on an individual at a particular point in time. Dorothy Day belongs, luminously, to the second [category].” —Los Angeles Review of Books
“The authors render their subject in precise and meticulous detail, generating a vivid account of her political and religious development.” —The New York Times
“We can be grateful to Loughery and Randolph for reviving a voice for our times.” —Samantha Powers, The Washington Post
The first full authoritative biography of Dorothy Day, American icon, radical pacifist, Catholic convert, and activist whom Pope Francis I compared to Martin Luther King Jr. and Abraham Lincoln.
After a middle-class Republican childhood and a few years as a Communist sympathizer, Dorothy Day converted to Catholicism and became an anomaly in American life for almost fifty years. As an orthodox Catholic, political radical, and a rebel who courted controversy, she attracted three generations of admirers. Day went to jail challenging the draft and the war in Vietnam. She was critical of capitalism and foreign policy, and as skeptical of modern liberalism as political conservatism.
Her protests began in 1917, leading to her arrest during the suffrage demonstration outside President Wilson’s White House. In 1940 she spoke in Congress against the draft and urged young men not to register. She frequented jail throughout the 1950s protesting the nuclear arms race. She told audiences in 1962 that President Kennedy was as much to blame for the Cuban missile crisis. She refused to hear any criticism of the pope, though she sparred with American bishops and priests who lived in well-appointed rectories and tolerated racial segregation in their parishes.
Dorothy Day is the exceptional biography of a dedicated modern-day pacifist, the most outspoken advocate for the poor, and a lifelong anarchist. This definitive and insightful account explores the influence this controversial and yet “sainted” woman still has today.
“The authors render their subject in precise and meticulous detail, generating a vivid account of her political and religious development.” —The New York Times
“We can be grateful to Loughery and Randolph for reviving a voice for our times.” —Samantha Powers, The Washington Post
The first full authoritative biography of Dorothy Day, American icon, radical pacifist, Catholic convert, and activist whom Pope Francis I compared to Martin Luther King Jr. and Abraham Lincoln.
After a middle-class Republican childhood and a few years as a Communist sympathizer, Dorothy Day converted to Catholicism and became an anomaly in American life for almost fifty years. As an orthodox Catholic, political radical, and a rebel who courted controversy, she attracted three generations of admirers. Day went to jail challenging the draft and the war in Vietnam. She was critical of capitalism and foreign policy, and as skeptical of modern liberalism as political conservatism.
Her protests began in 1917, leading to her arrest during the suffrage demonstration outside President Wilson’s White House. In 1940 she spoke in Congress against the draft and urged young men not to register. She frequented jail throughout the 1950s protesting the nuclear arms race. She told audiences in 1962 that President Kennedy was as much to blame for the Cuban missile crisis. She refused to hear any criticism of the pope, though she sparred with American bishops and priests who lived in well-appointed rectories and tolerated racial segregation in their parishes.
Dorothy Day is the exceptional biography of a dedicated modern-day pacifist, the most outspoken advocate for the poor, and a lifelong anarchist. This definitive and insightful account explores the influence this controversial and yet “sainted” woman still has today.
448 pages, Hardcover
First published March 3, 2020
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April 23, 2020Eventually, Day’s Catholic Worker Movement would serve the poor in more than two hundred communities. Under her guidance, it would also develop a curiously dichotomous political agenda, taking prophetic stands against racial segregation, nuclear warfare, the draft, and armed conflict around the world, while opposing abortion, birth control, and the welfare state. That dichotomy seems especially stark today, when most people’s beliefs come more neatly packaged by partisan affiliation. But by the time she died, in 1980, Day had become one of the most prominent thinkers of the left and doers of the right. In her lifetime, it was the secularists who called Day a saint. Now, though, the cause of her sainthood is officially advancing within the Catholic Church, a development that has occasioned a new biography and a documentary, both of which explore the contentious question of who owns her legacy.
Full review at “The New Yorker”: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/20...
Full review at “The New Yorker”: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/20...
October 6, 2019
Like her contemporary, Fr. Thomas Merton, there is renewed interest in the life and writings of Dorothy Day. With this comes a new detailed biography by John Loughery and Blythe Randolph. It is a full biography. The reader gains a focused picture of Day, the people she knew, the books she read, and the struggles she had. For anyone with interest in Day or the Catholic Workers movement, this book will be required reading.
This book will be released in March 2020. I received an ARC from the publisher in exchange for a fair and impartial review.
This book will be released in March 2020. I received an ARC from the publisher in exchange for a fair and impartial review.
April 8, 2020
Here, Randolph and Loughery deliver a competent biography of Dorothy Day (1897-1980), the 20th century radical who co-founded the Catholic Worker Movement and who blazed an extraordinary trail in American Catholic thought. I had hardly heard of Day until Pope Francis delivered his historic address to a joint session of the United States Congress in Washington DC in 2015. In that address, he lifted up by name four Americans from the nation’s history who should be looked to as moral guides for our future: Martin Luther King, Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Merton, and Dorothy Day. At that point, I read a bit about her and became really intrigued: who is this radical but uncategorizable American leftist who is currently on the pathway to sainthood in the Catholic Church? I had to know more. This is the first comprehensive biography to be published about Day’s life since then.
This was my first in-depth encounter with Dorothy Day’s life and work, and I learned a great deal. First, I was very surprised at how culturally well-connected she was even in her younger years. Her life story has an almost Forest Gump-like quality given the eclectic list of people she knew, worked alongside, or rubbed shoulders with: names like Caesar Chavez, Mother Theresa, Eugene O’Neill, Alice Paul, Flannery O’Connor, Michael Harrington, Daniel Berrigan, Mike Gold, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Thomas Merton, and I.F. Stone, among others. I was unaware that Day had initially aspired to being a novelist and in fact published a few books, nor did I know that she led a daring, wild, bohemian life in Greenwich Village before converting to Catholicism. Her early years were extremely interesting and a part of Day’s story that I previously knew nothing about. While I had some baseline knowledge about the Catholic Worker Movement and the Catholic Worker as a media publication, I learned a tremendous amount about each. I also learned a good deal about the ecosystem of left / radical Catholic publications in America, most of which are still publishing.
I think that Randolph and Loughery do a very good job of explaining Day’s religious conversion and transformation, and of offering an intellectual grounding of her theological worldview. I appreciated that the profound influence that Day’s Catholic Worker co-founder, Peter Maurin, had on her was sourced further to the Catholic writers and thinkers that had influenced him (Chesterton and Mounier in particular). This text includes a decent introduction into the basic tenets of the Catholic traditions of personalism and distributism.
Day was an indefatigable, irascible, steadfast, sure-footed advocate. She was unafraid to speak plainly and loudly about the failures of capitalism, the evils of white supremacy and apartheid, and the abominable American Empire, and to do so expressly as a core function of her duties as a Catholic. For these reasons, I am deeply drawn to her. Still, she is flawed, as we all are — and I think she would want us to see her that way, in imperfection, rather than as an unimpeachable moral authority. I was disappointed (but not surprised) by her consistent rejection of LGBTQ people. I’m bothered by ways people in her life were neglected and sacrificed to her work. And, I think it is fair to debate whether her activism was oriented towards building power (I think there’s a case to be made that it built power, but I’m not totally persuaded). She is complicated, which is to say, human — and an interesting biographical subject. I want to learn more about her, read more of her, and engage more deeply with radical Catholic traditions that she grounded herself in & furthered.
Of this biography, I will admit that I was not especially moved by the form. Some biographies read like literature and illuminate resonant, revealing, emotionally affecting narratives through or beyond the lives of their subjects. This, for me, was not such a biography: this was a serviceable, reasonably detailed telling of “here’s what happened, in order from start to finish.” I rate four stars because it thoroughly got the job done of introducing me to Day’s life, and because it is a welcome new addition to the historiography of Day, who feels to me like a very understudied subject. So, it didn’t sweep me off my feet, but it brought me lots of new and good information and accomplished what I’d hoped for.
Overall, a good read, and a great place for readers (like me) to begin a project of exploring Day’s life, work, and legacy!
