Dorothy Day: Portraits by Those Who Knew Her
By Rosalie G. Riegle. Orbis Books (Maryknoll, N.Y., 2003). 212 pp., $22.
The Very Rich Hours of Jacques Maritain: A Spiritual Life
By Ralph McInerny. University of Notre Dame Press (Notre Dame, Ind., 2003). 235 pp., $32.
Various estimates put the number of World War II veterans dying each day at 1,000 to 1,500. Similarly, by the time Rosalie G. Riegle in 2002 had finished recording her oral histories of people who knew Dorothy Day, the co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement, 14 of them had died. That alone makes her book of recollections, "Dorothy Day: Portraits by Those Who Knew Her," all the more valuable.
Day influenced numerous lives. The short list includes Jesuit Fathers Daniel Berrigan and Richard McSorley, artist Ade Bethune, author-psychiatrist Robert Coles, nonviolence activist Jim Douglass, peace activists Eileen Egan and Gordon Zahn, social critic Michael Harrington, actress-anarchist Judith Malina, counterculture figure Ed Sanders of the Fugs -- and even Robert Ellsberg, editor in chief of Riegle's publisher, Orbis Books.
Their reminiscences, and those of dozens more, are included in the book. Riegle cuts and pastes their memories and arranges them thematically along the many aspects of Day's life.
Despite these high-profile interview subjects, perhaps most gratifying are the few pages that feature Day's daughter, Tamar Hennessy. It was Day's pregnancy with Tamar that led to the spiritual path that included her joining the Catholic Church and the fusion of religious faith with social action that became the Catholic Worker. (This was but her first spiritual awakening; her second was, as a roll-your-own chain smoker, giving up cigarettes cold turkey following an Ignatian spiritual exercises retreat.)
Day had her run-ins with various New York archbishops, but always escaped sanction. Harrington said he recalled telling author William F. Buckley at a party, "When the history of America and Catholicism in the 1950s is written, Francis Cardinal Spellman will be a footnote and Dorothy Day will be a chapter." Harrington was prescient.
Looking for a link between Day and French Thomist philosopher Jacques Maritain? A Day compatriot recalled a 1936 incident in which the Catholic Worker House was doing battle with bugs, yet Day said she had to speak in front of "all the Catholic luminaries of the day. ... Well, after my humble little presentation, Jacques Maritain looked at me and said, 'Ah, Dorothy, you're always so serene.'" As it happened, she continued, "just at that moment, I felt this louse crawling across my bosom, and I thought to myself ... if you only knew the truth!"
What did Maritain share in common with Day? For one thing, both became Catholics as adults. For another, they were part of social action movements (his was Action Francaise) that published a newspaper. Unlike the Catholic Worker, Action Francaise received official condemnation. But Maritain shook off that stigma to become France's ambassador to the Vatican after World War II.
The "hours" in "The Very Rich Hours of Jacques Maritain" refer to the liturgy of the hours. McInerney's biography compartmentalizes Maritain's life along those lines, and it is one of the most artificial constructs I've ever encountered in nonfiction.
To really know Maritain, one would have to understand his philosophical underpinnings. This volume is too slim to provide that properly. (It's interesting to note, though, that Maritain was exposed to the writings of Anne Catherine Emmerich, whose visions played a large part in Mel Gibson's screenplay of "The Passion of the Christ.")
To understand Maritain one would also have to understand how fully he integrated his life with that of his wife, Raissa, a convert from Judaism in an era when all who became Catholics as adults were called converts. "The Very Rich Hours" does this much, much better justice.
-- Mark Pattison
The Cross in Our Context: Jesus and the Suffering World
By Douglas John Hall. Augsburg/Fortress (Minneapolis, 2003). 274 pp., $17.00.
"The theology of the cross is not a single chapter in theology, but the key signature for all Christian theology," says noted European theologian Jurgen Moltmann.
Douglas John Hall has focused on this "theology of the cross" for much of his long career as a Canadian Protestant theologian, one widely read in the United States and beyond. Martin Luther coined the phrase, it seems, clarifying a biblical theme strongly present in the writings of St. Paul and other early teachers, distinguishing it from a "theology of glory."
A theology of glory focuses on a God and a church that is triumphalistic and judgmental. A theology of the cross emphasizes a God and church who offer people strength in another way: "My power is made perfect in weakness" is what Paul puts into the mouth of God (2 Cor 12:9). This power is reflected in suffering love.
In Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ," Jesus dying on the on the cross is portrayed as a substitutionary, sacrificial victim for human sin, offered to placate a judging God. A theology of the cross counters that image. It is a "not-much-loved but much-needed" interpretation that portrays a God and church who suffer along with people and do not stand in judgment over them.
Hall, author of "The Cross in Our Context: Jesus in the Suffering World," claims that for almost 2,000 years, Western Christendom in both its Roman Catholic and major Protestant expressions has been welded to an atonement theology that has guaranteed keeping God the father quite distinct from the suffering son.
Historical Christianity -- Christendom -- has steadfastly avoided the theology of the cross, he says, because such a theology could only call into question the whole imperialistic bent of Christendom. But with the demise of Christendom in the modern and postmodern periods, it has become possible for serious Christians to reconsider the meaning and role of this submerged "critical theology."
The author describes how the spirit and method of this theological view -- one not well known in English-speaking lands -- works itself out in modern ecumenical Christian thought.
"God's commitment to the world entails suffering," says Hall. To live with purpose we need a God best revealed in the suffering love of Jesus. This suffering God helps us understand our context, or current reality.
The power of love reverses both the secular power and destructive submissiveness with which the church has too often been identified. God's apparent weakness in Jesus is actually strength. It does not glorify suffering since suffering is not the goal. It is life-focused. Suffering is rather the consequence of claiming the power of faith in Jesus.
The weakness of Jesus, and those who suffer with him, becomes the strength demanded of those who voluntarily forfeit their strength in order to be strong for the other.
Disestablished Christianity, a growing reality in the Western world, is well served by a theology of the cross. Hall believes that disestablishment, understood through the lens of this theology, is actually providential.
The author proposes that the mission of the Christian movement in the 21st century is to confess hope in action, through suffering love and reflected by a theology of the cross.
Catholic readers should value this book. It interprets a stream of biblical, early church and reformation theology that connects with modern Catholic teaching and practice. It could help all Christians to recover a faith tradition "not much loved, but much needed" in our time.
-- Wayne A. Holst The Reviewers:
Mark Pattison is media editor for Catholic News Service.
Wayne A. Holst is a parish educator at St. David's United Church in Calgary. He has taught religion and culture at the University of Calgary. |