Contemporary Authors

• Dorothy Day: The World Will Be Saved by Beauty: An Intimate Portrait of My Grandmother Scribner (New York, NY), 2017
• Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker: The Miracle of Our Continuance ( photographs by Vivian Cherry) Empire State Editions (New York, NY), 2016
• Hold Nothing Back: Writings by Dorothy Day ( edited by Patrick Jordan) Liturgical Press (Collegeville, MN), 2016

1. Dorothy Day : the world will be saved by beauty : an intimate portrait of my grandmother LCCN 2017288298 Type of material Book Personal name Hennessy, Kate, 1960- author. Main title Dorothy Day : the world will be saved by beauty : an intimate portrait of my grandmother / Kate Hennessy. Edition First Scribner hardcover edition. Published/Produced New York : Scribner, 2017. Description xii, 372 pages, 8 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations ; 24 cm ISBN 9781501133961 (hardcover) 1501133969 (hardcover) (ebook) CALL NUMBER BX4705.D283 H46 2017 Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms 2. Documenting culture in the 21st century symposium, 2015 June 4. LCCN 2016655256 Type of material Archival Manuscript/Mixed Formats (Collection) Main title Documenting culture in the 21st century symposium, 2015 June 4. Description manuscripts 1 folder. 1 video file (online) (forthcoming) : digital, sound, color. x photographs digital, NEF files, color. Rights advisory Duplication of the collection materials may be governed by copyright and other restrictions. Access advisory Collection is open for research. Access may be restricted. To request materials, please contact the Folklife Reading Room at http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.afc/folklife.contact Links Online presentation https://www.loc.gov/folklife/Symposia/documentingculture/index.html CALL NUMBER AFC 2015/018 Request in American Folklife Center (Jefferson, LJG53) 3. Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker : the miracle of our continuance LCCN 2015036364 Type of material Book Main title Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker : the miracle of our continuance / photographs by Vivian Cherry ; Text by Dorothy Day ; Edited, with an Introduction and Additional Text by Kate Hennessy. Edition First edition. Published/Produced New York : Empire State Editions, an imprint of Fordham University Press, 2016. Description xi, 136 pages ; 29 cm. ISBN 9780823271368 (hardback) CALL NUMBER BX4705.D283 D66 2016 CABIN BRANCH Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE 4. Hold nothing back : writings by Dorothy Day LCCN 2015033945 Type of material Book Personal name Day, Dorothy, 1897-1980. Uniform title Essays. Selections Main title Hold nothing back : writings by Dorothy Day / edited by Patrick Jordan ; foreword by Kate Hennessy. Published/Produced Collegeville, Minnesota : Liturgical Press, [2016] Description xvii, 110 pages ; 21 cm ISBN 9780814646557 Shelf Location FLS2016 109360 CALL NUMBER BX4668.D3 A5 2016 OVERFLOWJ34 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms (FLS2)

• Simon and Schuster - http://www.simonandschuster.com/authors/Kate-Hennessy/560866361

  Kate Hennessy
  Kate Hennessy is a writer and the youngest of Dorothy Day’s nine grandchildren. Her work has been included in Best American Travel Writing. She is the author of Dorothy Day: The World Will Be Saved By Beauty and, in collaboration with the photographer Vivian Cherry, Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker: The Miracle of our Continuance. Kate divides her time between Ireland and Vermont.

• NPR - http://www.npr.org/2017/03/23/521220274/an-intimate-portrait-of-dorothy-day-the-catholic-activist-with-a-bohemian-past

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  RELIGION
  An 'Intimate Portrait' Of Dorothy Day, The Catholic Activist With A Bohemian Past

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  March 23, 20171:53 PM ET
  Heard on Fresh Air
  Fresh Air
  Dorothy Day
  The World Will Be Saved by Beauty: An Intimate Portrait of My Grandmother
  by Kate Hennessy

  Hardcover, 372 pages purchase

  Kate Hennessy drew from family letters, diaries and memories in writing Dorothy Day, a biography of her late grandmother. Day founded the Catholic Worker Movement and is now a candidate for sainthood.

  DAVE DAVIES, HOST:

  This is FRESH AIR. I'm Dave Davies in for Terry Gross. If I were to tell you we're going to talk about one of the most important American Catholic leaders of the 20th century, you might not picture a woman whose early years included a Bohemian lifestyle in New York, an abortion and a child born out of wedlock. But Dorothy Day's story is anything but predictable.

  She co-founded the Catholic Worker Movement, a pacifist faith-based movement for social change that still exists today. They led the Catholic Worker Movement from its beginnings in the Great Depression through the Vietnam War era. Day fed thousands of people, wrote newspaper columns, novels and plays, was arrested several times in protests, chain smoked for years, at a time lived on farms as part of an agrarian Back-to-the-Land strand of the Catholic Worker Movement.

  She died in 1980 and is now a candidate for sainthood in the church. A new biography that illuminates Day's activism and her complex personal life comes from someone who knows both well. Writer Kate Hennessy is Day's youngest granddaughter, and she relied on family letters and diaries, interviews and her own memories for her new book "Dorothy Day: The World Will Be Saved By Beauty."

  Well, Kate Hennessy, welcome to FRESH AIR. Let's talk about Dorothy's teenage and early adult years. I mean, she had some amazingly rich experiences, but it was decidedly not a life of piety. Give us a sense of the kinds of people that she associated with, what she did.

  KATE HENNESSY: When she was still a teenager, her parents moved back to New York City. They had been living in Chicago. My grandmother moved back with them. She was actually a college student at that time. She dropped out of university, moved back to New York with them and then decided to become a journalist. Her father was a journalist, her two older brothers were journalists. And that is definitely what she felt called to be.

  Unfortunately, her father didn't believe that women should be journalists - or she - he didn't believe that women should work, so it was a very tense moment between the two of them. But she was determined. Her first job was with The Call, a Socialist paper. At that paper, that's when she started to meet very interesting people beginning with Mike Gold, who was a communist and longtime friend of hers. They were actually engaged to be married briefly. And through that, she and Mike Gold interviewed Leon Trotsky.

  At that time, this was in the teens. There was a lot of activity both with the socialists and the communists and the IWW, lot of union activity. It was a very radical time. Union Square would have protests, demonstrations. It was quite powerful, and she covered a lot of those stories for The Call. She then moved on to helping out with The Masses, and that opened a whole new door for meeting the big names of the time. But...

  DAVIES: The Masses being another publication, not just the people (laughter).

  HENNESSY: Yes. Yes. Sorry. It was - it is a publication that was more of a - The Call was definitely more of a political paper. The Masses liked to cross the line into literature and art, so it kind of opened - she was very much first involved with the the radical parts of New York City. And then with The Masses, she kind of moved into the more literature, the Bohemian elements. She was introduced to Eugene O'Neill at that time. He was writing plays for the Provincetown Playhouse.

  DAVIES: At age 20, she's arrested for the first time. This would become a pattern in her life because she was a social activist. This was for being at a suffragist rally - right? - and it was quite an experience. Tell us about that.

  HENNESSY: Well, she was kind of loose ends. Her job at The Masses had ended because this was during the beginning of World War I when they started to do - to conscript people. And The Masses came out against that, and they were shut down for that very reason. So my grandmother was at loose ends, and she was hanging around one of the favorite haunts of Greenwich Village.

  And her very good friend Peggy Baird walked in, and she - Peggy had just come from Washington, D.C. She had just served, I think, a 15-day sentence for protesting demanding women's rights - women's vote. And she came and said we need more women. And Dorothy said why not? And so they headed down to D.C. They went on the picket line, and it just happened to be at that time the worst of the arrests.

  So when my grandmother was arrested, they had decided to use this as a - an example - to make an example of the women and make it very difficult, put them under extreme stress, so that, you know, that they would back off. So she was sent to this notorious workhouse in Virginia where she was beaten. They went on a hunger strike for 10 days.

  And during that time - I mean, she was only 20 years old. She really didn't have any idea of how hard this was - would be. And she turned to the Psalms at that time to help her through that period. And when she came back to New York, I think she was a - she was an older, wiser person from that experience.

  DAVIES: I believe you write that before the arrest there was - it got violent on the picket line. She actually fought the police which was one of the reasons she was taken into custody, not a shrinking flower.

  HENNESSY: No, she was not, and she was quite tall. So I think, you know, she probably was physically formidable, though, she was very skinny, very slender.

  DAVIES: So this was an interesting and often turbulent life that she led. And this was a time when, you know, in the early part of the 20th century when capitalism was associated by a lot of people with war and exploitation, you know, rather than shared prosperity. And there were anarchists and socialists and Marxists everywhere, and she moved among these circles. But it seems she was drawn to faith, and she wasn't really - she was not raised as a Catholic, right?

  HENNESSY: No, she was not.

  DAVIES: And she would, you know, slip into cathedrals to take part in benediction. She would study the catechism on her own. Do we know where her interest in this came from?

  HENNESSY: It's a very interesting question. I think a lot of us would like to know the answer to that. She had this very powerful sense of God. As she was known for cornering people at parties to talk about God. And there's - there was this very famous quote given by a friend of hers from - who was a member of the Communist Party who said Dorothy will never be a good communist. She's far too religious.

  So people were very aware of this element of hers, but, you know, it's hard for - I mean, she, herself, couldn't really explain why it was there. And so I think the rest of us are kind of left remaining how did this happen? You know, is it there for us? I think it's a very powerful question.

  DAVIES: Right. And it's something obviously that stayed with her for the rest of her life.

  HENNESSY: Yes.

  DAVIES: She had a child out of wedlock, as it happens. Tell us that story.

