Dorothy Day
Roberts, Nancy L.
FIRST A JOURNALIST Dorothy Day Writings from Commonweal Edited by Patrick Jordan Nancy L. Roberts Commonweal had a long, rich connection with Dorothy Day (1897-1980). Outside of her own Catholic...
...With the pacing and suspense of a short story, the piece is a meditation on suffering, forgiveness, and transcendence...
...This volume gives fresh insights into her life and thought while not duplicating the earlier collection edited by Robert Ells-berg, By Little and By Little: The Selected Writings of Dorothy Day...
...Muste, she notes, "enjoyed listening to others, one felt, and was not just waiting to have his say, to be heard....He could sum things up succinctly enough at a small gathering, but when he was invited to speak at a meeting he spoke at length, with no gesturing, no 'eloquence.' You listened to what he had to say, not to how he said it...
...At first Brother Stanislaus is devastated when he calls his little friend and there is no response...
...Day adroitly paints a portrait of a hard worker, a passionate critic of mass-consumption values, who disavowed the automobile and used to ski into the village to shop for his groceries...
...Bed" (1931) is a humorous and touching account of trying to get the four-year-old girl settled in for the night...
...Stricken with invasive cancer at age fifty-six, he received last rites in his hospital bed as Day, his baptismal sponsor (along with Peter Maurin), looked on...
...It includes Day's eyewitness account of participating in the 1957 civil disobedience action against the New York City air-raid drill, for which she was jailed...
...Hergenhan ultimately lost his little house, perhaps because he couldn't pay taxes, and ended up at the Worker...
...Brother Stanislaus "prayed for a heart of flesh to take the place of the stone in his breast...
...Also of interest are Day's accounts of her travels in Mexico with her daughter Tamar Teresa...
...foreign policy, as when in 1967 it joined Day's Catholic Worker in advocating civil disobedience as a means of war protest...
...The battle is for this world, for the possessions of this world...
...She captures Diego Rivera, whom she met in Mexico in 1929, as "large and genial," while confessing that his attitude toward religion "shocked" her...
...And so this book of Day's Commonweal articles, reviews, and letters to the editor, spanning six decades, is a welcome addition to her anthologized work...
...The historical value of this collection is substantial...
...With the exception of the overuse of "gay" (as a synonym for "festive"), the language is contemporary and energetic...
...Then "the numb feeling turned to anger and the anger turned to remorse," as he considers the brother who inadvertently executed the rooster along with the other fowl that the community had been raising for the dinner table...
...The following year, the pair founded the Catholic Worker Movement, which has consistently advocated social justice and-for decades as a lonely voice among Catholics-pacifism...
...This exchange suggests Day's moral courage in expressing her convictions as well as Commonweal's traditional support for just-war thinking along with its growing acceptance of nuclear deterrence...
...She unfailingly discerns the drama and dignity in the lives of ordinary men and women and communicates their stories in a compelling way...
...And there is her 1948 letter to the editor in which she wrote starkly about her pacifism: "So let's not have any more talk about God and country...
...Overall, Day's sensibility and style hold up well...
...And two days later, "in some mysterious fashion, God made himself felt to the old lay brother, and his heart, as he wrestled with pots and pans, was full of joy...
...In response, Commonweal's managing editor, C. G. Pauld-ing, expressed "surprise at the passage in which she lists the reasons-all blindly selfish-for which men go to war...
...has had a profound impact upon the life of the church in the United States...
...urch-the people...
...That passage reflects an automatism, a determinism unworthy of her thinking and style...
...It's full of sprightly dialogue and reveals a side of Day that may be less familiar, since she has been more commonly viewed as the "mother" of a large Catholic Worker family...
...Through an unfortunate misunderstanding, Brother Stanislaus's charming, joyous bird lands in a pot, the ingredient for a fricassee that he, as the keeper of the kitchen, must prepare...
...Later, Commonweal was more willing to oppose U.S...
...In an age when the priesthood is increasingly seen as blemished, Day's old-fashioned Catholic piety and respect for the clergy do not seem too dated...
...For instance, her 1952 portrait of Steve Hergenhan, a crusty German carpenter who became a regular at the Catholic Worker, establishes him as "a skilled workman who after forty years of frugal living, had bought himself a plot of ground near Suffern, New York, and had proceeded to build on it, using much of the natural rock in the neighborhood...
...Another memorable piece is "The Brother and the Rooster," her 1929 account of a lonely contemplative who makes a devoted pet of a rooster...
...Three other men were lined up on the bed at the same time," Day wrote in her typically unsentimental way, "sitting there like gaunt old crows, their simple solemn faces lifted expectantly, childlike, watching every move of the priest, as he anointed their eyes, nose, mouth, ears, their dawlike hands stretched out to receive the holy oil, their feet with horny toes to which the priest bent with swift indifference...
...Day's is a contemporary voice, especially when she writes about the spiritual in the everyday...
...Perhaps this grows from her simultaneous respect for those whom she always considered the real church-the people...
...These are rich portraits of local people, customs, and spirituality, not to mention the antics of a young child...
...More important, it was through a Commonweal managing editor, George N. Shuster, that Day came to meet Peter Maurin (1877-1949) in 1932...
...Day and the Worker's brand of non-resistant pacifism has always been hard for many Catholics to embrace, especially before the Vietnam War...
...Outside of her own Catholic Worker, she wrote for no publication as much as Commonweal...
...Her 1967 piece about A. J. Muste of the War Resisters League, written shortly after his death, is a moving account of an anti-Vietnam War demonstration in New York's Union Square with the great advocate of nonviolence...
...By 1983, however, the American Catholic bishops in their pastoral letter singled out her historic peace advocacy, asserting "The nonviolent witness of such figures as Dorothy Day and Martin Luther King Jr...
...Day also writes with insight about the famous...
Vol. 130 • March 2003 • No. 5
