76 THENEWYORKER, APRIL 13, 2020
surprised when it lasted. Had Day been
an anodyne Protestant or an agnostic
Unitarian, her spirituality would have
raised fewer eyebrows, but she opted in
to what many of her friends regarded as
the most regressive and patriarchal insti-
tution outside of the federal government.
That government, by contrast, was
somewhat assuaged by Day’s religiosity.
Part of what kept her F.B.I. file from
getting any larger was the assurances
offered by the very hierarchy her leftist
friends so despised: as one agent noted,
“Church officials believe her to be an
honest and sincere Catholic.” That was
putting it mildly: Day took to the Ro-
sary and the saints, the confession and
the liturgy, the miracles and the sacra-
ments as, to quote the psalmist, a deer
longs for flowing streams. She felt that
the Church had cured her alienation and
isolation, drawing her into fellowship
with a community of living souls. “We
cannot love God,” Day wrote in her mem-
oir “The Long Loneliness,” published
in 1952, “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 we are not alone any more.”
It wasn’t all balm, though. Day had
reservations about Catholic dogma, was
dismayed by the faith’s history of impi-
eties and intolerance, and, above all, had
no patience for its failures to live up to
Christ’s core teachings. Still, to her mind,
her politics were not contradicted but
confirmed by the Catholic Church, both
in the Gospels and in two of the most
consequential encyclicals of the post-
industrial age. The first, Pope Leo XIII’s
1891 “Rerum Novarum,” praised labor
unions and called for reforming capital-
ism, asserting that “some opportune rem-
edy must be found quickly for the mis-
ery and wretchedness pressing so unjustly
on the majority of the working class.”
The second, Pope Pius XI’s “Quadrage-
simo Anno,” delivered forty years later,
affirmed the earlier teaching and called
for a new economy based on solidarity
and subsidiarity. Both encyclicals showed
a respectful apprehension about the role
of the state, believing that it should not
interfere in the private lives of its citi-
zens or usurp the moral authority of the
Church. This explained Day’s ongoing
anarchism and her hostility to govern-
ment welfare programs, which she pil-
loried as a “sop thrown to the proletariat.”
To the socialists and communists
who stood with Day on the picket lines
and protested with her in front of state-
houses and corporate headquarters, such
teachings seemed as nonsensical as the
Immaculate Conception. And her dis-
tance from would-be allies only increased
during the sixties and seventies. Although
she had been plenty countercultural in
her own youth, she disapproved of the
drug use, sexual promiscuity, and gen-
eral disdain for authority that came with
hippie culture. Many of the young peo-
ple who showed up at the houses of
hospitality—and at the kibbutz-like
communal farms the Catholic Worker
Movement tried to establish—did not
even know who Day was, and they were
as confounded as the old left had been
by her joy in the ritual of worship and
her solace in the habit of prayer. But what
most alienated Day from her fellow-
radicals was her conviction that what
was needed was not a violent revolution
but “a revolution of the heart,” as she
called it: an ability to see Christ in oth-
ers, and to love others as God loves us.
As the years passed, faith and radi-
calism, which coexisted so seamlessly in
Day herself, grew further and further
apart in the outer world. The left wanted
less heart and more revolution; the faith-
ful, less revolution and more heart. Day
wanted what she always had: justice for
the poor and peace for all. There was
an admirable consistency, perhaps even
obstinacy, in much of her political life:
in the nineteen-tens, she had picketed
for suffrage; in the twenties and thir-
ties, she had marched for the hungry;
in the forties, she criticized the govern-
ment for the internment of Japanese-
Americans; in the fifties, she refused to
participate in civil-defense drills and
protested nuclear proliferation; in the
sixties, she denounced the Vietnam
War, inspiring the men of the Catholic
Worker Movement to become the first
in America to burn their draft cards; in
the seventies (and in her seventies), she
was standing with Cesar Chavez’s farm
laborers in California when she was ar-
rested for the last time.
Yet, for almost every one of those
stands, she took others that she or his-
tory or both later judged less kindly. Day
defended the Catholic Church’s sexual
ethics at the ongoing expense of thosewho sought abortions like the one she’d
had, needed the birth control she’d once
used, were abused by their priests, or
were discriminated against because of
their sexual orientation. She opposed
Social Security, believing it to be over-
reach by the state, then lived long enough
to watch it save many senior citizens
from financial ruin. She saw the atroc-
ities of the Holocaust ended by the Al-
lies through the global conflict she had
opposed, and she witnessed the suffer-
ings caused by the Cuban Revolution,
which she had praised.I
n the early years of the Catholic Worker
Movement, Day joked that she wrote
down how much money came in and
how much money went out but never
reconciled the two columns—which is
more or less how she lived her life. Un-
fortunately, it also more or less describes
Loughery and Randolph’s biography: a
comprehensive, chronological account
that never arrives at a meaningful sum-
mation of the life it chronicles. It doesn’t
go much beyond what has been written
before: by Day herself in her memoirs;
in collections of her letters and diaries,
carefully edited by Robert Ellsberg, the
managing editor of the Catholic Worker
in the late seventies and the son of the
Pentagon Papers whistle-blower; and
in the biographies “Dorothy Day: The
World Will Be Saved by Beauty” (Scrib-
ner), by her youngest granddaughter, Kate
Hennessy, and “Dorothy Day: A Radi-
cal Devotion” (Da Capo Press), a percep-
tive portrait by the Catholic Worker
turned psychiatrist Robert Coles.
A more compelling addition to the
many studies of Day is Martin Doblmei-
er’s new documentary, “Revolution of
the Heart: The Dorothy Day Story,” the
latest in his “Prophet Voices” series, which
has already featured films about the theo-
logians Reinhold Niebuhr and Howard
Thurman. (The movie aired on PBS last
month and is now available on PBS.
org.) Admiring without being hagio-
graphic—an obvious temptation with the
life of a putative saint—it’s a fine exam-
ple of what Day herself was always ex-
tolling: a kind of personalist experience
whereby our hearts are changed not by
airtight argument or moral perfection
but by direct encounters with human
needs and those who rise to meet them.
Both the documentary and the bi-