Radical's Search for Meaning The Story of Dorothy Day (eBook)

James Murphy (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2024 | 1. Auflage
172 Seiten
Bookbaby (Verlag)
978-1-78605-233-9 (ISBN)

Infos

This is the story of a radical journalist, Dorothy Day, who shocked the conscience of many a patriotic American. She was jailed eight times for marching on picket lines for controversial causes. Now her canonization is in the hands of the Vatican. This is 'a riveting story about an amazing woman, written by an exceptional author with erudition, impartiality and finesse,' say the foreword. The questions it raises are as troubling today as they were in the last century. If anything, more so.

Monsignor James Murphy of the Diocese of Sacramento, California, has served as editor of the diocesan newspaper, 'The Catholic Herald,' diocesan director of communications, pastor of three bilingual parishes, rector to the Cathedral of the Blessed Sacrament, and vicar general of the diocese. He hold a master's degree in journalism from the University of California, Berkeley, and is author of 'Saints and Sinners in the Cristero War: Stories of Martyrdom from Mexico' and 'Beauty and Horror in a Concentration Camp: The Story of Etty Hillesum.'

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Dorothy Day was a radical journalist who shocked the conscience of many a patriotic American. She opposed the entry of the US into both world wars and wrote blistering columns about nuclear arms and American foreign policy. But it wasn't just her writing but her acts of nonviolence. She was arrested eight times for marching on picket lines and the FBI had her high on the list of those accused of sedition. After converting to Catholicism, she initiated a network of dining rooms that provides food and shelter for the poor. Her radical views never changed, however. Her canonization is now in the hands of the Vatican, and those who promote her cause are haunted by the same issues she was: the blight of homelessness, the sin of racism, the insanity of war, the worship of money, the futility of life without religious faith. Those questions are as relevant today as they were in the last century. If anything more so.

Textauszug

1.

Who Was Dorothy Day?

A Brief Overview of Her Life

On November 9, 1997, an important Mass was celebrated in Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, New York, to mark the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Dorothy Day. The celebrant that day was Cardinal John O’Connor, the high-profile head of the New York archdiocese who was also arguably the most knowledgeable American churchman in the U.S. military. Before becoming a bishop, O’Connor had spent twenty-seven years as a chaplain in the U.S. Navy and enjoyed the respect and admiration of the military establishment. By the time he retired from military service, he was the Chief of Navy Chaplains with the rank of rear admiral.

The person he was honoring that day, however, could hardly be described as a lover of the U.S. military. Dorothy Day was a famous anti-war radical who offended many a conservative American with her books and newspaper columns. She had opposed U.S. entry into the First World War and the Second World War, and police arrested her several times for protesting the annual civil defense drills during the Cold War. She marched on picket lines to protest the nuclear arms race and the Vietnam War and expressed horror at clergymen sprinkling holy water on U.S. bombers, and giving them names like “Holy Innocents” and “Our Lady of Mercy”.7 Even those in the top echelons of the federal government took notice. The FBI had a 500-page file on her, and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover recommended three times to the U.S. Attorney General that she be prosecuted for treason.

It must have been a surprise for those not in the loop, then, to see the Archbishop of New York honor this woman with a special Mass, not to mention hearing what he had to say in his sermon that day. He called Dorothy Day “a truly remarkable woman” who had combined a deep faith and love for the Church with a passionate commitment to serving the poor and saving lives.8 It was precisely because she was such a committed person of faith, he said, that she became such a radical Christian. The more he read about her, he said, “the more saintly a woman she seems to be”.9 The real purpose of the Mass at Saint Patrick’s, it turned out, was not to celebrate the anniversary of her birth, but to float an idea. O’Connor was considering proposing her for canonization.

By this time, it should be noted, attitudes about war and peace had changed in New York. Gone was the era of Cardinal Francis Spellman, the churchman who had famously supported American foreign policy around the world without a hint of self-doubt. (He was Dorothy Day’s bishop for a significant part of her life.) Cardinal O’Connor, despite his military background, turned out to be very different. As archbishop, he became an outspoken critic of war and militarization, and he condemned U.S. intervention in many trouble spots around the world, including Central America, Afghanistan and Yugoslavia. He also questioned the policy of spending vast sums of money on nuclear weapons systems that only made the world more dangerous. Ironically, it was his experience as a chaplain on the Vietnam battlefields that forged those outspoken convictions. “No priest can watch the blood pouring from the wounds of the dying, be they American or Vietnamese of the North or South, without anguish and a sense of desperate frustration and futility,” he had written back then. “The clergy back home, the academicians in their universities, the protesters on their marches are not the only ones who cry out, ‘Why?’”10 Chaplain O’Connor’s views on war and peace were closer to those of Dorothy Day than many imagined at the time.