This was my first in-depth encounter with Dorothy Day’s life and work, and I learned a great deal. First, I was very surprised at how culturally well-connected she was even in her younger years. Her life story has an almost Forest Gump-like quality given the eclectic list of people she knew, worked alongside, or rubbed shoulders with: names like Caesar Chavez, Mother Theresa, Eugene O’Neill, Alice Paul, Flannery O’Connor, Michael Harrington, Daniel Berrigan, Mike Gold, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Thomas Merton, and I.F. Stone, among others. I was unaware that Day had initially aspired to being a novelist and in fact published a few books, nor did I know that she led a daring, wild, bohemian life in Greenwich Village before converting to Catholicism. Her early years were extremely interesting and a part of Day’s story that I previously knew nothing about. While I had some baseline knowledge about the Catholic Worker Movement and the Catholic Worker as a media publication, I learned a tremendous amount about each. I also learned a good deal about the ecosystem of left / radical Catholic publications in America, most of which are still publishing.
I think that Randolph and Loughery do a very good job of explaining Day’s religious conversion and transformation, and of offering an intellectual grounding of her theological worldview. I appreciated that the profound influence that Day’s Catholic Worker co-founder, Peter Maurin, had on her was sourced further to the Catholic writers and thinkers that had influenced him (Chesterton and Mounier in particular). This text includes a decent introduction into the basic tenets of the Catholic traditions of personalism and distributism.
Day was an indefatigable, irascible, steadfast, sure-footed advocate. She was unafraid to speak plainly and loudly about the failures of capitalism, the evils of white supremacy and apartheid, and the abominable American Empire, and to do so expressly as a core function of her duties as a Catholic. For these reasons, I am deeply drawn to her. Still, she is flawed, as we all are — and I think she would want us to see her that way, in imperfection, rather than as an unimpeachable moral authority. I was disappointed (but not surprised) by her consistent rejection of LGBTQ people. I’m bothered by ways people in her life were neglected and sacrificed to her work. And, I think it is fair to debate whether her activism was oriented towards building power (I think there’s a case to be made that it built power, but I’m not totally persuaded). She is complicated, which is to say, human — and an interesting biographical subject. I want to learn more about her, read more of her, and engage more deeply with radical Catholic traditions that she grounded herself in & furthered.
Of this biography, I will admit that I was not especially moved by the form. Some biographies read like literature and illuminate resonant, revealing, emotionally affecting narratives through or beyond the lives of their subjects. This, for me, was not such a biography: this was a serviceable, reasonably detailed telling of “here’s what happened, in order from start to finish.” I rate four stars because it thoroughly got the job done of introducing me to Day’s life, and because it is a welcome new addition to the historiography of Day, who feels to me like a very understudied subject. So, it didn’t sweep me off my feet, but it brought me lots of new and good information and accomplished what I’d hoped for.
Overall, a good read, and a great place for readers (like me) to begin a project of exploring Day’s life, work, and legacy!
April 12, 2020
An exceptional biography of a remarkable woman and her extraordinarily complicated, often contradictory, life, offering an especially vivid account of her intellectual, political, and religious evolution.
March 15, 2025
Starke, wenn auch nicht perfekte Biographie von Dorothy Day. Wer sich für die prägenden Bücher, die sie gelesen hat und auch die, welche während ihres Lebens über sie geschrieben wurden, interessiert, hat hier eine Goldgrube. Wer sich für ihre Theologie, ihre Argumente oder ganz allgemein für ihr Denken interessiert, kommt hier allerdings nicht auf seine*ihre Kosten.
Da es für mich nicht das erste Buch über sie oder die Catholic Workers war, war ich voll zufrieden und der stärkere Fokus auf Literatur hat für mich eine Lücke gefüllt. Die beste Biographie ist für mich immer noch das etwas hagiographische Buch "Unruly Saint" von Danielle Mayfield. Dort wird aber weniger auf die negativen Seiten eingegangen, die in dieser Biographie hier widerum sehr wohl besprochen werden (das Chaos in den Houses of Hospitality sowie die Haltung von ihr und der Zeeiiitchriift in Bezug auf Homosexualität).
Da es für mich nicht das erste Buch über sie oder die Catholic Workers war, war ich voll zufrieden und der stärkere Fokus auf Literatur hat für mich eine Lücke gefüllt. Die beste Biographie ist für mich immer noch das etwas hagiographische Buch "Unruly Saint" von Danielle Mayfield. Dort wird aber weniger auf die negativen Seiten eingegangen, die in dieser Biographie hier widerum sehr wohl besprochen werden (das Chaos in den Houses of Hospitality sowie die Haltung von ihr und der Zeeiiitchriift in Bezug auf Homosexualität).
December 13, 2020
Speaking as a historian and fan of historical biography genre, this is a very well done book. I'm grateful to have read it.
While many of the events covered by Loughery and Randolph were familiar to this reader, they almost always added further context and more factual information. Their tone was objective. Their research is also impressive. It is great to have a work on my shelf about Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker movement that is more than memoir or autobiography.
Speaking as a Catholic with many political commitments that track fairly well with Day, I confess that I could not see directly how the authors own political or religious commitments shaped the work. They dealt forthrightly with criticism of Day without hectoring or dwelling too long on her mistakes, faults, and errors.
In the end, after completing this work, I felt that I liked Day more and, strangely, less. On the latter, Loughery and Randolph helped understand better where I part ways with Day. For instance, I see more clearly how much Christian anarchism influenced her and Peter Maurin's "agronomic university" and anti-statist Catholic Worker projects. I'm a Christian Socialist who values the richness of urban areas, and see Hilaire Belloc's "servile state" line of thought as incompatible with the realities of a populous world plagued with plutocrats. I also found Day's sometimes unnecessary rigorism off-putting. I believe her attachments to tradition blinded her, at times, to its failures and weaknesses: antisemitism, lack of sympathy with LGBTQ people, focus on liturgical correctness, and autocratic tendencies. Day herself would likely admit these things.
On the other hand, on liking Day more, her anti-capitalism, clerical critiques, anti-nuclear activism, and deep commitment to pacifism are wonderfully fleshed out by Loughery and Randolph. All of those still-current critiques of modern life resonate powerfully. Day's attachment to writing, to thinking through writing, in spite of her own weaknesses with the written word and failures in the world of formal publishing, are inspiring to me. Finally, Day's lifelong commitment to activism and bearing witness should inspire all of us a world that it not always friendly to demonstrations. She spoke truth to power.
I am agnostic on the pursuit, by Day's most intense admirers, of sainthood. She is worthy of consideration, but I can how it might fail. That said, all saints have warts. We admire them in spite of those weaknesses, which are deemed to be lesser than the good they created and fostered in the world. With that in mind, Day qualifies. And more American Catholics need Day's exemplary life in their vision.
While many of the events covered by Loughery and Randolph were familiar to this reader, they almost always added further context and more factual information. Their tone was objective. Their research is also impressive. It is great to have a work on my shelf about Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker movement that is more than memoir or autobiography.
Speaking as a Catholic with many political commitments that track fairly well with Day, I confess that I could not see directly how the authors own political or religious commitments shaped the work. They dealt forthrightly with criticism of Day without hectoring or dwelling too long on her mistakes, faults, and errors.
In the end, after completing this work, I felt that I liked Day more and, strangely, less. On the latter, Loughery and Randolph helped understand better where I part ways with Day. For instance, I see more clearly how much Christian anarchism influenced her and Peter Maurin's "agronomic university" and anti-statist Catholic Worker projects. I'm a Christian Socialist who values the richness of urban areas, and see Hilaire Belloc's "servile state" line of thought as incompatible with the realities of a populous world plagued with plutocrats. I also found Day's sometimes unnecessary rigorism off-putting. I believe her attachments to tradition blinded her, at times, to its failures and weaknesses: antisemitism, lack of sympathy with LGBTQ people, focus on liturgical correctness, and autocratic tendencies. Day herself would likely admit these things.
On the other hand, on liking Day more, her anti-capitalism, clerical critiques, anti-nuclear activism, and deep commitment to pacifism are wonderfully fleshed out by Loughery and Randolph. All of those still-current critiques of modern life resonate powerfully. Day's attachment to writing, to thinking through writing, in spite of her own weaknesses with the written word and failures in the world of formal publishing, are inspiring to me. Finally, Day's lifelong commitment to activism and bearing witness should inspire all of us a world that it not always friendly to demonstrations. She spoke truth to power.
