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Dorothy Day: Selected Writings; By Little and by Little

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Dorothy Day's life and writings challenge Christians to remember and serve the least among us. This selection of writings highlights a broad range of social, political and religious topics. In her time, Ms. Day's activism brought about much criticism and opposition. Today many remember her as America's Mother Teresa. Her purpose was to keep the Gospel alive through the challenge of service. Her voice continues to shine in the pages of this excellent collection. If you are interested in a call to social justice Dorothy Day's writings will be a source of continued inspiration.

This was the first book by Dorothy Day that I ever read and now I have just finished it for the second time. It's fabulous! Informative and inspirational. I found my faith strengthened by reading this book. I highly recommend it for all.

Anything that Dorothy Day said or wrote is worth reading because it finds its basis in her lived experience. She is an outstanding example of a Christian who practised what the Spirit of the Lord invites us to live on hearing the Good News. Her entire life, in which her writing - whether for the Catholic Worker magazine or in her autobiographical recollections - forms an integral part, can be thus regarded as the Gospel thrown wide open. As in his presentation of Dorothy's diaries, "The Duty of Delight", in this book also Robert Ellsberg's superb selection of her words from various sources enables people today to get know this woman of faith and indomitable courage, to be deeply struck by her love and service shown towards God's "little ones" - the destitute, marginalised, suffering, poor in various situations. Her vibrant words thus electrify all who read them with hope for a better world - a hope that is realistic because she lived it undauntedly through trying and seemingly impossibly concrete circumstances, trusting always in God's transforming grace, without which mere human projects and plans are short-lived and collapse. This book offers not merely an account of facts or events in Dorothy Day's committed work for social welfare or peace through bringing about a non-violent revolution of love. Rather, it puts one in touch with the mind and heart of a great lover of humankind because in prayer above all she discovered how to encounter and listen to the God of hope.
Michael L. Gaudoin-Parker,
Assisi, Italy.

This selection of writings by Dorothy Day, despite some editorial deficiencies, should help readers discover Day's views, many of which are not popularly known or are overlooked. Day herself declared in the January 1970 "Catholic Worker" that the organization "was a revolutionary headquarters rather than a Bowery mission, as most newspapers like to picture us." She was a lifelong believer in two opposing theories: pacifism and the Marxist tenet of class warfare. She abandoned neither of these beliefs when she became a Catholic. Indeed, one of her main goals was to incorporate both these contradictory views into the teaching of the Catholic Church. Thus, her writings often castigate and correct the views of average American Catholics and the hierarchy--such as Cardinal Spellman and Archbishop Hannan--who believed, according to the natural law teaching of the Church, that nations have a right to self-defense.

In the December 1965 article reprinted on pages 333-336, she reports "the happy news on the radio this morning" that the Vatican Council has passed the Schema on the Church in the Modern World, "included in which is an unequivocal condemnation of nuclear warfare." The printed document of Chapter 5 of "Gaudium et Spes," or "The Church in the Modern World," states: "Any act of war aimed indiscriminately at the destruction of entire cities of extensive areas along with their population is a crime against God and man himself. It merits unequivocal and unhesitating condemnation" (#80).

She also states that "the idea of arms being used as deterrents" is included in this condemnation. Chapter 5 of "Gaudium et Spes"--which never uses the word "nuclear"--states: "To be sure, scientific weapons are not amassed solely for use in war. Since the defensive strength of any nation is considered to be dependent on its capacity for immediate retaliation, this accumulation of arms, which increases each year, likewise serves, in a way heretofore unknown, as deterrent to possible enemy attack. Many regard this procedure as the most effective way by which peace of a sort can be maintained between nations at the present time" (#81).

Day does not convey the balance that exists in "Gaudium et Spes," which declares: "Motivated by this same spirit [of the love of Christ], we cannot fail to praise those who renounce the use of violence in the vindication of their rights and who resort to methods of defense which are otherwise available to weaker parties too, provided this can be done without injury to the rights and duties of others or of the community itself" (#78). "Those too who devote themselves to the military service of their country should regard themselves as the agents of security and freedom of peoples. As long as they fulfill this role properly, they are making a genuine contribution to the establishment of peace " (#79).

As this volume reveals, Day repeatedly presents unilateral disarmament as the proper Christian view. "Gaudium et Spes" states: "Since peace must be born of mutual trust between nations and not be imposed on them through a fear of the available weapons, everyone must labor to put an end at last to the arms race, and to make a true beginning of disarmament, not unilaterally indeed, but proceeding at an equal pace according to agreement, and backed up by true and workable safeguards" (#81).

The volume being reviewed thus can serve as a useful tool for "clarification of thought" in respect to the cause proposing the canonization of Day. Day herself declined, telling a reporter, "Don't call me a saint, I don't want to be dismissed so easily." She expands on page 103, in her usual style of making a statement, then qualifying and contradicting it:

"We are called to be saints....
"And all this talk about saints, and our obligation to strive toward sanctity, is because there is a very subtle way of attacking the temporal aims of the Catholic Worker, our work in the fields of pacifism and distributism, by saying, and in so saying dismissing us as quite beyond anyone's acceptance or imitation: 'Oh, they are all saints down there at Mott Street!'
"All the emphasis is laid on our work for the poor, our breadline, our clothing line, our tenement-house shelter, our sharing with others.... Our actions are admired and praised but only as palliatives and poultices, and our efforts to do away with the state by nonviolent resistance and achieving a distributionist economy [in which most people, including families with children, would live in communes and practice 'voluntary poverty'] are derided and decried.
"Of course we are few. But Marx and Engels and Trotsky and Stalin were few, but that did not keep them from holding their vision and studying and working toward it."

