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Dorothy Day
Love Your Neighbor
When Dorothy Day knelt at the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception and prayed that God would use her talents to help the poor, she had no idea that a nomadic socialist would provide the answer to her prayers. The next day, just back from reporting on the hunger march in Washington, DC, Dorothy answered a knock on her New York City apartment door. A stranger, the French immigrant and street soapbox philosopher Peter Maurin, stepped across the threshold and began speaking at once, almost as though “he were taking up a conversation where it had been left off,” Dorothy recalled later.1 Distracted by her daughter, who was ill with the measles, Dorothy only half listened to Maurin’s rambling speech, but she did glean four of his points loud and clear. Maurin wanted to found a radical, religious newspaper. He wanted to launch what he called “houses of hospitality” to care for the poor and the unemployed. He wanted to organize agrarian-based communities to shift America’s focus away from industrialization.
And he wanted Dorothy to lead all three initiatives.
Receiving “a Call, a Vocation, a Direction”
Dorothy was born into a family of journalists. Her father, John Day, reported on the racetracks and wrote a racing column for the New York Morning Telegraph. All but one of the five Day children grew up to become journalists. The family moved frequently during Dorothy’s early years, from Brooklyn to Oakland and finally to Chicago, after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake burned the newspaper that employed John Day to the ground. In Chicago they lived in a tenement over a tavern until her father found work again.
The Days were not religious—John was a self-proclaimed atheist, although he always carried a pocket Bible with him. As a result, Dorothy was not introduced to organized religion until the pastor of the neighborhood Episcopal church convinced John and his wife, Grace, to allow their children to attend services on Sunday mornings. Almost immediately Dorothy fell in love with the language of the Psalms, and the hymns filled her heart with a joy she had never before experienced.
Dorothy’s political tendencies took root during her last year of high school. Her brother Donald worked for a socialist newspaper, and Dorothy pored over each issue, engrossed in the work of the American labor movement. She was also mesmerized by Upton Sinclair’s description of Chicago’s stockyards and slaughterhouses in his novel The Jungle. Dorothy often walked her infant brother in his carriage along the grim West Side of Chicago, where she was surprised to find beauty in the midst of poverty: “The odor of geranium leaves, tomato plants, marigolds; the smell of lumber, of tar, of roasting coffee; the smell of good bread and rolls and coffee cake coming from the small German bakeries. Here was enough beauty to satisfy me.” Walking these streets as a young girl, she knew that “from then on my life was to be linked to theirs, their interests were to be mine: I had received a call, a vocation, a direction to my life.”2
Dorothy fought her religious inclinations for a long time. During her two years at the University of Illinois and, following that, her employment as a reporter at the New York socialist daily The Call and the antiwar magazine The Masses, she was surrounded by people who disdained organized religion and considered themselves atheists. Yet at the same time, Dorothy couldn’t bring herself to abandon God altogether. Bit by bit, she found herself drawn to the practice of worship, prayer, and Scripture reading. She told herself she read the Bible for its literary value, but when she roomed with three young Catholic women in Chicago, she also began to attend Mass with them on Sundays and on holy days.
In 1927, when her daughter Tamar was born, Dorothy’s longtime partner Forster Batterham, an anarchist and an atheist, objected to her desire to have the infant baptized in the Catholic Church. Dorothy held her ground: “I did not want my child to flounder as I had often floundered. I wanted to believe, and I wanted my child to believe, and if belonging to a Church would give her so inestimable a grace as faith in God, and the companionable love of the Saints, then the thing to do was to have her baptized a Catholic.”3 Five months later Dorothy returned to the same church for her own baptism, an act that marked the end of her relationship with Forster.
Despite her decision, Dorothy was wracked with guilt. The day after her baptism, as she kneeled during Mass, she felt like a hypocrite and a betrayer of the oppressed and the poor. “Here I was, going over to the opposition, because the Church was lined up with property, with the wealthy, with capitalism, with all the forces of reaction.” How could she balance such seeming disparity between the church itself and her personal drive for social justice? “How I longed to make a synthesis reconciling body and soul, this world and the next.”4
The answer to her questions came five years later, when a knock on the door revealed Peter Maurin on her doorstep. She wrote,
I felt keenly that God was more on the side of the hungry, the ragged, the unemployed, than on the side of the comfortable churchgoers who gave so little heed to the misery of the needy and the groaning of the poor. I had prayed that some way would open up for me to do something, to line myself up on their side, to work for them, so that I would no longer feel that I had been false to them in embracing my new-found faith. The appearance of Peter Maurin, I felt with deep conviction, was the result of my prayers.5
Radical Religion, Radical Hospitality
On May 1, 1933, part one of Maurin’s four-point plan came to fruition when 2,500 copies of the first issue of The Catholic Worker were printed and distributed for a penny a copy to the radicals and workers who crowded New York City’s Union Square to celebrate May Day. Dorothy had taken Maurin’s idea of launching a newspaper seriously. She produced the paper on a typewriter at the kitchen table in her Brooklyn apartment, scraping together fifty-seven dollars for printing by delaying payment on her utility bills.