I am agnostic on the pursuit, by Day's most intense admirers, of sainthood. She is worthy of consideration, but I can how it might fail. That said, all saints have warts. We admire them in spite of those weaknesses, which are deemed to be lesser than the good they created and fostered in the world. With that in mind, Day qualifies. And more American Catholics need Day's exemplary life in their vision.
October 6, 2020
Relentlessly dry and factual read of Dorothy Day's life. It was a trudge to read.
She seems to have been one of those born "true believer" personalities. Not religion in the original states in/of her youth but nearly every avenue she cared to venture (philosophy, emotion state, practical applications) it was "her way to think or no way". It was extreme "good" or extreme "bad" in almost everything you can name for Dorothy. A Dorothy "do" or a Dorothy "NOT". VERY LITTLE of anything in the middle.
These are the kinds of people who Communism and strict religions seem to like the most. I don't. IMHO, they are not only less fun in debates but usually turn out to be tyrants.
This prose is minutia detailed and million character name drop and place style. She traveled nearly constantly and was a VOICE.
Regardless, I have no more interest in ever reading further about her entities published etc. Hopefully, the Catholic Church will not follow through with any sainthood beyond what was started in the 20th century. She was a mover and doer and voice, but no saint. Not by any definition.
She seems to have been one of those born "true believer" personalities. Not religion in the original states in/of her youth but nearly every avenue she cared to venture (philosophy, emotion state, practical applications) it was "her way to think or no way". It was extreme "good" or extreme "bad" in almost everything you can name for Dorothy. A Dorothy "do" or a Dorothy "NOT". VERY LITTLE of anything in the middle.
These are the kinds of people who Communism and strict religions seem to like the most. I don't. IMHO, they are not only less fun in debates but usually turn out to be tyrants.
This prose is minutia detailed and million character name drop and place style. She traveled nearly constantly and was a VOICE.
Regardless, I have no more interest in ever reading further about her entities published etc. Hopefully, the Catholic Church will not follow through with any sainthood beyond what was started in the 20th century. She was a mover and doer and voice, but no saint. Not by any definition.
August 23, 2021
I have known a little bit about Dorothy Day for a very long time but having now listened to this biography I realize that I knew very little about her in reality. I consider myself a Pacifist sort of and an atheist sort of. I mostly consider myself a persistent activist who has now come to almost 75 years 3/4 of a century and still trying to go strong in some ways.
This book gets five stars in part because as I was listening to the section of the book toward the end which was her funeral Service, I had tears in my eyes. Tears always get an extra star for me as a guy who rarely cried in my life.
I am amazed in listening to this story how many people whose names I know and who I identified with. Dorothy was a lifelong reader and she was an intellectual. And she didn’t become a Catholic until she was around 20 years old. But she became a pretty serious Catholic. That means that she excepted some beliefs and some MOs in life from the Catholic Church that had quite a few people including me scratching their heads. Now that she is dead the Catholic Church is going through the process of seeing if she will be made a saint. That seems so bizarre!
I found this book very easy to listen to and although most of the information about Miss Day was pretty new to me, I found the book not at all preachy or even overly religious. I was amazed that as I listen to the book that I ended up with a pretty long list of books that I really should read that were mentioned here.
There are some photographs at the end of the e-book and I think some Bibliographical details.
This book gets five stars in part because as I was listening to the section of the book toward the end which was her funeral Service, I had tears in my eyes. Tears always get an extra star for me as a guy who rarely cried in my life.
I am amazed in listening to this story how many people whose names I know and who I identified with. Dorothy was a lifelong reader and she was an intellectual. And she didn’t become a Catholic until she was around 20 years old. But she became a pretty serious Catholic. That means that she excepted some beliefs and some MOs in life from the Catholic Church that had quite a few people including me scratching their heads. Now that she is dead the Catholic Church is going through the process of seeing if she will be made a saint. That seems so bizarre!
I found this book very easy to listen to and although most of the information about Miss Day was pretty new to me, I found the book not at all preachy or even overly religious. I was amazed that as I listen to the book that I ended up with a pretty long list of books that I really should read that were mentioned here.
There are some photographs at the end of the e-book and I think some Bibliographical details.
June 3, 2020
I’m glad I read this biography as my goal was to learn more about Dorothy Day whose ministry to the poor has been so inspirational to me. I felt, however, that the author’s desire to leave no stone unturned in Dorothy’s life & work led to a dry, heavy on the facts, light on the humanity book. I wanted her words & actions to reach out & speak to me but that didn’t happen, for me. Still, she’s a marvel.
December 27, 2020
Actually 3.5
October 16, 2021
An incredible and inspiring woman.
February 7, 2021
Very interesting book about a very interesting person. Someone who it would behoove more people to learn about. The only drawback is repetitive lists of random "artists" and communists who attended rallies or parties a hundred years ago, but that's a minor thing. Overall very enjoyable.
March 14, 2021
From Image, issue 105
IN HER 1952 AUTOBIOGRAPHY, The Long Loneliness, Dorothy Day reflects
on society’s prevailing views about the poor: “From my earliest remembrance the
destitute were always looked upon as the shiftless, the worthless, those without
talent of any kind, let alone the ability to make a living for themselves. They were
that way because of their own fault. They chose their lot.” Day, of course, famously
rejected this view, lived by a vow of voluntary poverty, founded The Catholic Worker,
a newspaper dedicated to social justice and pacifism, championed the causes of
immigrants and migrant workers, and established Catholic Worker houses to feed
and shelter the destitute.
The radiantly talented Marcelo Hernandez Castillo’s new memoir, Children of the
Land, about growing up as a low-income, undocumented immigrant in California,
demonstrates that little has changed in America’s popular conception of people like
him. When a drunk driver badly injured his mother, she cooperated with the police
to convict him, an act of bravery which should have qualified her for a special visa.
But the authorities, as if on a whim, deny it. “To the government,” Castillo writes,
“it was our fault. Always our fault.”
Stories like Castillo’s illustrate how radical and vital Dorothy Day’s beliefs and
work remain today. In 2000, Pope John Paul II named her a “Servant of God,”
taking one step in the formal process of considering her canonization. In 2015, Pope
Francis addressed congress during a visit to Washington, DC, praising four “great
Americans” who “shaped fundamental values which endure forever in the spirit of
the American people… Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Dorothy Day, and
Thomas Merton.”
In citing Day’s “passion for justice,” Pope Francis may have stoked new interest
in a woman who long advocated for reforms similar to those that have moved many
people in recent years. It’s easy to imagine Day marching alongside those now
promoting racial equality, the dignified treatment of immigrants, workers’ rights,
pacifism, and income equity. Day flirted with socialism in her youth, writing for
socialist newspapers (though she never joined the socialist or communist party and
disavowed the association after she converted to Catholicism). According to a 2019
Gallup poll, 49 percent of young adults view socialism favorably (and 51 percent
view capitalism favorably). Especially relevant today is Day’s personalist philosophy,
which emphasized the dignity and value of each human and asserted that the only
proper attitude toward every person is one of respect and love; you can hear echoes
of personalism in the Black Lives Matter movement and the 2018 protests against
the migrant family separation policy.
This year saw the release of two works examining Dorothy Day’s life: the
documentary Revolution of the Heart, written, directed, and narrated by Martin
Doblmeier, and a biography, Dorothy Day: Dissenting Voice of the American Century,
by John Loughery and Blythe Randolph. While both offer nuanced considerations
of Day’s life, the documentary seems to aim to bolster the case for her canonization,
while the biography focuses on her bohemian early life, when she longed to become
a novelist equal to her famous literary friends.
Day makes a striking subject for a film, and Revolution of the Heart shows her in
all her iconic glory—statuesque and crowned with a coiled white braid, or, as Garry
Wills once wrote in Esquire, “an awesome woman, tall, lantern-jawed, with Modigliani
eyes.” Of course she’d have hated any attention paid to her looks, just as she scoffed
when anyone suggested she could become a saint (“Bullshit!”). Despite all her
renunciations, she would, however, embrace the title “anarchist.” As the documentary
details, this “grandmother and anarchist” landed on the FBI watchlist of subversives
to be rounded up in the event of a national emergency, because of ideas she espoused,
company she kept, and her participation in demonstrations—including those for
women’s suffrage and against the Vietnam War—that landed her in jail eight times.