That someone being considered for canonization presents the above foursome as role models is eye opening. Day's goes even further, presenting Marx and Lenin as secular saints on page 214, where she rhapsodizes over "Papa Marx" and Lenin, "who loved to go into the peace of the pine woods and hunt mushrooms.... 'He went about doing good.'Immediately after this comparison of Lenin to Christ, Day asks "Is this blasphemy?" and rather than answering her own question goes on to excoriate the clergy and Christians for their failings in love! On page 303, she uses the same technique for Castro in 1961: "And when we see Castro dealing with the problem of unemployment and poverty and illiteracy, we can only say, 'We will see this good in him, that which is of God in every man,' and we will pray for him and his country daily....
"[Another Catholic Worker] was reminded of the parable in the Gospel of the man born blind who answered his questioners, after he had been hectored and badgered by men who said, '"Give glory to God. We ourselves know that this man is a sinner." He therefore said, "Whether he is a sinner, I do not know. One thing I do know, that whereas I was blind, now I see."'"

This is an interesting view, given Castro's suppression of the Church and his throwing out Catholic clergy and religious. Day claimed that the expatriates left willingly--yes, if they preferred being alive outside Cuba to being imprisoned or dead if they stayed. Pope John XXIII must have disgreed with Day's view, as he excommunicated Castro on January 3, 1962; an action that did not prevent Day's visit to Cuba, nor her reports in the CW praising Castro's Cuban "reforms." In February 1963, Day continued to support and advocate for the social revolution in Cuba--without mentioning Castro by name-- a wonderful example of how to follow the "letter" not the "spirit" of the Church's teaching. Carol Byrne's "The Catholic Worker Movement (1933-1980): A Critical Analysis," published in 2010, reveals many other examples of how Day distorted papal and Church teachings, such as the Mystical Body.

Day's presentation of Communist terrorists and murderers as role models is appalling--especially in view of her much vaunted concern for human life and pacifism. The above writings--all after her conversion--do not differ much from the unbelieving Day's exulting safely in the US over the Communists' victory in Russia. Hundreds of hostages were executed in the Moscow prisons in the 1918 September massacre ("The Black Book of Communism," p.76)--to mention only one incident. Day must have been in a mental bubble throughout her long life to dismiss Communist atrocities and acts of genocide or deny them as fabrications. The fall of the Soviet Union and declassification of KGB files has confirmed that these crimes against humanity occurred and the Iron Curtain and the Cold War were not an imaginary "Red scare." For further information, see "The Sword and the Shield," co-authored by ex-KGB agent Vasily Mitrokhin, and "Dupes," by Paul Kengor.

This book of readings also helps to explain the English spiritual writer Caryll Houselander's perceptive comments to an American friend in May 1948:
"Regarding the conflict between the 'Catholic Worker type' and the 'Keep to the Middle of the Road'--what strikes me is that there ought not really to be any conflict, and that it is caused by a whole lot of mistakes which are generally accepted without question.
"First of all take the Catholic Worker type. You get papers from them, in which practically every article is a very vital grouse about injustice, and a few boosting up by a wood- or lino-cut of Our Lord or St. Joseph driving a huge nail into a splitting plank, with a wooden mallet which would be ruined by the action.(Being a carver--in wood--by trade, this picture worries me.) But what is lacking in these papers is any articles that seem likely to make Christ more real to the worker himself in his own life, as if the only consideration is his just grievance and the duty shared by him and all men, to try to remedy it. What is absent is the suggestion of his being in unity with Our Lord in suffering injustice, or any real understanding of work itself, the integrity of the artist at work, which should be every worker's ideal, or the honour he has in practicing and suffering as Christ did, or the glory of being poor, and so on. Also it seems to be presumed that the rich man (a) doesn't work at all, b) doesn't suffer any injustice at all. I could start pages on the superficial side of this, but don't want to get away from the heart of it--namely, that in the Mystical Body we are all one, and we do all experience the Passion in at thousand secret ways, and we share--if we want to or not--in each other's lives and responsibilities. When I read snob-stuff from `Catholic Action' people of the `Flame' [Grail] type, and when I see it practiced, it turns my blood to poison; but I think the tendency to segregate every type and class, at least in the mind, leads to a vast number of individuals completely misunderstanding themselves and their glory. If everyone was concentrating on being a `Christ' in and through his own circumstances as they are, then I think that inevitably all the injustices would be righted." ("The Letters of Caryll Houselander," ed. Maisie Ward, 1965, p. 225)

A collection of Day's writing, it's a fascinating read, and one would hope a call to conversion for those who fail to see Christ in all around them, especially in the poor. Remember, we are told not to judge and to give freely to all who ask. Think about that the next time you're approached by a panhandler.

Inspiring book of author's own writings. This is a dynamic book that has the power to help you change your life. Great read and food for thought.