Dorothy Day: Radical Devotion

By Jeffry Odell Korgen and Christopher Cardinale

Paulist Press, 2024

114 pages, $16.95

We Are Only Saved Together

By Colin Miller

Ave Maria Press, 2024

175 pages, $17.95

 

There was nothing ordinary about the life of Dorothy Day. She was a left-wing radical, a sometime communist sympathizer and a believer in free love. She hung out in the early part of 20th-century New York City with some of the great writers of the age as well as gangsters, whom it is said she could drink under the table. 

But Day is proof that God can take the rawest of materials and make them shine with holiness.

Day, who died Nov. 29, 1980, is now on the ladder to canonization, having been declared a “Servant of God” in 2000 following the petition of Cardinal John O’Connor, then archbishop of New York. 

She became a Catholic in 1927 after giving birth to a baby daughter out of wedlock. She named her Tamar Teresa, the second name for St. Teresa of Ávila. She understood the Gospels in the way of the early Church, with a strong emphasis on community and communal help.

She was inspired by itinerant French Catholic philosopher Peter Maurin to live with the poor as equals. Maurin eschewed communism and capitalism and instead preached community built around the Eucharist as a radical form of Gospel life.

Day was also enamored of St. Thérèse of Lisieux and her “Little Way” of small acts of mercy. She even penned a biography of the Little Flower titled Thérèse.

In 1933, during the deepest part of the Depression, she and Maurin created Houses of Hospitality in Manhattan to serve the homeless. They also created a newspaper, named after their movement, The Catholic Worker. It sold for one cent per copy. 

“We have all known the long loneliness and we have learned that the only solution is love and that love comes with community,” Day wrote in her autobiography, The Long Loneliness.

Now, two new books have been released that further the Catholic Worker’s vision of a Christian society.

The first is We Are Only Saved Together by Colin Miller, a former Episcopal minister who converted to Catholicism. It’s a moving and challenging summary of what it looks like to try to fully live out the Gospels. 

The other is Dorothy Day: Radical Devotion, by Jeffry Odell Korgen and Christopher Cardinale. This graphic novel, which might be described to those unfamiliar with the genre as an “adult comic book,” tells the Catholic Worker story with striking illustrations and text. There are many great books about Day and Maurin and the movement they started but this book serves as an easy and enjoyable introduction to who they were and what they did.

Miller became a Catholic because he ultimately found Protestantism offered no single idea of what a Christian should be. But even in Catholicism, the Church he loved, he saw some unnecessary divisions. 

“This need to choose a side seemed odd to me, especially in light of the example of Maurin and Day,” Miller writes in We Are Only Saved Together.

“Their Catholicism was rooted deep in the heart of tradition — it grew from the same soil that sprouted the Benedictines and the Franciscans and St. Thomas Aquinas and any of the saints. They didn’t ever seem to identify as liberal or conservative or anything but Catholic.” 

Miller and friends first opened their own houses of hospitality in North Carolina and later in Minnesota. They were determined not to be aloof benefactors to the poor but, in the fashion of the Catholic Worker movement, to live with them as friends and equals.

Even with their desire to live as one with the most desperate in society, they still had to ask a basic question: How do we live together?

The answer they were looking for was in Day’s autobiography:

“We cannot love God unless we love each other, and to love we must know each other. We know Him in the breaking of bread, and we know each other in the breaking of bread, and (therefore) we are not alone anymore. Heaven is a banquet and life is a banquet, too, even with a crust, where there is companionship.”

From those words, Miller and his friends found their answer. He writes: “Loving God and one another in heaven will be a matter of eating together, with Christ and one another.” 

His book can make for uncomfortable reading. Miller demands a much greater adherence to the meaning of the Gospels. It is not enough, Miller believes, to simply be pious and attend Mass regularly.

“Individual piety is an important expression of faith, but it is also a very safe one,” Miller writes. “These are all good things — but this is a vision of holiness that leaves our fragmented, anxious, lonely lives pretty much intact. It keeps our faith safely sealed in the sanctuary.”

He refers to what it meant to be part of the early Church: Christians were set apart from the greater society and therefore made it dangerous to worship Christ rather than the emperor and the pagan gods. Being a Christian meant being all in. It demanded more than just showing up on Sunday for Mass. 

Maurin and Day looked around them and saw that Christians were no longer a distinctive people but were indistinguishable from the greater secular society. 

The Church, for Maurin and Day, Miller notes, was the “heart of life.”

“The Church is God’s intervention into a world gone mad — it is a fellowship that pulls us out of the world and transforms the world precisely by being a place in which people could live differently now.” 

They believed that Jesus came as one of “them,” the poor and homeless, the kind of person best avoided. 

Miller emphasizes that the Catholic Worker movement was never meant to be an alternative to the Church. “Radical” meant to “go to the root.”

The movement was not meant to be “strange, marginal or fringe Catholic — it is to be fully Catholic,” Miller writes. “It is to go to the root of one’s own life and to be transformed into Christ’s image at the deepest level. It doesn’t get any more radical than that.”

Dorothy Day: Radical Devotion makes a great companion to We Are Only Saved Together. It is an accessible biography of Dorothy Day and her journey from political radical to deeply religious Catholic. It covers the span of her life, warts and all. 

She was 8 years old when she and her family lived through the great San Francisco earthquake of 1906. She always remembered how people came out to help each other when faced with hardship. It’s almost as if that seminal experience were stamped on her soul.

As a young woman, she became a “girl reporter,” the label used for women who entered what was then the man’s world of journalism.

The story proceeds through her political radicalization, which was borne of her anger at the injustice faced by ordinary working people.

The darkest part of the story recalls her abortion, a gut-wrenching decision she deeply regretted for the rest of her life. The father offered no support and no marriage.

Later, she met a man she fell deeply in love with. Once again, she became pregnant — but this time saw her baby through to delivery. Day decided to have the baby baptized and hoped Forster Batterham would marry her.

But Forster told her:

“I’ll have none of this. I don’t believe in marriage and I don’t believe in God. And I don’t believe in this stupid church.” She gave up the man she loved to follow a different path.

It was in the Church that Day finally found her way. All her life was based on the Gospels, something she took more seriously than many pious cradle Catholics. Not only did she see the most desperate poor as her brothers and sisters, but she took Christ’s teaching to turn the other cheek seriously. That made her immensely unpopular, particularly when she opposed American involvement in the Second World War.

That put her at odds with much of the Church establishment, something that was not uncommon in Day’s life. 

But for Day the choices she made were simple but difficult: simple in that she chose to follow the Lord; difficult because no one, not even Christ, said that would be easy. 

A Dorothy Day Reading List

All Is Grace by Jim Forest, Garratt Publishing

Dorothy Day: An Introduction to Her Life and Thought by Terrence Wright, Ignatius Press

Works of Mercy by Fritz Eichenberg: This is a book of woodcuts that appeared in The Catholic Worker newspaper. Each is haunting and beautiful; Orbis Books.

The Long Loneliness by Dorothy Day, Harper Collins