Through interviews with Day’s grandchildren and others who knew her, clergy, and
writers and thinkers including Paul Elie, Cornel West, and Jim Wallis, as well as actor
Martin Sheen (who visited Catholic Worker houses for meals in his youth), the film
details how Day converted to Catholicism, prayed for a vocation, began a newspaper
with itinerant French theologian Peter Maurin on a shoestring budget, opened the
first Worker house with little plan or money, and became a devout, uncompromising
figure immersed in social justice movements throughout the world. Loughery and
Randolph’s lucid biography provides greater detail about the welter of controlled
chaos in which Day lived. Everything she attempted was so improbable that if she
had considered practicality, she may never have begun.
In the documentary, Robert Ellsberg, who left college to become managing editor
of The Catholic Worker in the late seventies, recalls once asking Day, “‘How do you
reconcile Catholicism and anarchism?’ She looked at me with a bemused expression
and said, ‘It’s never been a problem for me.’” She didn’t ask permission; she took
it. One of the few institutions she showed reverence for was the Catholic Church,
whose rules she strove to follow almost to the letter—although she challenged her
fellow Catholics to take Jesus’s strenuous demands in the Sermon on the Mount
more seriously. The only point on which she differed with the church significantly
was its doctrine of “just war.” Day believed nonviolence was always essential, and
while she earned praise for her breadlines during the Great Depression, when she
opposed America’s involvement in World War II, many turned against her, canceling
their Catholic Worker subscriptions.
Whether people approved of her or not, Day kept up her work. In one archival
interview, she recounts that the Brooklyn police once brought her a woman who was
filthy and covered with lice from sleeping outside in deplorable conditions. In New
York, one of the richest cities in the world, Catholic Worker houses were often a last
resort for those who had slipped through holes in the social safety net. Day accepted
nearly anyone who showed up at the door. She didn’t believe in overreliance on
government services to take care of the poor; she believed each of us should contribute
to taking care of each other, for the good of our own souls. Her vow of poverty was
an extension of this: she believed that if we remove ourselves from the suffering of
our fellow humans by putting too many layers of wealth and comfort between us
and them, we can never live as Christ wanted us to. And, as Ellsberg puts it, “The
goal of the Worker was not to fix all these people. It was not a social agency… You
just accepted people as they were and made room for them, as long as there was a
modicum of peace.”
Often the houses were chaotic and even dangerous, given the mental illness, lack
of hygiene, addictions, and rough habits of many she welcomed. The way Day ran
her Worker houses embodied Presbyterian pastor and writer Eugene Peterson’s belief
that “People are not problems to be solved. They are mysteries to be explored.”
Jim Wallis notes that Day was not a religious leftist. She was conservative in her
Catholicism, holding to its traditional practices from the time of her conversion in
her twenties. “She was radical in her social, economic, and political views because
of the conservatism of her faith.” Her belief in voluntary poverty grew out of this.
As Benedictine nun and author Joan Chittister observes, “She was witnessing to the
church itself. You taught us this; we’re doing it. Now don’t tell us we’re not Catholic.”
So far, so saintly, right? But some contend that Day will never become a saint
because of the sins of her early years. Both the book and movie sketch the personal
unhappiness of her youth—one lover forced her to have an abortion, after which
she attempted suicide twice. The atheist father of Day’s daughter Tamar refused to
marry her, and so Day, newly Catholic, painfully broke off their relationship when
Tamar was a toddler. During this dark time, Day lit a candle at church and prayed
to discover her vocation. A few days later, Peter Maurin turned up on her doorstep
with a plan to publish a newspaper that would advocate for social change.
The book and movie differ in their portrayals of Day as a mother. The biography
depicts her as being so busy with travel and running her newspaper and Worker
houses that Tamar didn’t always receive the attention she needed and subsequently
ended up adrift, with nine children and in a bad marriage to an alcoholic older man.
But in the documentary Kate Hennessy disavows this take: “My grandmother has
been accused of being an indifferent and neglectful mother, and that is just not what
my mother experienced… Dorothy was heroic in terms of her family obligations.”
Martha Hennessy admits that her mother Tamar experienced sacrifices growing up in
the turmoil of Worker houses but asserts that Tamar was as committed to Dorothy’s
work as her mother was.
Day didn’t like to discuss her hedonistic early years. She spurned writers who wrote
profiles mentioning her frequent visits in her twenties to the Greenwich Village bar
called the Golden Swan, known affectionately in the bohemian demimonde as “the
Hell Hole.” According to Loughery and Randolph, she could “drink most of the other
patrons under the table” and “hold her liquor better than [Eugene] O’Neill.” When
she was in her seventies, she burned a number of papers—personal correspondence
and writing. Perhaps she was trying to conceal her past, as Loughery and Randolph
speculate: “It was not how she wanted Peter Maurin to view her or how she wanted
the young people to think of her.” But another way of looking at Day’s tendency to
bristle over references to her youthful carousing is that she fervently believed in the
forgiveness and absolution provided by confession. After receiving the sacrament of
reconciliation, perhaps she felt she was a new person, and so she should be judged
by the way she lived her final fifty-three years, not her first thirty.
But her first thirty years do make for interesting reading. As the biography delves
into Day’s fascinating, chaotic early life, it’s a treat to learn that she hobnobbed with
Eugene O’Neill, Katherine Anne Porter, W.H. Auden, and other literary greats.
She wrote novels for years, and even a play, without much success; Loughery and
Randolph emphasize that fiction and drama were not her forte. Those of us who
write fiction will feel a pang as her efforts come to nothing and her literary friends
try not to offend her with honest reactions to her bad writing. But after all, if Day
had been as good a novelist or playwright as the company she kept, she may never
have discovered her unique calling.
Day may have failed as a literary writer, but she was a prolific journalist and memoirist
whose words stirred millions. She loved and supported literature, theater, art, and
classical music her whole life, and took solace in the arts. Loughery and Randolph
write, “As she aged, Dorothy’s aesthetic sense didn’t lessen; it deepened. She was
willing to allow herself more time for the pleasures of art.” If Dorothy Day does
become a saint, she could make a splendid patron for artists, people in poverty, pacifists,
single mothers, prisoners, social justice activists, and failed—but persistent—writers.
Are there flaws to the documentary and biography? Perhaps in the interest of
time—and bolstering the case for canonization—the fifty-seven-minute documentary
downplays the darkness of Day’s early years, the craziness and filth of the Worker
houses, and her genuine weaknesses; while the biography, which creates an admirably
balanced portrait, delves at times too far into minutiae and drops an overabundance
of names—though for the most part the names are fascinating ones. Both works
provide a welcome introduction to Day or a further education on her life.
Near the end of her life, Dorothy Day took an interest in the work of Cesar Chavez
among migrant farmworkers in California. “One of the best things that has been
happening in the United States is the strike of the United Farm Workers, headed
by Cesar Chavez,” Day says in the documentary. She traveled to California in 1973
when she was seventy-six to support a Chavez-led grape picker strike, where she was
arrested for the eighth and last time. “I first became a Catholic because I felt that
the Catholic Church was the church of the poor,” Day says in one interview, “and
I still think it’s the church of the poor. I think it’s the church of all the immigrant
populations that came over or were brought over.”
Though neither book nor documentary speculates about how Day would react to
current events, it’s certain that were she alive today, Day would have a thing or two to
say about the perpetually unpassed DREAM Act, which could provide citizenship to
people brought to the United States as children, and about the continued mistreatment
of undocumented immigrants and farm workers.
IN HER 1952 AUTOBIOGRAPHY, The Long Loneliness, Dorothy Day reflects
on society’s prevailing views about the poor: “From my earliest remembrance the
destitute were always looked upon as the shiftless, the worthless, those without
talent of any kind, let alone the ability to make a living for themselves. They were
that way because of their own fault. They chose their lot.” Day, of course, famously
rejected this view, lived by a vow of voluntary poverty, founded The Catholic Worker,
a newspaper dedicated to social justice and pacifism, championed the causes of
immigrants and migrant workers, and established Catholic Worker houses to feed
and shelter the destitute.
The radiantly talented Marcelo Hernandez Castillo’s new memoir, Children of the
Land, about growing up as a low-income, undocumented immigrant in California,
demonstrates that little has changed in America’s popular conception of people like
him. When a drunk driver badly injured his mother, she cooperated with the police
to convict him, an act of bravery which should have qualified her for a special visa.