By December, one hundred thousand copies of the paper were printed each month, and readers rallied behind The Catholic Worker’s unique voice and content, a melding of the radical and the religious. Soon immigrants, the unemployed, and the homeless appeared at Dorothy’s apartment, interested in helping with the paper. Stanley Vishnewski, a seventeen-year-old Lithuanian boy, ran errands and sold papers on street corners. When a shabby, unemployed man nicknamed Big Dan knocked on Dorothy’s door after walking the streets looking for work all day in the rain, he asked to soak his blistered feet in hot water, stayed for the night, and never left. Big Dan, with his booming voice and personable nature, sold more papers on the streets than anyone. Every person “employed” by the paper was a volunteer, working for nothing more than soup and bread.
When the paper’s editorial offices expanded into the former barbershop below Dorothy’s apartment, the staff began to serve lunch and offer accommodations to anyone who needed them. When The Catholic Worker moved into a larger building on Mott Street in 1936, which became its home for the next fourteen years, it officially became more than a newspaper. The second part of Maurin’s vision blossomed during the Depression, when hundreds of men formed breadlines outside the building every morning. Dorothy described the men as “grey . . . the color of lifeless trees and bushes and winter soil, who had in them as yet none of the green of hope, the rising sap of faith.”6
By the end of 1936 there were thirty-three Catholic Worker houses across the country. Dorothy was often criticized for helping those who came to the Catholic Worker for aid. She was accused of ignoring the “deserving poor” in favor of drunks and the lazy freeloaders. Readers often asked her how long the people were allowed to stay at the Catholic Worker. “We let them stay forever,” she replied. “They live with us, they die with us, and we give them a Christian burial. We pray for them after they are dead. Once they are taken in, they become members of the family. Or rather they always were members of the family. They are our brothers and sisters in Christ.”7
Striving for a New Social Order
Not all of the Catholic Worker’s initiatives were successful. While Maurin insisted that the organization needed to move toward supporting an agrarian-based society, the farming communes they founded on Staten Island and in Easton, Pennsylvania, were eventually abandoned due to strife between those who lived there.
The newspaper struggled as well during the Spanish Civil War of 1936. Dorothy, an ardent pacifist, refused to take sides in the war, despite the fact that the Catholic Church supported Francisco Franco, the fascist dictator of Spain. As a result, the paper lost two-thirds of its readers. Later, following America’s entry into World War II after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Dorothy announced that the paper would maintain its pacifist stand. “We will print the words of Christ who is with us always,” Dorothy wrote. “Our manifesto is the Sermon on the Mount.”8 Not all members of the Catholic Worker communities agreed. Fifteen houses of hospitality closed in the months following America’s entry into the war.
Likewise, during the Vietnam War, many young members in Catholic Worker communities were imprisoned for refusing to cooperate with conscription, while others did alternative service. Nearly everyone in the Catholic Worker communities took part in protests. Many went to prison for acts of civil disobedience, including Dorothy, who was arrested several times during her lifetime.
One of Dorothy’s last arrests was in 1973, when she was jailed in California for picketing at several vineyards in support of local grape pickers. She was frequently criticized by contributors to the newspaper, who wanted to ensure that their gifts would be used to feed the hungry rather than to publish what they considered propaganda. “Bread lines are not enough, hospices are not enough,” she responded. “I know we will always have men on the road. But we need communities of work, land for the landless, true farming communes, cooperatives and credit unions. . . . The heart hungers for the new social order wherein justice dwelleth.”9 For Dorothy, the Catholic Worker movement could never simply be about hospitality; it needed to be a movement of deep social change.
“Don’t Call Me a Saint”
Dorothy’s life was not squeaky-clean. She had an abortion when she was in her twenties. Shortly after, she married another man on the rebound, a union that lasted slightly over a year, and then lived with Forster for four years in a common-law marriage. Some have argued that she was a Communist as well, although that claim has been largely refuted. Despite her flaws, since her death in 1980 many within the Roman Catholic Church have insisted that Dorothy Day should be canonized as a saint.
Dorothy would have been the last person to accept the title of saint, or any title at all, for that matter. Throughout her life she defied labels and refused to be defined in a certain way or boxed into a particular category. “Don’t call me a saint,” she once quipped. “I don’t want to be dismissed so easily.”10 For Dorothy, sainthood didn’t require an elaborate canonization process; it was much simpler—and much more difficult—than that. “To put love into action, we must do all for the love of God,” she wrote in her journal. “It is out of our common lives, filled with ordinary actions, that we are supposed to increase in love, to become saints.”11
She took Jesus’ instructions to “love your neighbor as yourself” (Luke 10:27) to heart. She loved her neighbors day in and day out through the most ordinary of actions. Her neighbors ate what she ate. They sat at the same table. They slept where she slept, in beds and on couches down the hall. They used her bathroom and brushed their teeth at her sink. Their children played with her daughter. For Dorothy Day, there were no boundaries and no limitations on the definition of neighbor. Her neighbor was everyone, because in her eyes, every person was a brother or a sister in Christ.12