Books in Brief: All Is Grace

All Is Grace: The Spirituality of Dorothy Day, by William D. Miller (Doubleday, 207 pp., $14.95)

Dorothy Day was born in early November, 1897, and died 83 years later, in the last week of November, 1980. She was recognized as one of the most remarkable women of her time; in countless ways, she was the moral conscience of a nation. The story of her life has been so well told by William D. Miller, in the official biography of this outstanding Christian personality, that there is no need here to go over the details again. Suffice it to say that her meeting with the French peasant-intellectual Peter Maurin, in 1932, was probably the most decisive moment of her life. (Revealed here, too, is the devastating experience she had of an early abortion.) It was with Maurin that she co-founded the Catholic Worker, which is still distributed at a penny a copy. Subsequently, Dorothy Day became so immersed in social work among the poor and hungry, as well as so passionately involved as an activist against the prospect of nuclear warfare, that the luminous quality of her spiritual life has nearly been forgotten. William Miller rectifies this oversight by presenting here the retreat notes, journal, and some late letters of Dorothy Day, which reflect her image as surely as does the radiant photograph of her on the book’s dustjacket. Miller himself has done a remarkable job of sustaining the various texts with his own very lucid and useful commentaries, providing the necessary connective tissue to turn these fragments into a book. All the same, it must be admitted that Dorothy Day was not one of the great writers of pensées. She says at one point, for instance, that “they [the poor] are not put in our way to be judged, only that we may purchase heaven for them.” One would have thought that Jesus Christ had already done that through His death and resurrection. In any case, it is frequently assumed that because Dorothy Day was involved in politically liberal causes, she was therefore a spiritual libertarian as well. In fact, she was thoroughly conservative in her religion: She was constant in her fealty to the Church of Rome, disavowed the experimental folk Masses of the post-Vatican Council period, and rejected radical nuns who attempted to enlist her reputation in the cause of women’s ordination. Dorothy Day had a good deal of common sense.

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Thomas P. McDonnell

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All Is Grace: The Spirituality of Dorothy Day, by William D. Miller (Doubleday, 207 pp., $14.95)

Dorothy Day was born in early November, 1897, and died 83 years later, in the last week of November, 1980. She was recognized as one of the most remarkable women of her time; in countless ways, she was the moral conscience of a nation. The story of her life has been so well told by William D. Miller, in the official biography of this outstanding Christian personality, that there is no need here to go over the details again. Suffice it to say that her meeting with the French peasant-intellectual Peter Maurin, in 1932, was probably the most decisive moment of her life. (Revealed here, too, is the devastating experience she had of an early abortion.) It was with Maurin that she co-founded the Catholic Worker, which is still distributed at a penny a copy. Subsequently, Dorothy Day became so immersed in social work among the poor and hungry, as well as so passionately involved as an activist against the prospect of nuclear warfare, that the luminous quality of her spiritual life has nearly been forgotten. William Miller rectifies this oversight by presenting here the retreat notes, journal, and some late letters of Dorothy Day, which reflect her image as surely as does the radiant photograph of her on the book’s dustjacket. Miller himself has done a remarkable job of sustaining the various texts with his own very lucid and useful commentaries, providing the necessary connective tissue to turn these fragments into a book. All the same, it must be admitted that Dorothy Day was not one of the great writers of pensées. She says at one point, for instance, that “they [the poor] are not put in our way to be judged, only that we may purchase heaven for them.” One would have thought that Jesus Christ had already done that through His death and resurrection. In any case, it is frequently assumed that because Dorothy Day was involved in politically liberal causes, she was therefore a spiritual libertarian as well. In fact, she was thoroughly conservative in her religion: She was constant in her fealty to the Church of Rome, disavowed the experimental folk Masses of the post-Vatican Council period, and rejected radical nuns who attempted to enlist her reputation in the cause of women’s ordination. Dorothy Day had a good deal of common sense.