Dorothy Day, 1897-1980, was no stranger to controversy. While in college she became a supporter of the Communist Party. For the next decade picketed, marched and distributed literature in New York’s south side, for relief of mothers and children, just wages, and medical care for the needy. She was arrested for picketing in front of the White House and spent 10 days in jail on a hunger strike. “I wanted to be with the protesters, go to jail, write, influence others and leave my dreams to the world.” Living in a slum tenement near New York’s Greenwich Village, she moved in a circle of writers, playwrights and intellectuals, had several love affairs one of which led to an abortion. “I thought I was a free and emancipated young women,” she recalled, “and found out I wasn’t at all.”
She never doubted the sincerity of her communist friends. “I can write, from actual knowledge,” she later explained, “of the goodness of the people who live for ideals.” She developed a deep friendship with Rayna Prohme whose joyousness and love for truth indelibly impressed her. “Although Rayna died a Communist,” Dorothy Day later wrote, “she is counted among those who belong “to the invisible unity of the Church.”
Her conversion to Catholicism came slowly. As a child Dorothy Day had enjoyed Bible stories. For a time, she roomed with three young women who attended Sunday mass and devoted time for prayer each day. A Communist friend gave her a rosary. One day sitting on a beach, she met a bearded, old man who insisted on talking, and told her “because I am not a Christian, I am not afraid to die.” She told him he was crazy. The birth of a baby daughter in 1927, however, changed her mind. “No human creature,” she recalled, “could receive or contain so vast a flood of love and joy as I often felt after the birth of my child. With belief in God “came the need to … associate myself with others, the masses in loving and praising God.” And though raised as an Episcopalian, she instinctively turned toward Roman Catholicism. “Without even looking into the claims of the Catholic Church,” she reminisced,” I was willing to admit that for me she was the one true Church.” In 1926 she met Sister Aloysia, a retired grammar schoolteacher, who taught Dorothy basic prayers and helped her memorize catechism questions.
She had her daughter baptized in July 1927 and Dorothy became a Catholic herself in December of that year. Meanwhile, however, she continued to support radical causes, promoting the cause of revolutionaries in Central America and writing articles about the unemployed in New York. She was drawn to prayer and the Sacraments yet felt the official Church in many countries sided with “property, the wealthy, …with all the forces of reaction.” But there were a few breaths of fresh air. Cardinal Mundelein of Chicago wondered if, in many instances, “the Church has lined up on the wrong side.” She was particularly impressed by the labor Encyclicals of Leo XIII, and Pius XI. When the depression of the 1930s began and unemployment soared, she wondered where the American Catholic Church stood on social and economic issues. “I could write, I could preach, …but where was the Catholic leadership in the gathering of bands of men and women together, for the actual works of mercy.”
Dorothy Day worked for a while as a screen writer in Hollywood, but in meeting with other writers, she was appalled by the lack of ideas and the sheer commercialism of it all. “I was lonely, deadly lonely,” Dorothy recalled. She needed the kind of community that she found only after returning to New York’s lower east side. Living in a tenement house, writing from her kitchen table she edited the first issue of the tabloid newspaper, The Catholic Worker. Selling for a penny a copy, 2500 copies were printed for its first issue of 1933. An editorial posed the question, “Is it not possible to be radical and not an atheist.” Answering in the affirmative, the paper provided coverage of strikes, of the working conditions of blacks and women, and explained papal social teaching. When the paper was attacked as communist or fascist propaganda, Dorothy Day was quick to reply: “We are writing as Catholics and as Americans, and do not believe that the two positions are incompatible. We are accused by false conservatives who do not know what they want to conserve, of being Communists. And we are accused by Communists of being Fascists. So, we restate our position and the positions of opposing both the communist and the fascist-minded opponents.”
Along with the publication The Catholic Worker, a little group of followers gathered around her land and led lives of voluntary poverty. They began serving soup and coffee to several hundred needy each day. The group grew as students, workers, laypersons, seminarians blended prayer and study with picketing, leafleting, and helping the needy. Such “Hospitality Houses” soon spread through the United States.
Early on, the fledgling movement ran into trouble. In 1936 The Catholic Worker adopted the principle of radical Christian pacifism, opposing the use of force even in self-defense. “Love is indeed a harsh and dreadful thing to ask of us, of each one of us,” Dorothy Day explained, “but it is the only answer.” In Europe the Spanish Civil War was raging and many American Catholics supported what they perceived as the anti-communist crusade of General Francisco Franco. When The Catholic Worker refused to endorse either side in the conflict, the newspaper was condemned by several American bishops and banned in many parishes. “I never expected much of the bishops,” she ruefully noted. “It is the saints that keep appearing all through history who keep things going.”
Although The Catholic Worker declined to take stands on international matters, it was outspoken in US matters. When Catholic speakers in Brooklyn verbally attacked the Jewish community. Dorothy Day’s response was visceral. “For Catholics—or for anyone—to stand up in the public squares and center their hatred against Jews,” she wrote, “is to sidestep the issue before the public today. It is easier to fight the Jew than it is to fight for social justice—that is what it comes down to. God made us all. We are all members or potential members of the mystical body of Christ.”
From the time of her conversion Dorothy Day lived an intense spiritual life that she shared with those around her. She attended Mass at 7:00am each day and every afternoon joined in prayer services that featured hymns in which the volunteers and indigents, invariably accompanied the hymns with the jingle of shaking keys. Fearing that her message might be viewed as saccharine piety, she wryly observed: “Don’t call me a saint, I do not want to be dismissed that easily.”
Through World War II and the Korean conflict her pacifism remained controversial and she would later describe these years as her “long loneliness. Not until the anti-war protests of the 1960s and 1970s, did her principles of non-violent opposition to conflict briefly become widespread. Though pleased, she dismissed many of the hippy generation as self-indulgent children who had not “known suffering” and who lived without moral principles.
When Dorothy Day died at the age of 83 on November 29, 1980, the New York Times praised 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.” In November of 2012 the US National Conference of Catholic Bishops unanimously endorsed her cause for sainthood, and three years later Pope Francis spoke of her in his address to the US Congress, praising “the Servant of God Dorothy Day, who founded the Catholic Worker Movement. Her social activism, her passion for justice and for the cause of the oppressed, were inspired by the Gospel, her faith, and the example of the saints.” He listed her along with Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Merton and Martin Luther King as one of America’s leading religious figures. The Catholic Worker movement that she founded continues today.
