- Feb 5, 2002
- 166,314
- 56,040
- Country
- United States
- Faith
- Catholic
- Marital Status
- Married
- Politics
- US-Others
In “The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” Paul Elie weaves together the historically parallel stories of Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, Walker Percy, and Flannery O’Connor. Truly these were four of the last century’s most remarkable Catholic writers.
The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage, by Paul Elie (554 pages, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004)
In The Life You Save May Be Your Own, Paul Elie weaves together the historically parallel stories of Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, Walker Percy, and Flannery O’Connor. Truly these were four of the last century’s most remarkable Catholic writers. The first, presently being considered for canonization as a saint, persisted in “comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable,” as Theodore Hesburgh once remarked. The second, an authentic countercultural rebel, famously retreated from mundane contemporaneity to live in cowled solitude. The third, a physician by nature and training, forewent a medical career to pen philosophical novels and essays diagnosing the ontological malaise of postwar America. The fourth, a latter-day seer, centered her vatic body of fiction around the ideas of sin and redemption through God’s mysterious grace.
Day, born in 1897, recoiled from the sham and “ugliness of life in a world that professed to be Christian.” Everywhere she looked, finance capitalism had “dispossessed” the poor man, the advertisers had inflamed “his useless desires,” the radio and cinema had “enslaved him.” By the time she matriculated at the University of Illinois, Day fancied herself a Communist. In New York, where her family moved when she was nineteen, she wrote regularly for The Call, The Masses, and other stylish left-wing journals. She interviewed Leon Trotsky, propounded the anarchist views of Emma Goldman, and, in 1917, accompanied comrades to Madison Square Garden to celebrate the Bolshevik revolt.
At length, however, Day found Marxist ideology unable to satisfy her hunger for something otherworldly to expound and dignify the human predicament. Hence, after a series of lovers and a rued abortion, she embarked upon a religious quest that led her by degrees to the Catholic Church, in which she was determined to have her next and only other child baptized, despite the protests of the baby’s atheistic father, whom she lovingly renounced to receive the sacrament herself.
In the doctrine and dogma of Mother Kirk, Day discovered truths more real and palpable than any she had ever discerned in Communism. Moreover, Catholicism provided her with a supernatural warrant for her ardent concern for the needy. “What you do to the least of these,” Christ said, “you do to me.” Mindful of these words Day, with her inspiring counterpart, former French peasant and champion of Distributism Peter Maurin, established the Catholic Worker, a newspaper committed to social reform and world peace. They also opened and struggled to maintain a shelter for Manhattan’s homeless.
Continued below.
Four Roads to Rome ~ The Imaginative Conservative
The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage, by Paul Elie (554 pages, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004)
In The Life You Save May Be Your Own, Paul Elie weaves together the historically parallel stories of Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, Walker Percy, and Flannery O’Connor. Truly these were four of the last century’s most remarkable Catholic writers. The first, presently being considered for canonization as a saint, persisted in “comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable,” as Theodore Hesburgh once remarked. The second, an authentic countercultural rebel, famously retreated from mundane contemporaneity to live in cowled solitude. The third, a physician by nature and training, forewent a medical career to pen philosophical novels and essays diagnosing the ontological malaise of postwar America. The fourth, a latter-day seer, centered her vatic body of fiction around the ideas of sin and redemption through God’s mysterious grace.
Day, born in 1897, recoiled from the sham and “ugliness of life in a world that professed to be Christian.” Everywhere she looked, finance capitalism had “dispossessed” the poor man, the advertisers had inflamed “his useless desires,” the radio and cinema had “enslaved him.” By the time she matriculated at the University of Illinois, Day fancied herself a Communist. In New York, where her family moved when she was nineteen, she wrote regularly for The Call, The Masses, and other stylish left-wing journals. She interviewed Leon Trotsky, propounded the anarchist views of Emma Goldman, and, in 1917, accompanied comrades to Madison Square Garden to celebrate the Bolshevik revolt.
At length, however, Day found Marxist ideology unable to satisfy her hunger for something otherworldly to expound and dignify the human predicament. Hence, after a series of lovers and a rued abortion, she embarked upon a religious quest that led her by degrees to the Catholic Church, in which she was determined to have her next and only other child baptized, despite the protests of the baby’s atheistic father, whom she lovingly renounced to receive the sacrament herself.
In the doctrine and dogma of Mother Kirk, Day discovered truths more real and palpable than any she had ever discerned in Communism. Moreover, Catholicism provided her with a supernatural warrant for her ardent concern for the needy. “What you do to the least of these,” Christ said, “you do to me.” Mindful of these words Day, with her inspiring counterpart, former French peasant and champion of Distributism Peter Maurin, established the Catholic Worker, a newspaper committed to social reform and world peace. They also opened and struggled to maintain a shelter for Manhattan’s homeless.
Continued below.
Four Roads to Rome ~ The Imaginative Conservative
