Dorothy Day. On Pilgrimage. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999. Pp. xii + 256. $16.95 (Paper).

[1] On Pilgrimage is a republication of a long out-of-print work based on Dorothy Day's columns in The Catholic Worker in 1948. It appears now in the series Ressourcement: Retrieval and Renewal in Catholic Thought (edited by David L. Schindler) with a new foreword by Michael O. Garvey and an introductory essay by Mark and Louise Zwick.

[2] The introduction by the Zwicks, leaders of the Houston Catholic Worker community, is a lucid sixty-four page overview of the main themes and influences in Day's thought, well illustrated by quotations from Day's writings. Originally published separately in Communio, it is not specifically linked to On Pilgrimage.

[3] On Pilgrimage follows Dorothy (I will follow the Catholic Worker custom of using her first name) month by month through 1948. It is not a "true journal," she says, but rather a series of "meditations for women." Though the book has long been unavailable, some parts will be familiar from The Long Loneliness (1952), into which Dorothy reworked them.

[4] January finds Dorothy in rural West Virginia, near Berkeley Springs, where her daughter Tamar and son-in-law David Hennessy are homesteading and expecting their third child. Most entries begin with the temperature (as low as fourteen below) as well as the date. Here we see Dorothy the agrarian. Catholic Worker agrarianism was not just Peter Maurin's hobbyhorse but Dorothy's cause as well, though she could not exactly live it: "If we who are tied to the city cannot go villageward at once, we can begin to hold it as an ideal for our children" (71). We also meet Dorothy the reader. Michael Garvey, in his foreword, points out references in the January entries to eighteen authors or literary characters. And so throughout the book, Dorothy's experience is mediated through a lifetime of reading; "I feel like the Meagles family in Little Dorrit, who are always talking about how practical they are" (220) is typical. But especially we see Dorothy the mother and grandmother. I was pleased to find the original of a passage on the asceticism of motherhood that had circulated in handwritten form for decades among mothers of my acquaintance (75-77).

[5] Asceticism is a recurring theme. In March Dorothy complains, "So little is expected of us laypeople," as she comments on how priests dismiss her confession of small attachments, such as eating between meals, as "scruples." "We do little enough, and when we try to do a little more, we are lectured on Jansenism!" (112). She gives much space to "the Retreat," the retreat program developed by Father Onesimus Lacouture, promoted by Fathers John Hugo and Pacifique Roy, and championed by Dorothy since around 1940. The Retreat, based in the First Week of the Ignatian Exercises, emphasized silence, purification, giving up all attachments to find Christ. The controversies over nature and grace that marked the theological world of the 1940s spilled over into a controversy over the Retreat, and its proponents were silenced or restricted. In her entries for April, Dorothy incorporates a ten-page excerpt from Hugo's defense of his work, and her entries for July and August consist mainly of retreat notes compiled at the Catholic Worker Farm in Newburgh, New York.

[6] In April, Dorothy is back at the Catholic Worker house on Mott Street in Manhattan and meditating on love, divine and human. "We should see Christ in others, and nothing else, and love them." But "Everyone will try to kill that love in you" (124). A reading of Dwight McDonald on the Kinsey Report leads to reflections on sexual love. She recalls with horror the stirrings of sexual desire upon reading Havelock Ellis when she was seventeen: "It was like the uncoiling of a dank and ugly serpent in my breast." Books like Kinsey's, on the contrary, try "to make people overcome their sense of guilt, to deaden consciences" (129). From there, though, she turns to the goodness of sexual love, quoting with approval a young mother's criticism of the negative attitude toward sex in standard Catholic instruction (133-36). April's entries conclude with the excerpt from Father Hugo, defending his use of the analogy between sexual love and the Beatific vision against a Jesuit Censor who said it "is to be viewed 'with horror'" (137). The theme of sexuality recurs at several points in the book, for instance, in October: "It is in sex love that people catch glimpses of harmony and peace unutterable" (228).

[7] May's entries, and again November's, show us Dorothy the poet, both poems (148, 240-42) reflecting the love of nature that is expressed throughout Dorothy's writing. She also affords a glimpse of some of the ferment of the "Catholic Revival" of the late 1940s, as she describes various groups and movements and seeks to distinguish the Catholic Worker from the others "in its attitude to our industrial civilization, to the machine, and to war" (152). There is also a moving portrait of Peter Maurin in the physical and mental decline of the last year of his life.

[8] October opens in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, at the Catholic Worker house run single-handedly by Mary Frecon in one of the city's poorest districts. Dorothy's heart reaches more broadly than her aesthetic sensibilities. She sees Christ in all the people of the neighborhood, but she finds the African Americans' music "barbaric, horrible, monotonous" (222) and looks forward to the day when "Instead of a tent tabernacle with the rhythm of the jungle, there will be a church with the Mass" (226).

[9] On Pilgrimage has moments that are quirky, for instance a prayer for Lenin (125), or quaint, for instance, traveling the Pennsylvania Turnpike's tunnels in a car without headlights (187) and using DDT "like talcum powder" (178). But it will deepen any reader's awareness of Dorothy's thinking, her tastes, her familial relations and social commitments, and above all her spirituality. The theme which governs the whole book is love in its many forms, always leading to love of God; "My whole life so far," Dorothy says, "my whole experience has been that our failure has been not to love enough" (203).

William J. Collinge
Mount Saint Mary's College