Dorothy Day
Cort, John C.
Books: IN A TINE OF GIGANTIC EVIL THIS is a valuable book, a much better book than A Harsh and Dreadful Love, William Miller's first attempt to capture the life, mind, and spirit of Dorothy Day and...
...And I most firmly believe that all social reformers, without exception, should ponder well her words: "We live in a time of gigantic evil...
...Miller comments: "As Peter certainly knew, there was nothing in the method or philosophy of unionism that would make living a 'Christ-life' easier...
...Back to the land" was a siren song that Peter sang and Dorothy could not help but find almost as bewitching as her beloved Wagner...
...Dorothy herself suffered from ambiguity about the modern world...
...For example: "There is nothing wrong about cars...
...And became a Catholic...
...The book includes much that Dorothy was ashamed or simply unwilling to reveal in other accounts of the early years, before her conversion...
...It is a fault, but a fault that helped me clarify further the ambiguity in Dorothy's vision of what is wrong with the current social order and what should be done about it...
...In his second effort Miller has improved his writing style, dug up a lot of new material, cut down on insertions of his own viewpoint, permitted Dorothy and her relatives and friends to speak for themselves, and all-in-all produced an excellent biography of one whom the DOROTHY DAY A BIOGRAPHY William D. Miller Harper & Row, $18.95, 527 pp...
...The sad thing is that Dorothy never had the confidence in her own intelligence to challenge directly Peter's dead-end forays into Arcadia and away from the refusal to recognize that there is, after all, some good in the industrial revolution...
...For his agrarian reasons he had no love for unions , ("Strikes don't strike me," etc...
...If anything, the objectives of unionism, themselves so openly partaking of the spirit of the bourgeoisie, were themselves a major impediment to the'Christ-life...
...The contrast between Dorothy's common-sensible understanding of the realities of life, whether human or divine, and Peter's romantic escapism into the agrarian nostalgia of his childhood, is best illustrated on pp...
...In times of depression...
...it is hopeless to think of combating it by any other means than that of sanctity...
...It is hopeless to think of combating it by any other means than that of sanctity...
...and on the other hand, we must remake men to remake the social order...
...Dototby Day result of a torrid love affair with a newspaperman who cast such a spell over women that two of them tried to commit suicide over him and Dorothy may well have been a third...
...One of the virtues of Miller's biography is that he does not idealize either Dorothy or the Catholic Worker, but reveals them as they are, or were, "warts and all...
...The truth is that, despite those obvious limitations, she had a sounder idea of what to do about the social order than Peter did...
...The effect is not to diminish our conviction that Dorothy was a bona fide saint, but rather to strengthen it by reminding us of the human weakness that she had to overcome in order to attain that heroic faith and virtue that qualifies her for inclusion among the church's most elect...
...Dorothy wrote in the Catholic Worker: "We do believe that they [the unions] are the only efficient weapons which workers have to defend their rights as individuals and Christians against a system which makes the Christ-life practically impossible for large numbers of workers...
...To think of overcoming such evil by material means, by alleviations, by changes in the social order only-all this is utterly hopeless...
...And how could the state be expected to do this if Christian citizens did not vote...
...because I did not know any candidates, and also because of discouragement with the prevailing political system...
...Cut down, but not eliminated...
...With warm approval Miller sums up her reaction to her first week-long retreat given by Hugo and Father Louis Farina: "The Christian disposition, then, as she saw it, should not become politicized or socialized...
...It was, certainly, the work of the Christian to end injustice, but not to be assailing unjust systems...
...Frankly, I believe this too is a mis-statement of what Dorothy believed, for if she believed it, she was farther gone toward Manicheanism than anything she herself said or wrote would lead us to conclude...
...There is no room to spell out the intimate relationship between unions and the Works of Mercy, except perhaps to quote again Monsignor Joseph Gremillion's profound aphorism, "To feed the hungry is a simple mandate, but it is not a simple undertaking...
...John C. Cort New York Times has called "the most influential lay person in American Catholicism...
...We believe that Catholic workers must use unions in their efforts to heed the exhortations of the popes to 'de-proletarianize' the workers...
...Injustice would be ended with the coming of the Kingdom...
...Nevertheless, she had this tendency, especially in moments of depression or discouragement, to emphasize what Miller calls "time with its evil nightmares" or "time's capricious and endless farces...
...This abortion was significant because the guilt preyed on her mind to the point where she was persuaded that she could not absolve herself unless she had a child...
...Miller may have taken this description too literally, for he cites and quotes from the book without always making it clear to the reader that he is citing autobiographical fiction and not actual autobiography...
...As a matter of fact, Peter "certainly knew" no such thing...
...But she did let a few hints slip out...
...Miller adds, "She had a 'love for cars.' but if cars could be made only by dehumanizing the worker, then cars would have to be made by another system...
...In fact, they are a joy and a delight...
...How could she square this with such other statements as: "Of course, as Pope Pius XI has pointed out, in times of crisis the state must intervene for the common good...
...but I never heard him say anything that would indicate that he was so at odds with common sense, history, and the teaching of the church as Miller would indicate...
...This child, Tamar, the fruit of a common-law marriage with another man, was greeted by Dorothy with such joy and gratitude that she acknowledged God as the only plausible source of it...
...I wrote above that Miller has cut down on insertions of his own viewpoint...
...On the one hand, we have to change the social order in order that men might lead decent Christian lives...
...the state had the duty to take care of the homeless, the poverty-stricken...
...Still, she was a saint...
...I was a journalist, loved to write, but was far better at making a criticism of the social order than of offering any constructive ideas in relation to it...
...And yet, late in life she wrote: "I have never registered, nor voted.'' The reasons given are pathetically sophomoric...
...One irony of her life was that her first of five trips to prison was the result of picketing the White House in 1917 with a group of women suffragettes...
...Much of the new material comes from The Eleventh Virgin, the novel that Dorothy wrote when she was twentythree and later described as "a very bad book" but one that she also described as "all true...
...To think of overcoming such evil by material means, by alleviations, by changes in the social order only-all this is utterly hopeless.'' The emphasis is added...
...305 and 306 of Miller's book, where he is reporting, with obvious distaste, Dorothy's support of the surge of union activity that characterized the 1930s...
...In a humble but inaccurate statement she once wrote, "Peter Maurin is most truly the founder of The Catholic Worker movement...
...One of the more surprising revelations is that Dorothy had an abortion as the "Common sense in religion is rare, and we are too often trying to be heroic instead of just ordinarily good and kind...
...She loved the country and rebelled periodically against the dirt and corruption of city life, which her devotion to the poorest of the poor never permitted her to ignore...
...For we too are working toward a classless society...
...Books: IN A TINE OF GIGANTIC EVIL THIS is a valuable book, a much better book than A Harsh and Dreadful Love, William Miller's first attempt to capture the life, mind, and spirit of Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker, which was published in 1970...
...Peter deserves our grateful admiration because he needled Dorothy into starting the Catholic Worker, because he had a clear vision of the central - place of the Works of Mercy in any Christian system, because he could express that vision in his Easy Essays with such force and simplicity that any fool could understand it, and because he was a gentle soul who embodied the love of voluntary poverty that is also at the heart of Christ's message...
...And founded the Catholic Worker...
...The Christian's work was to end the world‚ to end time and not to struggle with it...
...The retreats of Father John Hugo did nothing to discourage this escapist tendency and, in fact, clothed it with a semblance of more authentic spirituality...
...I firmly believe that, and believe it more firmly after reading William Miller's story of her life, despite its faults, and hers...
...We live in a time of gigantic evil...
Vol. 109 • September 1982 • No. 16
