[This coming weekend, the great Martin Sheen celebrates his 84th birthday. Sheen’s life has been as impressive and inspiring as his iconic career, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of threads to both. Leading up to a special tribute to a pair of even more inspiring Americans!]
On a great
example of art imitating and amplifying life.
For a
December 2019 piece for my Saturday Evening Post Considering History
column, I highlighted the inspiring Catholic activism of Dorothy Day. Day eventually
played an important role in Martin Sheen’s own activist life, so I’d ask you to
check out that column if you would and then come on back for two layers to
Sheen’s relationship to Day and Catholic activism.
Welcome back! The Wikipedia page for Sheen
claims that he “met Catholic activist Dorothy Day” while pursuing his youthful
acting career with the Living Theatre
company in New York City, but that seems to be an overstatement. As Sheen
remembered it in this
2015 interview with Chicago Catholic, “He may have met Dorothy Day
in 1959 or 1960 when he was a young man working for a pittance in an
avant-garde theater in Greenwich Village and eating the free meal provided
every night by the Catholic Worker. ‘They had a breadline, and you didn’t have
to pay and you didn’t have to listen to a sermon, you just showed up five
nights a week and you got a free supper,’ he said. ‘Now, I could have met
Dorothy Day. I can’t say for sure because I went there for months and months,
but I was only there for the food. Eventually, I came to a far better
understanding of the Catholic Worker and it became a very powerful force in my
life and a great source of inspiration and I’m still to this day very
supportive of the Catholic Workers all over the United States.’”
So Sheen’s personal connection to Day and the Catholic
Worker movement was a long arc, although no less (and perhaps in some ways even
more) meaningful for it. But he also has an interesting artistic connection to
the movement, through his performance as Peter Maurin in the 1996 independent
film Entertaining
Angels: The Dorothy Day Story (1996; Sheen’s West Wing co-star Moira Kelly plays Day). Maurin co-founded the
Catholic Worker movement with Day, and was in his own right a hugely important figure
not just in that specific spiritual and activist tradition, but in the arc of
20th century American social and labor
activism among other histories. As I know every reader of this blog knows
well, I believe that cultural representations of our figures and histories
offer one of the most compelling and successful ways to add them to our collective
memories; few American figures need such adding more than Dorothy Day and Peter
Maurin, and Martin Sheen offers us a cultural as well as biographical and
activist way to better remember that pair.
Next
SheenStudying tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think?
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