  HENNESSY: She and my grandfather actually had met several years before 1919. He was from the South. He was from Asheville, N.C. His parents were both English - had come over from England. He was a - probably in many ways totally different from my grandmother. He was not a talker. My grandmother loved to talk. He was an outdoors person. He loved to fish. He loved to go out in the boat. He was a biologist by training.

  For some reason, these very opposite people fell in love, deeply in love, but he was also a very loving, loyal man. So he was very pleased when my mother was born. But he was a - well, my grandmother called him an anarchist and an atheist. You know, he did not believe in religion. He did not believe in marriage. He never got married in his entire life. He was not going to go down the more traditional route, and that caused a big rift in them.

  When my mother was born, my grandmother decided to have her baptized in the Catholic Church. And so she went off and had her baptized. Now, this was quite funny because she was not Catholic yet, and certainly Forster wasn't Catholic. So here she was baptizing her child in a religion that that neither one belonged in. But that started a rift between them and also her desire to get married furthered that rift.

  DAVIES: Kate Hennessy's new book is "Dorothy Day: The World Will Be Saved By Beauty: An Intimate Portrait Of My Grandmother." It's a story of Dorothy Day, who began the Catholic Worker Movement for social justice, and Dorothy Day is Kate Hennessy's grandmother. We'll continue our conversation in just a moment. This is FRESH AIR.

  (SOUNDBITE OF MOACIR SANTOS' "EXCERPT NO. 1")

  DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR, and we're speaking with writer Kate Hennessy. She has a new biography of her grandmother, Dorothy Day, who was the founder of the Catholic Worker, a decades-old social justice movement. The book is called "Dorothy Day: The World Will Be Saved By Beauty."

  So your grandmother, Dorothy Day, enters into life as, in effect, a single parent. Her daughter, Tamar, is with her. The father of the child, Forster Batterham, is a presence in the life but not with them all the time. And then there's a point - she meets a man who changes her life, Peter Maurin, a Frenchman. Tell us about him.

  HENNESSY: Well, Peter was a - he was a catalyst for my grandmother. She had been down in Washington, D.C., covering a march, a hunger march. This was in December of 1932, and it was a real turning point for her because at that point she had been a Catholic for five years. And in that time, she didn't really know how to continue with her activist life. There was no path for her, clear path. It was Catholicism, and then there was her radical friends, and these two paths did not intersect. So she was standing on the sidelines covering this hunger march and she asked herself, well, where are the Catholics? Where am I? And this was a hard moment for her. What was her vocation? How should she move ahead?

  So she returned to New York and waiting for her was Peter Maurin, this French peasant, probably about 15 years older than her. I don't remember exactly. And he had a program of action for Catholics, and he said this is not my program of action. This is Catholicism. These are the social teachings of Catholicism, and he started to educate her. At this point, she had no idea of the social teachings of Catholicism. She had no idea they existed. And so it was a real eye-opener for her. And she said, well, what can we do? And he said, well, let's start writing. Now, he meant let's start publishing my writings because he was a writer. He wrote what came to be called Easy Essays. And my grandmother, being a writer, being a journalist, said, OK, I can do this. And what she was seeing was a paper that she would be the editor and publisher of. And so they kind of parted ways a bit on that issue. The paper, the Catholic Worker, the first issue was handed out in May of 1933. So this is how quickly this whole - all came together.

  DAVIES: Right. And, you know, for context, I mean, this was in the middle of the Great Depression. So there was a lot of poverty, a lot of need and a lot of, you know, social ferment, people looking for solutions. So they start this paper, the Catholic Worker, which had astonishingly quick growth. It was - began with - I think the first edition was 2,500. Within four months, it was 20,000, within a year 100,000. Tell us about the paper. What was it? And how did it - why did it connect so?

  HENNESSY: As you say, the - 1933 was in the midst of the Great Depression, and it was probably the most difficult year. New York City was just flooded with people who were homeless, who were hungry, starving, needed work. They were standing there watching this. And Peter says to Dorothy, we need to write about this, we need to help people see a way out of this. Dorothy says, OK, let's do this. They start handing out the paper at Union Square during May Day, so there were huge marches at that time, huge unrest. I mean, no one was working, so there were people on soapboxes at every corner talking about their program of action, whether it was a socialist or the communists or the anarchists.

  And so this small group of people come in and start handing out a paper called the Catholic Worker. And they're standing next to, you know, the Daily Worker and calling out, you know, read the Catholic Worker. Here is a social program for Catholics. And I think that that really caught people's attention because they had never heard of such a thing. And many people didn't believe them, but they persisted. For some reason, that really caught people's attention. And then it started catching the attention of people who needed help. So people started showing up at the door saying, well, you're talking about feeding the hungry and sheltering the homeless. Here we are. And so they had to open up a house of hospitality. They started a soup line. They first began with people staying in apartments. They ran out of room, so they had to move into buildings. They eventually ended down in Mott Street renting a building there.

  DAVIES: Which is where, the Lower East Side?

  HENNESSY: Yes, this is the Lower East Side.

  DAVIES: Yeah.

  HENNESSY: Little Italy.

  DAVIES: This is remarkable. I mean, this - again, you kind of just see how enterprising Dorothy Day is, starts this newspaper, it takes off. And part of it, I guess, was that a lot of poor people in New York were Catholic, right? There were a lot of Italians and a lot of Irish and other folks who were Catholic. And then people show up in need, and she just starts - figures out a way to provide help. How big did this get, the first hospitality house?

  HENNESSY: Well, by the time they moved into Mott Street - and this was in 1936 - they were housing about 70 people. The soup line could be up to 1,000 people a day. It was huge. Hours - it would last for hours, and the line would just snake down the street, Mott Street, for blocks. People would light fires to keep themselves warm while they were waiting for the soup line to move. And also at this time, they decided to buy a farm. One of the elements of Peter's program was farming communes, and so they bought a farm out in eastern Pennsylvania. And that was supposed to be the hope part of the Catholic Worker, that it was, you know, it was good to have the soup line and the houses of hospitality.

  But if you really wanted to change the social order that Peter believed, that we had to go back to the land, that there was no unemployment on the land. You know, people would be able to feed themselves on the land. So that also started at that time, and that was hugely popular. People were very interested in that experiment.

  DAVIES: And the paper, the Catholic Worker, was it a weekly?

  HENNESSY: It was a monthly. Though, some months, it wouldn't come out because there wouldn't be enough money to have it printed. It now is 10 issues per year; still exists, still sells for a penny a copy.

  DAVIES: Penny a copy, wow. She became famous, and people came to think of her as a spiritual leader. And you write that she got some interesting questions about what special powers she might have.

  HENNESSY: Yeah. There would be people who would say, you know, do you have visions? There was a rumor once that she had stigmata. And she had no patience for celebrity. One of her most famous statements is, don't call me a saint, I don't want to be dismissed so easily. I mean, to her, it's like you have to do the work, you know. And celebrity is a way of kind of avoiding that responsibility, that personal responsibility.

  DAVIES: How did the church react to the growth of the Catholic Worker Movement then?

  HENNESSY: They were very supportive. One of the reasons why the circulation went so high is because parishes would order bundles. So they thought it was wonderful and very supportive.

  DAVIES: And did that change over the years?

  HENNESSY: Yes, it did. As her pacifist stance came out, that really did a lot of damage.

  DAVIES: And that was in World War II, right?

  HENNESSY: Yes.

  DAVIES: Right.

  HENNESSY: Yes, it is.

  DAVIES: And then did it - did the relationship improve in the '50s, '60s, '70s?

  HENNESSY: Well, the '50s, I think I would say that she was still considered part of the fringe and not taken seriously. That started to change in the '60s. You know, of course, Vatican II came out in the '60s. And much of what they were speaking of was what she had been speaking about all along. So I think she kind of - there was a resurgence in interest in her. And I remember at that time a lot of priests and nuns coming through the Worker, which had been the case early on in the '30s.

  It was astounding how many priests and nuns would come through visiting and spending time. And that dropped away during the '40s and '50s, then picked up again in the '60s. And then in the '70s, she really became an icon. I mean, that's when the biography started coming out, the interviews. Bill Moyers interviewed her in the '70s. And so she really became quite revered at that time.

  DAVIES: You know, your book is about Dorothy, your grandmother, and the movement that she created. But it's also about her family. And it's really fascinating, I have to say. And when you're doing something on the scale that she is, it has impacts on the family. And I'd like to read - for you to read a section later in the book where you're writing about your own experience many, many decades after she began, when the movement's still going, and your own kind of experiences with the Catholic Worker and these hospitality houses. You want to share this with us?

  HENNESSY: (Reading) I wanted to be part of the Worker but it was hard - the noise, the dirt, the needs. I was terrified of being asked to be on the house, not so much for having to cook the meals or hand out clothing, but for what seemed to me to be people's unvoiced and unanswerable needs. I was even more terrified of being asked to take the floor during the soup line and face that long line of men who sometimes showed up drunk and angry. Because I was Dorothy's granddaughter, I thought I was supposed to be strong and to pull it off with the grace I felt so many others who weren't related to Dorothy had. But I backed off, frightened by those whose needs seemed bottomless and who grasped desperately at something, anything. It had been difficult for both Tamar and Dorothy to be in the line of fire of such need, to not instinctively protect themselves from those who lashed onto them in desperation. In the '40s, while observing Tamar's marriage, Dorothy had written. And I know she was also speaking for herself. There is so much talk of community and so many who desire to share your life who look at you with wistful eyes, who want from you what you cannot give - companionship. They want to move in with you, crawl into your skin, this awful intimacy.

  DAVIES: That's writer Kate Hennessy reading from her biography of her grandmother, "Dorothy Day: The World Will Be Saved By Beauty." After a break, she'll talk about Day's relationship with her only daughter, Hennessy's mother, Tamar. And we'll remember Chuck Barris, creator of "The Dating Game" and "The Gong Show." He died earlier this week. I'm Dave Davies and this is FRESH AIR.

