The Catholic Counterculture in America, 1933-1962:
Hoyt, Robert G
BOOKS The way we weren't CATHOLIC COUNTERCULTURE IN AMERICA. 1933-1962 James Terrence Fisher University of North Carolina Press, $32.50, 300 pp. Robert G. Hoyt his is a work of cultural...
...that the burden of suffering, either imposed or chosen, can be lightened by acceptance...
...She swept away all of psychiatry and modern psychology as not only godless but possibly/probably demonic...
...Of the six, Day, Jackson, and Willock were movement-related: social critics, moralists, organizers, givers of inspiration...
...And she was not equipped to organize a successful revolution in Catholic or American mores (and didn't really try...
...There are better and simpler explanations...
...and Dorothy Day is no footnote but a living force...
...She had common sense, as Fisher once acknowledges, and she was herself a journalist...
...Willock and the other founders of Marycrest were "the last Catholics to risk everything while insisting on their rightful place within the church...
...His analysis is best exemplified in his treatment of Dorothy Day, who is credited with "the invention, in the 1930s, of American Catholic romanticism...
...further, it came about because of the confluence of a great many forces, among them the experience of pluralism and democracy, the growing numbers of Catholic college graduates and their relative religious sophistication, the carefully venturesome work of mainstream theologians and other thinkers...
...Fisher might have reflected that while he had to rescue Integrity and its founders from obscurity, the study of Thomas Merton's life and thought constitutes a small industry (admittedly devoted more to his spirituality than to his social criticism...
...Professor Fisher is a professional historian and he has obviously done thorough research on the period and on the individual figures he has chosen for study...
...To put it more bluntly than the author might, Day and her allies and sympathizers wanted to rebuild the social order by bringing American Catholicism to life, but their efforts had little impact on society and more or less wrecked the church...
...As for the Worker, Fisher says that "only the very naive can any longer argue that during her lifetime [it] was not primarily a vehicle for Dorothy Day's powerful journalism...
...Giving the major blame or credit for this development to "personalism" or its advocates suggests that while the author knows a great deal about these people, he lacks a proper feel for the context in which they moved...
...Her explanation of why God lets bad things (like insanity) happen to some people is "so that the rest of us can exercise charity toward them...
...she lived it more than she led it...
...But that isn't all bad, even from a perfectly orthodox perspective...
...These efforts not only failed, the author holds, but had effects very different from those intended...
...In the East on a rescue mission, I asked Dorothy Day for fund-raising advice...
...in their place she would put the medieval distinction of the four temperaments-choleric, melancholic, sanguine, and phlegmatic-along with the practice of exorcism...
...also that chastity and celibacy are not of themselves proof of emotional disturbance...
...But Jackson, in my view, was more ideologue than thinker (and I say so as one who swallowed every issue of Integrity within an hour of its arrival...
...She was sometimes morose, sometimes brusque, basically a very serious person...
...A final chapter looks for parallels in the lives of Thomas Merton and Jack Kerouac...
...Finally, if the half-century now closing is put into a larger context, it becomes rash indeed to predict that we have seen the last of the Catholic "romantics...
...a year or so ago, writing in the Wanderer, she explained why Karl Rahner, Edward Schillebeeckx, Hans Ku'ng, and others who have gone on from Thomism, became heretics: it was their personal immorality...
...But she didn't deprive herself of good books, music, conversation, the joys of mothering and friendship, the beauties of flowers, surf, sky...
...O'Brien credits Day and Thomas Merton with central roles in promoting the "evangelical" (Gospel-based) style of being Catholic and American, a style which, he says, is even now becoming powerfully influential in the American church, notably in the bishops' recent pastoral letters...
...Fisher says Jackson eventually dropped her "militant Thomism" in favor of "a more mystical personalism...
...But readers may find it illuminating, as I have, to consider this book's thesis in the light of David O'Brien's essay in the present issue of Commonweal...
...What they all had in common, in the author's view, is that they were romantic failures: idealists, Utopians, and "antitriumphalists"-a term that seems to mean willful losers...
