A WOMAN OF ACTION

SPRING 2019


Illustrations by Vinny Bove

By Michael S. Cain

ON DECEMBER 29, 1927, at Our Lady Help of Christians on Staten Island, Dorothy Day was baptized a Catholic. She was 30 years old. 

Though her family was not religious, since childhood she had felt drawn to the Church, and her baptism was the culmination of that lifelong yearning. She would go on to become, through her works and her writings, one of the most influential American Christians of the 20th century – editor of The Catholic Worker and co-founder of a network of “hospitality houses” offering aid to the poor and homeless in towns and cities across the United States and around the world – but her mission was not clear to her on the day of her conversion. Her call to a life of heroic virtue came not through a divine vision or dramatic revelation, but through years of ardent searching, study and prayer.

EDUCATED BY HISTORY

A child of the industrial age whose family crisscrossed the country as her journalist father moved from job to job, Dorothy saw firsthand many upheavals of early 20th century America. She witnessed the San Francisco earthquake in 1906, after which her family shared clothing and food with the displaced; the miserable conditions of immigrant families in the stockyards of Chicago, made famous by Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle; and cruel suppression of labor activists and suffragists in the Northeast. In the process, she developed a deep affinity for people living in poverty and oppression and a lifelong practice of directly helping those in need.

She was also a gifted writer. By the age of 20, Dorothy was on her own in Greenwich Village, writing professionally, one of the youngest members of a bohemian circle of writers and artists that included the playwright Eugene O’Neill and socialist John Reed. As a journalist, she often wrote about nascent movements for social justice, and she sometimes participated instead of chronicled: marching, picketing, even getting arrested and enduring a hunger strike in a Maryland prison.
 

SEARCHING FOR THE WAY

Her Catholic baptism, when it finally came, brought her tremendous joy, but it also occasioned a painful loss. Many of her activist friends considered religion untenable and the Church the enemy of progress. Dorothy was forced to part ways with her common-law husband, the father of her child, who would not marry within the Church or accept Dorothy’s ties to it. Her first years as a Catholic were lonely and marked by a desperate longing to unite her religious fervor with her commitment to those who were abused and forgotten in the industrialized economy of the time.

In 1932 – the deepest days of the Depression – on assignment to cover the Hunger March, a protest by unemployed workers who traveled from New York to Washington, D.C., Dorothy’s despair threatened to overwhelm her. Kneeling in the crypt of Washington’s new National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, she “offered up a special prayer,” as she describes it in a memoir, The Long Loneliness: “a prayer that came with tears and with anguish, that some way would open up for me to use what talents I possessed for my fellow workers, for the poor.”
 

A PRAYER ANSWERED

On her return to New York, Dorothy found a stranger waiting for her: Peter Maurin, an itinerant scholar, a onetime Christian Brother who had worked on farms and railroads, in brickyards, steel mills and coal mines. In a heavy French accent, Peter told Dorothy he had come to see her on the recommendation of George Shuster, editor of Commonweal, and presented her with a grand plan: to create a program of “round-table discussions, houses of hospitality and agronomic universities.” The part that caught her attention was his plan to create “a paper for the man in the street.”

“But where do we get the money?” Dorothy asked.

“God sends you what you need when you need it,” Peter promptly answered. “You will be able to pay the printer. Just read the lives of the saints.”

And so began a movement.
 

A MOVEMENT IS BORN

The first issue of The Catholic Worker was published on May 1, 1933. The cost of printing for 2,500 copies ($57) was paid by Dorothy, who used her outside writing income and delayed payment of her gas and electric bills. At the annual May Day rally in New York City’s Union Square, Dorothy and three volunteers wove their way among thousands of workers and activists, giving out the issues without even asking for the one-cent cover charge.

The newspaper was well received, and subscriptions and donations soon began rolling in. By November, Dorothy had increased the print order from 2,500 to 35,000, and by May 1935, circulation had grown to 110,000. Readers bought the paper for hard-hitting stories about trials and strikes, social issues such as racism and child labor, and protests against the inequities of the economic system. There were also Dorothy’s lyrical meditations on life in the city and the countryside and Peter’s Easy Essays – short verses on economic justice, Catholic social teachings and the values of personalism, the idea that each of us must take responsibility for the betterment of the world.

FROM WORDS TO ACTS

In late 1933, a desperate woman came to the Catholic Worker office to inquire about the houses of hospitality that Dorothy and Peter had been writing about. No such houses yet existed, Dorothy confessed. Then she took immediate action, renting an apartment and furnishing it with beds.

At the end of 1938, as the Catholic Worker circulation reached 180,000, the houses of hospitality were also proliferating. In New York, they had served over a million breakfasts and hosted nearly 60,000 overnights in the previous three years. In addition, more than 30 houses had opened in other cities, including Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago and San Francisco, offering food, shelter and a place for discussion of Catholic ideas of social justice and the personalist vision of our role in our communities and the world. Driving the growth of the Catholic Worker movement was the success of the paper as well as Dorothy’s travels around the country to give talks and engage in discussions, inspiring others to live the gospel.

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“If your brother is hungry,  you feed him. You don’t meet him at the door and say, ‘Go be thou filled,’ or ‘Wait for a few weeks, and you’ll get a welfare check.’ You sit him down and feed him.”

– Dorothy Day, in a 1971 interview

WAR AND PEACE

Increasingly, The Catholic Worker and Dorothy were becoming a part of the national conversation – sometimes controversially. The paper stood up against racism and anti-Semitism, staging a demon-stration against trade with Germany during the early days of the Nazi government and losing more than half its readership by taking a pacifist stand against U.S. involvement in World War II. In 1942, Dorothy drew attention to the internment of Japanese-Americans on the West Coast, describing life in the “concentration camps where Japanese men, women and children are being held” and earning a threatening letter from the U.S. Office of Censorship. Later, she decried the use of the atom bomb in Hiroshima and Nagasaki as a “monstrous crime.”

