Dorothy Day: Radical Devotion, Written by Jeffry Odell Korgen and Friar Mike Lasky, OFM Conv., Illustrated by Christopher Cardinale, Pauli’s Press, 2024.
With the canonization process moving ahead for Dorothy Day, interest continues to grow for the Servant of God who famously said, “Don’t call me a saint. I don’t want to be dismissed that easily.” Biographer and granddaughter Kate Hennessy warned, “If we continue to narrow down who she was, that does a disservice to not only her, but to us.” To its great credit, the new graphic novel from Paulist Press, Dorothy Day: Radical Devotion, resists any hagiographical pull, allowing the person of Dorothy Day to speak through a vivid and honest rendering, recognizing that sanctity speaks for itself.
The graphic novel is a particularly suitable form for someone so on the move as Dorothy was, who entitled her long-term column, ‘On Pilgrimage.’ The story begins in 1906 Oakland, as Dorothy and the Day family are awakened by the great San Francisco earthquake across the bay. Illustrator Cardinale’s use of color tone and linework evokes a sense of movement that will set the tone for the remainder of the book. In the aftermath of the earthquake, thousands of refugees stream into Oakland, with the community responding with a hospitality that seemed to have impressed itself upon the eight-year-old Dorothy. “Mother, why can’t people treat each other like this all the time?,” foreshadowing her radical embrace of the Gospel.
In a little over 100 pages, the book packs in an impressive amount of biographical information without losing any figurative or literal color. As a cub reporter, we see Dorothy step off a streetcar and into the tumult of WWI-era New York City, where she documents the dignity and squalor of tenement living, rubbing shoulders with labor and literary icons such as John Reed and Eugene O’Neill.
After depicting Dorothy’s formative experience picketing for women’s suffrage and being thrown in jail for it, the book details a conversation between Dorothy and O’Neill over the course of a Greenwich Village night. Dorothy is taken by the playwright’s barroom recitation of poem ‘The Hound of Heaven.’ Deftly portrayed, the conversation becomes a cipher for clashing worldviews; while each feel themselves haunted and pursued by God, it is Dorothy who will let herself be found.
Then begins one of the most formally impressive sequences of the book. Each panel’s coloration is gradually desaturated into blue, beginning when a mutual friend overdoses on heroin. As Day rushes to tend to him, O’Neill is nowhere to be seen. She confronts him about their friend. “It’s not my mess,” he replies, and Day realizes a painful truth to which she will frequently return, courtesy of Dostoevsky – love in dreams is easy, love in action is hard.
Day falls in love and becomes pregnant by a vagabond journalist who tells her to get an abortion. She travels to Chicago for the procedure, and the experience is heartbreakingly illustrated with little dialogue, as the frames juxtapose the barrenness of the doctor’s office with Day imagining herself being embraced and possibly forgiven by a woman on a labor poster in the office. We see in a closeup of her face the physical and spiritual agony she undergoers. She tries to commit suicide, marries then divorces, and struggles to incorporate her faith without any community. It is when she moves out to Staten Island and meets Forster Batterham that light reappears, emerging over the horizon. To her surprised delight, she becomes pregnant.
Creative sequences such as these weave throughout the novel. For example, see the juxtaposed versions of the infamous “Coffee Cup Mass” or the rendering of the FBI’s dossier on Dorothy. When Peter Maurin and Day providentially meet and begin speaking about what will become the Catholic Worker, we get a clear sense for Maurin’s legendary appetite for conversation, fluttering about panels explicating his “three-point program” of cult, culture, and cultivation. The Catholic Worker movement began, and continues, in a culture of discussion, collaboration, and prayer, a dynamic framework which will lead it from Depression-era breadlines to protesting with Cesar Chavez in the 1970s and on into the 21st-century.
Many reading will be familiar with major events of Dorothy’s life in the Catholic Worker and they need no rehashing here. The text and dialogue narrating the book are solidly crafted and impressively informative, contextualized by historical notes, so that even those well-versed in the CW movement might learn something new: for instance, I had no idea that the eminent poet W.H. Auden met Dorothy and financially supported the Worker. As a whole, Radical Devotion exceedingly accomplishes its purpose to introduce the life and holiness of Dorothy Day. What one comes away with is a better understanding of Dorothy’s distinctive pilgrimage, from someone who might have remained passive before the accidents of history, toward a vocation of Gospel witness actively shaping the times through which she moved.
Her story began with an earthquake, and it’s a fitting metaphor; the Catholic Worker movement continues to reverberate, as illustrated on the last page: food delivery in the Philippines, hospitality in Indiana, a farm in Nashville, a non-violent protest of the Keystone Pipeline in Iowa. I got my feet wet at Casa Juan Diego in 2019, enduring those first turbulent months of COVID alongside a community I continue to cherish in my heart. Against my window rests the Eichenberg print, ‘Christ of the Breadlines,’ given at the end of my CJD tenure and signed by my fellow CWers. It is impossible to imagine all the loaves and fishes given over the years through the movement Dorothy led. “It all just came about,” she wrote at the end of The Long Loneliness. “It just happened… it is still going on.”
Houston Catholic Worker, October- December, Vol. XLIV, No. 4.
