Remembering Dorothy Day in Words and Deeds

• Her Life
• Her Deeds
• Her Words
• Resources

HER LIFE

Dorothy Day was born a hundred years ago on November 8, 1897 in New York City. Eighty-three years later, on November 29, 1980, she died in the city of her birth. Though she was born into a middle-class, conventional family, she died in the midst of the family she helped found-the Catholic Worker family-among her beloved poor.

Catholic historian David O'Brien, in 1980 on the occasion of her death, said that Dorothy Day "was the most significant, interesting, and influential person in the history of American Catholicism." Some have called her a saint, a suggestion she didn't like.

What in her spirit is vital for us in these waning years of the twentieth century? Two qualities of Dorothy Day significant for our time are her stance of resistance and her saintliness.

By her stance of resistance I mean Dorothy Day's permanent dissatisfaction with our American society and her actions to change it. She resisted the notion that there had to be so many poor people in the midst of great wealth, that the State was responsible for solving the problems of poverty, and that war and violence were ever necessary (she was a lifelong pacifist).

Instead, following Peter Maurin's vision, she advocated that each of us take personal responsibility for our neighbor in need and follow the gospel of Matthew 25, performing the works of mercy at a personal sacrifice. She took action for peace by writing, picketing, going to jail, praying, and fasting-all acts of nonviolent resistance. She adopted voluntary poverty for herself and encouraged it for others as an antidote to our society's acquisitiveness.

Dorothy advocated a "permanent revolution,"-a revolution of the heart-where through cooperation each person and family would have good work and sufficient means to meet their needs. Today, Catholic Workers in over 140 communities are inspired by her witness: offering hospitality to the poor, resisting our still militarized culture, and going to jail for their convictions.

When I speak of Dorothy Day's saintliness I have in mind her seriousness about becoming a saint, following St. Paul's injunction, and her call for us to become saints. Dorothy knew that any talk about her being a saint raised the possibility that she would then be easily dismissed-after all, who can live like and do what saints do?

What she did was simply take the Gospel seriously every day until she died. She hungered for God (she called it her "long loneliness"), she sought to use her talent of journalism in the service of God and neighbor, she had a disciplined life of prayer including daily Mass, she performed thousands of little acts of love (the "little way" of St. Therese), and she trusted in God to sustain her faith.

In what follows I hope you can get to know a bit more about Dorothy Day's life and discover, in her own words, why she has become a spiritual friend to so many of us.

Jim Allaire

HER DEEDS

Below are some interesting facts about Dorothy Day's life, many commonly known and others less so.

• Born in 1897, she was raised in a nominally Protestant family and became a Roman Catholic in 1928.
• One of her early memories was the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and how her mother offered help to quake victims.
• Her father was a sportswriter who covered racetrack news.
• She loved reading novels from early childhood on, and her favorite author was Fydor Dostoevsky.
• She rejected organized religion in college because she didn't see so-called "religious people" helping the poor.
• In the World War I period she was part of a circle of social radicals and literary types like Eugene O'Neill.
• She first went to jail with a group of suffragettes in 1917 who were demonstrating at the White House in favor of giving women voting rights.
• She had an abortion in a failed relationship when she was 22 years old.
• The birth of her daughter Tamar in 1927, within a common-law marriage, brought her great joy and happiness, and led to her final embrace of the Catholic faith.
• She was a single parent who supported herself as a free-lance journalist.
• She met Peter Maurin in 1932, in the midst of the Great Depression.
• The Catholic Worker newspaper appeared in May 1933 with 2,500 copies distributed by hand. Circulation grew to 190,000 by 1938, and dropped to 50,000 during World War II, largely because of the paper's pacifist stand. (Today's circulation is over 80,000.)
• The first House of Hospitality opened in 1933. Today over 130 Catholic Worker communities exist in thirty-two states and eight foreign countries.
• She maintained throughout her life that Peter Maurin, not she, started the Catholic Worker Movement. She called him a modern St. Francis who was responsible for completing her Catholic education.
• Her written work includes 8 books, 350 plus articles for journals and magazines, and over 1,000 articles for The Catholic Worker newspaper.
• A heavy smoker for years, she finally gave up the habit "cold turkey" after praying for several years for help in quitting.
• She went to daily Mass and weekly confession, and regularly went on religious retreats.
• She read the Bible at a time most Catholics didn't.
• She travelled long distances by bus. She carried a Bible, a missal, the Divine Office, and a jar of instant coffee on her hundreds of trips.
• She went to jail four times from 1955 to 1959 for acts of civil disobedience. She with others refused to take shelter during civil defense drills that simulated a nuclear attack on New York City.
• In 1955 she became a professed secular oblate of the Benedictine Abbey of St. Procopius.
• She and a group of women fasted for ten days in 1963 in Rome, at Vatican Council II, wanting the bishops to condemn all war. They did condemn nuclear war.
• She inspired Bob Gilliam of Winona in his conscientious objection. For which he went to prison. He later went to New York to work with Dorothy and The Catholic Worker paper.
• She was instrumental in founding Pax Christi USA.
• She was a prolific letter writer, including many years of correspondence with the monk Thomas Merton.
• She was a grandmother nine times, with one grandson going to Vietnam with the U.S. military during the war.
• She was a friend to bishops and cardinals, while being critical of the Church's wealth and support for war and war preparations.
• She went to India to speak to Mother Teresa's novices and received a cross from Mother Teresa worn by the Missionaries of Charity.
• Her last jailing was in 1969 at the age of 76 while protesting with Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers in California.
• She loved the beauty of the natural world and would seek out the quiet of a small beach cottage she owned on the shore of Staten Island.
• Her gravestone has engraved on it a design of loaves and fishes and thewords "Deo Gratias" ("thanks be to God").

