A PENNY A COPY

When Dorothy Day founded ""The Catholic Worker"" back in the early Thirties, her infant newspaper--and the opinions of Miss Day herself--were regarded as dangerously leftist and just barely Catholic. Today, both are comparatively tame for having been outstripped, at least theoretically, by angrily articulate young priests (so far as the Catholic angle goes) and by the phenomenon of creeping socialism in the form of new deals, fair deals, great societies, etc. (so far as the ""worker"" aspect is concerned). All of which means that ""The Catholic Worker"" is no longer what it once was: a radical force for social justice. That fact does not, however, detract from that newspaper's historical importance in the formation of the social conscience of America; and it is from that viewpoint that the present collection of articles from ""The Catholic Worker"" has whatever value it may have. To the ""socially aware"" reader of the late Sixties, however, the articles--even the most recently published ones--convey almost uniformly an attitude of unthinking resentment that is more inflammatory than it is critical or constructive, more an opiate than a stimulus for the amorphous ""worker,"" and more a hearkening to the bad-old-days than a recognition of changing attitudes and values. On the whole, it is difficult to determine to whom this collection will appeal, other than to the many personal admirers of Miss Day herself.