Saint, Sinner, Troublemaker
By: Michael O'Donnell, WSJ
In the early 1950s, as the Cold War began to take shape, the radical Catholic Dorothy Day protested a series of nuclear air-raid drills in New York City. Rather than staying indoors as ordered, Day and other pacifists gathered in parks and waited to be arrested. The gesture signified their refusal to participate in “psychological warfare” as well as their penance for America’s nuclear attacks on Japan in 1945. The midcentury drills look quaint in hindsight, a relic of a black-and-white era safely behind us. Yet as a pandemic upends the globe, we are reminded that disaster can and does strike and that civil preparation means the difference between life and death. One thing we can safely assume: If Day had a second chance, she would skip the drills all over again.
The novelist Saul Bellow might have had Day in mind when he described a character in “The Adventures of Augie March” as “an autocrat, hard-shelled and Jesuitical, a pouncy old hawk of a Bolshevik.” Dorothy Day (1897–1980) was equal parts Mother Jones and Mother Teresa, her white hair pulled back, her gaze level and hard, and her lips pressed together until they erupted in laughter. She had a flat, Midwestern accent for a New Yorker, perhaps from time spent in Chicago and central Illinois. The founder of the Catholic Worker, a left-wing periodical, Day was a Christian first and an activist second. No target was safe, not even the church. In 1948 she cheered on the gravediggers of Calvary Cemetery in Queens during their strike against St. Patrick’s Cathedral. As John Loughery and Blythe Randolph write in “Dorothy Day: Dissenting Voice of the American Century,” “there is enough in the record of her dramatic life to alienate anyone.”
It is the first full biography in nearly 40 years of an icon who may yet become a saint. (The canonization process is underway.) The authors are sympathetic yet clear-eyed in their assessment of Day’s turbulent life and maddening contradictions. “To her critics on the left, she was a distressingly loyal daughter of a reactionary Church,” they write, “but to her critics on the right, she was a rudely outspoken woman of questionable orthodoxy.” She ran a series of soup kitchens and lived among the city’s destitute; Evelyn Waugh described her as an “ascetic who wants all of us to be poor.” Her first miracle, one mourner later remarked, was to grant a morning free of hangovers to everyone who got drunk at her wake.
