Dreadful Conversions by John C Cort

...Considering the depth of his conversion and his boldness in presenting his unwavering, lifelong Catholic commitment in various public forums, Cort's memoir touches rather lightly on theological matters and only hints at precisely how his personal faith has nurtured and sustained him through often difficult circumstances-beyond, of course, inspiring his deep commitment to social justice...

...Catholic labor activists were regularly smeared as "red-baiting clerical fascists" when they opposed Communist control of unions, even though they were often instrumental in legitimizing unionism among pious Catholic factory workers...

...At the time that fateful meeting occurred, Cort was a young Harvard graduate who had recently undergone what he calls a somewhat "bizarre" conversion to Catholicism...

...Not likely...

...He includes "interviews" with his children about their lives in the inner city, as well as an account of an uproariously funny "family meeting" about domestic duties in the 1970s that might have been titled "Patriarchal Liberal Catholic Has His Consciousness (Partly) Raised...

...Yet many other dimensions of Cort's varied and colorful career are presented in the same earnest, anecdotal, and often very funny voice...

...One attempt to distribute the Catholic Worker and pro-CIO Catholic literature in Boss Hague's anti-union Jersey City led to the following debate with some Irish Catholic cops about who was to blame for the littering that occurred when people discarded their literature: COP: You're the first cause of the littering...

...One would also like to know more about Cort's spiritual journey...

...What attracted me was a quality of humor and laughter, but with a base deeper than you might get from a good comedian," he reflects...

...While promoting the papal encyclicals and encouraging Catholic laborers to join unions, the "ACTists" opposed gangsters, Communists, and Coughlinites as well as anti-union employers...

...But it was the "worker" side of the movement that most attracted Cort...

...Mel Piehl Has anyone personally expe-rienced more of the drama of modern American Cath-olic history than John C. Cort...

...It is a remarkable life by any standard, and Cort's memories and reflections convey its compelling drama as well as the history he has witnessed...

...He often found himself standing against the anarchist, pacifist, and even anti-industrial tendencies of many of his fellow Catholic Workers...

...Here and there, though, one catches glimpses of the religious insight that underlies that taken-for-granted commitment...

...And here he is at the conclusion of this lively, engaging memoir offering sharp commentary on the recent Catholic sexual-abuse scandals...

...In showing how one layman has lived out such a "theology of the cross" in the modern American context, Dreadful Conversions may remind Catholics and others of what their faith at its best can yield...

...Cort was part of the Catholic Worker movement almost from its beginnings in the early 1930s...

...The Catholic labor causes of the 1930s and 1940s clearly formed the passionate heart of Cort's public life, and Dreadful Conversions is most vivid and insightful in recalling them...

...What was it about Dorothy Day that had such an effect...

...Cort's wife Helen Haye Cort and their ten children are a consistent presence through the later chapters of Dreadful Conversions...

...Cort attempts to set the record straight on this score through pungent bibliographical commentaries as well as his dramatic personal accounts of various union fights (some of them literal...

...I thought God made man to break the law so we could have a job...

...This minimalist treatment of spiritual matters may reflect less an autobiographical reticence than a now-less-common type of lay Catholic piety, one that was so deeply ingrained in a way of life that it hardly required articulation...

...He says surprisingly little about the conflicts and shifting concerns of Catholic liberalism during his lifetime, about topics like birth control and papal authority, or about his extensive association with Commonweal (he wrote a regular column for this journal and served on the editorial staff from 1943 to 1959...

...Like Dorothy Day herself, Cort "was converted" (in the older Catholic phrase) not because of the church's social message (he wasn't aware of any) but because he found in the Gospels and the old Catholic Encyclopedia irrefutable answers to the personally troubling questions of moral choice, salvation, and human destiny that his personal anxieties and critical Harvard education had led him to confront...

...He concludes that it was not her delivery or even her social message, but something about her person...

...third COP: That's funny...

...On a few topics Cort seems less than completely revealing, and one sometimes suspects that Dreadful Conversions stops short of conveying the full inner life of this wise and thoughtful man...

...Cort still asks...

...Cort's account of their efforts is breezy, self-deprecating, and often humorous, but underneath the vivid anecdotes and wit is revealed the utterly serious religious commitment that old-time Catholic activists like Cort brought to their work...

...He recounts his long, painful battle with tuberculosis, his extensive career as a journalist (he long edited the journal Religious Socialism), his service as a Peace Corps and War on Poverty administrator in the 1960s, and his movement with his family into inner-city Boston during the heated racial crises of the 1970s...

...A fair amount of the book is taken up with Cort's continuing argument for what he calls "Catholic socialism," though his undogmatic social ideology seems closer to that of his friend and fellow ex-Catholic Worker Michael Harrington, who talked about "the left wing of the possible" and helped usher the remnants of the old Debsian Socialists into the Democratic Party...

...second cop (figuring to expose our Catholic pose): Why did God make man...

...To that end, Cort relates, he and others organized the Association of Catholic Trade Unionists around the kitchen table at the Catholic Worker...

...Hearing Day speak at the Boston Catholic Worker, Cort immediately vowed to chuck his cub reporter's job, postpone his pursuit of an attractive Wellesley girl, and head for a life of "voluntary poverty" in New York...

...Laughter on all sides.] Cort still plainly chafes at the frequent ideological misrepresentation of Catholics' role in the American labor movement- a distortion that has been perpetuated in many latter-day leftist-tinged labor histories...

...An earlier version appeared in the July 3,1981 Commonweal as "How the Females Put an End to Male Oppression...

...cort: If you're going to talk about first causes, then God is the real first cause because God made man...

...Mel Piehl teaches in the history department at Valparaiso University...

...cort (letting him have it straight from the Baltimore Catechism): God made man to know him and be happy with him forever...

...While generally critical of avant-garde theologians like Hans Kiing, Cort strongly endorses Kiing's statement that "Without faith in the cross, faith in the risen Christ lacks its distinctive character and decisiveness...

...He begins with his life's defining moment: his first meeting with Dorothy Day...

...His own lifelong mission became trying to apply to the conditions of modern industrial society artist Eric Gill's claim that "men work best when they own and control their own tools and materials...

...He describes how as a "pompous Harvard convert" he became quickly immersed in the Catholic Worker way of life at the houses of hospitality and farms, which involved "a lot of hard work and some good laughs...

...In one word it was a quality of joy....Whatever she had-fun, joy, Holy Spirit-it moved me...

...Joining the Catholic Worker movement in New York not only solved Cort's problem of "spiritual loneliness" after his conversion (he had known no Catholics at Harvard), but gave him his lifelong vocation as a social critic and activist especially concerned with labor issues...