Dorothy Day was a journalist who worked on behalf of the poor and the homeless. She was cofounder of the Catholic Worker Movement, a nonviolent pacifist crusade. Dorothy has been named a “servant of God” by the Catholic Church and has been proposed for sainthood.
Dorothy Day was born on November 8, 1897, in Brooklyn, New York. She was the middle child in a family of five children. Day had two older brothers, Donald and Sam Houston; a sister, Della; and a younger brother named John.
John, Dorothy’s father, was a newspaper reporter who had been raised in Tennessee. As a southerner, John believed deeply in traditional values such as conventional roles for men and women. He could also be prejudiced against people. Even as a child, this bothered Day.
Day’s mother, Grace, held similar views. She believed girls should behave as “proper” young ladies. From the time Day was very young, she was an independent thinker, often quietly disagreeing with her parents’ ways of seeing the world. Day’s siblings accepted their sister for the individual she was.
Day and her younger sister
When Day was six years old, her father was offered a job as a sports writer for a newspaper in San Francisco. Day and her family moved from the tree-lined sidewalks of Brooklyn to the city streets of Oakland, California. In 1906, when the San Francisco earthquake struck, the newspaper offices where John worked were devastated. The earthquake left many people homeless among its rubble. Though a lot of the city’s residents were destitute, the earthquake had a positive effect. Day was keenly aware of how so many kindhearted women and men helped those in need, especially homeless families. She wanted to help, too. But at age nine, there wasn’t much she could do to assist others who were forced to sleep on the streets and beg for food. The memory of those days stayed with her.
Devastation after the 1906 earthquake
The earthquake had affected California’s economy. As a result, John lost his job and was forced to look for work. He moved his family to Chicago’s South Side, where he remained out of work. The Day family could only afford to rent a tenement apartment. Living among the poor had a profound influence on Day. She saw firsthand how being out of work impacted her parents, and how poverty shaped their existence and the lives of her neighbors.
Day began to become interested in religion. Her parents rarely went to church and had no strong religious convictions or beliefs. Day was different. She started to read the Bible faithfully. When she turned ten, she attended an Episcopalian church at the urging of the church rector, who convinced Day’s mother to let her sons join the church choir.
One day, she went to visit a friend. The other girl was a devout Catholic. Looking for her friend, Day saw the girl’s mother kneeling at her bedside, praying intently. The mother heard Day’s quiet footsteps and looked up from her praying. She smiled at Day, pointed to the room where her daughter could be found, and quickly returned to her prayers. In remembering that moment, Day recalled that she felt a burst of love. This experience shaped Day’s early impressions of the Catholic religion and its practices. Despite her father’s dislike of Catholics, Day liked what little she knew about Catholicism at that time.
At the same time, Day became an avid reader. She loved the library on Chicago’s South Side. Her favorite books were the ones that featured stories about people who suffered adverse conditions, but who fought to overcome them. She especially liked the book Les Misérables by Victor Hugo, a story that highlights the virtues and values of the poor.
After months of searching for work as a journalist, Day’s father was finally hired as the sports editor for a Chicago newspaper. John was now making a very good salary. Day and her family packed up their belongings and moved from their tiny apartment in one of Chicago’s poorest sections to a comfortable house on the North Side, a part of town where middle-class families lived.
John and Grace were glad to be out of their tenement building. But Day missed her friends and the people from her former neighborhood, as well as her church. She also missed the sense of community that was found on the South Side, where families of very limited means helped one another and received solace from those who came to lend a helping hand.
Day was now a teenager. She poured her energy into reading more of the Bible and other books that addressed issues of conscience and morality. One of her favorite authors was Peter Kropotkin, a philosopher, who believed in communism. Kropotkin’s ideas about a society free of a central government, and influenced by the workers, made an impression on Day.
The works of author Upton Sinclair also inspired Day. After reading The Jungle, about an immigrant who discovers the benefits of socialism, Day felt compelled to return to Chicago’s South Side. She wanted to help the people who had once been her neighbors, and to bring a fresh perspective to parts of the city where some of the toughest men didn’t dare to wander. Some parts of town were desolate. The cracked streets and sidewalks smelled bad and were littered with trash. As the neighborhood’s poverty increased, crime began to fester. Some regarded this place as its own kind of jungle, similar to the conditions described in Sinclair’s book.