...One can't imagine any such judgment issuing from Dorothy Day...
...But there was also a dark side, Fisher writes, and it was dark indeed...
...The change came about because of an underlying attitude permeating the consciousness of the persons and movements the author studies: "Although the Second Vatican Council (1962-65) has often been cited as the cause of the immigrant church's transformation, or demise, the changes were actually rooted in three decades of an evolving sensibility I have called personalism...
...She was, he acknowledges, strong-willed, both attractive and charming, passionate and genuinely compassionate, a compelling writer...
...Dooley, Kerouac, and Merton are portrayed as searchers for identity, Catholic or otherwise...
...In short, to the extent that Day and the Worker can be termed failures, psychohis-tory doesn't explain the matter...
...And there goes the problem of evil...
...The Goliath of today's mainstream culture is armored against slingshots...
...Not so one can notice...
...Besides which: Did she really fail...
...As one now dubbed "Senior Writer," I can advise Professor Fisher that he may wish to reconsider that last judgment when he reaches his declining years...
...I thought she meant it, and probably tried to comply, but the next day she said she was sorry for brushing me off, and offered some names and ideas...
...She could, for instance, get along without things most people think necessary, partly out of detachment, partly out of the necessities of her work...
...love this body of ours at whatever age is treacherous...
...The same tone pervades the treatment of Merton...
...Two chapters discuss the life and career of Tom Dooley, the charismatic young doctor who practiced heroism in Indochina (well before the war) and heroics on the lecture stage in America...
...on the testimony of those who knew her better than I, I don't believe she pushed their ideology to its limits or bought it as a package...
...He finds other common characterological traits that help to explain both the genesis and the failure of the midcentury Catholic counterculture...
...Another goes to Carol Jackson and Ed Willock, co-founders of Integrity, a monthly magazine that gained a cult following in the late 1940s and early 1950s...
...As for the rest, it's again a matter of context...
...In any case, it is the treatment of Carol Jackson that I think best reveals Fisher's "outsider" perspective...
...Professor Fisher excuses himself from any examination of the impact the ideas she championed (e.g., on pacifism and [ugh!] "voluntaristic social welfare") have had, on the ground that these matters have been treated elsewhere...
...Day was morbidly attracted to suffering, and espoused "one of the most abject brands of self-abnegation in American religious history...
...B) The paper was a spin-off of Integrity, which was itself an offshoot of the Worker movement...
...Jackson had converted from "an agnostic brand of socialism" to Catholicism, but even more to neoscholasticism...
...the essence of Catholic Worker spirituality was "a thirst for a short downward path to the absolute...
...Though [Dorothy] Day was essentially a devoutly Catholic separatist, her movement [the Catholic Worker] launched a process which by the 1960s would find, much to her sorrow, millions of American Catholics exalting private conscience over the claims of the Church of Rome...
...It's also true that now, in contrast to previous eras, many practicing Catholics feel free in conscience to ignore or reinterpret some of the church's moral teachings and sanctions, especially but not exclusively in matters sexual...
...She replied, brusquely: "Go pray to St...
...is no footnote but a living force...
...For her, trust in God was meaningless unless total...
...today, he says, it exists primarily to preserve her memory rather than to be or become the kind of movement she envisioned...
...While she and Willock were its editors, Integrity condemned the rhythm method as "the unhappy compromise," reflecting and reinforcing the same values as the pill or the condom...
...There is an elegaic tone about Fisher's treatment of Integrity, Jackson, and Willock: that is not wholly inappropriate but is stretched far beyond their particular cases: "After Integrity, Catholic romantics would have to travel alone...
...Thomas taught, she became an instant triumphalist, more Catholic than any pope and less afflicted by doubts than anybody, especially about morals...
...Both quests rose in reaction against the materialistic, sensate individualism of Protestant, capitalist America and against the defensiveness and parochialism of immigrant Catholicism...
...Even apart from its quixotic elements (Peter Maurin's "Green Revolution," for example), the program Day set out for herself and the Worker was too much for anyone to accomplish in a lifetime...
