Explore "Dorothy Day: Dissenting Voice of the American Century" by John Loughery on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
APPROVAL OF THE CATHOLIC WORKER in Catholic circles, lay and ecclesiastical, as well as in the columns of Catholic publications, came to a grinding halt over one of the most divisive issues of the day: the Spanish Civil War. As the events of that foreign conflict unfolded, the skepticism of many parish priests about their younger parishioners hawking a newspaper put out by that troublesome woman was confirmed in their minds by Dorothy Day's blunt refusal to fall into line with the Vatican's thinking about that conflict.
What was happening in Spain, in addition to the ideological fault lines that were now made painfully visible across Europe, was also a harbinger of more unease to follow, a prelude to a certain kind of alienation. From that point on, there would be few, if any, occasions when Dorothy would be willing to acquiesce to received opinion about explicitly political and military issues. Like Emmanuel Mounier, she believed that Western civilization was reaching a pathological crisis point in her time.