Confronting Dorothy Day
McCarthy, Abigail
CONFRONTING DOROTHY DAY A symposium was held in March at Mercy College in Dobbs Ferry, New York, to honor Dorothy Day. Messages acclaiming her came that day from figures as widely spaced...
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...But so far most women who have been leaders on the world scene, from Elizabeth I to Golda Meir and Indira Gandhi, have had to do so in the way of men...
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...population, about food, about mass poverty, about the gap between the poor and the rich nations, about illiteracy, child morbidity, unemployment, and . . . about the very air we breathe, the food we eat, and the water we drink...
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...It's not that the second part of the book is weaker...
...For she was the constant, in season and out of season...
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...The guerrillas are fighting, and thousands of courageous Argentine people, including priests, are being killed by the military, precisely because of their courageous opposition to the military tyranny...
...Come to the Bower" and "Bog Queen," necromantic fantasies of decayed loveliness, suggest a macabre sexuality...
...But her writings spread in the little penny paper and she talked where she could, insisting on the need to take literally the call of the gospel to feed the hungry and harbor the harborless...
...Even saintly mother foundresses have been known to fret at the limitations imposed by sex, and to equal men in manipulative expertise...
...As a young woman she loved a man, and considered bearing their child one of the greatest moments of her life and one which led her to Ood...
...It is the institutions that have ceased to function properly in Argentina: the state, the military, the press and the 13 May 1977:318...
...The Paulist life is not an easy one...
...Through the years she has led in a woman's way by letting the motley communities of the Worker form and function autonomously--"like families" mand by constant visitation, by listening, by reiterating the principles over and over againmbut also by lending her presence again and again, a mother and a sister, in prison wRh war resisters, in prison with the farm workers, submitting to body search and abuse in her old age...
...She is very sure of which half of the world's population she belongs to, and is not threatened by sharing with the other, as the evidence inclines us to think that men may be...
...In the desolate waste, where stripped off layers of sod reveal eternities of savagery and passion, he makes his grove, assumes an Antaeus-like pose, interprets bog history with biting sarcasm: Come back to this 'island of the ocean' where nothing will suffice...
...The slashed throat of the tarcast Grauballe Man and the shaven and severed heads of an adultress ("Punishment") and an ax-stunned maiden ("Strange Fruits") translate to further grim reminders of the here and now...
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...OOOOOO 000 Abigail MeCarthg (Cent...
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...Many of these themes are among those things about which worldwide decisions are still made by one sex, as Helvi Sipila, highest ranking woman at the United Nations, once said despairingly, "the decisions about (Contimwd on page 317) Commonweal: 297 In "Belderg" it is the spectacle of the cyclopean quernstones "piled like vertebrae" and the mysterious phonic marriage of a bogland name that signify the "congruence of lives" and prompt our fierce imaginings...
...It is real action as well as symbolic action...
...In this collection there are the same intriguing word plays, graphic images, mythos of place, and touches of wry Ulster h u m o r that characterize Heaney's earlier successes, but, with saga impulses and bog ruminations, there are exciting added dimensions...
...As a small communiW of Catholic priests, we have worked [or over a cent u r y t h r o u g h o u t t h e United S t a t e s and Canada--from Manhattan to Toronto...
...In an interview published that same week Archbishop Jean Jadot, Apostolic Delegate to the United States, when pressed to identify the good or great American Catholics whom he would cite as models, had only been able to name Dorothy Day...
...Drinan and Commonweal for the article "Repression in Argentina [Feb...
...We are missionaries...
...0 0 o o 0 0 0 0 0 CORREHPOIqDENCE (Continued ~tom pctge 291) program of teachings, some of them repugnant to Christianity as the Catholic Church understands and proclaims it...
...And if the group as a whole is unwilling to profess the Catholic faith as the Catholic Church teaches it, why are priests ordained for them, and why are they allowed to regard themselves as an incipient religious house...
...He was obviously uncomfortable in the feigned role of leadership...
...from Greensboro to Houston, from Los Angeles to Fairhanks...
...Dorothy was our lodestar...
...Life must mean something diff e r e n t : t h e a t t e m p t t o live in union with God...
...Because of her it was possible to remain faithful to a Church with which we were often at odds...
...If Dorothy was, and is, really the leader of this movement which has served as a prod to our consciences, as the voice crying in our wilderness, her way of leadership may be worth studying...
