Explore "Dorothy Day: Dissenting Voice of the American Century" by John Loughery on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
A MAN WHO FINDS HIS WAY to Catholicism, out of the tangle of modern culture and complexity, must think harder than he has ever thought in his life," G. K. Chesterton wrote in Christendom in Dublin. That was a statement to which Dorothy could readily assent. There was nothing simple or precipitous about the choice she had made. Chesterton went on to note in that same work that the convert must also "feel all the counter-attractions of Paganism, at least to know how attractive are those attractions. " That was another sentence speaking directly to Dorothy's younger self. His conviction, though, that an embrace of Catholicism necessarily led to an immediate and glorious transformation, a renewal in which the convert would find himself "suddenly in the morning of the world"-that had been far from her experience.
For most of 1931 and well into 1932, Dorothy lived with the certainty that she had made the right decision in converting, yet she was left with one large, unanswered question: What, really, did that amount to? She prayed, confessed, attended Mass, read about the saints, and saw to it that Tamar, now of school age, received religious instruction. But daily life involved too much drift, too little actual fulfillment, even or especially on a spiritual level. Struggling to make ends meet, she wrote a gardening column for a small Staten Island paper, the Staten Island Advance, and freelanced for Catholic periodicals such as Commonweal, The Sign, America, and The Tablet of Brooklyn. Her articles tended to be human interest stories, family centered and sentimental, though she also wrote for America about the growing Communist presence in US political life. Her account of a Cooper Union forum at which Earl Browder, the head of the Party in the United States, had spoken made mention of her old friend Malcolm Cowley, now a fellow traveler. The article took a mild jab at Cowley's glib sense of politics. She visited her mother in Florida for long stretches, to Grace's delight (while her father was off who knows where), and amassed pages for the novel she must have feared by now would never be published. "Our Brothers, the Jews" was an article that dealt perceptively with rising anti-Semitism, but America rejected it.