Explore "Dorothy Day: Dissenting Voice of the American Century" by John Loughery on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
IN THE FALL OF 1974, a recent college graduate named Marc Ellis, a son of middle-class Jewish parents, a child of the Miami suburbs, decided to postpone his graduate school studies and move into St. Joseph House in New York to see what help he could offer. He had heard Dorothy speak in one of his history classes at Florida State University, when she had been invited by his teacher, William Miller, and that experience had been quietly transformative. Miller was profoundly uneasy when he discovered that his student was planning not a weeklong or monthlong visit to the Lower East Side but a stay that might last all of that academic year. He knew the neighborhood, he knew the residents, he knew how far suburban south Florida was from the shocking world Ellis would encounter. As it turned out, Ellis stayed at St. Joseph House for nine months, devoting himself to the work that had to be done and keeping a diary, which was published by the Paulist Press in 1978.
A Year at the Catholic Worker: A Spiritual Journey Among the Poor is an unnerving document. The memories of those who were a part of the Catholic Worker then quite naturally dwell today on warm recollections of Dorothy, a heartfelt appreciation of one's friends and hardworking peers, the sacramental sense of life one acquired by proximity to her and those who shared her belief in the power of love and a commitment to Christ's way. Those thoughts fill Ellis's journal as well. He would never be the same person again after spending September 1974 to the following spring on East 1st Street in the most degraded period of that city's twentieth-century history. Yet the book has the merit of pressing the reader's face into the sights, smells, chaos, dangers, irrationality, brutality, and satisfactions of the house in a way that few other chronicles of the Catholic Worker do.