by Paul Eliefrom Georgetown University
On “Pilgrimage”: Stories of Dorothy Day
Tom Cornell was there, telling a story – he who burned his draft card in Union Square in 1965 and was sent to prison for doing so. Robert Ellsberg was there – he who dropped out of Harvard in the early seventies to join in the Catholic Worker. Jane Sammon was there – she who has been a presence at Maryhouse on East 3rd Street since Dorothy Day was living in the house in the 1970’s. So were Martha Hennessy, one of Dorothy Day’s granddaughters and a voice in the cause for her canonization; and Carmen Trotta, who organized things as he has organized so many things for the New York Catholic Workers in the past twenty years; and Monica Cornell, who made filling out the forms a small but sure act of resistance, smiling all the while.
“There” was the StoryCorps Listening Booth in Foley Square in Manhattan. Through the American Pilgrimage Project (a partnership of Georgetown and StoryCorps) it was arranged for Catholic Workers who knew Day – the movement’s foundress – to record their recollections of her. It was apt that the booth is just a few yards away from City Hall Park, where Day and other Catholic Workers protested against civil-defense air-raid drills year after year in the 1950s – and just across the square, Tom Cornell pointed out, from the federal courthouse where he was tried, found guilty, and sentenced to a prison term in 1968.
As Day’s cause is considered in Rome – and considered in the couple of hundred Catholic Worker communities around the world – these stories will form vital parts of the record. And they’ll be valuable beyond price in their own right. What was Dorothy Day like? How can we be sure? Because these people knew her, and they told us.
The recording process put in mind a story that figures into The Life You Save May Be Your Own. Peter Maurin – radical, raconteur, extemporaneous philosopher, author of versified “Easy Essays” – founded the Catholic Worker with Dorothy Day in 1933. In 1947, he had a stroke. He began to mumble his words; then for long stretches he stopped talking altogether.
God “took from him his mind, the one thing perhaps he took delight in,” Day observed. “He could no longer discuss with others, give others in a brilliant overflow of talk his keen analysis of what was going on in the world.” So the Catholic Workers decided to tape-record him reading some of his “Easy Essays” before it was too late. They gathered around his bed, set the reels going, and held the microphone close. “His voice strangely enough was louder and clearer as it came over the wire than it had been for a long time … ,” Day recalled. “Then, after we had triumphantly made a fifteen -minute spool, someone else tried to work the machine and erased it all.”
The photograph, in the Brooklyn Museum’s collection, shows Day and other Catholic Workers protesting in City Hall Park.
