In a recent conversation, a highly regarded historian made the remark that Dorothy Day was the most interesting person in the history of American Catholicism. I agreed, but should have added, “and the most challenging, the most provocative.”
Last summer, the New Yorker (August 9,1999) published a sixteen-page Richard Avedon portfolio, “The Sixties.” There were Avedon portraits of Bob Dylan, Sly Stone, Gus Grissom, Janis Joplin, Julius Lester, and Bernadette Dohrn. Abbie Hoffman was captured giving the finger, and remarking to writer Doon Arbus: “I’m not against the war in Vietnam. I’m for the National Liberation Front winning. So I’m not for peace there.” Folowing an icy triptych of rock musician Johnny Winter, there was a nearly two-page portrait of seventy-one-year-old Dorothy Day. It had been taken at the Milwaukee Catholic Worker in the fall of 1969. If not regal, Day appears patrician in a hand-me-down blouse and blazer. In contrast to many of the other subjects in the portfolio, Day looks directly into the camera with clear eyes and an implacable strength and serenity. Her shoulders, while stooped, remain squared. Wisps of white hair escape the wreath of her braids. Reading glasses dangle at an angle from a cord around her neck. Within several sentences she instructs Arbus about civil disobedience and the works of mercy: “You know, a lot of Catholic Workers go up in the world. And a lot of them go down in the world—to jail. I must say I have much more esteem for those who keep trying to get lower.”
Trying to get lower is one of the themes of Day’s 1948 book, On Pilgrimage. And in fact the book initially succeeded in doing just that as the first of several works published by the in-house Catholic Worker Books in the late 1940s. The December 1948 Catholic Worker announced the price for the 175-page paperback as $1.50. By the January 1949 issue of the paper, the cost had been lowered to $1. Eerdmans has just republished the book as part of its ressourcement in Catholic thought series. The small volume is based on some of Day’s columns, articles, and notebooks for 1948, and includes a lengthy introduction by Mark and Louise Zwick, editors of the Houston Catholic Worker, which first appeared in Communio (Fall, 1997). As the Zwicks rightly point out, what is most relevant about this volume is not simply Day’s prophetic writing and witness, but her spiritual depth and pratice. How these intersect constitutes her enduring challenge.
On Pilgrimage is not Day’s best book. She clearly profited from having an editor—her The Long Loneliness is a classic, and her Loaves and Fishes is a more coherent volume—but she seldom had one when preparing her columns for the monthly issue of the Catholic Worker. (The present collection suffers from a presumed familiarity on the part of her readers. We are not given help to understand first-name-only characters who sound quite intriguing. Who is this “Slim” she mentions who liked to call her Fuhrer-ess to her face?) Nonetheless, this 1948 book is full of high-grade ore and some unforgettable passages that demonstrate not only Day’s gripping reportage but her luminous humanity and spirit.
Particularly affecting are the pictures she paints while visiting her daughter’s growing family on a small, dirt-poor farm in West Virginia: the warmth they share, not only on dark February nights in a frozen holler, but in the languid splendor of summer swims with her small grandchildren in a nearby creek. There is a searing description of the Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, ghetto, with its overpowering smell of dead rats. Day eventually links the plight of those who suffer in America’s wastelands with the pungent fruits of capitalism: “The stink of the world’s injustice and the world’s indifference is all around us,” she says. And one senses it would be impossible to look her in the eye and presume to contradict her.
But this book is full not only of Day’s passion for justice but her spiritual commitment and her own self-doubts and self-criticism. The latter were exacting companions that nevertheless worked to save Day from the self-righteousness endemic among inspired radicals, left or right. At fifty she writes, “I have always to struggle against self. I am not disillusioned with myself either. I know my talents and ability as well as failures. But I have done woefully little.”
That, of course, would be true of most of us, but not Dorothy Day. Who else could write so authoritatively, “Let us rejoice in poverty, because Christ was poor”? “Let us love to live with the poor,” she continues, “because they are specially loved by Christ. Even the lowest, most depraved—we must see Christ in them and love them to folly.”
Day did, but with clear eyes, an active mind, engaged heart, fervent prayer, radical critique, and uncommon joy. We cannot but learn from her many pilgrimages, and this 1948 collection, circumscribed and limited though it may be, reveals something essential and timelessly challenging about her.