  (SOUNDBITE OF JOHN LEWIS' "J.S. BACH: WELL-TEMPERED CLAVIER, BOOK I, BWV 848 - PRELUDE NO. 3")

  DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Dave Davies in for Terry Gross. We're speaking with Kate Hennessy about her new biography of Dorothy Day, the co-founder of the Catholic Worker Movement, a faith-based movement for social change that began in the '30s and still exists today. Hennessy explores Day's activism and her complex personal life, both subjects she knows well. Hennessy is Day's granddaughter. Her book is "Dorothy Day: The World Will Be Saved By Beauty."

  You know, your grandmother was giving herself to a larger world, a very needy world. And she had a daughter, Tamar, who had an unusual experience for a kid, right? I mean, her mother was away speaking a good bit, and she was often living with a lot of strangers. What did it mean for the kind of life Tamar had as a kid, her daughter?

  HENNESSY: Well, it was both a difficult and a wonderful time for my mother. My mother loved growing up in the Catholic Worker. It really was a time that she thought about until the day she died. She was surrounded not by strangers when she was at the Worker. She was surrounded by aunts and uncles as far as she was concerned. And she got along very well with the most difficult of people.

  She also - as you say, my grandmother was away a lot speaking. And so the care of my mother fell to a couple, the Johnsons (ph). One of the things that my grandmother would often do is just kind of choose people and say, OK, you're going to do this or you're going to do that. She had found this couple to help care for my mother. And that was the way that my mother was able to, you know, to have a stable life.

  The Catholic Worker is not a stable life for any child. It was very difficult for her that her mother was away so much. But her memories of the Catholic Worker were so dear to her and so important that I don't think she could ever separate both the difficulties and the wonders.

  DAVIES: I mean, one of the things I believe you wrote was that she had to get used to the fact that her possessions, her toys might be stolen. It just happened a lot at the hospitality house.

  HENNESSY: Yes. She lost a lot of possessions, both from people who took from her and from my grandmother's kind of loose relationship to possessions herself.

  DAVIES: What - she would share any possessions with anyone? There's this notion that you are not attached to the material world; you use that to help other people?

  HENNESSY: Well, she really sincerely wasn't attached to the material world. She loved beautiful things. And she would surround herself with beautiful things. But then she would pass them along. She would give them away to other people - except for her books. She did miss her books because they would never disappear. Things always disappeared at the Catholic Worker. It's just one of the elements of being there.

  So my grandmother just had a very loose sense of what you needed materially. And I think that she didn't quite understand that my mother was very different that way - that my mother had her treasures that she wanted to keep hold of. So that was a very difficult aspect that I think lasted for many years for my mother.

  DAVIES: I want to talk a bit about your mom, Tamar, who was Dorothy Day's only child. She married a man named David Hennessy at age 18. It was a time when she and Dorothy were kind of having their struggles. Tell us a bit about your father, David Hennesy. Who was he, and why did they marry?

  HENNESSY: My father was from Washington, D.C., from a very devout and large Catholic family. He came up to the Catholic Worker farm in Easton in 1940. He had read about the Catholic Worker from the paper. He received the paper, and he was very impressed by the farm element of it. And so he came to the Worker. And once there, because he was - he was quite conservative. He really did not do well there, and he was planning to leave.

  And my mother had been in Canada going to a school there, French-speaking school. And when she returned, she had just turned 16. She arrived at the farm, and she met my father. And they immediately hit it off. But of course, she was only 16, and he was actually 13 years older than her. And my grandmother said, well, you know, you're 16 years old. You can't get married. Wait until you're 18, figuring that by this time the whole thing would kind of blow away. Unfortunately, it didn't.

  And I say unfortunately because it really was not the best marriage for either one of them. My father was not really able to be responsible for the large family - my mother ended up having nine children. My mother was too young to make that kind of decision.

  But because she was in - having such a difficult time with her mother and she was really fighting at that time, I think, to forge her own way - from the very beginning, people were asking her - are you going to follow your mother's footsteps? But at a very young age, my mother was saying no, no, you know, I have to find my own way.

  And I think this early marriage was her way of saying, this is my life. I will do what I want to do with it. But of course, you know, the children were arriving one after another. And it - you know, it doesn't - at some point, it really - the poverty was a struggle. But ultimately, I don't think it was what destroyed their marriage.

  DAVIES: She said to understand him, you need to read some works of fiction. Do you remember what they were?

  HENNESSY: One was an Arthur Miller play, and I'm blanking out on the name, the title of that. But it was based on his relationship with Marilyn Monroe. The second one was "The Great Santini" by Pat Conroy, which is the relationship of a father and son. And the third one is "Lolita."

  And I think that what she was saying with those three - she was never one to explain things, you know, clearly. She would just give me little insights, little clues. And I think with Arthur Miller she was saying the difficulty of a relationship when one person is very needy. And that certainly was the case with my father.

  The second one, "Great Santini" - my father never said a word about his father - never wrote about him, never discussed him. In his diaries, he never mentions him. And so I think that there was something quite traumatizing in that relationship. And I think that's what she was kind of saying to me that to understand my father that I have to look at what happened to him with his father.

  And the third, "Lolita," I think she was referring to their relationship, that she was very young. And she was 16 when they met. And she said that she was a very immature 16-year-old. And he was 29, so I think that that's what she's referring to there.

  DAVIES: Did Dorothy ever object to the patriarchal kind of structure and rules of the church? I mean, a lot of the progressive community would have been very critical of a lot of the church's policies. Did she ever wrestle with that?

  HENNESSY: Yes, she did. But she also - she always saw the church at its heart. She wasn't - well, as my mother used to say - she said, Dorothy wasn't raised in the church. She doesn't understand the need for, you know - to ask permission. And that was one of the things about the Catholic Worker was that my grandmother did not ask permission to start this. She just started it. She would - she saw what needed to be done and would just do it.

  And I think in terms of how that relates to the hierarchical church, she always said that if she was told to stop, she would stop. But, you know, she was on to something. And I think whenever people see that, they recognize that.

  And she also said that, you know, when - I mean, there are many ways you can tussle with the church. And people would want her to take up certain causes against the church. And she just said, I will not fight the church. That is not a battle that I am going to do. And I think that that is extraordinarily wise. I mean, I think that you can really get caught up in proceduralism or institutionalism and lose the sight of the heart of a matter. And I think that's her genius, is that she never lost sight of the heart of the church.

  DAVIES: One thing I've read is that she had spoken out against abortion - she'd of course had an abortion early in her own life - and that that had drawn support from conservative members of the church. Do you know if that's the case?

  HENNESSY: I know that some people find that very important, her anti-abortion stance. I think ultimately, though, conservatives will have a very hard time with her. It's hard to just - to define her as an anti-abortion person. And I think there are people who want to say this is - Dorothy Day is an anti-abortion saint. I think she came out once with a statement, anti-abortion statement - very clear. But overall, this wasn't what she chose to focus on. She was concerned with war. That, to her, was the thing that she wanted to focus on.

  DAVIES: And what's the state of the Catholic Worker Movement today?

  HENNESSY: At this point, I think there are about 250 houses of hospitality and farms. It's hard to keep track because they do come and go. There's a lot - most of them are in the U.S. There are quite a few overseas - Australia, New Zealand, England, Germany. There are people who affiliate themselves with the Worker, definitely.

  The houses in New York City are still there on East Third Street and East First Street. There's a farm that's still, you know, in upstate New York. These are all the places that were in existence when my grandmother was still alive. The paper, The Catholic Worker paper is still in existence. It still sells for a penny a copy.

  DAVIES: Well, Kate Hennessy, thanks so much for speaking with us.

  HENNESSY: Thank you.

  DAVIES: Kate Hennessy is the youngest granddaughter of Dorothy Day, co-founder of the Catholic Worker Movement. Hennessy's book is "Dorothy Day: The World Will Be Saved By Beauty." Coming up, we remember Chuck Barris who created "The Dating Game" and "The Gong Show." He died Tuesday. This is FRESH AIR.

  (SOUNDBITE OF MONKEY PUNCH'S "PURCEPTION")

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• The Compass - http://www.thecompassnews.org/2017/03/dorothy-days-granddaughter-inherited-grandmothers-passion-writing/

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  Diocese of Green Bay

  Dorothy Day’s granddaughter inherited her grandmother’s passion for writing

  By Sam Lucero | The Compass
  March 1, 2017

  Kate Hennessy says her new book is more than story of her grandmother

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  DE PERE — Kate Hennessy was at Maryhouse, the Catholic Worker house in New York City founded by her grandmother, Dorothy Day, when Pope Francis gave his address to Congress on Sept. 24, 2015.

  “I was a little bit late, so I came down to the dining room where they set up a TV,” Hennessy told The Compass. “I sat down and then suddenly he mentions Dorothy Day and I practically fell out of my chair. I was so shocked and surprised.”

  Kate Hennessy, granddaughter of Dorothy Day, led two presentations on her new book, subtitled “An Intimate Portrait of My Grandmother,” on Feb. 23 at St. Norbert College in De Pere. (Sam Lucero | The Compass)
  The pope’s exact words were: “I cannot fail to mention the Servant of God Dorothy Day, who founded the Catholic Worker Movement. Her social activism, her passion for justice and for the cause of the oppressed were inspired by the Gospel, her faith and the example of the saints.”

  “That was really an astounding moment when that happened. I did not expect that,” said Hennessy, who believes her grandmother would have enjoyed meeting Pope Francis. “I think they would have been good friends.”

