Forty years ago, Dorothy Day, a founder of the Catholic Workers, passed away (on November 29, 1980). She changed from a radical free lover and Communist agitator to a Christian. For her work to help the poor and the afflicted, she has been nominated for sainthood in the Catholic church.
On Sunday evening’s Journey TV program, historian Jon Butler will point to Day as an example of someone who was profoundly affected by the institution of the Catholic Church through its extensive building programs in the 20th Century. When she went to confession, she experienced a different dimension of life. In her autobiography The Long Loneliness Day recalls the profound impact of going to confession in a warm, dimly lit vastness of the church with the smell of wax and incense in the air, and the outside treet noises emphasizing the stillness inside.
The religions of NYC didn’t roll over when Modernism rose as a challenging movement. Instead, Butler argues, the believers crashed into the modern wave with church and synagogue buildings, the formation of organizations, and providing a bevy of theologians and pastors savvy in the ways of the modern world.
Dorothy Day came to New York City as a dropout from church and joined the Greenwich Village radicals in the 1910s and 1920s. But their cruel attitude toward unborn children (abort them was her boyfriend’s advice) and materialist dogma turned her away. She discovered a higher dimension of self-regard and helping the poor in the radical love and spiritual experience of Jesus. She and a friend established the Catholic Workers to create a radical activist Christian presence among the poor. For many years, her home was on Staten Island.
Sunday at 7:30 pm Butler will talk about Dorothy Day, Judy Blume, Reinhold Niebuhr, G. Gresham Machen, Harry Emerson
Fosdick, and other contributors to the religious responses to 20th Century Modernism.