HER WORDS

On how it all happened:

We were just sitting there talking when Peter Maurin came in.

We were just sitting there talking when lines of people began to form, saying, "We need bread." We could not say, "Go, be thou filled." If there were six small loaves and a few fishes, we had to divide them. There was always bread.

We were just sitting there talking and people moved in on us. Let those who can take it, take it. Some moved out and that made room for more. And somehow the walls expanded.

We were just sitting there talking and someone said, "Let's all go live on a farm." It was as casual as all that, I often think. It just came about. It just happened.

I found myself, a barren woman, the joyful mother of children. It is not easy always to be joyful, to keep in mind the duty of delight. The most significant thing about The Catholic Worker is poverty, some say.

The most significant thing is community, others say. We are not alone any more. But the final word is love. At times it has been, in the words of Father Zossima, a harsh and dreadful thing, and our very faith in love has been tried through fire.

We cannot love God unless we love each other, and to love we must know each other. We know Him in the breaking of bread, and we know each other in the breaking of bread, and we are not alone any more. Heaven is a banquet and life is a banquet, too, even with a crust, where there is companionship.

We have all known the long loneliness and we have learned that the only solution is love and that love comes with community. It all happened while we sat there talking, and it is still going on (The Long Loneliness).

On a revolution of the heart:

The greatest challenge of the day is: how to bring about a revolution of the heart, a revolution which has to start with each one of us? When we begin to take the lowest place, to wash the feet of others, to love our brothers with that burning love, that passion, which led to the Cross, then we can truly say, "Now I have begun" (Loaves and Fishes).

On the works of mercy:

The Corporal Works are to feed the hungry, to give drink to the thirsty, to clothe the naked, to ransom the captive, to harbor the harborless, to visit the sick, and to bury the dead.

When Peter Maurin talked about the necessity of practicing the Works of Mercy, he meant all of them. He envisioned Houses of Hospitality in poor parishes in every city of the country, where the precepts of Our Lord could be put into effect. He pointed out that we have turned to state responsibility through home relief, social legislation, and social security, that we no longer practice personal responsibility, but are repeating the words of the first murderer, "Am I my brother's keeper?"

The Works of Mercy are a wonderful stimulus to our growth in faith as well as love (The Commonweal, November 1949).

On the freedom to oppose:

Where are the heroes and the saints, who keep a clear vision of man's greatest gift, his freedom, to oppose not only the dictatorship of the proletariat, but also the dictatorship of the benevolent state, which takes possession of the family, and of the indigent, and claims our young for war? (The Catholic Worker, May 1953).

On thanksgiving:

During the summer when things were going hard in more ways than one, I grimly modified grace before meals: "We give Thee thanks, O Lord, for these Thy gifts, and for all our tribulations, from Thy bounty, through Christ our Lord, Amen." One could know of certain knowledge that tribulations were matters of thanksgiving; that we were indeed privileged to share in the suffering of Our Lord. So in this month of thanksgiving, we can be thankful for the trials of the past, the blessings of the present, and be heartily ready at the same time to embrace with joy any troubles the future may bring us (The Catholic Worker, January 1942).

On the long loneliness:

For years, when people talked with me about my youth, about my life in New York before I became a Catholic, they have always brought up the subject of my loneliness and my restlessness. I am to blame for the mention of loneliness, though I didn't mean the word as it has been taken by so many people.

I meant a spiritual hunger; that's what I had in mind- a loneliness that was in me, no matter how happy I was and how fulfilled in my personal life (quoted in A Radical Devotion by Robert Coles).

On her need for the Church:

No human creature could receive or contain so vast a flood of love and joy as I often felt after the birth of my child. With this came the need to worship, to adore. I had heard many say that they wanted to worship God in their own way and did not need a Church in which to praise Him, nor a body of people with whom to associate themselves. But I did not agree to this. My very experience as a radical, my whole make-up, led me to want to associate myself with others, with the masses, in loving and praising God (The Long Loneliness).