  Hennessy was at St. Norbert College Feb. 23 to talk about her newly released book, “Dorothy Day: The World Will Be Saved by Beauty: An Intimate Portrait of My Grandmother.” The youngest of Dorothy Day’s nine grandchildren, Hennessy was 20 when her grandmother passed away on Nov. 29, 1980.

  Born Nov. 8, 1897, Day was a journalist and co-founded the Catholic Worker Movement with Peter Maurin in 1933. She converted to Catholicism and became a champion of social justice. She served as editor of The Catholic Worker newspaper from 1933 until her death at age 83. The Archdiocese of New York began her canonization process in 2000 and she received the title “Servant of God.”

  Hennessy said her book is more than the story of Dorothy Day.

  “It’s also the story of my mother, Tamar, Dorothy’s only child,” said Hennessy. “It came out of the period after my mother’s death in 2008, when I realized that if my mother’s story wasn’t told, a very essential element of my grandmother’s story would remain untold.”

  She said the book is also a chance to “address some errors in the narrative of Dorothy, particularly as they concern my grandfather, Forster Batterham, and my mother. I think there have been stories out there that are not accurate and it was really important to me to be able to right those wrongs.”

  Tamar was born and raised Catholic and was active in the Catholic Worker Movement. She had fundamental disagreements with certain church teachings and left the church, said Hennessy. Her book explores the “very difficult” challenges of her upbringing, including her parents’ separation shortly after Hennessy’s birth.

  “She married young and my father wasn’t interested in the Catholic Worker Movement and he took her away,” said Hennessy. After her separation, Tamar returned to the Catholic Worker Movement with her six daughters and three sons. Hennessy and her sisters Maggie, Susie and Martha have remained active.

  “My grandmother and mother were such real people. They were so grounded in their families, their work, their view of the world,” said Hennessy. “I think we can derive strength from their strengths. That’s what I’m hoping. I just want to give a way for people to say, maybe there is something I can do, some way I can move ahead.”

  Hennessy said she has very fond memories of her grandmother.

  “She had incredible energy. She was always going places, doing things,” she said. “She was probably one of the most energetic people I’ve ever known. When she started slowing down, that gave me the opportunity to hang out with her, to spend time in her room at the Catholic Worker in New York City, just talking and reading and kind of being with each other, so I’m very grateful for that.”

  According to Hennessy, she inherited her grandmother’s passion for writing. “I would see her in her room pounding away on her typewriter. She was a prolific writer. I was like, ‘Oh my God, that’s so great. I’m going to be a writer,’” she recalled. “So that was really the very first influence she had on me.”

  Many of the other lessons learned from her grandmother did not make sense until later in life, she said.

  “As I got older, there was more of an understanding of what she was trying to do,” she said. “It wasn’t until I was in my 30s that I would understand voluntary poverty. … I’ve certainly learned that living simply is not so hard, it doesn’t’ have the weight that it had when I was in my 20s.”

  Near the end of Day’s life, Hennessy would spend time with her mother and grandmother and family friend, Stanley Vishnewski, a longtime Catholic Worker. “I think those were my favorite times, just sitting and being with her, listening to her stories and listening to her laugh,” she said.

  Hennessy said her grandmother’s sainthood cause is “an interesting thing to kind of get my head around.”

  “For me, I believe absolutely that she’s a saint. I have no doubt about that,” she said. “But in this canonization process, the church has very definite, specific steps to take. I’m just thinking: trying to take this incredibly multi-faceted, paradoxical person, full of contradictions, to kind of shape her to fit this process of sainthood – to me, I can’t go there. It really is very hard for me to imagine. Bless them for taking this on. I wish them all the best.”

  Thankful for her grandmother’s strong Catholic faith, Hennessy said she has been “returning to the church for the past 30 years.”

  “It’s a very long process because my grandmother and my mother have both had very different paths, very different expressions of their faith,” explained Hennessy. “My grandmother was a convert to Catholicism and my mother was a cradle Catholic. I understand both of them so well.

  “I’m in this process of discerning my faith and I’ll probably be in this process for the rest of my life,” said Hennessy. “I hope I’m in this process for the rest of my life.”

  Related
  Day's granddaughter urges Catholics to speak out against war, injustice
  Local Catholics spearhead Dorothy Day prayer network
  Men team up to promote Dorothy Day’s canonization
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• WOSU - http://radio.wosu.org/post/conversation-author-and-dorothy-days-granddaughter-kate-hennessy#stream/0

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  A Conversation with Author and Dorothy Day's Granddaughter Kate Hennessy
  By CHRISTOPHER PURDY • APR 21, 2017
  All Sides with Ann Fisher
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  Author Kate Hennessy
  Author Kate Hennessy
  GARRY JONES / SIMON & SCHUSTER INC.

  "Dorothy Day: The World Will be Saved by Beauty" is a new biography by Day's youngest grandchild, Kate Hennessy.

  I spoke to Hennessy recently from her home in Vermont. Here's what she has to say about her grandmother, who may become the newest saint in the Catholic church.

  Listen Listening...0:00 WOSU's Christopher Purdy interviews author Kate Hennessy.
  Dorothy Day (1897-1980), with philosopher Peter Maurin, formed the Catholic Worker Movement in 1933. The work continues to this day, focusing on the corporal works of mercy: Feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, shelter the homeless, visit the sick and the prisoners, bury the dead and give alms to the poor.

  Kate Hennessy's new biography of her grandmother Dorothy Day
  CREDIT SIMON & SCHUSTER INC.
  From the streets of New York City during the Great Depression, the Catholic Worker Movement today has over 200 houses of hospitality worldwide. Its flagship newspaper, Catholic Worker, is published eight times a year and still sells for one penny, as it did in 1933.

  A case for sainthood is being made for Day in the Catholic Church. In her early life, Day was a writer and newspaperwoman, at home in the bars and cafes of Chicago and New York's Greenwich Village. Her only child, Tamar Teresa, was born out of wedlock to Day and her partner Forster Batterham.

  In this TV interview from the 1970s, Day discusses the movement, activism, anarchy and more:

  From this unconventional life in the 1920s comes a legacy of charity and compassion on an international scale.

  TAGS:
  AUTHOR KATE HENNESSYDOROTHY DAYDOROTHY DAY: THE WORLD WILL BE SAVED BY BEAUTYDOROTHY DAY BIOGRAPHYCATHOLIC WORKER MOVEMENTBIOGRAPHIES
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• WNYC - http://www.wnyc.org/story/life-legacy-dorothy-day-told-granddaughter

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  The Legacy of Dorothy Day, Co-founder of the Catholic Worker

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  Dorothy Day, publisher of "The Catholic Worker," is shown circa 1960.
  Dorothy Day, publisher of "The Catholic Worker," is shown circa 1960.
  ( ASSOCIATED PRESS) / AP Photo )

  i
  Jan 25, 2017
  Dorothy Day is one of the most controversial -- and fascinating -- figures in American Catholicism. The writer and activist abandoned her bohemian literary lifestyle when she converted to Catholicism in 1927. A few years later she co-founded the Catholic Worker newspaper and movement—which both continue to advocate for the poor, years after her death. Her granddaughter, Kate Hennessy, has written a new biography called Dorothy Day: the World will be Saved by Beauty.

  Kate will be giving a talk at McNally Jackson at 52 Prince St. on Thursday, January 26th at 7:00pm. For more information, click here.

  8 Comments

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• Marquette University - http://www.marquette.edu/library/news/2017/events-hennessy.php

  FEBRUARY 22: KATE HENNESSY
  Book Talk with Dorothy Day’s Granddaughter
  Kate Hennessy will discuss her recent memoir of her grandmother Dorothy Day, February 22 at 2:30 p.m.
  >> RSVP NOW TO ATTEND
  Social activist and journalist Dorothy Day is most noted for her role in launching the Catholic Worker movement in the 1930s, but her entire life was devoted to fighting against the injustices of inequality and war. Her outstanding faith and work on behalf of the poor have been highlighted by multiple popes, including Pope Francis in his recent speech to Congress.
  Day’s granddaughter, Kate Hennessy, has sketched a loving portrait of Day’s inspiring life in her recent memoir, Dorothy Day: The World Will Be Saved by Beauty. (For a taste of what’s in store, visit this Publisher’s Weekly interview.) Plan to attend to hear Hennessy’s insights into the book as well as stories about growing up with her grandmother.
  If you are unable to attend this book talk, Kate Hennessy is also making an appearance February 21, 2:00 p.m., at Alverno College. Contact the college for more information.
  Event Details
  Free and open to all, but RSPV is required. >> RSVP NOW.
  Date: Wednesday, February 22, 2017
  Time: 2:30-4:30 p.m.
  Location: Marquette University, Raynor Memorial Libraries, Beaumier Suites (Raynor Library, lower level)
  Planning to Attend?
  View campus map and parking information. The 16th Street parking structure is the closest too Raynor Library.
  Questions? Contact Elisa Coghlan, elisa.coghlan@marquette.edu or (414) 288-7068.
  Event Sponsors
  The event is sponsored by Marquette University's Raynor Memorial Libraries, Campus Ministry, and Center for Peacemaking.
  Dorothy Day Archives at Marquette
  Marquette University’s Raynor Memorial Libraries have a special connection to Dorothy Day as the keeper of the Dorothy Day-Catholic Worker archival collections. Learn more about these collections.

