From Union Square to Rome by Dorothy Day

From Union Square to Rome Reviews

• 
  Kressel Housman

  I became interested in Dorothy Day last year after reading about her life in
  David Brooks’s
  The Road to Character. She is the founder of the Catholic Worker, a charitable activist group that melds socialist concern for the common laborer with Catholic ideals. This was the precise journey she took in her life, from left-wing politics to devout Catholicism, or, as the title says, From Union Square to Rome. But rather than doing a complete 180 turn and repudiating her past, Dorothy Day sought to preserve the positive values she retained from her leftist years and find a way to incorporate them into the practice of her religion, to which she remained devout until the end of her life.
  
  I am not a Catholic, but I was involved in leftist politics in my late teens and early twenties before turning to Orthodox Judaism. Heck, I even spent a few years with a foot in each camp, looking for a way to reconcile ideologies and lifestyles that seemed completely incompatible to everyone else, but came from one consistent impulse in me. The book confirmed for me that Dorothy Day was exactly the same, except she left the lasting legacy of the Catholic Worker. I don’t know what the future holds in store for me.
  
  The introduction to this volume states that Day’s later work,
  The Long Loneliness, is a much more complete autobiography. This book reads much more like a coming of age memoir, except it is written as a letter to her brother, a Communist and atheist. The final chapter, “Your Three Objections,” most directly addresses him, whereas most of the rest is about her early life, which presumably, her brother already knew. That final chapter is the most polemical section in the book and was therefore the least interesting to me. After all, it’s a bit questionable for an Orthodox Jew to be reading about Catholicism! So I skimmed some parts and read for the “universal” religious experience.
  
  I absolutely loved some of the insights she brought out, though. First, she observed that to a young idealist raised without religion, nothing is more natural than to be attracted to leftist ideologies. That was certainly true in her times, and though leftism was much more out of vogue in mine, (I came of age in the Reagan era), I still completely agree. Quoting someone else, she said that the measure of our love of G-d is how much we love others. That's consistent with Judaism as were her views on free will. Free will is our most precious of gifts, she says, and it is no surprise that so many people are willing to fight and die to preserve it, even though humans throughout history have also used their free will to catastrophic ends. Brilliant stuff!
  
  Even though it has nothing to do with the book, I do want to tell a personal story of how my life was impacted by the Catholic Worker and why I was already predisposed to Dorothy Day. When I was a senior in high school, a self-proclaimed communist, I was looking for some volunteer work to do, and happened upon a calendar of leftist events. That led me to the Catholic Worker shelter for indigent women in the East Village where I spent a few hours getting my arms soaked while washing industrial-sized pots. I took a break in a small, enclosed garden behind the building, and there I met a woman named Amelia. She didn’t live in the shelter; she actually lived with her parents nearby, even though she was probably in her thirties at least. She probably suffered from something that would be labeled a mental illness, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t hold an intelligent conversation with a searching and socially clueless eighteen-year-old. “You know what you would like?” she said. “The Carlebach shul. 305 West 79th Street.” She wrote it down, and gave me the date to show up. That date was the holiday of Shavuos.
  
  That was the rough beginning of my teshuva (return to Orthodoxy). I left NYC and began college in Binghamton shortly after, so I was away from both the Catholic Worker and the Carlebach shul. But I continued to make left-wing friends, got into quite a bit of trouble, and dropped out two years later. Only when I felt I had lost everything – my friends, my education, everything that mattered to me – did I go back to Carlebach to build a Jewish life in earnest. But that first link came from a fellow Jewess sitting with me in the garden of the Catholic Worker women’s shelter. Hashem works in unpredictable ways.
  
  I like to think that Dorothy Day would be pleased with that story. Though I didn’t find my way to her religion, I found my way to my own. And it all began with my concern for the homeless and her vision in making service possible. I know it's not the only service organization in the world, but it was a start for me. May Hashem bring us all back to truth and unity.
  
• 
  David

  There wasn't a whole lot here that was new, and I wouldn't really recommend this book to those who are just beginning to read Day (that said, I gobbled it up in less than two days). However, the book does have a purpose: she writes the book as a response to her comrades on the left who are dubious about why someone who cared deeply for the poor and oppressed would choose to ally herself with the Catholic Church. In typical Day fashion, she answers this through both narrative (her story giving her leftist bona fides and how she turned to the Church in a time of joy rather than despair) and direct response (the final chapter confronts three standard objections from Communists toward Christianity). Day is more of a journalist/orator than a debater/philosopher proper, so one shouldn't expect an involved dialectic with secular leftist ideology, though she shows a decent familiarity with the socialist, communist, and anarchist critiques of organized religion of her day. I think that if someone from the political left was just beginning to study Day, he or she would be better off starting with 'Loaves and Fishes' (which gives the origin of the Catholic Worker movement) since this gives a broader view of the positive aims of what she was doing and the intellectual justifications behind the movement, but Union Square to Rome might be an appropriate place to turn shortly thereafter since one is likely to be curious about her background and reasons for making the kind of life commitment that she ultimately did.
• 
  Kj

