My book review of new (and wonderful) biography of Dorothy Day

Jim Forest’s beautifully written and poignant All is Grace: A Biography of Dorothy Day reveals the founder of the Catholic Worker movement as no ordinary saint, if her cause for beatification and canonization opened in 2000 proves successful.

The book does not gloss over any of the controversial aspects of her early life. Before becoming Catholic, Day sought an abortion, hoping losing the child would save her love affair with the baby’s father. Afterwards, she returned to their apartment to find the man had left, leaving behind only a letter urging her to forget him and a small amount of money that he had originally intended to pay a bar bill, Forest writes.

Four years later, she was delighted to become pregnant while in another relationship that, because of his atheism and her entering the Catholic Church, she realized she must end.

Day was someone who struggled with her faith in her early life, made some terrible mistakes, but then did something extraordinary with her life for the love of God that touched the lives of hundreds of thousands.

Seventeen years after Day’s death in 1980, her granddaughter wrote in The Catholic Worker, the newspaper Day and Peter Maurin founded in 1933 at the height of the Depression: “To have known Dorothy means spending the rest of your life wondering what hit you. On the one hand, she has given so many of us a home, physically and spiritually; on the other, she has shaken our very foundations.”

Forest, who not only worked with Day but had access to her writings and private papers in the preparation of the book, writes, “Whenever I think about the challenges of life in the bright light of the Gospel rather than in the gray light of money or the dim light of politics, her example has had its influence. Every time I try to overcome meanness or selfishness rising up in myself, it is partly thanks to the example of Dorothy Day... Every time I give away something I can get along without — every time I manage to see Christ’s presence in the face of a stranger — there again I owe a debt to Dorothy Day.”

This book may inspire in the reader a similar sense of indebtedness because it gives such a realistic, compassionate view of a woman who had a powerful presence and a deep faith, but suffered for it and experienced much loneliness and misunderstanding.