On the Little Way of St. Thérèse:

When a mother, a housewife, asks what she can do, one can only point to the way of St. Thérèse, that little way, so much misunderstood and so much despised. She did all for the love of God, even to putting up with the irritation in herself caused by the proximity of a nervous nun. She began with working for peace in her own heart, and willing to love where love was difficult, and so she grew in love, and increased the sum total of love in the world, not to speak of peace (The Catholic Worker,December 1965).

On having a Christ's room:

Every house should have a Christ's room. The coat which hangs in your closet belongs to the poor. If your brother comes to you hungry and you say, Go be thou filled, what kind of hospitality is that? It is no use turning people away to an agency, to the city or the state or the Catholic Charities. It is you yourself who must perform the Works of Mercy. Often you can only give the price of a meal, or a bed on the Bowery (The Catholic Worker, May 1947).

On the Mystical Body:

An understanding of the dogma of the Mystical Body is perhaps the greatest need of the present time. It is a further explanation of the Incarnation.

Christ is the head and we are the members. And the illness of injustice, hate, disunion, race hatred, prejudice, class war, selfishness, greed, nationalism, and war weaken this Mystical Body, just as the prayer and the sacrifices of countless of the faithful strengthen it.

St. Augustine says that we are all members or potential members of the Mystical Body of Christ. Therefore all men are our neighbors, and Christ told us that we should love our neighbor whether they be friend or enemy(The Catholic Worker, October 1939).

On poverty:

We need always to be thinking and writing about poverty, for if we are not among its victims its reality fades from us. We must talk about poverty, because people insulated by their own comfort lose sight of it. And maybe no one can be told; maybe they will have to experience it. Or maybe it is a grace which they must pray for. We usually get what we pray for, and maybe we are afraid to pray for it. And yet I am convinced that it is the grace we most need in this age of crisis, this time when expenditures reach into the billions to defend "our American way of life." Maybe this defense itself will bring down upon us the poverty we are afraid to pray for (The Catholic Worker, May 1952).

A response to the bombing of Pearl Harbor:

We will print the words of Christ who is with us always, even to the end of the world. "Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who persecute and calumniate you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven, who makes His sun rise on the good and the evil, and sends rain on the just and unjust."

We are still pacifists. Our manifesto is the Sermon on the Mount, which means that we will try to be peacemakers. Speaking for many of our conscientious objectors, we will not participate in armed warfare or in making munitions, or by buying government bonds to prosecute the war, or in urging others to these efforts (The Catholic Worker, January 1942).

On needs and wants:

I remember one of my young nieces coming home from school with a project book she was making. Her task was to furnish a home, to cut out all the things one would need in that home, and she pored over magazines, and cut out linoleum, furniture, kitchen sets, parlor sets, gadgets, and had a lovely time doing it. And all the while standards were being set up in her mind, desires were being stimulated to buy what the advertisers present and to get the job, to get the money, to buy what the advertisers present (The Catholic Worker, September 1953).

On persecution:

If we are not being persecuted there is something wrong with us. This is not having a persecution complex (The Catholic Worker, July-August 1961).

On responding to requests to speak:

For thirty-four years I have spent months of every year in traveling and speaking, and I never left our house of hospitality in New York, or one of our farms, without a wrench, without a sickness of having to go. And yet I was convinced that this was my vocation. Years ago, Father McSorley, of the Paulists, who was my spiritual advisor, had told me to go where I was asked (On Pilgrimage: The Sixties).

Resources

Books by Dorothy Day:

• From Union Square to Rome. Preservation of Faith Press, 1938. (Out of print but available online. See below)
• The Long Loneliness: The Autobiography of Dorothy Day. Harper & Row, 1952; Harper San Francisco, 1997.
• Thérèse. Fides, 1960; Templegate, 1979.
• Dorothy Day: Selected Writings. Orbis Books, 1992.
• Loaves and Fishes. Harper & Row, 1963; Orbis, 1997.

Books about Dorothy Day:

• Allaire, James & Rosemary Broughton. Praying with Dorothy Day. Saint Mary's Press, 1995.
• Forest, Jim. Love is the Measure: A Biography of Dorothy Day. New York: Paulist Press, 1986; Orbis, 1994.
• Miller, William D. Dorothy Day: A Biography. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1982.

Internet Resources:

• The Dorothy Day Library on the Web (at http://www.catholicworker.org/dorothyday) contains the text of her early autobiography From Union Square to Rome and over 100 articles from The Catholic Worker paper.
• The Catholic Worker Home Page (at http://www.cais.com/agf/cwindex.htm) contains biographical sketches of Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin, and information about the Catholic Worker Movement.
• The Catholic Worker Roundtable (at http://www.catholicworker.org/roundtable) contains essays about Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker Movement, and an annotated bibliography of her writings.