Stud­ies in Courage and Tenacity

To Serve the Poor: Dorothy Day (1897−1980)

Dorothy Day — jour­nal­ist, activist, rad­i­cal, Catholic con­vert — was a woman of con­science who devot­ed her life’s work to help­ing the urban poor. The Dorothy Day Guild explains below:

Dorothy had grown to admire the Catholic Church as the ​“Church of the poor” and her faith began to take form with the birth of her daugh­ter Tamar in 1926. Her deci­sion to have her daugh­ter bap­tized and embrace the Catholic faith led to the end of her com­mon law mar­riage and the loss of many of her rad­i­cal friends. Dorothy strug­gled to find her role as a Catholic. While cov­er­ing the 1932 Hunger March in Wash­ing­ton, D.C. for some Catholic mag­a­zines, she prayed at the nation­al Shrine of the Immac­u­late Con­cep­tion that some way would open up for her to serve the poor and the unem­ployed. The fol­low­ing day, back in New York, she met Peter Mau­rin, a French immi­grant and for­mer Chris­t­ian Broth­er, who had a vision for a soci­ety con­struct­ed of Gospel values. 

Togeth­er they found­ed the Catholic Work­er news­pa­per which spawned a move­ment of hous­es of hos­pi­tal­i­ty and farm­ing com­munes that has been repli­cat­ed through­out the Unit­ed States and oth­er coun­tries. At the Catholic Work­er, Dorothy Day lived a life faith­ful to the injunc­tions of the Gospel. Often the news­pa­per quot­ed G.K. Chesterton’s famous obser­va­tion that Chris­tian­i­ty hadn’t real­ly failed — it had nev­er real­ly been tried. Day’s life was spent try­ing. She was shot at while work­ing for inte­gra­tion, prayed and fast­ed for peace at the Sec­ond Vat­i­can Coun­cil, received com­mu­nion from Pope Paul VI at the 1967 Inter­na­tion­al Con­gress of the Laity, and addressed the 1976 Eucharis­tic Con­gress in Philadel­phia. Her pil­grim­age end­ed at Mary­house in New York City on Novem­ber 29, 1980, where she died among the poor.

Tired of Giv­ing In: Rosa Parks (1913−2005)

Rosa Louise Parks is nation­al­ly rec­og­nized as the ​“moth­er of the mod­ern day civ­il rights move­ment” in Amer­i­ca. Her refusal to sur­ren­der her seat to a white male pas­sen­ger on a Mont­gomery, Alaba­ma bus, Decem­ber 1, 1955, trig­gered a wave of protest Decem­ber 5, 1955 that rever­ber­at­ed through­out the Unit­ed States. Her qui­et coura­geous act changed Amer­i­ca, its view of black peo­ple and redi­rect­ed the course of his­to­ry. Here she recounts what led up to that fate­ful deci­sion (from her book, My Sto­ry):

No Way Left but Upward: Alek­san­dr Solzhen­it­syn (1918−2008)

Alek­san­dr Isayevich Solzhen­it­syn was a Russ­ian nov­el­ist, his­to­ri­an, and short sto­ry writer. He was an out­spo­ken crit­ic of the Sovi­et Union and com­mu­nism and helped to raise glob­al aware­ness of its Gulag forced labor camp sys­tem. Lev Gross­man wrote the fol­low­ing memo­r­i­al of Solzhen­it­syn for TIME Mag­a­zine in 2008:

In 1973 [Solzhen­it­syn] com­plet­ed the first vol­ume of The Gulag Arch­i­pel­ago, a thun­der­ing, ency­clo­pe­dic indict­ment of the Sovi­et labor camp sys­tem and the gov­ern­ment that built it which com­bines lit­er­ary fic­tion with the tes­ti­mo­ny of hun­dreds of actu­al sur­vivors. It is a tow­er­ing mon­u­ment to the pow­er of witness. 

In The First Cir­cle Solzhen­it­syn wrote: ​“For a coun­try to have a great writer is like hav­ing anoth­er gov­ern­ment. That’s why no régime has ever loved great writ­ers, only minor ones.” With The Gulag Arch­i­pel­ago Solzhen­it­syn had become too great for the Sovi­et gov­ern­ment. After years of harass­ment he was put on a plane and expelled from Russia. 

[He and his fam­i­ly set­tled in Vermont.]

Solzhen­it­syn was an icon of free­dom to the West­ern world, but he did not return the esteem it heaped on him. As a man of enor­mous Chris­t­ian faith, he regard­ed the West as spir­i­tu­al­ly dete­ri­o­rat­ed, and he some­times baf­fled sup­port­ers and crit­ics alike with his reac­tionary crit­i­cisms of West­ern democ­ra­cy. In a sear­ing speech to Har­vard’s grad­u­at­ing class of 1978, he observed that ​“a decline in courage may be the most strik­ing fea­ture that an out­side observ­er notices in the West today.”

Solzhen­it­syn remained hope­ful that the com­ing cen­turies would bring with them a world where mankind’s mate­r­i­al and spir­i­tu­al lives, our bod­ies and our souls, would be able to flour­ish togeth­er. After per­son­al­ly endur­ing and bear­ing wit­ness to some of the great­est tragedies of a trag­ic cen­tu­ry, he still believed that life could and would evolve and improve. ​“The ascen­sion is sim­i­lar to climb­ing onto the next anthro­po­log­i­cal stage,” he said. ​“No one on earth has any oth­er way left but upward.”