Now, as archbishop, he was floating the idea of canonizing her, and he invited interested people to write to him. He also organized a lengthy meeting with those who knew her best, and the feedback he eventually got from those sources convinced him that he should indeed follow through with his idea. He would be failing in his duty if he didn’t act, he said, adding: “I don’t want to have on my conscience that I didn’t do something that God wanted done.”11

That was over twenty-five years ago. Since then, the canonization process for Dorothy Day has been steadily moving ahead. Cardinal O’Connor’s successor, Cardinal Edward Egan, formally established the Dorothy Day Guild in 2005 to promote the cause, and his successor, Cardinal Timothy Dolan, in 2012 proposed Dorothy Day’s cause to the annual meeting of the American bishops, who gave the idea overwhelming support. In 2021, Cardinal Dolan officially closed the local phase of the investigation process (again during a Mass in Saint Patrick’s Cathedral) by putting a wax seal on the last of the archival boxes containing 50,000 pages of evidence on Dorothy’s holiness. The boxes were then shipped to Rome. Following Vatican rules, those boxes had to include transcripts of everything Dorothy had written—which was considerable—along with interviews with those who knew her well. About two hundred people had worked on the project, half of them volunteers. Her cause is now in the hands of the Vatican Congregation for the Causes of Saints.

Predictably, the controversy that followed Dorothy Day throughout her life has also been following her through this canonization process. “Was Dorothy Day Too Left-Wing to Be a Catholic Saint?” the New York Times asked. In his homily at the cathedral, the newspaper said, the cardinal skimmed over Dorothy’s political beliefs about war and peace and focused on her far from sinless life. “He reduced her to ‘she lived a life of sexual promiscuity and she dabbled in communism,’” one of Dorothy’s granddaughters said. “What worse enemy could we have, saying those things about her.”12 There is a point to that criticism, but it is exaggerated. Dorothy Day was indeed a political radical and that should not be downplayed, but neither should the Saint Augustine-like story of her conversion that culminated in a life of mysticism. Both aspects are part of her remarkable story. One homily can’t cover everything, but the 50,000 pages of evidence in the archival boxes certainly did.

Controversy comes with the territory when canonizing saints. The canonization of Junípero Serra by Pope Francis in 2015 was met with bitter condemnation from some Native Americans who believe he was part of a colonial system that caused the extinction of their people. History has plenty of other examples. Saint Thomas Aquinas was among several thirteenth-century theologians who were condemned by the then archbishop in Paris. He is now considered the greatest of the Scholastic philosophers, and his comprehensive synthesis of Christian theology and Aristotelian philosophy has had a major influence on Catholic doctrine for centuries. Saint Augustine is another example. He was famous for his early life of sin, which he wrote about at length in his Confessions. “God, grant me chastity and continence, but not yet,” he famously said.

Growing up in a family of five children

Dorothy Day was born in New York City, not far from the Brooklyn Bridge and the waterfront; the towers of the bridge were probably visible from her house. She was the third of five children, the first three of whom came in ten-month intervals: Donald in 1895, Sam Houston in 1896, and Dorothy in 1897. Her sister Della was born in 1899, and baby John in 1912. “I can remember well the happy hours on the beach with my brothers,” she wrote, “fishing in the creeks for eel, running away with a younger cousin to an abandoned shack in a waste of swamp.”13

Dorothy’s father, John Day, was a sports writer whose specialty was the race track. He carried a Bible around with him, and his columns about racing were often laced with biblical and Shakespearean allusions—this despite the fact that he professed to be an atheist. His friends considered him an eccentric. “He was gruff, surly, smart, respected,” according to one nephew. “Just about everybody referred to him as ‘Judge Day’.”14 A tall, well-dressed southerner who loved the “American Way”, he disliked Jews, African Americans, radicals, and foreigners. He didn’t have much time for Catholics either. “Nobody but Irish washerwomen and policemen are Catholic,” Dorothy remembered him saying.15 But he loved the outdoors and the horses. He was fonder of horses than he was of children. He ate with his children on Sundays only, and that meal was conducted in gloomy silence. They could hear each other swallow, Dorothy remembered.

Judge Day believed that women had no place in barber shops or news rooms, so it should be no surprise that he disapproved of how his elder daughter turned out. He referred to her as “the nut in the family”, and Dorothy responded with silence.16 She says little about him in her autobiographies, and throughout her life she tended to avoid contact with him. “We children did not know him very well, so stood in awe of him”, she wrote, “only learning to talk to him after we had left home.”17 It didn’t help matters that Dorothy’s personality was very like that of her father. They were “two...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 23.10.2024
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Biografien / Erfahrungsberichte
• ISBN-10: 1-78605-233-4 / 1786052334
• ISBN-13: 978-1-78605-233-9 / 9781786052339