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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 September 2014
Dorothy Day has received a great deal of attention from contemporary scholars of U.S. Catholicism. This article makes a unique contribution to this growing literature by offering a close reading of Dorothy Day's autobiography, The Long Loneliness. The purpose is to highlight the narrative's integrity as a sustained argument in defense of Christian faith transformed by wrestling with the Marxist charge: religion is the opiate of the people. Day deserves credit for a daring approach to Catholic apologetics in the 1950s. The article presents the narrative as a dialectic between the personal and the political, the material and the spiritual, and the natural and the supernatural that resolves itself in a creative synthesis through the Catholic Worker Movement. Day embraces Marxist aspirations and acknowledges their criticism's truth in defending the authenticity of her Catholic commitment. Day simultaneously demonstrates that the Incarnation's reality informs traditional Catholicism with its radical political character.
1 The edition used here is The Long Loneliness: An Autobiography with an introduction by Berrigan, Daniel, reprint ed. (New York: Harper & Row, 1981).Google Scholar Page numbers of quotations appear in parentheses immediately following citations.
2 Day, Dorothy, From Union Square to Rome (Silver Spring, MD: Preservation of the Faith Press, 1938).Google Scholar This text was Day's first attempt at autobiography.
3 The literature on Dorothy Day grows daily, but no study to date has analyzed The Long Loneliness in and of itself. Examples of recent analyses of Day that cull their arguments from a variety of her writings include Fisher, James Terence, The Catholic Counterculture in America, 1933-1962 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989)Google Scholar, and Merriman, Brigid O'Shea, Searching for Christ: The Spirituality of Dorothy Day (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994).Google Scholar
4 Quoted in Carey, Patrick, ed., American Catholic Religious Thought (New York: Paulist, 1987), 51.Google Scholar