Dorothy Day biography highlights courage, compassion, and controversy of the Catholic activist | Book review
A former Bohemian and communist sympathizer who converted to Catholicism at age 30, she built the Catholic Worker Movement.
Dorothy Day: Dissenting Voice of the American Century
By John Loughery and Blythe Randolph
Simon & Schuster. 436 pp. $30
Reviewed by Samantha Power
In September 2015, in my capacity as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, I sat in the House chamber listening to Pope Francis deliver a joint address to Congress. In remarks that touched on religious fundamentalism, immigration, and the death penalty, the pope said he intended “to dialogue” with Americans and their elected representatives. To do so, he drew on the lives of four national figures: Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr., the Catholic Trappist monk and writer Thomas Merton, and “servant of God” Dorothy Day, whom the pope hailed for “her passion for justice and for the cause of the oppressed.”
When I heard Day’s name, I looked around the chamber, wondering if anybody else was struck that he had included her.
Day, a former Bohemian and communist sympathizer who converted to Catholicism at age 30, built the Catholic Worker Movement, which still runs “hospitality houses” that care for the homeless, the mentally ill, and all manner of disadvantaged people, and which publishes the Catholic Worker, a radical newspaper. As a political activist, Day denounced America’s entry into World War II, as well as President Harry Truman’s nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki as America’s “mortal sin.” She also believed that capitalism was destroying countless American lives, arguing even in the midst of McCarthyism that, because of America’s racial segregation and its role as the world’s arms supplier, “our way of life, as we are living it, is not worth saving.”
Before joining the church, she had an abortion and gave birth to a child out of wedlock. Once baptized, she frequently attacked the Catholic Church hierarchy for its silence or complicity on matters of injustice. Despite this colorful past, nobody in the U.S. House chamber seemed to react to her inclusion. I wondered if this was because people were unfamiliar with her complex and gripping life story.
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With Dorothy Day: Dissenting Voice of the American Century, John Loughery and Blythe Randolph add to a growing canon on Day, whom the Vatican has been considering for sainthood since 2000.
Drawing on Day’s vast archive of letters, diaries, manuscripts, and oral-history transcripts, the authors were clearly swept up — as were so many during Day’s own era — by their subject’s charisma, political courage, and utter selflessness in caring for the poor.
Unfortunately, what at times reads as a nearly year-by-year account of Day’s life includes details about people and places that would interest only the most avid Day followers. (Readers might wish to start with David Brooks’ brisk and inspiring profile in The Road to Character or the Catholic activist’s own engaging memoir, published in 1952, The Long Loneliness.)
Loughery and Randolph highlight stands Day took that have resonate in today’s divided America — for example, her biting attacks on corporate interests driving public policy, her spirited advocacy on behalf of Jewish refugees and interned Japanese Americans, her deep aversion to the use of military force, and her suspicions of an overzealous federal bureaucracy, which for years kept Day and the Catholic Worker Movement under FBI surveillance.
They are critical of Day for privileging her work with the poor over care for her own daughter, and they fault her reluctance to stand up for gay rights as she had for other oppressed minorities. They also question how she could fail to grapple with the costs of pacifism in the face of Hitler’s rise and terror. In citing the polemical headlines she penned in the Catholic Worker at the dawn of World War II, such as “We Are to Blame for New War in Europe,” the authors intentionally make readers cringe. However, even when her positions are objectionable, Day’s constancy — and willingness to pay a price (whether jail time or a massive drop in readership and funding) for her beliefs — stand out.
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Day’s fierce independence of mind made her an incessant irritant to the church hierarchy, which she frequently criticized. Yet whenever she seemed to be on the verge of crossing the line — at one point, for example, causing the archdiocese to instruct her to remove the word “Catholic” from the Catholic Worker’s masthead — she backed off. She simply didn’t believe that she would be able to sustain her personal faith outside the organized confines of the Catholic Church. She loved the church, the authors write, “authentically and critically.”
Day was aghast at the ways people of professed faith would turn their backs on those in need, when the example of Jesus and the message of God were so clear. She also rejected what today we call “canceling” — boycotting or withdrawing support for individuals because of their wrongdoings. Day’s capacity for forgiveness was capacious, and she was firm in arguing that nobody was beyond redemption.
In November 1980, knowing that her end was near, Day, 83, asked to be released from a hospital so she could return to her Catholic Worker home to die among those with whom she had served for so long. In her last extended conversation before her death, Day spoke by telephone with her friend Eileen Egan, and asked about the victims of an earthquake in Italy and the aid efforts by Catholic Relief Services.
Egan later remembered, "Her voice was strong with compassion."
We can be grateful to Loughery and Randolph for reviving a voice for our times.
Power, a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, is the author of “The Education of an Idealist: A Memoir” and a professor of practice at Harvard Kennedy School and Harvard Law School. She wrote this review for the Washington Post.