Revisiting Dorothy Day
By Marian Ronan
Because of my half-century of participation in the Grail,
an international laywomen’s movement, I have always felt related to Dorothy
Day. The first recorded contact between the Grail and American Catholics was a 1936
letter to her from the co-founder of the US Grail, Lydwine van Kersbergen. In
1943, with the Grail planted in the Midwest, Day, on sabbatical from the
Catholic Worker, participated in a three-week Grail program on rural living, liturgy, and the women’s apostolate. Later
she made a silent retreat at Super Flumina, the Grail’s farm in Foster, Ohio.
My personal contacts with Day were limited. She spoke at a meeting of the Catholic Art
Association—or maybe it was the Catholic Art Guild, since the Art Association
shut down in
1970––during one of the summers that I spent at
Grailville, the Grail’s farm and conference center near Cincinnati, when I was
still a fourth-grade teacher. Her talk
followed the showing
of a short art film, “Two Men and a Wardrobe.” My
recollection is that Day was quite dismissive of the film, something that led
me to categorize her as a crabby, old-fashioned Church type; I was in my
mid-twenties at the time and not very forgiving.
I also wrote to Day in 1975, after I had become a
full-time member of the Grailville staff, asking if she would send me a copy of
the Muslim “Ninety-Nine Names of God” that another
Grail member, recently home from Egypt, had given her.
She responded,
Sorry. Those 99 Names have disappeared from my treasure
box, though the beads remain. My bedroom is always used in my peregrinations,
so things disappear, are ripped off, liberated, to use the language of the
young.
My love to all there.
–– In Christ––Dorothy.
The message came on a postcard bearing the kind of
dramatic woodcut, this one by Antonio Frasconi, that appeared frequently in the
Catholic Worker. Eventually I had the postcard
framed archivally, to preserve it. When I show it to visitors
I tell them that if Dorothy is canonized, it will become a second-class relic,
a comment that baffles most of them.
All the rest of my “encounters” with Dorothy have taken place
since her death in 1980. One was reading the letter from Cardinal John O’Connor
to the Vatican nominating Day for canonization. It highlights, as a reason for
her canonization, Day’s repentance for the abortion she underwent before she
became a Catholic. Later, Cardinal Timothy Dolan, at an event in Day’s honor at
St. Joseph’s in Greenwich Village, the church where Day was baptized, described
her as an “obedient daughter of the Church.” I was well past my mid-twenties by
then, but my responses to these statements were still not very forgiving. With
regard to Day’s obedience to the Church, for example, I thought: except for the
cemetery workers’ strike, where Day and her Catholic Worker colleagues picketed
against the strikebreakers brought in by the Archdiocese.
Most recently, my encounters with Day include reading Jim
Forest’s biography, All is Grace (Orbis 2011). I have had it in my head for
years to write a book about Joan of Arc, Thérèse of Lisieux, and Day, because
of the strong but seemingly unlikely connections between them––Thérèse the
ascetic having written a play about Joan the warrior, and Day, the pacifist,
devoted to Joan as well, then writing a book about Thérèse. Forest’s book is
part of the material I’ve been accumulating for the project.
Forest is a terrific writer, and I learned a great deal
from his biography that I had not known about Day. For one thing, I learned
that she really was in many respects a traditional, if
also utterly committed, Catholic. She was also a fairly
judgmental individual, a sin she confessed again and again. So my evaluation of
her in the 1970s was not entirely mistaken. I also learned that Day really was
an obedient daughter of the Church, frequently following the directions she
received from bishops and priests—though she was by no means naïve about the
sins of the institution.
I even learned that Day really did seriously
regret—repent of—her abortion, though whether she would want to be remembered for
that before anything else is another question. Indeed, she objected strongly to
any suggestion that she was a saint, believing it undercut the Catholic
Worker’s fundamental commitment to egalitarianism and denial of self.
Perhaps the most important insight I took away from
reading Forest’s biography, however, is that precisely because of her high
level of Christian commitment and the strength of her positions, Dorothy Day
may well be exactly the kind of role model needed in this difficult time. In
the midst of the environmental crisis that engulfs us, for example, I look
around our apartment and wonder why in hell I ever bought all these clothes,
these books, those items of kitchenware, and I find myself deeply inspired by
Day’s poverty and self-abnegation.
And as I observe the chaos that paralyzes many of the
groups I belong to, underpinned by the individualism and expectations of
gratification by so many in my generation, I find myself profoundly challenged
by Day’s concern with and obedience to authority, however communal her
understanding of it was.
And when I am too lazy to turn out for public
demonstrations or too afraid of being arrested, I remember Day’s endless commitment
to social action, and her many stays in jail. Could it be, I find myself
wondering, that the woman I once dismissed as too traditional a Catholic and
too judgmental a person is exactly the model––the saint––we need as we face the
crises that confront us?
Marian Ronan is Research Professor of Catholic Studies at
New York Theological Seminary, a Black, Latinx and Asian theological school in
New York City, and co-author, most recently, of Women of Vision: Sixteen
Founders of the International Grail Movement (Apocryphile Press, 2017)
