Dorothy Day: Writings from "Commonweal" (review)

In early December 1932, the editors of The Commonweal (as it was called at the time) sent a thirty-five-year-old single mother, freelance journalist, former Leftist, and recent Catholic convert to Washington, D.C. to cover several days of demonstrations on behalf of the poor, the unemployed, and financially strapped farmers suffering from the economic depression that was gripping the country. The resulting article appeared in the January 11, 1933 issue. Entitled "Real Revolutionists," the article reveals an ability to draw distinctions among radical Leftist groups that was uncommon among Catholic writers of the day. But more notable than the article itself was what the author did when she was in Washington working on it. After a day of attending meetings, interviewing demonstrators, taking notes, and writing it all up, she went to the national shrine at the Catholic University where she "offered up a special prayer, a prayer which came with tears and with anguish, that some way would open up for me to use what talents I possessed for my fellow workers, for the poor." That prayer was powerfully answered over the next half century, beginning a few days later when, upon arriving back in New York, she found waiting in her apartment "a short, stocky man in his mid-fifties, as ragged and rugged as any of the marchers I had left." He introduced himself and then explained that "George Shuster, editor of The Commonweal, told me to look you up." (Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness [New York: Harper and Brothers, 1952], 166, 169)

So began the first of many conversations between Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin, which in the ensuing months led to the birth of the Catholic Worker Movement. This is recorded in Day's autobiography, The Long Loneliness, published twenty two years later. Because it is so widely read, particularly this part of it, Day's longstanding and intimate relationship with Commonweal is well known. But now it will be known in greater detail thanks to Patrick Jordon who, as editor of The Catholic Worker from 1969 to 1975 and present-day managing editor for Commonweal, is uniquely qualified to edit this volume. Jordon may have missed an opportunity to tell us about Day's writing—not the noun but the verb: How did she write? What time of day? Did she revise? What was she like as an editor? How did she respond to being edited? He knows a lot about her that many of us do not know. Still, his introduction is informative (he picks up an error in Day's own account of her Washington trip) and insightful, providing a solid bridge into the volume itself. The volume consists of simply everything Dorothy Day wrote for Commonweal, arranged chronologically, thirty eight pieces in all: articles for the most part (twenty seven), but also book reviews (four), letters to the editor (four), one short story, one brief interview, and one set of fragments from a manuscript on Peter Maurin's ideas about women that was never published (understandably).

Several of the early pieces read like a running journal of the experiences of Day and her daughter Teresa (she doesn't call her Tamar) as they traveled through Mexico, to New York (her Staten Island beach house), to Florida, then back to New York (this time, to Manhattan). Published between early 1930 and late 1932, these early essays depict the people, places, and events that one would expect to capture the attention of a recent Catholic convert: the devotions of the women attending daily Mass in Mexico City for example, the scapulars they wear, the missals they use to "assist" at Mass, the candles they hold while coming to Communion on feast days, the way they approach the exposed Blessed Sacrament on their knees. But little in Day's prose smacks of sentimental piety. She simply has, in Jordon...