...but by this time Day had lost patience with the magazine and particularly with Carol Jackson, who planted the idea for the Sun Herald and became its guru...
...An anecdote from my own experience may be relevant: I have what must be the unusual distinction of having received an apology from Dorothy Day...
...It's clear that, on the whole, the author admires Day...
...It gives three chapters to Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker movement...
...Despite their efforts, few American Catholics today evidence much attachment to or understanding of the specifically Catholic ideals the movements sought to promote: detachment, community, social justice, a rejection of industrialist capitalism, and (in the case of the Worker) radical pacifism...
...I do agree with Fisher, on the basis of other evidence, that the retreat masters Day enlisted for the Worker preached a particularly harsh and dour version of this strain within the Catholic tradition...
...Robert G. Hoyt his is a work of cultural history, focused on the efforts of some Catholics in the three decades preceding Vatican II to create a Catholic counterculture, "a new society within the shell of the old," and/or to achieve an authentically Catholic selfhood...
...Francis of Assisi, John of the Cross, Saints Teresa and Therese are still in the books...
...Day was also Jansenistic in her approach to sexuality (wouldn't read the Kinsey report, was shocked to learn of promiscuity among Catholic Workers) and remained so all her life-this we know because when approaching sixty she wrote that "in any physical expression of...
...or, perhaps more accurately, brought about a break-up of the existing Catholic culture...
...They were both converts, both charismatic and articulate...
...Some of this is too-confident future history, amply rebuttable on present evidence...
...The moral of the story is that Jackson and Day don't belong in the same book, at least not as exemplars of a single thesis...
...the bourgeois version of Catholicism is not the only one in play today...
...I can't testify about the present direction or strength of the Worker, beyond noting that there are now nearly 140 Catholic Worker houses and farms as compared to 76 in 1982, and that Workers recently picketed the new office building of the United States Catholic Conference as too utterly posh for the pilgrim church of the poor...
...I lack competence as well as space to discuss in any detail the uses to which the author puts the lives and work of Merton, Kerouac, Dooley, and Ed Willock (though I must say that it defeats me to grasp why Dooley is here at all, and gets two chapters...
...But even here, as will appear later, a caveat is in order...
...that suffering so received can serve to purify the self...
...Having absorbed what she thought St...
...Willock was also a chief figure in the establishment of Marycrest, a housing commune in Rockland County, New York...
...At the time I was part of a group that had started a national Catholic daily, the Sun Herald (it was published from a rat-infested storefront in Kansas City, Mo., five days a week from October 1950 to April 1951...
...Day thought we were mainly fools, despite being nice people and orthodox Catholics...
...As a nonscholar, my credentials for commenting are that I came of age in these decades, had some contact with four of Fisher's six principal figures, and was strongly influenced by them...
...Translation: (A) Because we had launched the Sun Herald with little experience, few contacts, and practically no money, we thought we were being fools for Christ...
...I do have a quarrel, however, with the thesis he argues...
...Two sentences from the introduction convey his thesis...
...He makes a number of shrewd observations about these people, and others that are either too subtle for me or go beyond my knowledge...
...But she loved life, was sometimes very funny, and was not a Tragic Figure...
...Jackson (writing as Peter Michaels) condemned insurance on principle: it preempted trust in God and one's neighbor and it depended ultimately on the practice of usury, because most insurance company investments involve the taking of interest for nonproductive loans...
...Day did not invent (but did help recover) the ideas underlying her approach to life: that Christianity has something to do with a willing acceptance of the cross...
...her religiosity may have been tinged with "sadomasochistic impulses...
...Essentially the book is an exercise in character study, or psychohistory...
...It's true enough that the Worker and similar movements that flourished during this period did not build Zion in America...
...Joseph...
...He apparently accepts David J. O'Brien's assessment of her as "the most significant, interesting, and influential person in the history of American Catholicism" (Commonweal, December 19,1980...
Vol. 116 • November 1989 • No. 20