...For forty years Dorothy Day has created an audience for what Joseph Cunneen, organizer of the symposium, called the "emphases of the Catholic Worker: the theme of poverty, nonviolence, the problem of power and the powerless, the role of women, the relation between prayer and politics...
...Messages acclaiming her came that day from figures as widely spaced in the American spectrum as Terence Cooke, Michael Harrington and Norman Mailer...
...Lewis Lancaster, Phd...
...Activists and thinkers came to the Worker over the years, stayed awhile and left some to become editors, politicians, movement leaders, professors, priests, nuns, novelists...
...Unless the questions were abstractly philosophical or sweepingly historical, he would turn helplessly to Dorothy Day for an answer...
...She continues to show us what that means...
...You are the Church...
...we are actively involved in parish work...
...I agree with you," he said to the interviewer, "on the lack of heroes, and of real prophetic figures, in the way Dorothy Day was, and still i s . " There was no such acclaim when Dorothy first began her tireless travels around the country talking of her Catholic Worker in the thirties...
...In Part One of North Heaney is a word-wielder of considerable stature...
...She does the physical things and so keeps a balance . . . . Now when women are putting their hand to the machine gun and joining in the violence which is racking us, the men join in the healing and n o u r i s h i n g . . , the cultivation and the preservation of the good earth...
...But one who dares will find rewards beyond ex)ectatJon...
...And in "Viking Dublin: Time Pieces," he probes for involuted logic in the serpentine patterning of artifacts, but finds in them the ineluctable common denominator of tribal retribution...
...To do so...
...Rev, Joshu Sasski, Roshi Frederick Streng, Phd...
...Sipita lists, and she has insisted that men share her concerns...
...a good house, a 9nod c a r . . , and if we're lucky, a good marriage...
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...In the early poems of North the genetic memory runs wild...
...She answers that questioning best herself: "Perhaps it is easier for a woman to understand than a man...
...But Dorothy remained always, her unique literary gift and her great power of example, its mainstay...
...To think that this thing of beauty . . . had come from my flesh, was my own child...
...But to say that "there is not one courageous person in all of Argentina" is contradictory with the rest of Drinan's paper...
...What does it mean that Dorothy to this day insists that Peter Manrin founded the Worker and led it...
...The new poems are provocative, inspired, and well wrought...
...Such a great feeling of happiness filled me that I was hungry for Someone to thank, to love . . . . " Her motherhood and grandmotherhood have been a source of her meditation and inspiration...
...For some (and perhaps for you) this is not enough...
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...Orange Drums, Tyrone 1966" toys with a metaphoric lambeg pounding aerial hstred...
...The Paulists offer a way of life which can s a t i s ~ young men who seek more t h a n the ! "good life...
...We had no doubt that she was the real leader of the Catholic Worker movemeat...
...report us fairly, how we slaughter for the common good and shave the heads of the notorious, how the goddess swallows our love and terror...
...10019 Dear Father DeSiano...
...Characteristically, she gave all credit for her remarkable accomplishment . . . to Peter Maurin, an itinerant French philosopher . . . a man of genuine Franciscan detachment from worldly goods, extremely humble in manner...
...For further information write: Q CIMARRON ZEN CENTER 2505 Cimarron Street Los Angeles, CA 90018 in this affirmation and true to her own bent and experience...
...Many looked on her as a possible Communist infiltrator...
...Part Two contains autobiographical poems written earlier (1966-72) and reflects on the troubles in the wartorn province...
...20th, "This seminar is an excellent opportunity to intxoduce Buddhist Wisdom in an authentic setting...
...It may say something about the way women might contribute if they had equal responsibility in the world with men...
...But active love," he says, "is labor and fortitude...
...Yet in a day of obsession with liberation her reIevancy ---her insistence on feeding and sheltering the poor--is often questioned...
...Director of Vocations PAULIST FATHERS/Dept.C 415 West Sgth Street New York, N.Y...
...Articles like this one, and campaigns like the one conducted by Amnesty International are the only hope that thousands of innocent people have to save their lives and the only hope that the world has for a more humane political system in Argentina...
...Leo Pruden, Phd...
...Joseph's Abbey Spencer, Mass...
...But how, then, is it possible to justify his continuing to remain pastorally the superior of his group...
...insisting, moreover, on the need to examine the society which left people homeless, drove farmers from their land, made of workers automatons, and gave no vision to the young...