But the authorities, as if on a whim, deny it. “To the government,” Castillo writes,
“it was our fault. Always our fault.”
Stories like Castillo’s illustrate how radical and vital Dorothy Day’s beliefs and
work remain today. In 2000, Pope John Paul II named her a “Servant of God,”
taking one step in the formal process of considering her canonization. In 2015, Pope
Francis addressed congress during a visit to Washington, DC, praising four “great
Americans” who “shaped fundamental values which endure forever in the spirit of
the American people… Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Dorothy Day, and
Thomas Merton.”
In citing Day’s “passion for justice,” Pope Francis may have stoked new interest
in a woman who long advocated for reforms similar to those that have moved many
people in recent years. It’s easy to imagine Day marching alongside those now
promoting racial equality, the dignified treatment of immigrants, workers’ rights,
pacifism, and income equity. Day flirted with socialism in her youth, writing for
socialist newspapers (though she never joined the socialist or communist party and
disavowed the association after she converted to Catholicism). According to a 2019
Gallup poll, 49 percent of young adults view socialism favorably (and 51 percent
view capitalism favorably). Especially relevant today is Day’s personalist philosophy,
which emphasized the dignity and value of each human and asserted that the only
proper attitude toward every person is one of respect and love; you can hear echoes
of personalism in the Black Lives Matter movement and the 2018 protests against
the migrant family separation policy.
This year saw the release of two works examining Dorothy Day’s life: the
documentary Revolution of the Heart, written, directed, and narrated by Martin
Doblmeier, and a biography, Dorothy Day: Dissenting Voice of the American Century,
by John Loughery and Blythe Randolph. While both offer nuanced considerations
of Day’s life, the documentary seems to aim to bolster the case for her canonization,
while the biography focuses on her bohemian early life, when she longed to become
a novelist equal to her famous literary friends.
Day makes a striking subject for a film, and Revolution of the Heart shows her in
all her iconic glory—statuesque and crowned with a coiled white braid, or, as Garry
Wills once wrote in Esquire, “an awesome woman, tall, lantern-jawed, with Modigliani
eyes.” Of course she’d have hated any attention paid to her looks, just as she scoffed
when anyone suggested she could become a saint (“Bullshit!”). Despite all her
renunciations, she would, however, embrace the title “anarchist.” As the documentary
details, this “grandmother and anarchist” landed on the FBI watchlist of subversives
to be rounded up in the event of a national emergency, because of ideas she espoused,
company she kept, and her participation in demonstrations—including those for
women’s suffrage and against the Vietnam War—that landed her in jail eight times.
Through interviews with Day’s grandchildren and others who knew her, clergy, and
writers and thinkers including Paul Elie, Cornel West, and Jim Wallis, as well as actor
Martin Sheen (who visited Catholic Worker houses for meals in his youth), the film
details how Day converted to Catholicism, prayed for a vocation, began a newspaper
with itinerant French theologian Peter Maurin on a shoestring budget, opened the
first Worker house with little plan or money, and became a devout, uncompromising
figure immersed in social justice movements throughout the world. Loughery and
Randolph’s lucid biography provides greater detail about the welter of controlled
chaos in which Day lived. Everything she attempted was so improbable that if she
had considered practicality, she may never have begun.
In the documentary, Robert Ellsberg, who left college to become managing editor
of The Catholic Worker in the late seventies, recalls once asking Day, “‘How do you
reconcile Catholicism and anarchism?’ She looked at me with a bemused expression
and said, ‘It’s never been a problem for me.’” She didn’t ask permission; she took
it. One of the few institutions she showed reverence for was the Catholic Church,
whose rules she strove to follow almost to the letter—although she challenged her
fellow Catholics to take Jesus’s strenuous demands in the Sermon on the Mount
more seriously. The only point on which she differed with the church significantly
was its doctrine of “just war.” Day believed nonviolence was always essential, and
while she earned praise for her breadlines during the Great Depression, when she
opposed America’s involvement in World War II, many turned against her, canceling
their Catholic Worker subscriptions.
Whether people approved of her or not, Day kept up her work. In one archival
interview, she recounts that the Brooklyn police once brought her a woman who was
filthy and covered with lice from sleeping outside in deplorable conditions. In New
York, one of the richest cities in the world, Catholic Worker houses were often a last
resort for those who had slipped through holes in the social safety net. Day accepted
nearly anyone who showed up at the door. She didn’t believe in overreliance on
government services to take care of the poor; she believed each of us should contribute
to taking care of each other, for the good of our own souls. Her vow of poverty was
an extension of this: she believed that if we remove ourselves from the suffering of
our fellow humans by putting too many layers of wealth and comfort between us
and them, we can never live as Christ wanted us to. And, as Ellsberg puts it, “The
goal of the Worker was not to fix all these people. It was not a social agency… You
just accepted people as they were and made room for them, as long as there was a
modicum of peace.”
Often the houses were chaotic and even dangerous, given the mental illness, lack
of hygiene, addictions, and rough habits of many she welcomed. The way Day ran
her Worker houses embodied Presbyterian pastor and writer Eugene Peterson’s belief
that “People are not problems to be solved. They are mysteries to be explored.”
Jim Wallis notes that Day was not a religious leftist. She was conservative in her
Catholicism, holding to its traditional practices from the time of her conversion in
her twenties. “She was radical in her social, economic, and political views because
of the conservatism of her faith.” Her belief in voluntary poverty grew out of this.
As Benedictine nun and author Joan Chittister observes, “She was witnessing to the
church itself. You taught us this; we’re doing it. Now don’t tell us we’re not Catholic.”
So far, so saintly, right? But some contend that Day will never become a saint
because of the sins of her early years. Both the book and movie sketch the personal
unhappiness of her youth—one lover forced her to have an abortion, after which
she attempted suicide twice. The atheist father of Day’s daughter Tamar refused to
marry her, and so Day, newly Catholic, painfully broke off their relationship when
Tamar was a toddler. During this dark time, Day lit a candle at church and prayed
to discover her vocation. A few days later, Peter Maurin turned up on her doorstep
with a plan to publish a newspaper that would advocate for social change.
The book and movie differ in their portrayals of Day as a mother. The biography
depicts her as being so busy with travel and running her newspaper and Worker
houses that Tamar didn’t always receive the attention she needed and subsequently
ended up adrift, with nine children and in a bad marriage to an alcoholic older man.
But in the documentary Kate Hennessy disavows this take: “My grandmother has
been accused of being an indifferent and neglectful mother, and that is just not what
my mother experienced… Dorothy was heroic in terms of her family obligations.”
Martha Hennessy admits that her mother Tamar experienced sacrifices growing up in
the turmoil of Worker houses but asserts that Tamar was as committed to Dorothy’s
work as her mother was.
Day didn’t like to discuss her hedonistic early years. She spurned writers who wrote
profiles mentioning her frequent visits in her twenties to the Greenwich Village bar
called the Golden Swan, known affectionately in the bohemian demimonde as “the
Hell Hole.” According to Loughery and Randolph, she could “drink most of the other
patrons under the table” and “hold her liquor better than [Eugene] O’Neill.” When
she was in her seventies, she burned a number of papers—personal correspondence
and writing. Perhaps she was trying to conceal her past, as Loughery and Randolph
speculate: “It was not how she wanted Peter Maurin to view her or how she wanted
the young people to think of her.” But another way of looking at Day’s tendency to
bristle over references to her youthful carousing is that she fervently believed in the
forgiveness and absolution provided by confession. After receiving the sacrament of
reconciliation, perhaps she felt she was a new person, and so she should be judged
by the way she lived her final fifty-three years, not her first thirty.
But her first thirty years do make for interesting reading. As the biography delves
into Day’s fascinating, chaotic early life, it’s a treat to learn that she hobnobbed with
Eugene O’Neill, Katherine Anne Porter, W.H. Auden, and other literary greats.
She wrote novels for years, and even a play, without much success; Loughery and
Randolph emphasize that fiction and drama were not her forte. Those of us who
write fiction will feel a pang as her efforts come to nothing and her literary friends
try not to offend her with honest reactions to her bad writing. But after all, if Day
had been as good a novelist or playwright as the company she kept, she may never
have discovered her unique calling.