8/7/17, 5(20 PM
Print Marked Items
A saint for difficult people: from bohemian to
radical to Catholic activist, Dorothy Day devoted
her life to the poor, however unlovable
James Parker
The Atlantic.
319.2 (Mar. 2017): p32. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 Atlantic Media, Ltd. http://www.theatlantic.com
Full Text:
ONE WAY TO understand the saints--the radiant, aberrant beings next to whom the rest of us look so shifty and shoddy--is to imagine them as cutting-edge physicists. Their research, if you like, has led them unblinkingly to conclude that reality is not at all what, or where, or who we think it is. They have penetrated the everyday atomic buzz and seen into the essential structures. They have seen, among other things, that the world is hollowed-out and illumined by beams of divine love, that the first shall be last and the last shall be first, and that sanctity--should you desire it--is merely to live in accordance with these elementary facts.
Whether or not the Catholic Church makes it official--and the cause for her canonization rumbles on--Dorothy Day was most definitely a saint. Is a saint, because her holiness has suffered no decrease in vitality since her death, at age 83, in 1980, and her example, her American example, is more challenging and provocative today than it ever was. Day was about people, especially poor people, especially those whom she called with some wryness "the undeserving poor," and the paramount importance of serving them. For her, what the Church defines as Works of Mercy--feeding the hungry, visiting the sick, sheltering the homeless, and so on--were not pious injunctions or formulas for altruism but physical principles, as inevitable as the first law of thermodynamics. Pare her right down to her pith, strip away all her history and biography, and what do you get? A fierce set of cheekbones and a command to love. That's the legacy of Dorothy Day, and it is endless.
Her history and biography, nevertheless, are intensely interesting, particularly as revisited by her granddaughter Kate Hennessy in Dorothy Day: The World Will Be Saved by Beauty. What a story. Although the chronology, and even the spiritual progress (so far as we presume to discern it) are straightforward-from bohemianism to radicalism to motherhood to Catholicism to a life, a mission, of purely focused sacrifice and activism--the images are kaleidoscopic. There's Greenwich Village Dorothy, cub reporter, in the teens of the 20th century: "cool-mannered, tweed-wearing, drinking rye whiskey straight with no discernible effect." She's with her buddy Eugene O'Neill--the Eugene O'Neill--in a bar called the Hell Hole. O'Neill, with "bitter mouth" and "monotonous grating voice," is reciting one of his favorite poems, Francis Thompson's "The Hound of Heaven": I fled Him, down the nights and down the days;/I fled Him, down the arches of the years. By way of response, Dorothy sings "Frankie and Johnny."
There's young Dorothy lying in darkness on a work-farm bunk in Virginia, on a hunger strike, having been arrested, beaten, and terrorized for joining a picket line of suffragists. ("I lost all consciousness of any cause," she would write of this episode in her memoir The Long Loneliness. "I had no sense of being a radical, making protest ... The futility of
about:blank Page 1 of 8
8/7/17, 5(20 PM
life came over me so that I could not weep but only lie there in blank misery")
There she is in 1922 in Chicago, following an abortion, a failed marriage, and two suicide attempts, "fling[ing] herself about" and in love with the pugilistic, alpha-male newspaperman Lionel Moise.
And there she is in December 1932, on East 15th Street, with Peter Maurin knocking at her door: Maurin, the street philosopher who, Hennessy writes, "didn't say hello or goodbye, and every time he arrived ... began talking where he had left off." He told Dorothy that he had been looking for her.
Maurin is the pivot character in this story. More even than the birth of Tamar, Day's daughter (and Hennessy's mother), whose out-of-wedlock arrival in 1926 jump-started her conversion to Catholicism, Maurin's entrance marks the great shift in the narrative of Dorothy Day. A self-described peasant, 20 years older than she was and originally from France, he was a liminal figure, a kind of intellectual jongleur, who gave his ideas--a very personal hybrid of radical politics and Catholic social teaching--to the air in extraordinary, rippling singsong. (He claimed that the word communism had been "stolen from the Church.") A crank, perhaps. Some people, notes Hennessy, found him ridiculous.
But not Day. In his inspired eccentricity, Maurin gave her a hinge between the natural and the supernatural, and in his exhausting monologues she heard a program for action. With him she almost instantaneously founded the Catholic Worker movement, the entity (Hennessy calls it "the great American novel") to which she would henceforth give herself in serial gestures of the heart and commitments of the body. The movement was first a newspaper--The Catholic Worker, which Day edited for 40-odd years--and then in short order a number of "houses of hospitality," some urban, some agrarian, all autonomous, dedicated to the provision of welcome (and food, and shelter) for the chronically unwelcome. The newspaper continues to be published, and more than 200 Catholic Worker houses and communities are currently active in the United States.
A lot of gas has been spewed recently--green, heavy, showbiz-wizard gas--about the overlooked person, the forgotten man. Dorothy Day lived with the forgotten man, and he was a huge pain in the ass. His name was Mr. Breen, and during his residency at the Catholic Worker house on Mott Street he was a vituperative racist and a fire hazard. His name was also Mr. O'Connell, who stayed for 11 ill-natured years at Maryfarm, the Catholic Worker farming commune in Easton, Pennsylvania, slandering the other workers without mercy, hoarding the tools, and generally making of himself "a terror" (in Day's words) and "hateful, venomous, suspicious " (in Hennessy's).
One gets the sense from Hennessy's book, and from Day's own writing, that she reserved a special respect for these
about:blank Page 2 of 8
8/7/17, 5(20 PM
very difficult people, because it was with them--so thornily particular--that she was obliged to put flesh on all those airy abstractions about justice and generosity. This was, so to speak, where the rubber met the road. Loving Mr. Breen, loving Mr. O'Connell--that involved great vaulting maneuvers of self-negation. Dealing with them day to day was a high moral science. How tolerant could or should one be? At what point was one simply indulging one's own goody- goodiness? "This turning the other cheek," she wrote in her memoir Loaves and Fishes, "this inviting someone else to be a potential thief or murderer, in order that we may grow in grace--how obnoxious. In that case, I believe I'd rather be the striker than the meek one struck."
Meekness was not in her nature. Her obedience, her submission--to the Church and to the poor--was as headlong and headstrong in its way as her benders with Eugene O'Neill had been. But it made her whole. Or rather it joined her to the whole. In The Reckless Way of Love, a new miscellany of her spiritual writings, Day quotes one of the mottoes of the Industrial Workers of the World, otherwise known as the Wobblies. "The old IWW slogan 'An injury to one is an injury to all,' " she writes, "is another way of saying what Saint Paul said almost two thousand years ago. 'We are all members of one another, and when the health of one member suffers, the health of the whole body is lowered.'" Which happens to be a perfect synthesis, Peter Maurin-style, of fist-in-the-air communitarianism and Christian dogma. But it also directs us to the mystical body of Dorothy Day--the Catholic Worker movement, in all its aspects and expressions- -and to her own non-mystical body, so present in Hennessy's book: her body in pleasure, in pain, under political punishment, in motherhood, and finally surrendered in the luminous drudgery of service.
DOROTHY DAY: THE WORLD WILL BE SAVED BY BEAUTY
KATE HENNESSY
Simon & Schuster
James Parker is a contributing editor at The Atlantic.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Parker, James. "A saint for difficult people: from bohemian to radical to Catholic activist, Dorothy Day devoted her life
to the poor, however unlovable." The Atlantic, Mar. 2017, p. 32+. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA482392458&it=r&asid=c8927540d38de0d4a498c348b633047e. Accessed 7 Aug. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A482392458
about:blank Page 3 of 8
8/7/17, 5(20 PM
A life in full
Bailey Shannon
Sojourners Magazine.
46.3 (Mar. 2017): p44. From Book Review Index Plus.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Shannon, Bailey. "A life in full." Sojourners Magazine, Mar. 2017, p. 44+. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA483271840&it=r&asid=438ef160d33b1d0b2949b955b4ba3f98. Accessed 7 Aug. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A483271840
about:blank Page 4 of 8
8/7/17, 5(20 PM
Dorothy Day: The World Will Be Saved by Beauty; An Intimate Portrait of My Grandmother
Ray Olson
Booklist.
113.6 (Nov. 15, 2016): p14. From Book Review Index Plus.
COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text:
* Dorothy Day: The World Will Be Saved by Beauty; An Intimate Portrait of My Grandmother. By Kate Hennessy. Jan. 2017.384p. illus. Scribner, $27.99 (97815011339611.267.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
The youngest grandchild of Catholic social activist Dorothy Day (1897-1980) reminds us that before she became the candidate for sainthood she now is, she was a mother and a grandmother in a tumultuous, unconventional family. Bosom friend of Eugene O'Neill's in the original Greenwich Village bohemian scene and lover of a footloose left-wing reporter whose baby she aborted, Day wedded a fellow radical who left her after the birth and Catholic baptism of their daughter, Tamar (they maintained a lifelong friendship, though). While a single mother raising Tamar, she met Catholic visionary Peter Maurin and launched Catholic Worker in the depths of the Depression, first with a newspaper, then with a house of hospitality in Manhattan, and eventually, fulfilling Maurin's dream, with communal farms. Hennessy's memoir presents all those developments but focuses on Dorothy's relations with Tamar and the nine children Tamar bore the troubled David Hennessy. Tamar and her children struggled with Day, and all abandoned the church, if not necessarily either the faith or CW. Dorothy Day comes to life, here, but Tamar also lives on the page, engaged with her mother in an absorbing family drama that Hennessy depicts with warmth, poignancy, and not a little poetry.--Ray Olson
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Olson, Ray. "Dorothy Day: The World Will Be Saved by Beauty; An Intimate Portrait of My Grandmother." Booklist,
15 Nov. 2016, p. 14. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA473788174&it=r&asid=0017e643e7a45be15cfc66009645a4d1. Accessed 7 Aug. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A473788174
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Hennessy, Kate: DOROTHY DAY
Kirkus Reviews.
(Nov. 15, 2016): From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2016 Kirkus Media LLC http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Hennessy, Kate DOROTHY DAY Scribner (Adult Nonfiction) $27.99 1, 24 ISBN: 978-1-5011-3396-1
A rare glimpse into the life of one of America's most revered social activists.Hennessy (Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker: The Miracle of Our Continuance, 2016), granddaughter of Dorothy Day (1897-1980), utilizes family correspondence, Day's journals, and her own memories to construct a detailed, riveting biography. In many ways, this book is a dual biography, not only of the author's grandmother, but also her mother, Tamar, who was Day's only daughter. Indeed, the complex mother-daughter relationship between Dorothy and Tamar makes up a large portion of the book. Hennessy dives right into Day's unusual and chaotic life. Even as a very young woman, Day was on her own, working varied jobs, coming into and out of abject poverty, experiencing heady love affairs, and always writing. With time, she funneled her energies into three pursuits: her newfound Catholic faith, her daughter, and her great creation, the Catholic Worker, which was primarily a newspaper but which was also a way of life for many activists. Readers will be intrigued to learn of Day's intimate life story from the 1920s through the 1940s, especially, with the rise of the Catholic Worker as a parallel tale. Somewhat estranged from her mother during the 1950s, Tamar would return to New York and to the Worker, eventually taking it on as her own life's work. Hennessy presents her grandmother in full. Though her respect for her is great, she also recognizes the challenges she faced and the many facets of her personality and life that prove she, like anyone else, was far from perfect. Perhaps no theme so dominates the book as much as love: the love between mother and daughter, Day's often unrequited love for Forster Batterham, Tamar's father, and Day's love for helping the poor, which drove her life's work and was inspired by her love for God.Fascinating, well- told, candid, and tender.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Hennessy, Kate: DOROTHY DAY." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Nov. 2016. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA469865795&it=r&asid=e51cb4fd8ed4dcc126767a9e23b0474f. Accessed 7 Aug. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A469865795
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Hennessy, Kate. Dorothy Day: The World Will
Be Saved by Beauty; An Intimate Portrait of My
Grandmother
Chad E. Statler
Library Journal.
141.19 (Nov. 15, 2016): p94. From Book Review Index Plus.
COPYRIGHT 2016 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
Hennessy, Kate. Dorothy Day: The World Will Be Saved by Beauty; An Intimate Portrait of My Grandmother. St. Martin's. Jan. 2017. 384p. index. ISBN 9781501133961. $27.99. BIOG
Dorothy Day (1897-1980), who established the Catholic Worker movement along with Peter Maurin, is the subject of this new biography by her granddaughter, Hennessy. The author tells the story of Day's life from her bohemian youth writing for leftist newspapers such as The Liberator, her conversion to Catholicism in the 1920s; the birth of her only daughter, Tamar; the founding of the Catholic Worker movement in 1933; and the ensuing struggles of maintaining the movement through many difficult years. This book also chronicles a family. Day's strained and sometimes troubled relationship with her daughter is featured prominently, as are her relationships with Tamar's father and her grandchildren. What results is an all too human portrait of a woman who deeply loved and cared for her family as well as the needy and poor who found their ways to the Catholic Worker and its hospitality houses.
VERDICT Readers interested in religious figures, American Catholic history, and peace and social justice movements will all find something to like and takeaway from this intimate portrayal of Dorothy Day.--Chad E. Statler, Lakeland Comm. Coll., Kirtland, OH
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Statler, Chad E. "Hennessy, Kate. Dorothy Day: The World Will Be Saved by Beauty; An Intimate Portrait of My
Grandmother." Library Journal, 15 Nov. 2016, p. 94. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA470367217&it=r&asid=49d11abed46e9f345d65d9842d3839e9. Accessed 7 Aug. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A470367217
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Dorothy Day: The World Will Be Saved by Beauty
Publishers Weekly.
263.46 (Nov. 14, 2016): p49. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Dorothy Day: The World Will Be Saved by Beauty
Kate Hennessy. Scribner, $27.99 (384p) ISBN 978-1-5011-3396-1
Dorothy Day, named a Servant of God by the Vatican, was just "Granny" to Hennessy. In this intimate, detailed biography, Hennessy depicts her grandmother as a very human being. By the third chapter, Day has been jailed, failed at suicide, chosen abortion, lived in sin, and borne a daughter out of wedlock. Then she converted to Roman Catholicism and eventually founded the Catholic Worker houses of hospitality. Hennessy's memoir emphasizes Day's role in her family: mothering her daughter, Tamar Hennessy (often discordantly), and grandmothering Tamar's nine children (Hennessy is the ninth). The memoir spills as much about Tamar as about Day. Tamar moved often with her children and spinning wheel, always dragging along her deflating self-esteem. Hennessy quotes Day's love letters to Tamar's father and interviews Tamar about her memories. She also weaves in lines from Day's columns for the Catholic Worker newspaper, splices in the Hennessy siblings' stories, embeds quotes, and reveals the backstory of a magnetic woman who was "not always a clear-eyed visionary." Hennessy has created an amazing tapestry of Day's life and the memories she left with her loved ones. (Jan.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Dorothy Day: The World Will Be Saved by Beauty." Publishers Weekly, 14 Nov. 2016, p. 49. PowerSearch,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA473459040&it=r&asid=a17d17df35250ef2da186b8573010c01. Accessed 7 Aug. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A473459040
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Parker, James. "A saint for difficult people: from bohemian to radical to Catholic activist, Dorothy Day devoted her life to the poor, however unlovable." The Atlantic, Mar. 2017, p. 32+. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA482392458&it=r. Accessed 7 Aug. 2017. Shannon, Bailey. "A life in full." Sojourners Magazine, Mar. 2017, p. 44+. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA483271840&it=r. Accessed 7 Aug. 2017. Olson, Ray. "Dorothy Day: The World Will Be Saved by Beauty; An Intimate Portrait of My Grandmother." Booklist, 15 Nov. 2016, p. 14. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA473788174&it=r. Accessed 7 Aug. 2017. "Hennessy, Kate: DOROTHY DAY." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Nov. 2016. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA469865795&it=r. Accessed 7 Aug. 2017. Statler, Chad E. "Hennessy, Kate. Dorothy Day: The World Will Be Saved by Beauty; An Intimate Portrait of My Grandmother." Library Journal, 15 Nov. 2016, p. 94. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA470367217&it=r. Accessed 7 Aug. 2017. "Dorothy Day: The World Will Be Saved by Beauty." Publishers Weekly, 14 Nov. 2016, p. 49. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA473459040&it=r. Accessed 7 Aug. 2017.

