Great autobiography of a 20th century convert to Catholicism whose road to conversion is as fascinating as her tremendous active works among the poor, setting up Hospitality Houses and developing the Catholic Workers Movement. She is an inspiration, albeit I felt a certain sense of her loneliness as I read this during my own soup kitchen days.... ( )

Dorothy Day was a social activist who began her work with the poor and outcast around 1915. Eventually she converted to Roman Catholicism, rejecting Communism. Not the best writing here -- it rambles occasionally -- and she talks a lot about "the mass" and "the proletariat", etc. With help from friend Peter Maurin, she started the Catholic Worker newspaper, which helped Catholics see their role as notthat of sitting in pews, but acting as Christ would on behalf the poor and outcast. "I have not done well," she said, "but I have don what I could." How many of us can say the same?

nother autobiography by an American Catholic convert who is remembered as one of the great leaders of social justice of the Twentieth Century. Unlike Merton, Day did not head to the cloister but to the streets and the farms meeting poverty and injustice head on. I'm impressed by her devotion and the way in which she incorporates her faith into a lifestyle. And she writes with both humility and humor. It's hard not to want to change my life after reading this book. I also think now that I may be an anarcho-syndicalists and never knew it.
Favorite Passages

Going to confession is hard. Writing a book is hard, because you are "giving yourself away." But if you love, you want to give yourself. You write as you are impelled to write, about man and his problems, his relation to God and his fellows. You write about yourself because in the long run all man's problems are the same, his sustenance and love.
People have so great a need to reverence, to worship, to adore; it is a psychological necessity of human nature that must be taken into account. We do not like to admit how people fail us. Even those most loved show their frailty and their weaknesses and no matter how we may will to see only the best in others, their strength rather than their weakness, we are all too conscious of our own failings and recognize them in others.
The Catholic Worker, as the name implied, was directed to the worker, but we used the word in its broadest sense, meaning those who worked with hand or brain, those who did physical, mental or spiritual work. But we thought primarily of the poor, the dispossed, the exploited.

Every one of us who was attracted to the poor had a sense of guilt, of responsibility, a feeling that in some way we were living on the labor of others. The fact that we were born in a certain environment, were enabled to go to school, were endowed with the ability to compete with others and hold our own, that we had few physical disabilities -- all these things marked us as privileged in a way. We felt a respect for the poor and destitute as those nearest to God, as those chosen by Christ for His compassion (p. 204).
What a delightful thing it is to be boldly profligate, to ignore the price of coffee and go on serving the long line of destitute men who come to us, good coffee and the finest of bread.

"Nothing is too good for the pour," our editor Tom Sullivan says, and he likes that aphorism especially when he is helping himself to something extra good (p. 235).
Once a priest said to us that no gets up in the pulpit without promulgating a heresy. He was joking, of course, but what I suppose he meant was that truth was so pure, so holy, that it was hard to emphasize one aspect of truth without underestimating another, that we did not see things as a whole, but in part, through a glass darkly, as St. Paul said. ( )

3812. The Long Loneliness The Autobiography of Dorothy Day (read 13 Oct 2003) Reading this is a result of my reading Paul Elie's great book The Life You Save May Be Your Own on Sept 1, 2003. This autobiography was published in 1959 and tells of Day's life to that time (she died in 1980). Her story is an inspiring one and I hope she is canonized some day, since she led a heroic and saintly life. I felt the book well worth reading, though I learned little I did not already know, having been a recipient of her paper, The Catholic Worker, since my days in college so many years ago. ( )

I'm one of those disaffected youths that doesn't hold with organized religion, but this book was truly an inspiration. Just because I don't have much capacity for faith doesn't mean I can't admire it in others! This is a very inspirational work for anyone who wishes to channel their dissatisfaction with the world in a more positive way. ( )