Day may have failed as a literary writer, but she was a prolific journalist and memoirist
whose words stirred millions. She loved and supported literature, theater, art, and
classical music her whole life, and took solace in the arts. Loughery and Randolph
write, “As she aged, Dorothy’s aesthetic sense didn’t lessen; it deepened. She was
willing to allow herself more time for the pleasures of art.” If Dorothy Day does
become a saint, she could make a splendid patron for artists, people in poverty, pacifists,
single mothers, prisoners, social justice activists, and failed—but persistent—writers.
Are there flaws to the documentary and biography? Perhaps in the interest of
time—and bolstering the case for canonization—the fifty-seven-minute documentary
downplays the darkness of Day’s early years, the craziness and filth of the Worker
houses, and her genuine weaknesses; while the biography, which creates an admirably
balanced portrait, delves at times too far into minutiae and drops an overabundance
of names—though for the most part the names are fascinating ones. Both works
provide a welcome introduction to Day or a further education on her life.
Near the end of her life, Dorothy Day took an interest in the work of Cesar Chavez
among migrant farmworkers in California. “One of the best things that has been
happening in the United States is the strike of the United Farm Workers, headed
by Cesar Chavez,” Day says in the documentary. She traveled to California in 1973
when she was seventy-six to support a Chavez-led grape picker strike, where she was
arrested for the eighth and last time. “I first became a Catholic because I felt that
the Catholic Church was the church of the poor,” Day says in one interview, “and
I still think it’s the church of the poor. I think it’s the church of all the immigrant
populations that came over or were brought over.”
Though neither book nor documentary speculates about how Day would react to
current events, it’s certain that were she alive today, Day would have a thing or two to
say about the perpetually unpassed DREAM Act, which could provide citizenship to
people brought to the United States as children, and about the continued mistreatment
of undocumented immigrants and farm workers.
Read
May 24, 2024Thorough and comprehensive. More detail than I was anticipating (maybe I need to read more biographies) but I learned so much! What a remarkable woman
April 20, 2022
I love and admire Dorothy Day, so this book seemed right in my wheelhouse. However, this biography reads like a simple list of names and facts. Go ahead, open the book to any page. You'll see few dozen names of people, plays, books, places and newspapers with little context or storyline. Why? The narrative structure is simply incredibly poor. I'm not saying the facts are unimportant: I love facts. But a good biography chooses the important facts and weaves them into an engaging story about a person's life. I'm sorry, it hurts me to write this, because I love Dorothy Day and I love biographies and other historical non-fiction, but I was shocked and dismayed to find this book an utterly unengaging story about an incredibly interesting and important woman. I usually don't write reviews, but I was disappointed enough I just had to vent.
June 12, 2020
Excellent and thought-provoking biography of the founder of the Catholic Worker. I really knew next to nothing about Day's life before I started this biography. Born in 1897, Day had a bohemian youth, having an abortion and a child out of wedlock before converting to Catholicism. She became a social activist, founded the Catholic Worker with Peter Maurin and devoted her life to pacifism, taking care of the destitute, fighting racial discrimination, and defending the rights of workers. Throughout her life, she lived among the poor whom her organization aided.
While Day had a fascinating life, the book is much more than a conventional biography. For me it was more about what it means to live a life according to the teachings of Jesus in the Gospels. Day strove to live that way, and her decisions often put her at odds with those who controlled the Catholic Church. She was very uncompromising in her beliefs, even when they made her unpopular, such as when she advocated resistance to the military draft during World War II. That stance was better received in the Vietnam era, but Day's views were unwavering. War was immoral, no matter what the circumstances, in Day's view, and so the draft was wrong in every instance.
In many ways, the book exposed the hypocrisy of many of the religious, who supported wars, suppressed strikes by workers, and who practiced racial and religious bigotry. Day often found herself at odds with such people, while at the same time obeying the rulings of those higher in the church hierarchy.
The book provides good illustrations of the tensions that arise when one fights for social justice while at the same time strictly following the rules of the Catholic Church. For all of her activism, Day was a strictly observant Catholic, and she followed the church teachings on matters such as sexual behavior. This led to some inconsistencies. For example, while Day was an outspoken foe of racial discrimination, she had basically nothing to say about anti-gay discrimination. She was, of course, walking a tightrope, trying to adhere to church doctrine while maintaining her principles, perhaps an impossible task.
At the end of the book, the authors discuss the recent movement to have Day designated as a saint. It is a bit odd that the church, which shunned Day and distanced itself from many of her causes, now wants to take control of her legacy. It's an interesting issue, and one wonders what Day would have thought if she knew of it.
All in all, a fascinating study of a most interesting life. Highly recommended.
While Day had a fascinating life, the book is much more than a conventional biography. For me it was more about what it means to live a life according to the teachings of Jesus in the Gospels. Day strove to live that way, and her decisions often put her at odds with those who controlled the Catholic Church. She was very uncompromising in her beliefs, even when they made her unpopular, such as when she advocated resistance to the military draft during World War II. That stance was better received in the Vietnam era, but Day's views were unwavering. War was immoral, no matter what the circumstances, in Day's view, and so the draft was wrong in every instance.
In many ways, the book exposed the hypocrisy of many of the religious, who supported wars, suppressed strikes by workers, and who practiced racial and religious bigotry. Day often found herself at odds with such people, while at the same time obeying the rulings of those higher in the church hierarchy.
The book provides good illustrations of the tensions that arise when one fights for social justice while at the same time strictly following the rules of the Catholic Church. For all of her activism, Day was a strictly observant Catholic, and she followed the church teachings on matters such as sexual behavior. This led to some inconsistencies. For example, while Day was an outspoken foe of racial discrimination, she had basically nothing to say about anti-gay discrimination. She was, of course, walking a tightrope, trying to adhere to church doctrine while maintaining her principles, perhaps an impossible task.
At the end of the book, the authors discuss the recent movement to have Day designated as a saint. It is a bit odd that the church, which shunned Day and distanced itself from many of her causes, now wants to take control of her legacy. It's an interesting issue, and one wonders what Day would have thought if she knew of it.
All in all, a fascinating study of a most interesting life. Highly recommended.
May 19, 2021
Having somewhat-recently read The Long Loneliness: The Autobiography of the Legendary Catholic Social Activist, I wanted to learn more about Dorothy Day and her life. That autobiography doesn't hit every part of her life in detail, so I figured I would pick up John Loughery's book, which I had heard a lot about.
Loughery and Randolph clearly spent a long time researching; it shows in their especially thorough final product. They have a knack for distilling Day's evolution and presenting a high level of detail. The authors succeed in providing a full picture of their subject. Dorothy Day is revered in some corners of the left, but they often don't grapple with her views on issues like birth control. Similarly, many conservatives within the Church are uncomfortable with Day's pacifism (which did not waver, even under immense pressure), her bohemian youth, or her emphasis on living among the poor and not treating them with paternalism. Yet they might find something to like in her theological devotion or criticisms of the new left. Bill Kauffman in fact lists her among his 'reactionary radical tradition', which I think is one of the few monikers that sticks.
The authors don't just highlight the positives of her character and life, which would've been easy to do with such a remarkable woman. They point out her tendency to be domineering and discuss in depth her fractured relationship with her daughter Tamar. Readers emerge with a more complete picture due to this fair portrayal.
The book ends with a discussion of her case for canonization, something I personally support. The authors recognize the complexity of this question, although their work to me provides stronger backing for canonization. Dorothy Day was a truly incredible woman, indeed a 'dissenting voice of the American Century' like the subtitle spells out. The people she worked with and inspired are numerous and went on to make the world a better place. We still face some of the same problems Dorothy Day devoted her life to combatting. Even if you don't agree with all of her views or methods, she merits respect and remembrance. This book is a great place to take a deeper dive into her life and legacy.
Loughery and Randolph clearly spent a long time researching; it shows in their especially thorough final product. They have a knack for distilling Day's evolution and presenting a high level of detail. The authors succeed in providing a full picture of their subject. Dorothy Day is revered in some corners of the left, but they often don't grapple with her views on issues like birth control. Similarly, many conservatives within the Church are uncomfortable with Day's pacifism (which did not waver, even under immense pressure), her bohemian youth, or her emphasis on living among the poor and not treating them with paternalism. Yet they might find something to like in her theological devotion or criticisms of the new left. Bill Kauffman in fact lists her among his 'reactionary radical tradition', which I think is one of the few monikers that sticks.