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  A Saint for Difficult People
  From bohemian to radical to Catholic activist, Dorothy Day devoted her life to the poor, however unlovable.

  Bettmann / Getty

  JAMES PARKER MARCH 2017 ISSUE CULTURE
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  Dorothy Day: The World Will Be Saved by Beauty
  By Kate Hennessy
  Scribner
  One way to understand the saints—the radiant, aberrant beings next to whom the rest of us look so shifty and shoddy—is to imagine them as cutting-edge physicists. Their research, if you like, has led them unblinkingly to conclude that reality is not at all what, or where, or who we think it is. They have penetrated the everyday atomic buzz and seen into the essential structures. They have seen, among other things, that the world is hollowed-out and illumined by beams of divine love, that the first shall be last and the last shall be first, and that sanctity—should you desire it—is merely to live in accordance with these elementary facts.

  Whether or not the Catholic Church makes it official—and the cause for her canonization rumbles on—Dorothy Day was most definitely a saint. Is a saint, because her holiness has suffered no decrease in vitality since her death, at age 83, in 1980, and her example, her American example, is more challenging and provocative today than it ever was. Day was about people, especially poor people, especially those whom she called with some wryness “the undeserving poor,” and the paramount importance of serving them. For her, what the Church defines as Works of Mercy—feeding the hungry, visiting the sick, sheltering the homeless, and so on—were not pious injunctions or formulas for altruism but physical principles, as inevitable as the first law of thermodynamics. Pare her right down to her pith, strip away all her history and biography, and what do you get? A fierce set of cheekbones and a command to love. That’s the legacy of Dorothy Day, and it is endless.

  Scribner
  Her history and biography, nevertheless, are intensely interesting, particularly as revisited by her granddaughter Kate Hennessy in Dorothy Day: The World Will Be Saved by Beauty. What a story. Although the chronology, and even the spiritual progress (so far as we presume to discern it) are straightforward—from bohemianism to radicalism to motherhood to Catholicism to a life, a mission, of purely focused sacrifice and activism—the images are kaleidoscopic. There’s Greenwich Village Dorothy, cub reporter, in the teens of the 20th century: “cool-mannered, tweed-wearing, drinking rye whiskey straight with no discernible effect.” She’s with her buddy Eugene O’Neill—the Eugene O’Neill—in a bar called the Hell Hole. O’Neill, with “bitter mouth” and “monotonous grating voice,” is reciting one of his favorite poems, Francis Thompson’s “The Hound of Heaven”: I fled Him, down the nights and down the days; / I fled Him, down the arches of the years. By way of response, Dorothy sings “Frankie and Johnny.”

  There’s young Dorothy lying in darkness on a work-farm bunk in Virginia, on a hunger strike, having been arrested, beaten, and terrorized for joining a picket line of suffragists. (“I lost all consciousness of any cause,” she would write of this episode in her memoir The Long Loneliness. “I had no sense of being a radical, making protest … The futility of life came over me so that I could not weep but only lie there in blank misery.”)

  There she is in 1922 in Chicago, following an abortion, a failed marriage, and two suicide attempts, “fling[ing] herself about” and in love with the pugilistic, alpha-male newspaperman Lionel Moise.

  And there she is in December 1932, on East 15th Street, with Peter Maurin knocking at her door: Maurin, the street philosopher who, Hennessy writes, “didn’t say hello or goodbye, and every time he arrived … began talking where he had left off.” He told Dorothy that he had been looking for her.