None of this bothered Day. In her eyes, the South Side’s challenges presented an opportunity. The only thing the neighborhood and its residents needed, Day reasoned, was a caring soul who could show them some love. Spending time in a downtrodden neighborhood taught Day an important lesson about peace. Day came to believe that when human beings are made to suffer because of economic and social conditions, they become restless and discontented. To Day’s way of thinking, poverty could lead to violence. Violence could lead to war. One of the ways to maintain a peaceful society, Day concluded, would be to ensure that everyone had the same resources. This concept was known as socialism. Day was becoming a socialist and a pacifist. She embraced fairness as a means for achieving peace among people.
In addition to being strong-minded, Day was smart. She received a college scholarship to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she enrolled in 1914. Soon after Day arrived at college, she didn’t want to continue. She wasn’t like many of the other young women at school. They enjoyed reading the classics. She liked books about radicals who spoke out against popular opinions.
At college, Day avoided parties and kept to herself much of the time. When her father sent her money for expenses, she refused it. When it came time to buy clothes and shoes, Day went to local thrift stores for her dresses so she could afford them with the money she earned as a maid to support herself. Classes at school were only partially interesting to her. Rather than studying for tests and writing papers, Day was interested in using her knowledge to help people in need.
After two years at the University of Illinois, Day quit school and headed to New York City. Day settled on New York’s Lower East Side, a neighborhood similar to her South Side neighborhood in Chicago. She felt immediately at home among the diversity and culture of what some referred to as New York’s “slum hole.”
Pushcart peddlers in the Lower East Side, New York City
Day was hired as a reporter for New York’s only socialist daily newspaper, the New York Call. As a female journalist working for a publication that promoted fairness among people from all social, political, and economic backgrounds, Day was rare. To research an article, she would sometimes have to visit the most sordid places in town to interview poor men and women who slept on the streets. It was important to Day to get their perspective. She also interviewed wealthy business owners, labor organizers, maids, government officials, artists, and revolutionaries.
The New York Call gave Day a forum for expressing her socialist views and bringing attention to the unjust disparities among people of different social classes. She started out earning $5 per week as a reporter, but was soon bringing home $12 every Friday. Day’s raise in pay was due to her hard work and the quality of the articles she’d written.
Day also brought her reporting skills to a magazine called The Masses, a publication that opposed war and promoted unity among people. More than ever, Day was committed to peace. She joined the Fellowship of Reconciliation, a Christian pacifist organization, a group in which she would remain a loyal member for her entire life.
In 1917, Day was twenty years old. She considered herself deserving of the same rights and privileges as men. Day found a group of forty like-minded women and joined them in a protest in front of the White House. These outspoken suffragettes were on a mission. Their picket signs shouted their discontent — they wanted equal rights for women now! The suffragettes also opposed the harsh treatment other women freedom fighters got when they were sent to jail for participating in public demonstrations.
Law enforcement officers arrested Day and her friends and sent them to a workhouse in the country, far away from President Woodrow Wilson’s front door. The suffragettes were treated terribly. To protest, they went on a hunger strike, refusing to eat until justice was won. The women’s right to vote would not be enacted until 1920, but Day and her group had been heard. The president sent word to free them. Each of the women went home even more determined to keep going in their pursuit of justice.
Day returned to New York, where she trained to become a nurse. Her plan was to aid wounded soldiers who had returned to America after fighting in World War I in Europe. If she could not fully heal the scourge of discrimination, she would help heal the injuries of war.
To Day, part of healing any sickly condition is the power of prayer. Day started to attend late-night services at St. Joseph’s Catholic Church on Sixth Avenue in New York City. Catholicism affected her soul in mighty ways. Its values appealed to Day’s socialist beliefs. She viewed the Catholic Church as “the church of the immigrant, the church of the poor.”
Day as a young woman
Day eventually left New York to pursue journalism work back in Chicago. She found a job as a reporter and rented an apartment with three other women, all of them devout Catholics. Recalling that special time in her life, Day later said that “worship, adoration, thanksgiving, and supplication . . . were the noblest acts of which we are capable in this life.”
It was 1932. America had now entered the Great Depression and jobs were scarce. As a result of the troubled economy, more people were becoming homeless and going hungry. Day traveled to Washington, D.C., to report on a hunger march that had been launched by a Communist organization. She was filled with empathy as she watched the protesters. They marched proudly, while holding signs calling out for jobs, fair housing for everyone, aid for poor mothers and their children, and proper health care.
