Fwd: DOROTHY DAY AND THE WOODSTOCK GENERATION
Catholic Worker
From: Brian Terrell <brian195...@gmail.com>
Date: Tue, Mar 24, 2026 at 8:22 AM
Subject: DOROTHY DAY AND THE WOODSTOCK GENERATION
To: Catholic Worker <catholicw...@gmail.com>
DOROTHY DAY AND THE WOODSTOCK GENERATION
Brian Terrell
March 24, 2026
The political and cultural commentator David Brooks is not alone when he suggests in his 2015 book, The Road to Character, that Catholic Worker co-founder Dorothy Day’s life was a protest “against the values of the Woodstock counterculture the media was prone to celebrate.” For some of Day’s most ardent admirers in the years since her death in 1980, she is held to be the very antithesis of what has been called the Woodstock Generation.
Day’s relationship to that culture and to the actual rock festival that lent it its name was more nuanced, however. The Catholic Worker farm at Tivoli, New York, where Day spent much of her time in those years, was not far away from Max Yasgur's farm in Bethel where the Woodstock festival actually occurred. On August 16, 1969, Day recorded in her diary, “Story in Times about Rock Festival at Bethel (Woodstock), most favorable. ‘A well-behaved half million young people.’ All farm teenagers went.” Two days later she reported “Mary, Maggie, Martha (Day’s granddaughter) Adrian and all the other teenagers back from Rock Festival. They had a weekend of rain. Sounded like a nightmare to me.”
If a weekend of rain, mud and rock music with a half million kids, no matter how well behaved, sounded like a nightmare to a septuagenarian in 1969, Day was by no means making a moral judgement. On a Sunday in October that year, Day wrote in her diary a critique of the sermon she heard in the Catholic parish church in Tivoli: “A good sermon but ending with condemnation and ill-concealed disgust at the youth, ‘orgy of sex and drugs’ at Bethel. No compassion for the young.”
Day greatly admired folk singer Joan Baez, who was the final act of the first day of the Woodstock Rock Festival, and considered her a friend. In 1973, writing in her regular column in The Catholic Worker newspaper of Baez’ visit to North Vietnam, Day said, “Yes, the world will be saved by such beauty, such courage! She stood on a balcony in Hanoi and sang to the people in the midst of this inhuman war.”
Day’s diary recorded a visit from the famed beat poet Allen Ginsberg, who lived in the same lower east side neighborhood as the Catholic Worker when he was not in Woodstock- “Allen Ginsburg came in tonight with Gary. Attended Vespers. Ten in the dining room sang mantras, some of which involved us all- Hare Krishna went into Jesus, Mary, then Virgin Mary, then a litany asking for prayers for all… We’ve all sung better since he was here. I mean the hymn to the Blessed Mother at the end of vespers.”
If Day famously insisted that she did not want to be called a saint, she did not hesitate to apply that title to the popular comedian and Black activist of that generation Dick Gregory, whom she called “a brave and courageous spirit” and “a saint of our times.” Day took notice in her column, too, that the ground breaking, many times arrested for obscenity, comedian Lenny Bruce “said once (the Catholic Church) was the only THE Church in America!” It is said that she was amused when Abbie Hoffman called her the original hippie.
Day did not idealize the younger generation, though, and her disapprovals are amply catalogued elsewhere. It is reasonable to imagine, even, that she would share some of David Brook’s criticism of “the antinomianism, the intense focus on the liberated individual and ‘doing your own thing’” that marked the Woodstock counterculture. Her stronger criticisms, though, were reserved for the Catholic Church which she also loved: “I feel that over and over again in history the Church has become so corrupt that it just cries out to heaven for justice,” she said in an interview in The National Catholic Reporter in 1970. “I think that it is the result of the corruption of the institutional church, through money and through their acceptance of this lousy, rotten system.”
In a 1998 article by Paul Elie in The New York Times, Francis Cardinal George, archbishop of Chicago, who also strangely insisted “remember, Dorothy Day did not turn her criticism of the social order on the church,” confessed that “It's the Catholic Worker now that I'm worried about. At the end of her life she said, ‘They've turned day into night,’ and I fear she was right.” This has been repeated in various forms by scholars, bishops, even by some who identify with the Catholic Worker movement and it has come to be accepted as true by many.
Responding to William Miller about his 1973 book, A harsh and dreadful love; Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker Movement, Day wrote “and it is a valid criticism, I think, that you put too much emphasis on me and disregard all the wonderful and exciting young people all over the country who do the work while I go around and make speeches.”
Later as her health was failing, in letters to old friends and in entries to her diary, Day did vent her frustrations over her younger co-workers, her fears for them, sometimes expressing desolation over them, even. She also berated herself for being so judgmental and she sometimes sought reconciliation with those she had criticized or spurned. “Judge not” was her frequent reminder to herself. Day’s declining years were not an easy retirement for her and she often complained of feeling useless, “on the shelf” as she put it. About the various accolades that came her way in those years she said, “How one dreads such honors when inactive, and a group of dedicated young women bearing the brunt of all the work. One feels like a figurehead.” In another letter, Day confessed, “With everyone else taking responsibility, and having taken it for so long, bearing so much, I feel like an utter failure- wrung dry.”
I came to the Catholic Worker in 1975, when I was 19 years old and Day was 78 and this was shortly before her first heart attack. I would like to think that I was numbered among the “attractive (physically and mentally) crowd here now in the First and Third Street houses” Day praised in her January 1979 column in The Catholic Worker, but the one time that I was mentioned in her column by name was in June 1978- “I rejoice to see the young people thinking of ‘the works of mercy’ as a truly revolutionary, but nonviolent program. The spiritual and corporal certainly go together, and often involve suffering. To oppose nuclear buildup has led to the imprisonment this last month of two of our workers, Robert Ellsberg and Brian Terrell, in Rocky Flats, Colorado... Meanwhile, I am confined in another way by weakness and age, but can truly pray with fervor for those on active duty, and sternly suppress my envy at the activities of our young and valiant workers.”
Deliberate or not, putting Day at odds with the movement as it was in her later years effectively dismisses most of the contemporary movement as well. One of today’s scholars of the movement wrote in a National Catholic Register article, “Sadly, the Catholic Worker movement (Day) created, along with Peter Maurin, has for the most part departed from this deeply Catholic vision and has embraced instead modern, leftist social ideology instead.” The same scholar, in a Catholic Answers podcast, claimed that “a lot of people look askance at the contemporary Catholic Worker movement because I mean to be blunt, there are strong elements in the contemporary movement that have simply degenerated into leftist sort of ooey gooey politics, the latest cause de jour and so on,” as if the “latest cause de jour,” the pressing issues of our times, did not concern and motivate Day and Maurin and the movement they founded from the first issue of their newspaper launched at a labor rally on May Day, 1933, to the present time.
It is this perspective that allows many of Day’s most ardent and pious devotees today to love “Saint Dorothy” without being challenged by her urgent call to “overthrow” what she called “this rotten, decadent, putrid industrial capitalist system which breeds such suffering” and that at this present moment threatens the lives of all of God’s creatures on this planet.
Dan McKanan in his book The Catholic Worker After Dorothy, 2008, suggested that “what Dorothy Day experienced as a generation gap was, for the younger generation, a remarkable experience of generational continuity.” This has been my experience over the past 50 years. Now that I am almost as old as Dorothy was when I met her, I experience that generational continuity in my friendships and collaborations with many younger Catholic Workers. I thank God for these friends and for the hope against hope that they give that sustains me in times such as these.
Attached photo, Dorothy Day, Frank Donovan and Brian Terrell, New York City, 1978, by Stanley Vishnewski
