Catholic autobiographies
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Catholic Spiritual Autobiography Reading List
Catholic Spiritual Autobiography Reading List
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Biographies and Autobiographies: Lives of and by the Saints
Within the genre of biography, autobiography is a special type. We hope for accuracy, objectivity, and balance from a biographer, but unless there are diaries or other spiritual writings from the individual who is the subject of the account, it is much harder to know for sure what was taking place within the person. The genre of autobiography allows, and in fact, encourages more self-disclosure. To be sure, it is not that the genre is immune to deception and misrepresentation, but here the factor of real sanctity works in favor of the reader. Where the autobiography of a worldly person could well be devised in such a way as to leave a certain impression, regardless of its truth, the true saint who writes knows that the most important witness is the Lord, and has ever reason to tell the truth.
Were this a court of law, there would be reason to be suspicious. No one thinks it wise to let the accused be the judge in his
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The Long Loneliness
The compelling autobiography of a remarkable Catholic woman, sainted by many, who championed the rights of the poor in America’s inner cities. When Dorothy Day died in 1980, the New York Times eulogized her as “a nonviolent social radical of luminous personality . . . founder of the Catholic Worker Movement and leader for more than fifty years in numerous battles of social justice.” Here, in her own words, this remarkable woman tells of her early life as a young reporter in the crucible of Greenwich by political and literary thought in the 1920s, and of her momentous konvertering to Catholicism that meant the end of a Bohemian lifestyle and common-law marriage. The Long Loneliness chronilces Dorothy Day’s lifelong association with Peter Maurin and the genesis of the Catholic Worker Movement. Unstinting in her commitment to peace, nonviolence, racial justice, and the cuase of the poor and the outcast, she became an inspiration to such activists as Thomas Mer