After the war, many felt that Dorothy and the Worker, having lost so many readers to controversy, would fade into history. When Peter Maurin died in 1949, Dorothy was devastated – but her work was far from finished. During the 1950s, as the paper steadily regained its following, she led protests for civil rights and against nuclear testing and the militarism of the Cold War; three times, she was arrested for staging outdoor demonstrations during mandatory air-raid drills in New York City, saying that the drills promoted the suicidal illusion that citizens would be able to survive an attack with nuclear weapons by hiding in shelters. In 1963, when many Americans had not yet heard of Vietnam, the Catholic Worker movement organized the first televised protest against U.S. military intervention there. Inspired by Pope John XXIII’s encyclical Pacem in Terris, she led a group of women in a hunger strike at the Second Vatican Council, successfully petitioning the bishops to embrace a set of pacifist principles.

Dorothy’s health began to fail in the 1970s, but she did not let up. In 1973, already suffering from heart failure, she was arrested for the last time, during a nonviolent demonstration with the United Farm Workers in California, and spent 10 days in jail. She was 76 years old.

Three years later, she would suffer a heart attack that restricted her mobility for her remaining years. She died November 29, 1980, in New York City, at the age of 83.

Dorothy's last arrest, 1973. // Illustration by Vinny Bove from a photo by Bob Fitch, courtesy of Bob Fitch Photography Archive, Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Library.

LIVING LEGACY

Nearly 40 years after her death, the movement Dorothy Day founded with Peter Maurin in 1933 is very much alive. Today, there are more than 220 Catholic Worker communities across the United States and in 10 foreign countries, continuing their mission to feed, clothe and shelter those in need and champion causes of peace and social justice. Dorothy’s influence has grown since her death, especially since Pope Francis named her one of four “great Americans,” along with Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Thomas Merton.

“Dorothy cuts across ideological boundaries and calls people back to the Sermon on the Mount,” says George Horton, director of social and community development for Catholic Charities of New York and a vice postulator in the cause for Dorothy’s canonization. “She was a laywoman, a single mother who experienced a devastating loss of love. She had the vulnerabilities that many of us have and was able to transcend them. She believed that each person is called to take care of the poor.”
 

Mother Teresa visits Dorothy at Maryhouse, a Catholic Worker center in New York City, 1977. // Photo by William Barrett.

UNDYING LOVE

The work continues, and there is much to do.

“Look at a place like Yemen,” Horton says, “where enormous atrocities are happening. Every Saturday there are people from the Catholic Worker and other activist groups who stand in Union Square for an hour and call people’s attention to that war. The messages that come out of Dorothy and the Catholic Worker are still essential. We need those voices opposing war and injustice.
 

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“Her social activism [and]  her passion for justice and for the cause of the oppressed were inspired by the Gospel, her faith and the example of the saints.” 

– Pope Francis, speech to the U.S. Congress, September 24, 2015

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A full appreciation of Dorothy Day, however, must look beyond the prodigious works of corporal mercy to her practice of prayer, meditation and the celebration of the magnificence of God’s creations. Biographer Jim Forest, who worked with Dorothy and the Catholic Worker movement from 1960 through her death, described her prayer life in an afterword to his book All Is Grace: A Biography of Dorothy Day. “How often have I seen her on her knees at one of the nearby parish churches,” he wrote. One day he picked up a prayer book she had left in a pew and “discovered page after page of names, all written in her careful italic script, of people, living and dead, for whom she was praying. It seemed to me Dorothy prayed as if lives depended on it, and no doubt some did.”

Throughout her vivid writings, from her teenage years until her death, Dorothy found joy in beautiful things, from the flowers in tiny gardens in the slums of Chicago to the sunsets at Maryfarm, a Catholic Worker community near Newburgh, NY. She wrote of the power of love and the joy of sharing, even when money was short: “We cannot love God unless we love each other, and to love each other we must know each other,” she wrote in The Long Loneliness. “Heaven is a banquet and life is a banquet, too, even with a crust, where there is companionship.”  

For more information on the Catholic Worker movement, go to catholicworker.org. To subscribe to The Catholic Worker, still published seven times a year, see Frequently Asked Questions at that site (you’ll have to send a request by mail). The price per copy is still one cent, plus mailing costs.
 

Dorothy Day in prayer. // llustration by Vinny Bove, from a photo by Bob Fitch, courtesy of Bob Fitch Photography Archive, Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Library.

 

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SAINT DOROTHY?

In late 1998, Archbishop of New York John Cardinal O’Connor began the formal process, or “cause,” for the canonization of Dorothy Day. Two years later, Rome approved the initiation of the cause, granting her the official title servant of God. In 2005, the Archdiocese of New York formed the Dorothy Day Guild to advance the cause through donations and the recruitment of volunteers in the considerable task of documenting her life and work. 

The process of canonization is a slow one, involving interviews with people who knew Dorothy and extensive review of all her writings, published and unpublished. “Her writing was a way of expressing her inner self and her joys and struggles,” George Horton says. “But that’s also one of the challenges of her canonization. The Catholic Worker archives at Marquette University house some 8,600 pages of Dorothy’s journals, and all of them have to be transcribed and reviewed. That takes a long time.” 

After the Archdiocese of New York has completed its investigations – perhaps in 2022 – it will send the complete record to Rome for further deliberation. No final determination is expected for at least five years. 

For more information about the work of the guild or to volunteer as a transcriber, visit dorothydayguild.org.

For more about the canonization process, see our Spring 2019 Ask a Priest.