The authors don't just highlight the positives of her character and life, which would've been easy to do with such a remarkable woman. They point out her tendency to be domineering and discuss in depth her fractured relationship with her daughter Tamar. Readers emerge with a more complete picture due to this fair portrayal.
The book ends with a discussion of her case for canonization, something I personally support. The authors recognize the complexity of this question, although their work to me provides stronger backing for canonization. Dorothy Day was a truly incredible woman, indeed a 'dissenting voice of the American Century' like the subtitle spells out. The people she worked with and inspired are numerous and went on to make the world a better place. We still face some of the same problems Dorothy Day devoted her life to combatting. Even if you don't agree with all of her views or methods, she merits respect and remembrance. This book is a great place to take a deeper dive into her life and legacy.
December 31, 2020
An excellent biography of a complex and sometimes unsympathetic character in Catholic history. Dorothy Day was a study in contradictions. An avowed hedonist who grew up in an agnostic household she nevertheless felt a dramatic pull to the Catholic Church. She was heavily influenced by the asceticism and simplicity of faith such as Saint Francis of Assisi and Saint Therese of Lisieux which led her to a passionate focus on the helping of those less fortunate: the homeless, the out of work, the drug addicts, the alcoholics. Day was passionately devoted to the Holy Sacraments and remained so even during the tumultuous 1960s when institutions were called into questions and openly criticized. At times, Day had a challenging relationship with the Catholic leaders of her day. They did not understand or always support her almost fanatical devotion to the poor and downtrodden. She openly criticized her perception of lavish spending and living of those who should have been examples on how to support the poor through church teaching. For students interested in gaining a better understanding of the complexities of the challenges of the Catholic Church in the 20th Century from both a worldly and doctrinal perspective. The book also provides an excellent detailed study of a complex human being as she attempts to reconcile her faith with the perceived problems that she saw in society.
Day is not always a sympathetic character. She struggled as a mother to her daughter and seemed to focus more on her charitable efforts than her parental responsibilities. Her faith in her ideology led her to blindly support movements around the world that she believed would better the poor and downtrodden. I was surprised when she openly supported Che Guevara and Saul Alinsky despite their aversion and hatred toward the Catholic Church. But Day's faith and single mindedness toward helping those who are downtrodden make her a fascinating character.
May 2, 2020
This book, more than any other Dorothy Day biography I've read, gets at a truth at the very heart of her Catholic Worker movement: "we don't measure our success, we don't despair, and we don't judge; we simply do the work God intends us to do."
Some writings about Day (including, I would say, her own) fall into something like the classic Catholic Saintwashing syndrome -- putting some gloss over the difficulties inherent in the truly Christ-centered life. Some, especially more recent works, focus on the shortfalls of the movement. Day's own shortcomings as a religious leader, as the anarchist figurehead of a movement, are highlighted in the stories of this most disorganized organization. And this book does not soft-pedal those aspects.
But in acknowledging these worldly shortcomings it puts them too in the proper context. The Catholic Worker is not a social service organization, and it was never intended to be. It stands as an example of what Pope Francis has said he wants the Church itself to be: a field hospital for a damaged and broken world.
Dorothy Day set up the triage unit for that field hospital. It took in the worst, most damaged cases, and gave them a bit of respite. Its successes are not measured in terms of how it changed the world, but perhaps in terms of how it changed individuals who went on to change their small part of the world.
Day's story as it is presented here is the story of small successes and failures which add up to an attempt at a Christian life. And it is in this -- not the glossy holy-card image of a Saint but the messy but well-meaning life of a human being at her best and at her worst -- that we can find some inspiration.
Some writings about Day (including, I would say, her own) fall into something like the classic Catholic Saintwashing syndrome -- putting some gloss over the difficulties inherent in the truly Christ-centered life. Some, especially more recent works, focus on the shortfalls of the movement. Day's own shortcomings as a religious leader, as the anarchist figurehead of a movement, are highlighted in the stories of this most disorganized organization. And this book does not soft-pedal those aspects.
But in acknowledging these worldly shortcomings it puts them too in the proper context. The Catholic Worker is not a social service organization, and it was never intended to be. It stands as an example of what Pope Francis has said he wants the Church itself to be: a field hospital for a damaged and broken world.
Dorothy Day set up the triage unit for that field hospital. It took in the worst, most damaged cases, and gave them a bit of respite. Its successes are not measured in terms of how it changed the world, but perhaps in terms of how it changed individuals who went on to change their small part of the world.
Day's story as it is presented here is the story of small successes and failures which add up to an attempt at a Christian life. And it is in this -- not the glossy holy-card image of a Saint but the messy but well-meaning life of a human being at her best and at her worst -- that we can find some inspiration.
June 12, 2024
Books like this are why I read. Yes, I learned about Dorothy Day, but I also learned about pacifism and the reasons behind Day's beliefs. I may not agree with everything, but I understand it now. Her way of thinking is so foreign to many Americans, both then and now, which is why she is such a controversal figure. However, she was consistant, that's for sure! I also learned about many more events in American history that I never really knew about, and had topics come up that I had already read about and so understood much more deeply than the author could get into.
" 'If you wish to astonish a Nazi,' Mounier wrote, 'tell him that he lives under a dictatorship.' If you wish to astonish an American, he further suggested, tell him that he is a cog in a system whose aim is economic hegemony across the planet and the triumph of consumerist desire, a desire that, properly stoked, will never be satiated. Those living under fascism, communism, and American capitalism had ceded their personhood to a 'collective consciousness,' eash assuming that his was sounder than the others and had been freely chosen." p139
regarding the societal changes in the 50's: two priests argued "her claim that not everyone was able to share in the postwar bounty. The poor were largely undeserving, they argued. If a man couldn't support a family, he shouldn't have one. Opportunities to pull oneself up by one's bootstraps were plentiful. The sin now, in modern America, was hard-heartedness or indifference to the pain of others, it seemed. The sin was poverty." p 262
" 'If you wish to astonish a Nazi,' Mounier wrote, 'tell him that he lives under a dictatorship.' If you wish to astonish an American, he further suggested, tell him that he is a cog in a system whose aim is economic hegemony across the planet and the triumph of consumerist desire, a desire that, properly stoked, will never be satiated. Those living under fascism, communism, and American capitalism had ceded their personhood to a 'collective consciousness,' eash assuming that his was sounder than the others and had been freely chosen." p139
regarding the societal changes in the 50's: two priests argued "her claim that not everyone was able to share in the postwar bounty. The poor were largely undeserving, they argued. If a man couldn't support a family, he shouldn't have one. Opportunities to pull oneself up by one's bootstraps were plentiful. The sin now, in modern America, was hard-heartedness or indifference to the pain of others, it seemed. The sin was poverty." p 262
April 23, 2020
I cannot speak more highly of a biography I’ve read in the past five years. Regardless of your faith or belief system, Dorothy Day’s life and story is, at minimum intriguing and at most inspirational. Her journey from radical pacifist feminist of the 1920s living a life that had her interact with the great American authors, artists and playwrights (she had a relationship with Eugene O’Neill) to a radical pacifist Catholic leader is both remarkable and yet seemingly natural for her.
I had first heard of Dorothy Day and The Catholic Worker in high school when a teacher, Br. McPartland talked about her, her works, and distributed copies of the paper to our rowdy teenage class (we missed so much). This book not only provides a lively and caring portrait of Ms. Day but also keeps from straying into hagiography - quite the feat when your subject may literally be a saint one day.
When we heard leaders of Christian denominations say (or read) that “God is love” we often don’t see actions that those words should spark. Ms. Day lived that. She showed loved to those that we often ignore, dismiss or forget. She showed love for all people with her fight for peace even straining her relations in the Catholic Church by supporting Castro, speaking out against the use of the atomic bomb in WWII the moment they were dropped, and defending those who were Communist as brothers and sisters and not enemies of the US.
I had first heard of Dorothy Day and The Catholic Worker in high school when a teacher, Br. McPartland talked about her, her works, and distributed copies of the paper to our rowdy teenage class (we missed so much). This book not only provides a lively and caring portrait of Ms. Day but also keeps from straying into hagiography - quite the feat when your subject may literally be a saint one day.
