Secular Saint

By Melvin Maddocks

DOROTHY DAY by William D. Miller

Harper & Row; 527 pages; $18.95 We are put here to become saints," Dorothy Day declared, and with braid-crowned head thrust back and lanky arms flailing, she marched through life as if being a saint were the least of it. This fierce woman, this muscular Christian, founded and edited the intransigently radical Catholic Worker. She suffered prison zestfully for her conscience, as suffragist and pacifist. At 15 she demonstrated with the farm workers of Cesar Chavez and went to jail for one last time. The old lady's picture in the papers made almost too pat a portrait of a martyr.

But in the beginning, nobody could have seemed less like a saint. Born in Brooklyn in 1897, the daughter of a lapsed Episcopal mother and an atheistic father whose holy passion was the race track, Day did not even become a Catholic until she was 30. At 15 she was reading Darwin. Marx soon followed. After dropping out of the University of Illinois, she went to work for $5 a week for a socialist daily, the Call, on New York's Lower East Side. One of her first assignments was to interview Leon Trotsky. Before she was 20, she became an editorial assistant at the Masses, where she met John Reed.

Day fell upon Greenwich Village in legendary times, and she became a legend herself. Pursuing what she described as the "downward path to salvation," she experienced in short order an abortion, a marriage that failed to survive the European honeymoon, and a not very passionate love affair, designed primarily to produce the child she had come to long for, Tamar.

With a new interest in salvation, Dorothy Day had Tamar baptized in a Roman Catholic church. "Grimly, coldly making acts of faith," she felt "like a hypocrite." She did not discover what acts of faith meant until she met an obstinate, self-educated French peasant named Peter Maurin. He believed that a Christian bore witness by simple, direct response to the immediate needs of the oppressed.

In the spring of 1933, Day printed the first edition of the Catholic Worker, proclaiming this gospel from headquarters in the kitchen of her apartment. Next came the implementation: hospices or "houses of hospitality" for the dispossessed, the Workers' School, the farm communes. By 1935 the circulation of the Catholic Worker had risen from 2,500 to 110,000. By 1937 the hospices were feeding a thousand a day.

No wonder her admirers were astonished to learn that Day had become an archconservative in matters of morals, dead set against birth control, abortion, and sex for pleasure, even in marriage. "She could sometimes be difficult to deal with," William D. Miller, her respectful biographer, remarks with characteristic discretion. Yet there was still a curiously romantic side to her. Despite her angular body and schoolmarm demeanor, men fell in love with her into her 50s.

How did this ardent puritan reconcile her contradictions? It is the one question neglected by the conscientious Miller, a Marquette historian who got to know Day while writing a study of the Catholic Worker movement. He owes himself and his reader a hypothesis instead of the oddly sad tension he leaves in the air surrounding the halo of his admirable overachiever. We feel her humanitarianism for ourselves. Her ecstasy (religious or otherwise) we have to take Miller's word for. Was she ever quite at ease with herself--her selves?

"It was the duty of a saint to be happy," she concluded. That may be the one duty she shirked. --ByMelvinMaddocks

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