Day wanted to join the demonstrators. At the same time, though, she was reluctant to jump into the march. The Communist group that had organized the parade was opposed to religion. As a Catholic, Day was not sure she wanted to support a march that was being led by men and women who were against something she held so dear. But the socialist in Day was very eager to help stop homelessness and hunger.
Day stood on the sidelines, conflicted. With her journalist’s notepad in one hand and her pencil in the other, she uttered a prayer for guidance. Later that day, Day went to one of the largest Catholic churches in America — Washington, D.C.’s Shrine of the Immaculate Conception. Years later, when Day recalled that evening, she said that she prayed hard, offering up a plea that “came with tears and anguish, that some way would open up for me to use what talents I possessed for my fellow workers, for the poor.”
It didn’t take long for Day’s prayers to be answered. The very next day, she met Peter Maurin, a Frenchman who had once been a monk and who still lived a life of simplicity. Maurin and Day shared many of the same values. He was a pacifist who believed deeply in social change through religion and moral conviction. It was as if Maurin had known Day for many years. He told Day that she should start a newspaper to promote Catholic teachings, socialist ideas, and peace. Without a doubt, Day knew that this was what she was meant to do.
Peter Maurin
Day went home, cleared off her kitchen table, and made it her editorial desk. Her kitchen was now the headquarters for her new venture, a publication called the Catholic Worker. On May 1, 1933, the newspaper’s first eight-page issue was published. Each copy was sold for a penny, so that anyone could afford to buy it. To make sure the Catholic Worker was reaching as many people as possible, Day went to New York’s Union Square and handed out copies.
Her hard work paid off. By December 1933, one hundred thousand copies of the paper were being printed each month. Readers were embracing Day’s and Maurin’s ideas. The Catholic Worker was a religious paper, but packed in its pages were articles about how, even in the midst of the Depression, people could affect things for the better by taking radical approaches to social change, supporting workers, and making the growth in cities serve individuals. For example, rather than individuals seeking opportunities for themselves, people could rally together and push for better conditions for all. The newspaper reminded readers that a group could wield more power than one person alone.
Soon the Catholic Worker was regarded as more than just a newspaper. It was deemed a call to action. The commentary in the publication did more than bemoan the state of society — it prompted people to take charge by doing something about the problems of the day, rather than complaining about the challenges they faced. Readers from many religions and social classes found its contents intriguing. By 1935, Day had expanded the Catholic Worker’s editorial philosophy to include pacifism as one of its core virtues. In her articles, Day told readers that pacifism was an important aspect of Christianity. Through her writings, she shared the beliefs of Indian peace leader Mahatma Gandhi, citing that Gandhi’s philosophies would help “in our struggle to build a spirit of nonviolence” in society.
The Catholic Worker’s articles were so informative and helpful that they drew people to Day’s front door. Peter Maurin had written several essays for the paper, which highlighted the Christian values of hospitality, charity, and service, especially for the homeless. In his writings, he underscored the Christian idea that every home should have a “Christ Room,” a place that was designated for “ambassadors of God.” This meant that all men and women, no matter how low they had fallen personally or financially, were entitled to a place that would welcome them. Volunteers showed up in Day’s kitchen eager to help her and Maurin promote their mission. At the same time, homeless women, men, and families came knocking. Day allowed them to bathe, gave them clothes and food, and prayed for their well-being. Day’s apartment was an early example of what a homeless shelter is today. She extended this idea by renting additional apartments and homes throughout the city, where homeless people could stay until they were able to support themselves.
Day and her daughter, Tamar
This concept grew. By the late 1930s, there were “Catholic Worker Houses of Hospitality” throughout America. Not a single person was ever denied entry to one of these safe havens. As more and more people were helped, Day’s shelters spread. What was once simply a newspaper had expanded to become a worldwide pacifist initiative known as the Catholic Worker Movement.
The movement spread to Canada and the United Kingdom. By 1941, there were more than thirty Catholic Worker communities across the globe. Today, there are more than one hundred Catholic Worker facilities in places such as Australia, Germany, Mexico, New Zealand, and Sweden.