...In North he responds eloquently to criticisms of sameness in substance and form...
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...Those of us who read and heard, and who saw the Worker movement founded with its idea of houses of hospitality for the poor, in body or spirit--forty from coast to coast in a very few years--of farming communes, of communities of workers ABIGAIL MeCARTHY and scholars, were given an answer to our complaints that the Church did not address the problems of the day...
...But not complete satisfaction, for we are constantly searching to make the Gospel real to more people in today's world...
...The "good life" somehow is not enough...
...Whatever You Say, Say Nothing" responds to the rhetoric of violence in calculated irony...
...It is walking in the steps of Jesus . . . . " Dorothy is fond of quoting Dostoevsky who wrote that love in dreams is greedy for immediate action, rapidly performed and in the sight of all...
...e ua zu and UCLA EXTENSION Announce A SUMMER SEMINAR ON THE SUTRAS At Mount Baldy, Calif...
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...Dorothy Day was then (1937) about forty and a strikingly attractive woman . . . . She was quietly effective in her constant prodding of young people to achieve greater progress i n spiritual development combined with detachment and social concern...
...One cannot imagine Dorothy in a community of women alone...
...it's just that the ground has been covered before...
...In the Church itself her welcome was, at best, lukewarm...
...I with: Kees Bolle, Phd...
...The poems, "Bone Dreams" and "The Digging Skeleton," disinter more blackened corpses...
...preaching, adult education, camp u s m i n i s t r y , p u b l i s h i n 9 and mass communications...
...To the Editors: As Argentine born, with family and many friends in Argentina, I would like to thank Fr...
...To speak the message of Jesus Christ to this modern world: to communicate His shatterin9 love and overwhelming forgiveness in a t i m e and world where He so often seems absent...
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...Over the years she has insisted on being taken seriously on the subjects Mrs...
...Now that there is neither bond nor free _9 . . we are a little nearer to the heavenly kingdom when men are feeding the hungry...
...She had disillusioned many of her former comrades on the left by joining the Church...
...Two 2 week sessions: July 17th to July 29th and July 31st to August 12th Resident Accomodations for 1 O0 Students & Scholars at Mount Bald~ Credit available through UCLA Extension to qualified students...
...One of those who came, John Cogley, and left to become in turn an editor of Today, Commonweal, The New York Times, and the Center Magazine, wrote in his last book of their meeting when he was a young man...
...We feminists are fond of saying that women, given the chance, would do things differently...
...K.Wako Kato, Phd...
...to serve others, to give a s totally and as generously a s you can...
...H.Graham Lamont, Phd...
...Dorothy Day was one of those first feminists to go to jail in the struggle for suffrage...
...Read the inhumed faces of casualty and victim...
...Don't let your i d e a l i s m die...
...If Feeney himself is no longer well enough to deal with the theological issues involved, and wishes to be reconciled with the Church, few would quarrel with the decision of the bishops concerned to make every allowance for him...
...I tend to dispute these Catholic feminists who see in this just another example of the ageold strategy of women who had to achieve their goals through men...
...You can do these things and do them where you are...
...Her relationships are a continual affirmation of the need of one sex for the other in our common endeavor...
...But when the exhumations have been done, our poetexcavator contemplates the softness of the bog: in "Kinship" he admits I love this turf-face, its black incisions, the cooped secrets of process and ritual...
...we are bridgebuilders...
...Because no matter what catastrophe has occurred or hangs overhead, she has to go on with the business of living...
...Frank DeSlano...
...It is true that apathy has taken over the Argentine people, apathy that can be explained to a large extent by the catastrophic administration of Peron and his wife...
...There were cities in which no parish hall or Catholic school auditorium was open to her...
...Some of the young, like myself, who could not completely accept the Worker ideas and the Worker way of living, nevertheless became fellow travelers of the Worker for life...
...And that over the years there have been a succession of men to whom she ascribed leadership and quoted respectfully-men who thus had a far wider hearing than they would otherwise have had...
...She is wifely iS F LIFE COLLEGE?I it depends on what "life" means...
...In "Funeral Rites" it is the recent victim of a "neighbourly murder," craving rhythmic requiem that spurs the poet's resolution: I would restore the great chambers of Boyne, prepare a sepulchre under the cupmarked stones, he insists...
Vol. 104 • May 1977 • No. 10