  Dorothy Day lived with the forgotten man, and he was a huge pain in the ass.
  Maurin is the pivot character in this story. More even than the birth of Tamar, Day’s daughter (and Hennessy’s mother), whose out-of-wedlock arrival in 1926 jump-started her conversion to Catholicism, Maurin’s entrance marks the great shift in the narrative of Dorothy Day. A self-described peasant, 20 years older than she was and originally from France, he was a liminal figure, a kind of intellectual jongleur, who gave his ideas—a very personal hybrid of radical politics and Catholic social teaching—to the air in extraordinary, rippling singsong. (He claimed that the word communism had been “stolen from the Church.”) A crank, perhaps. Some people, notes Hennessy, found him ridiculous.

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  But not Day. In his inspired eccentricity, Maurin gave her a hinge between the natural and the supernatural, and in his exhausting monologues she heard a program for action. With him she almost instantaneously founded the Catholic Worker movement, the entity (Hennessy calls it “the great American novel”) to which she would henceforth give herself in serial gestures of the heart and commitments of the body. The movement was first a newspaper—The Catholic Worker, which Day edited for 40-odd years—and then in short order a number of “houses of hospitality,” some urban, some agrarian, all autonomous, dedicated to the provision of welcome (and food, and shelter) for the chronically unwelcome. The newspaper continues to be published, and more than 200 Catholic Worker houses and communities are currently active in the United States.

  A lot of gas has been spewed recently—green, heavy, showbiz-wizard gas—about the overlooked person, the forgotten man. Dorothy Day lived with the forgotten man, and he was a huge pain in the ass. His name was Mr. Breen, and during his residency at the Catholic Worker house on Mott Street he was a vituperative racist and a fire hazard. His name was also Mr. O’Connell, who stayed for 11 ill-natured years at Maryfarm, the Catholic Worker farming commune in Easton, Pennsylvania, slandering the other workers without mercy, hoarding the tools, and generally making of himself “a terror” (in Day’s words) and “hateful, venomous, suspicious ” (in Hennessy’s).

  One gets the sense from Hennessy’s book, and from Day’s own writing, that she reserved a special respect for these very difficult people, because it was with them—so thornily particular—that she was obliged to put flesh on all those airy abstractions about justice and generosity. This was, so to speak, where the rubber met the road. Loving Mr. Breen, loving Mr. O’Connell—that involved great vaulting maneuvers of self-negation. Dealing with them day to day was a high moral science. How tolerant could or should one be? At what point was one simply indulging one’s own goody-goodiness? “This turning the other cheek,” she wrote in her memoir Loaves and Fishes, “this inviting someone else to be a potential thief or murderer, in order that we may grow in grace—how obnoxious. In that case, I believe I’d rather be the striker than the meek one struck.”

  Meekness was not in her nature. Her obedience, her submission—to the Church and to the poor—was as headlong and headstrong in its way as her benders with Eugene O’Neill had been. But it made her whole. Or rather it joined her to the whole. In The Reckless Way of Love, a new miscellany of her spiritual writings, Day quotes one of the mottoes of the Industrial Workers of the World, otherwise known as the Wobblies. “The old IWW slogan ‘An injury to one is an injury to all,’ ” she writes, “is another way of saying what Saint Paul said almost two thousand years ago. ‘We are all members of one another, and when the health of one member suffers, the health of the whole body is lowered.’ ” Which happens to be a perfect synthesis, Peter Maurin–style, of fist-in-the-air communitarianism and Christian dogma. But it also directs us to the mystical body of Dorothy Day—the Catholic Worker movement, in all its aspects and expressions—and to her own nonmystical body, so present in Hennessy’s book: her body in pleasure, in pain, under political punishment, in motherhood, and finally surrendered in the luminous drudgery of service.

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  Kate Hennessy (Photo by Gary Jon)
  Kate Hennessy (Photo by Gary Jon)
  A granddaughter's portrayal of Dorothy Day
  By Michael Langan | Published January 13, 2017 | Updated January 13, 2017
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  Dorothy Day: The World Will Be Saved By Beauty --

  An Intimate Portrait of My Grandmother

  By Kate Hennessy

  ADVERTISEMENT

  Scribner

  384 pages, $27.99

  Dorothy Day (1897 – 1980) was called a “great American” by Pope Francis on his recent visit to the United States. Note that the pope didn’t call her a "saint," as she is not; although the Catholic Church has opened the cause to consider her canonization. In fact, Dorothy once said, “Don’t call me a saint; I don’t want to be dismissed that easily.” Latterly, it appears that the Vatican doesn't completely agree with her request.

  Day was a journalist and a social activist who lived a bohemian life before her conversion to Roman Catholicism. She described her spiritual journey to Rome in her 1932 autobiography, “The Long Loneliness.” This book deals with the quest, as the author, Kate Hennessy says, to find out who she - Day's granddaughter - is. It’s certainly is that; but it is also far more.

  The reader wants to know more about Dorothy Day and her remarkable life.

  Of all the words Dorothy wrote, she admired others’ words more. Hennessy writes that Dorothy would often awaken hearing in her mind the phrase of her favorite writer, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, What were those words? “The world will be saved by beauty,” Dostoyevsky wrote.

  Hennessy confirms this aspiration of her grandmother's, that, for all her years of struggle, weariness and a sense of deep and abiding failure, she believed in salvation through beauty. This is the way that she thought of life. The idea of beauty supported her, even though she experienced her share of ugliness daily.

  Day's is such a plain, direct message. As readers, how can we not listen?

  Even more, we’d like to know what "beauty" meant to Dorothy. It seems a simple enough request, but beauty can be complex, and we are interested in how the author explains the phenomenon. A hint: sometimes beauty comes about with one’s character by being crushed by life first. Here’s a sampling of Dorothy’s sorrow.

  Hennessy asks us to imagine Dorothy at age 18. The year is 1916, and Dorothy is roaming the horse-manure-spattered cobblestone streets not so far from where the Catholic Worker, the paper she founded in 1933, is now.

  Tall, thin, “with a strong, clear jaw and large oddly slanting blue eyes, straight brown hair and auburn highlights; she is looking for work as a journalist.” Temperamentally, she is like her father John, another newspaperman: tough as nails. Father has put her two brothers, Donald and Sam, out of the house at age fifteen to work. And, he’s trained Dorothy to read and write as a young child.

  Result: Dorothy won a three hundred dollar scholarship from the Hearst papers in the newspaper’s essay contest. With the winnings, she attended the University of Illinois. But despite her love of Cicero and Virgil, her granddaughter informs us, Dorothy was an indifferent student and careless in spending. Her money ran out before she got a degree.

  To avoid starving, she found a job in Chicago cooking for a family at 20 cents an hour. Two years of this squalor and poverty went by before she left with her family for New York City, where her parents had earlier met and married.

  Get ready now for a few paragraphs that detail the complication that describes Dorothy’s life over the next ten years. In 1917, atheism, anarchism, socialism, vegetarianism, women’s rights, free love, free speech, free thought – all were in the air in New York City’s Greenwich Village, our author writes.

  Dorothy took a whiff of some of these "isms." She had a Jewish boy friend named Itzok Granich who was a journalist. She wrote for different papers and broadsides with names like “The Call” and “The Masses.” She hung out with the aspiring playwright, Eugene O’Neill, ‘Gene’ - to her, and took another job at a newspaper called “The Liberator.” She also fell in love with a man whom she said she loved more than any other, Forest Batterham, a young actor.

  All the while - her granddaughter writes – Dorothy was a “cool-mannered, tweed-wearing woman, who drank rye whiskey straight with no discernible effect…she smoked like a chimney at a time when women weren’t allowed to smoke in public.”

  Not finding consistent work, Dorothy moved to Washington, D.C., where she wrote for the “Suffragist.” She got arrested and spent time in jail at Occoquan, a work farm in Virginia. There, during what was called “The Night of Terror,” about 40 guards armed with clubs, “dragged, kicked, trampled, and choked the women incarcerated, including Dorothy, for protesting conscription in a march.”

  At this point, and you can see why, Day shuttled back to New York City. There Dorothy would pass some dawn visits to St. Joseph’s Catholic Church on Sixth Avenue after spending nights at the Hell Hole tavern with Gene O’Neill, by now a drunk and a philanderer who became an excellent writer. Did she lose her virginity with Gene? Did she love him? Years later she said "no" to both queries.

  Around this time another writer, Louis Holladay, tall, blond, and slow of speech, Kate Hennessy tells us, died in Dorothy’s arms at an Italian restaurant on Prince Street. Said by the coroner to be chronic endocarditis, it was in fact a heroin overdose. Was it suicide? Some say Dorothy hid the heroin bottle.

  The Spanish flu took many lives in America in 1918. Result: Dorothy took up nursing. She was courageous in everything that involved the pandemic, surrounded by dying men and women of her own age.

  Slightly later, she quit her series of temporary jobs and moved in with a man that “she would come to love beyond reason and hope,” a newspaperman named Lionel Moise, who impregnated her. Without telling her lover, Dorothy had an abortion.

  In the mid-1920s, she became pregnant with Kate's mother, Tamar Teresa, by Forster Batterman, a biologist. Tamar was born on March 4, 1926. What unhappiness came between Dorothy and Forest that they separated? Day's lovers also including radical writer Michael Gold, and a marriage to Berkeley Tobey, all recounted in her granddaughter’s book.

  Throughout, Dorothy continued to explore Catholicism. She was keenly aware of her sinfulness. Her conversion to Roman Catholicism, her combativeness with the hierarchy of the Church over decades on what she considered matters of principle, are told at length this admirable book.

