Get to know Thomas Merton and Dorothy Day

John Timpane

is an Inquirer staff writer

During his U.S. visit, Pope Francis mentioned two Americans just about everyone knows - Abraham Lincoln and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He added two not everybody knows - Dorothy Day and Thomas Merton. That sent TV newscasters frantically Googling those last two names.

Everyone should know them. Everyone should read Merton's spiritual autobiography, The Seven-Storey Mountain, and subscribe to the Catholic Worker, a monthly newspaper (with woodcut art!) that Day started in 1933 and is still being published by the Catholic Worker Movement in New York. (Day's The Long Loneliness is worth reading as well.)

Believe in God or not, consider yourself right, left, center, independent, or nothing: If you're American, these two strange human beings should figure in the way you see yourself. Like Lincoln and King, they stand for this country of wanderers and seekers. Like them, too, they stand for the stubborn fact of social injustice and the need to protest and fight against it.

Pope Francis included Day and Merton because both were converts, after long, agonizing quests for a spiritual home. Both were not always saintly - another reason to include them. Some folks "write off" a historical figure because of, say, depression or hypocrisy (Lincoln, King), sexual affairs (Day, King, Merton), abortion (Day), or alcoholism (Merton and Day). But surely, surely, the point is to embrace these wanderers, these imperfect people. The United States is a land of wanderers, seekers for answers, people who make really bad mistakes and then go out and make more. Many, however, find better lives. That, too, is the story of Merton and Day. With Lincoln and King, they are quintessential Americans.

Surely, Francis was saying: It's not that these fell; it's what you do, you out there, faced with lives like theirs. And what lives!

Day lived at least two lives: Her first 30 years (1897-1927) and her next 53 (1927-1980). In her 20s, she was an anarchist, anticapitalist, pacifist, bohemian journalist who worked in poor communities, protested the First World War, and championed the women's vote and workers' rights. She had an abortion, was married briefly.

The love of her life was biologist Forster Batterham. They had a daughter, Tamar, in 1926, but Batterham refused to marry Day. She had Tamar baptized Catholic, and, after a long, painful interior odyssey, she converted in 1927.

She has one of the most interesting sexual lives in the 20th century - one of renunciation, her towering desire for the man she loved, who said no. She loved Batterham for years after their separation, writing him lonely, grinding, sexually balked letters, pleading for marriage, promising her faith would not intrude.

In 1933 came her watershed. She and theologian Peter Maurin founded the Catholic Workers Movement. It pictured Catholicism as an activist social-justice faith, working locally for the poor and marginalized, protesting the inherent injustice of capitalism, espousing pacifism and nonviolent protest, and reminding the world of the redeeming love of Christ. The first issue of the Catholic Worker asked: "Is it not possible to be radical and not atheist?"

In the last week, Day quotes like this one have become notorious: "We need to overthrow, not the government . . . but this rotten, decadent, putrid industrial capitalist system which breeds such suffering in the whited sepulcher of New York." Last weekend, a particular Facebook friend really worried my keister over that one.

But . . . Day doesn't want to overthrow the government. She wants more justice in our economic system. Who believes our system is all-the-way just? Can I see some hands? If you say, "OK, no, I can't really say that," does that make you a wild-eyed Horrible Person? Day challenges all Americans. She put her money where her very quotable mouth was. Praising her God and Christ, she worked for the rest of her life among the poor and destitute.

As for Merton, another odd, difficult person, he was born in that amazing year 1915 (along with Frank Sinatra, Billie Holiday, and other greats) in France, was naturalized as a U.S. citizen in the late 1940s, and became a Trappist monk at the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky.

He also caused a worldwide sensation with The Seven-Storey Mountain (1948). In a way few religious figures do as of 2015, his thought became a mainstay in the intellectual discourse of the next two decades. He expanded the notion of spirituality, engaging with American Indian and Eastern religions - much ahead of the "turn to India" of the 1960s. He inveighed against the nuclear arms race, the Cold War, and the Vietnam War.

What's remarkable, though, is how far ahead of his times he was. Merton was among our earliest "ecologically minded" writers. He came at it from a religious standpoint: "We are in the world and part of it, and we are destroying everything because we are destroying ourselves spiritually, morally, and in every way. It is all part of the same sickness, it all hangs together." The environment, as Pope Francis said repeatedly during his U.S. visit, is a social-justice issue. We hurt humanity when we hurt the environment, and in so doing we hurt Christ.

On racism, Merton wrote that white society "has betrayed Christ by its injustices to races it considered 'inferior' and to countries which it colonized. In particular it has sinned against Christ in its lamentable injustices and cruelties to the Negro."

Merton was a social-justice radical just as Day was, albeit from the study and not the street. He, too, advocated social action, nonviolent protest (he and Day are as American as Thoreau, as global as Gandhi), and race, class, and gender equality. He, too, sees the system as inherently unjust: "We are living in a society which for all its unquestionable advantages and all its fantastic ingenuity just does not seem to be able to provide people with lives that are fully human and fully real."

American writers prefer to dwell on our "unquestionable advantages" and "fantastic ingenuity," to praise the system through which these gifts come to us all - as if that were sufficient. Day and Merton warn us it's not. Work remains, always, hard, long, frustrating work.

To impugn our productive, unruly, uncaring system - isn't that unmindful of our history? Unpatriotic? A betrayal of land, livelihoods, markets? Day and Merton warn us that the real crime is to delay, deny, dither, do nothing.

Lincoln, Day, Merton, and King shared a questing life, a life of religious epiphany that impelled them into a lifetime of activism. Implicit in the pope's praise of these four was that our work here isn't finished. But, then, neither is America, and in the names of Lincoln, Day, Merton, and King, I hope it never is.

jt@phillynews.com

215-854-4406 @jtimpane