She is still gripping and unsettling

Revolution of the Heart: The Dorothy Day Story - Trailer HD from Journey Films on Vimeo.

This documentary aired on Public Broadcasting on Monday. I liked it.

I'm suspicious of hagiography around Dorothy and that particularly applies to the campaign to acknowledge her as a saint. She was awe inspiring and nearly impossible -- the impulse to drown the latter in the former can be overwhelming. The film catches her stubbornness as well as her compassion. The Catholic Worker movement wouldn't have existed without both.

Above all, I recommend this for the visuals, for its smooth integration of old pictures with the narrative of Dorothy's life and work. Most of the photos are black and white images which seem true to the poverty of the Depression era as well as among the homeless men who frequented the Bowery area in the 1960s and '70s. It was a starkly gray scene. There were more women about than these pictures would suggest; I found it interesting that more than one the clips of Dorothy speaking about the work referred to women in need who became part of the community.

From viewing this film, you might think that "the poor" among whom Dorothy found her vocation were all white people. That would not be an entirely true picture. In the Catholic Worker's advocacy mission, the movement stood loyally on the side of civil rights for African Americans; Dorothy identified closely with Clarence Jordan's Koinonia Farm, a bravely integrated communal experiment in Georgia.

Yet these gestures toward the nation's original sin were extrinsic to the life of the Worker in Dorothy's time. Certainly the Lower East Side of New York in Dorothy's later years was still home to plenty of older European immigrants who had not escaped from urban squalor to the suburbs -- though their children might have. And there were always some African Americans among the homeless men the Catholic Worker fed and clothed. But in addition to young white people looking for low rents, the neighborhood was filling with Spanish-speaking newcomer families, mostly Puerto Rican. The various kinds brushed past each other, but interacted little in my time there. Dorothy was aware of racial tensions and did what she always did about conflict: both ignored and prayed.

Who'd have thought there'd now be a Whole Foods on New York's Houston Street?

The film describes Dorothy's piety as "conservative." I wouldn't object to the label, though for people who never lived inside American Catholic culture, I'm not sure it communicates adequately. Her understanding of Christianity was formal, traditional, Tridentine, and hierarchical with the overlay of Catholic immigrants' need to prove to "respectable" Protestant Anglos that they weren't just dumb, dissolute Irish Micks and Polaks. Few American Catholics are like that now. Quite a few Catholics were not like that then, including her contemporaries, Thomas Merton in his later years and the Berrigan brothers -- with whom she often felt out of phase.

Yet Dorothy was also mystical, enfolded in a piety that arose out of stories of heroines and saints. One of the oddments in the film which rang very true to me was Cornel West trying to explain how Dorothy's life was rooted in the mass, in receiving Christ in the Eucharist daily. I wouldn't have turned to Cornel West for that insight, but I'm delighted these moviemakers did.

What I often find lacking when people try to explain the power of Dorothy's life is an appreciation that, even into old age, she was a beautiful woman. (For what I consider a sad example, see the Robert Lentz icon.) Yes, she had a piercing stare that could only be met by steeling ones inner core, but she also emanated both calm amid chaos and delight from her depths. In this film, that Dorothy is there for all to see.

If you have a chance -- and I am sure there will be many -- do see this documentary.

I lived in the New York Catholic Worker community for several years in the early 1970s and among Catholic Workers for the remainder of the decade.