  It’s a story well told by Kate Hennessy, who concludes with these remarks:

  Dorothy's life and its struggles shows how grace makes straight our paths. Perhaps her grandmother understood what beauty was best when she wrote, "... God understands us when we try to love."

  Michael D. Langan is a frequent reviewer of books for The Buffalo News.

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• The Catholic Spirit
  http://thecatholicspirit.com/featured/granddaughter-gives-new-perspective-dorothy-day/
  Word count: 1820

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  You are here: Home » Featured » Granddaughter gives new perspective on Dorothy Day

  Granddaughter gives new perspective on Dorothy Day
  The Catholic Spirit | Bridget Ryder | March 3, 2017 | 0 Comments

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  Kate Hennessy, the granddaughter of Dorothy Day, talks about the book she wrote about Day during a presentation at the University of St. Thomas Feb. 27. Dave Hrbacek/The Catholic Spirit
  In new biography, Kate Hennessy details Catholic convert and activist as mother, grandmother

  For Kate Hennessy, the story of Dorothy Day is not the story of a social activist, an influential Catholic American or even a potential saint. It is, rather, the deeply personal story of her grandmother, whom she knew and loved.

  Hennessy brought that story to the Twin Cities Feb. 27-28 as part of her book tour for her January release of “Dorothy Day: The World Will be Saved by Beauty” (Scribner, 384 pages). During two-plus days of book readings at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Hennessy met with students, faculty, the public and members of the movement her grandmother co-founded in 1933, The Catholic Worker.

  Although Day has already been widely written about, the biography sheds new light on the Catholic convert’s life and person.

  “She is known for changing the American Catholic Church and for her canonization [cause], but these are not the most important things to me. The most important thing to me besides that she is my grandmother is her great work, the Catholic Worker,” Hennessy said at a breakfast with St. Thomas students Feb. 27. “I believed that my mother’s story needed to be told and that my grandmother’s story as a mother needed to be told, and if I didn’t write it, it would be lost.”

  An ‘intimate portrait’

  Hennessy, 57, is the youngest of Day’s nine grandchildren through her only child, Tamar Teresa Batterham Hennessy. During Hennessy’s childhood, Day regularly visited the farm in Vermont where she grew up, and Hennessy also spent summers at the Catholic Worker Farm in Tivoli, New York, where Day often spoke at peace movement conferences in the 1960s and ’70s. In her teens, Hennessy grew even closer to her grandmother during Day’s last years at the Maryhouse Catholic Worker in New York City. Day died in 1980, and Cardinal John O’Connor opened her cause for canonization in 2000. The process continues to move forward. Hennessy’s book, however, grew out of years of conversations with her own mother, the 27 years between the death of Day and Tamar’s death in 2008.

  “I’d say, ‘You’ve got to write this,’” Hennessy explained during a public reading Feb. 28. “‘I can’t,’ my mother would say. Then I’d say, ‘I’ll write it,’ and my mother would tell me, ‘No, you can’t.’”

  The back and forth went on intermittently for years. But a year after her mother’s death, Hennessy became convinced she needed to write her mother’s and grandmother’s stories.

  “This is actually an intimate portrait of my grandmother and mother as it concerns my mother,” Hennessy said.

  It also incorporates Catholic Worker history, since Tamar grew up within and loved the movement her mother co-founded with Peter Maurin. Hennessy said the original draft was twice as thick as the published book, fattened by stories of the Catholic Worker as the extended family of both her mother and grandmother. She is considering publishing those sections as a blog. Still, Hennessy’s book uncovers some new history of the Catholic Worker. It also tells more of the story of Tamar’s father, Forster Batterham, a figure Hennessy said had been lost in the abundance of Day’s own writing.

  Hennessy hopes the biography will make Day human in a new way.

  “Just don’t put Dorothy Day on a pedestal and then walk away,” she said at the Feb. 28 evening reading.

  For Hennessy, it is what Day achieved as the mother of a natural family and in her perseverance, despite a deep sense of failure, that proves her heroism. The book also recounts Tamar’s own heroism as both the daughter of a woman everyone considered a mother and the mother of a large family in a difficult marriage. In a closeness that persevered despite misjudgments, misunderstandings and hurts, Hennessy considers the relationship between her mother and grandmother “one of the most powerful relationships I have ever witnessed.”

  “They had some difficult times, some fierce times, but they never gave up. That wasn’t an option,” she said Feb. 28. “The extrapolation of that is the Catholic Worker. It never gives up on people. They knew when they were taking many people in it was for life. Love is not easy — what it asks of us. This is something we have to live. As my mother would say, we all have to live our disasters, and one of those disasters is love.”

  Local ties

  The University of St. Thomas has a long history with both Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker Movement. During her life, Day spoke at the St. Paul Seminary School of Divinity, said Anne Klejment, a history professor at St. Thomas. In one of her 1960 columns for The Catholic Worker newspaper, Day mentions Jim Shannon, former auxiliary bishop and president of the university, lending her his car. Klejment, who has dedicated her academic work largely to Day, won the 1997 Pax Christi Award for her book “American Catholic Pacifism: The Influence of Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker Movement.” She also organized Hennessy’s visit and is a member of the Dorothy Day Canonization Support Network.

  St. Thomas’ Center for Catholic Studies, too, has a strong association with Day and the Catholic Worker Movement. Michael Naughton, director of the Center for Catholic Studies, began the collection process for Day’s canonization for the Claretian Fathers while in graduate school. In 1999, Naughton, along with two other St. Thomas professors, started a Catholic Worker House on St. Paul’s west side that became the catalyst for the Center for Catholic Studies’ Latino Leadership Program.

  Today, around 240 Catholic Worker communities worldwide commit themselves to nonviolence, voluntary poverty, prayer and hospitality for the homeless, exiled, hungry and forsaken, its website states. There are seven Catholic Worker communities in the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis.

  Karen Loome, a student in the Catholic Studies master’s program, is the co-founder of one of Stillwater’s two Catholic Worker communities with her husband, Tom. She is doing an independent study on Dorothy Day with Klejment. Loome attended the Feb. 28 reading.

  “It flushes out the story of Dorothy Day in a new way,” she said of Hennessy’s book. “With Kate’s book, there’s more color.”

  Loome, 58, said Day has influenced how she has lived most of her adult life.

  “I don’t think I’d even know how to be Catholic without the Catholic Worker Movement. At least not the kind of Catholic I’d want to be,” she said.

  Klejment hopes that through Hennessy’s visit, Day will inspire a new generation.

  “I think it’s important for students to see Catholicism as not only a way we worship, but also the way we can live, and Dorothy Day put them together,” Klejment said.

  Hennessy’s book is available at the University of St. Thomas book store and other major book sellers.

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• Englewood Review
  http://englewoodreview.org/kate-hennessy-new-dorothy-day-bio-interview/
  Word count: 621

  Kate Hennessy – New Dorothy Day Bio [Interview]
  January 20, 2017 — 0 Comments
  38 26 0 69

  Kate Hennessy.cred Gary Jones

  We recently had the opportunity to interview Kate Hennessy…

  the granddaughter of Dorothy Day, about her new biography of her grandmother’s life: Dorothy Day: The World Will Be Saved by Beauty(which releases next Tuesday, Jan 24).

  The full interview will run in our Lent 2017 magazine issue, but we wanted to offer you a taste here in anticipation of the book’s release.

  SUBSCRIBE NOW to our magazine
  (in print or digital format)
  and don’t miss this interview!

  Dorothy Day:
  The World Will Be Saved by Beauty:
  An Intimate Portrait of My Grandmother
  Kate Hennessy

  Hardback: Scribner, Jan. 24, 2017
  Buy Now: [ Amazon ] [ Kindle ]

  Interviewed by
  Erin Wasinger

  ERB: Why did you feel you needed to write this book? What was your vision?

  KH: You know, I didn’t have a vision [for the book]. I didn’t have an outline. I didn’t know where the book would take me. I knew what the framework was: I wanted to tell the story of my grandmother and my mother and I wanted to tell it in a way that even people who didn’t know about Dorothy Day could come to it. Other than that, I had no idea what was going to happen. … [But] this was a story that no one else could write. It was hard — there were many, many times when I was like, ‘I can’t do this, it’s too difficult, there are too many elements that are hard to express.’ It’s been very hard most of my life trying to feel that my own path is good enough.

  When you have someone like Dorothy Day as your grandmother or even as someone you knew well, I think that you can feel lazy, lethargic, self-centered. She had an extraordinary energy and just never stopped. In addition to her public persona, she had a very active personal life. (But) I can’t quite see what a legacy looks like. I mean certainly, there is the legacy of her work, and that’s the Catholic Worker in full force. The New York City houses are still going strong, there’s houses all over the country. That legacy is quite something.

  ERB: She’s known for her love. Dorothy’s quotes about it [“I really only love God as much as I love the person I love the least,” and “The final word is love,” are two] are widely used in sermons, books, and even internet memes. But depression is another recurring problem, which you note winds through Dorothy’s, Tamar’s, and your lives. Do you see love and depression intertwining? How do they interact?

  KH:Depression is a funny one, it’s very hard to understand and define. I do believe from personal experience that depression can really heighten one’s sense of love, certainly. It’s kind of counterintuitive in a way; you think of depression as a damping down of one’s feelings. But I certainly don’t think that happens at all. At least not for my grandmother or my mother or me, because all three of us have suffered depression. The love becomes more poignant, maybe. Love becomes more difficult, too, and more powerful.

  ——
  Erin Wasinger is co-author of the coming book The Year of Small Things: Radical Faith for the Rest of Us (Brazos Press).

  Image Credit: Promotional photo by Gary Jones, courtesy of the pu

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