  This was a very good, slim volume on her life. It does not hold all the details like her autobiography, rather it is a overview-telling of the journey she took. Very good.
• 
  Alma Rodríguez

  Great book. Totally recommended, you won’t regret to read it.
• 
  Shannon

  This book helped me transition into my post-undergrad, post-Catholic, post-journalist life as a teacher. I read this during an uhmayzing Seattle U 3-day silent retreat where I made many touchingly profound collages from magazine clippings, drank copious amounts of earl grey tea, and wrote pages and pages of thoughtful, introspective notes in green ink. (Much is both very different and exactly the same a decade later)
• 
  Carolus

  buku ini sudah diterjemahkan dan diterbitkan oleh penerbit DIOMA, Malang. Isinya sangat menarik dan menggetarkan. ternyata, untuk menjadi baik dan lebih baik itu sangat "dekat" dengan kehidupan harian kita.
  wassalve,
  ismulcokro
• 
  Nick Jordan

  The introduction describes this as a "first draft" of The Long Loneliness. While it certainly makes me want to reread that work (and more Dorothy Day in general), it also stands on its own among the *great* spiritual memoirs.
• 
  Brian

  from Mary's recommend
• 
  Jennifer

  An honest, thoughtful personal story.
• 
  Michelle

  The story of one of my favorite modern saints - Dorothy Day. This particular writing tells of her early years and transitioning relationship with the church
• 
  Andrew

  "Yes, love, great love–and who wishes to be mediocre in love?–brings with it a desire for suffering. The love of God can become so overwhelming that it wishes to do everything for the Beloved, to endure hunger, cold, sleeplessness in an ecstasy of zeal and enthusiasm. There is a love so great that the Beloved is all and oneself nothing, and this realization, leading to humility, a real joyful humility which desires to do the least, the meanest, the hardest as well as the most revolting tasks, to crush the pride of self, to abandon oneself fully, to abandon even the desire for heroism. To prostrate oneself upon the earth, that noble earth, that beloved soil which Christ made sacred and significant for us by His Blood with which He watered it."
  
  -Servant of God Dorothy Day (From Union Square to Rome, pg 176)
• 
  Elyse Hayes

  Fascinating memoir of her early years as a student, journalist, Socialist, bohemian, etc. and her conversion to Roman Catholicism. I heard her granddaughter recommend this book as having a freshness to it, and she was right. Day was always an excellent writer. but this has a vivacity to it that is delightful. This was supposedly written in answer to her (Communist) brother's objections to religion. It moves along beautifully until the last section, when she is writing theology. The theology is solid, but it's not as interesting as her personal experiences.
• 
  Maurício Perez

  Um livro encantador e, ao mesmo tempo, duro. Retrata a vida dos trabalhadores norte americanos no início do século XX, os movimentos radicais (anarquistas, comunistas) e a trajetória de Dorothy.
  
  A autora abre o coração e expõe seu sentimento de indignação com a exploração dos trabalhadores, sua busca pelo transcendente e o longo caminho pelo qual chegou a se tornar católica.
  
  Escreve a seu irmão menor, comunista, antipático pelas religiões, as razões da sua fé.
  
  Um livro ainda atual
• 
  Diana Cortez

  Fue muy esperanzador leer la autobiografía de esta extraordinaria mujer, defensora de los marginados y de la justicia social. Actualmente se encuentra en proceso de beatificación.
• 
  Margaret Mihalick

  never knew going from communism to christianity existed but i am so so enthralled by it
• 
  Kate

  Long Loneliness was better. She took a while to get to the point in this one.
• 
  Javier Palomo

  No es que me haya enamorado la lectura del libro, pero en mi caso ha cumplido bien su función de ayudarme a conocer a Dorothy Day, la cofundadora junto a Peter Maurin en 1933 de Catholic Worker, movimiento católico preocupado por los marginados y desamparados de Nueva York
• 
  Katie Brosky

  Read for class. 3.5 - actually really enjoyed, the writing reminded me a lot of Patti Smith. Wasn’t interested in the religious themes
• 
  Amy Bird

  Read for Action and Evil Study Group at St. George's Round Church.