When we heard leaders of Christian denominations say (or read) that “God is love” we often don’t see actions that those words should spark. Ms. Day lived that. She showed loved to those that we often ignore, dismiss or forget. She showed love for all people with her fight for peace even straining her relations in the Catholic Church by supporting Castro, speaking out against the use of the atomic bomb in WWII the moment they were dropped, and defending those who were Communist as brothers and sisters and not enemies of the US.
February 11, 2021
It's hard to distinguish clearly between my liking of this book vs. my liking of the person it portrays. That's an issue reviewing any biography, but it seems particularly hard here because it's the only biography of Day I've consumed (this one via audiobook through SFPL and Libby).
Dorothy Day is one-of-a-kind: wildly progressive, wildly Catholic. That was an odd combination when she was living it out, and seems almost impossible in today's divided times.
We can all learn from Day's ability to walk between two worlds while never losing sight of her true north, which was a version of Catholicism that was dogmatic and yet in ways revolutionary. She would probably look happily on the rise of Pope Francis, who has similarly been committed to both the catechism and the community in ways many find hard to reconcile.
It was hard to read about some of the ways people took advantage of Day's open-mindedness at the Catholic Worker. And I can understand how it might have been hard for the organization to thrive without her vision and personality to guide it. I know that the CW is still active across the country, and I plan to look to see how I can learn more about how it's evolved since Day's passing.
Overall, I highly recommend this one!
Dorothy Day is one-of-a-kind: wildly progressive, wildly Catholic. That was an odd combination when she was living it out, and seems almost impossible in today's divided times.
We can all learn from Day's ability to walk between two worlds while never losing sight of her true north, which was a version of Catholicism that was dogmatic and yet in ways revolutionary. She would probably look happily on the rise of Pope Francis, who has similarly been committed to both the catechism and the community in ways many find hard to reconcile.
It was hard to read about some of the ways people took advantage of Day's open-mindedness at the Catholic Worker. And I can understand how it might have been hard for the organization to thrive without her vision and personality to guide it. I know that the CW is still active across the country, and I plan to look to see how I can learn more about how it's evolved since Day's passing.
Overall, I highly recommend this one!
February 7, 2022
If you are interested in the Catholic journalist and social activist Dorothy Day, this is the book to read. I have read 4 or 5 books about her--the hagiography by Robert Coles, the memoir by her granddaughter, and Day's autobiography, On Pilgrimage, as well as one of the earliest books about the Catholic Worker movement, William Miller's A Harsh and Dreadful Love--and of all of these, this one is the best. It provides a history of her early years--her short sojourn at the University of Illinois, her ability to drink Eugene O Neil under the table, her strange affair with a bullying journalist, her rivalry with Katherine Anne Porter, her dangerous abortion--as well as a picture of her intellectual growth. It also helpfully provides context for her strongest stances--her refusal to support our entry into the Second World War, her arguments with the Pope--as well as charming tidbits about the people in her life (W.H. Auden accosting her on the street to give her a check for 250$, Evelyn Waugh rolling up the the Mott St house in a chauffeur-driven Cadillac--). The writers are graceful and clear and, while they are admiring, they are able to be critical as well. Highly highly recommended.
June 25, 2021
"Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me." Dorothy Day had a distaste for complacency and luxury and an unwavering commitment to unconditionally serving the 'least of these.' Her stubbornness in her pursuit had no problem ruffling feathers (even for me, as a reader of her biography).
This detailed account carefully paints the life of someone who is anything but easy to understand. I appreciate how it focuses on the people and works that influenced her intellectually and spiritually (offering me plenty to explore further). I did though,find myself skimming through some of the lengthy accounts of others.
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A scattered life story: a convert and committed Catholic, she was also a political force. An anti-capitalist, anarchist, pacifist, she supported labor movements and was an early voice against racial violence. Yet, she never seemed to fit neatly into political parties. I am challenged by her commitment to Christ's teachings: especially the Sermon on the Mount. Her life challenges passivity in local & global communities: spiritually and vocationally. She seemed to deeply understand Common Grace.
This detailed account carefully paints the life of someone who is anything but easy to understand. I appreciate how it focuses on the people and works that influenced her intellectually and spiritually (offering me plenty to explore further). I did though,find myself skimming through some of the lengthy accounts of others.
--
A scattered life story: a convert and committed Catholic, she was also a political force. An anti-capitalist, anarchist, pacifist, she supported labor movements and was an early voice against racial violence. Yet, she never seemed to fit neatly into political parties. I am challenged by her commitment to Christ's teachings: especially the Sermon on the Mount. Her life challenges passivity in local & global communities: spiritually and vocationally. She seemed to deeply understand Common Grace.
July 11, 2022
I loved the book. Dorothy Day, wow, what a force of nature. I can’t believe I had never heard of her or learned about her at all in high school or even college (granted, American History was not one of my subjects, but I did go to a Catholic College)… but then the cynical part of me can guess why she wasn’t mentioned in the history books. Day (and the Catholic Worker) was outspoken on so many topics, an anarchist, anti-capitalist, a fierce critic of materialism, a voice for the voiceless, a labor agitator, fiercely at the forefront of the civil rights movement, a trade unionist, an advocate for the poor, the orphan, the mentally ill, for women, and oddly enough, a rather devout Catholic who was conservative when it came to abortion, family planning, and gay rights. Oh, and I nearly forgot a pacifist-something that perhaps caused her to be more hated than almost anything else, particularly during World War II. She was quite the contradiction.
A fascinating book on a fascinating lady.
A fascinating book on a fascinating lady.
June 2, 2021
This book on the life of Dorothy Day is excruciatingly detailed. While the detail sometimes felt a bit overwhelming, it did provide a great background on the people, many famous, who interacted with her. Who knew that she was close to Eugene O'Neill? This book identifies Dorothy Day's place in the world of the twenties, thirties and forties. I think it would be very useful to read some of her own writings to gain a better understanding of her theology and devotion to the gospels as written. I was very disappointed to read that the Vincentians, an order founded by St. Vincent de Paul, a saint dedicated to the poor, forbade the distribution of The Catholic Worker newspaper on the campus of St. John's University in New York. Also disappointing was the story of Cardinal Spellman's use of seminarians as strikebreakers during the strike of the gravediggers in the catholic cemetery. It makes Dorothy Day really look like a saint!
February 12, 2022
I've read a lot about Dorothy Day. But this is the first book that doesn't shy away from her "sinful" past. I'm not judging her by saying sinful. That's how she would have spoken of her own life before her religious conversion. Day became a Catholic with a vengeance. She took to her faith like St. Francis. She opened houses of hospitality for the most desperate during the Depression in New York. The houses were full of bed bugs and rats and crazy people. But she took seriously the idea of housing the homeless, clothing the naked and feeding the hungry. She also followed the Sermon on the Mount taking Christ's words to heart and becoming a pacifist, Even after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor she was against going to war. That view mader her awfully unpopular even among her greatest friends and supporters. Day was a remarkable human being. I would say she was a saint and one day the Catholic Church will recognize that too.
June 24, 2020
A very comprehensive biography on a very complex person that skillfully crafts a complete person (grey areas included) in an attempt to capture who Dorothy Day was. Presented is a nuanced telling of a person striving to genuinely live out the gospel, from the redemptive manner in which she sought to save souls (and see other Christs in her fellow man) to the recognition on her own imperfections in executing this salvation. The latter portions of her life appear a little glossed over compared to the earlier years, and some controversial topics, while addressed, receive more mention and coverage than insight and analysis (as per the impact of earlier events on her later life).
November 30, 2020
The life of Dorothy Day is captured in this work. Her amazing story is a call to action for everyone. Aside from being an in-depth account of her life, the context of the story is rich with literary lore specific to the 1930s and 1940s. Historical anecdotes include the dates, names and places of New York City in graphic detail. Many Americans have a distorted view of "socialism." Readers of this book will gain insight into socialism that dispels the attempt made by conservatives to demonize it. Despite Dorothy Day’s unorthodox life, it is clear why she is considered to be a Catholic saint--on the road to canonization
December 19, 2020
I have always admired Dorothy Day and her work with the poor. I knew some things about her work and life, but I wanted to learn more. My husband recommended this new biography about her to me after he read it, and we both now understand why she is being considered for sainthood. Though far from perfect, and certainly espousing some points of view that I find antiquated, my admiration for her is well grounded in the capacity she had to love her fellow human being, and the example of her self sacrificing life. This biography showed that Dorothy Day is truly worthy of the respect given her by many.
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