As the leader of a pacifist organization, Day would not support the concept of war. She and Maurin made their views known in the Catholic Worker. Their first example of this was in 1936 during the Spanish Civil War. During the war, General Francisco Franco, a dictator, was a keen defender of the Catholic faith. Many Catholics stood by Franco because of his strong Catholic beliefs. Day compared those who advocated for Franco to those who were supporting the atrocities inflicted by the Nazis in Germany. She was very vocal about her concerns for Jews who were undergoing oppression. To strengthen her views, Day would later be one of the founders of the Committee of Catholics to Fight Anti-Semitism. The Catholic Worker was criticized for not supporting Franco’s position. This caused a decline in the Catholic Worker’s audience. Two-thirds of the Catholic Worker’s readers turned their backs on the newspaper by not purchasing it.
In 1941, when America entered World War II after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Day and her staff clung to their pacifist ideals, making it clear that they did not believe in war under any circumstances. This was a very unpopular position, as it was seen as anti-patriotic. Some of Day’s followers began to separate themselves from her and the Catholic Worker movement. Volunteer workers who had once enthusiastically given their time to helping at Catholic Worker houses, all of a sudden stopped helping. They did not want to be associated with someone who was considered anti-American. With fewer workers lending their support, many Catholic Worker shelters in America were forced to close their doors, leaving homeless citizens with no place to live. Day tried to explain that her pacifist convictions didn’t mean she was in favor of America’s opponents, or that she was un-American. She told her detractors, “We love our country. . . . the only country in the world where men and women of all nations have taken refuge from oppression.”
After World War II, Day’s antiwar position stayed strong. During the 1950s, when the Cold War was beginning, New York State began a series of safety drills that trained people on what to do in the event of a nuclear attack. In a series of public protests during the mid and late 1950s, Day and her followers spoke out strongly against these exercises. They believed the drills instilled fear in people and promoted nuclear war as something that could be “won.” For those with strong religious convictions, fear was the opposite of true faith in God. Also, pacifists believed that “winning” a war was not winning at all; warfare was always a losing proposition.
A nuclear drill in a school, 1951
Day was jailed several times between 1955 and 1959 for leading demonstrations that were against Cold War policies. By 1960, the protest crowds had grown to hundreds of people who shared Day’s views. The marches had become louder, bigger, and harder to ignore. And they worked. In 1961, government authorities stopped the drills.
In 1963, Day was named one of the fifty “Mothers for Peace” representatives. As part of her citation, Day traveled to Rome to attend Pope John XXIII’s encyclical Pacem in Terris, a Latin term that means “Peace on Earth.” An aspect of this declaration was that the Catholic Church took a stand against war and made a pronouncement on behalf of human rights.
The Pope explained that conflicts “should not be resolved by recourse to arms, but rather by negotiation.” He underscored the importance of respect for human rights as central to Christian understanding. His decree made this clear.
Day was pleased to learn of the Catholic Church’s position on war and human rights. The Pacem in Terris indicated that the Church had embraced pacifism as part of its official doctrine. Many believe that Day’s hard work and determination over the years had contributed to this important proclamation.
In 1972, Day received the Pacem in Terris Peace and Freedom Award of the Interracial Council of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Davenport, Iowa, for her ongoing and unflagging commitment to pacifism.
Even as Day entered her seventies, she refused to slow down. She traveled to India, where she met the notable Roman Catholic nun and world-renowned missionary Mother Teresa. Day spent time with Mother Teresa as she ministered to the sick, the poor, and the hungry. This was most gratifying for Day, as Mother Teresa embodied all that Day stood for.
When Day was seventy-six years old, she joined labor leader Cesar Chavez and a group of activists in their justice crusade on behalf of farm fieldworkers in California. Day and the other demonstrators were arrested and put in jail for ten days.
Friends and colleagues encouraged Day to be mindful of her advancing age. By 1976, Day was seventy-nine years old. Her health had started to decline. On August 6, she gave her final public address at the Eucharistic Congress. The conference was held in Philadelphia to mark the Bicentennial of the United States. Day spoke with great conviction. She encouraged the conference attendees to spread love wherever they went.
Soon after the conference, Day suffered a heart attack. She died on November 29, 1980, in New York City.
Day as an older woman
There are several entities that are named in honor of Day’s tireless commitment to peace, unity, and equality for all people. These include childhood learning centers, housing organizations, and community service programs for the homeless. Dorothy Day is still under consideration to be named a saint — a fitting acknowledgment for someone who devoted her life to the service of others.