Dorothy Day (1897- 1980)

BY: John Dear

CREATED: September 7, 2010

Dorothy Day

(1897-1980)

Dorothy Day was born in Chicago on November 8, 1897. As a communist and journalist living in New York City’s Greenwich Village, she fought for labor rights, women’s rights and an end to the World War I. In 1927, after her daughter Tamar was born, she was filled with gratitude and received the gift of faith. She decided that the two of them should be baptized in the Church. In response, her partner promptly left her.

It was 1932, and Dorothy didn’t know what to do or how to be a radical Catholic Christian. While attending a march against hunger in Washington, D.C., she prayed that God would open up a way for her to practice her radical politics as a devout Catholic. Her prayer was answered in the person of Peter Maurin, a French peasant intellectual who was waiting for her back in New York. Within a few months, they founded the Catholic Worker Movement. Seventy five years later, the Catholic Worker still runs over 140 houses of hospitality for the homeless, publishes many newspapers, and manages a few farming communes.

For the rest of her life, until her death on November 29, 1980, Dorothy Day was the single most important voice on behalf of the Gospel of peace and justice in the North American Church. “Poverty is my vocation,” she once said, “to live as simply and as poorly as I can and never to cease talking and writing of poverty and destitution.” In her book Loaves and Fishes, she wrote: “I condemn poverty and I advocate it. Anything you do not need belongs to the poor…Once we begin not to worry about what kind of house we are living in, what kind of clothes we are wearing, once we give up the stupid recreation of the world, we have time which is priceless--to remember that we are all our brothers’ and sisters’ keepers and that we must not only care for their needs as far as we are immediately able, but we must try to build a better world.”

Robert Coles tells a classic story about his first visit with Dorothy Day in 1952. He entered the ramshackle Catholic Worker house on Mott Street in New York City to find the main room filled with tables and a large messy kitchen. Two people sat at one of the tables, one of them was Dorothy Day, the other was a drunk woman with a large, purple-red birthmark on her face who talked on and on nonsensically. All the while, Dorothy sat right there, listening intently, as Coles relates:

When would it end--the alcoholic ranting and the silent nodding, occasionally interrupted by a brief question, which only served, maddeningly, to wind up the already over talkative one rather than wind her down? Finally, silence fell upon the room. Dorothy Day asked the woman if she would mind an interruption. She got up and came over to me. She said, “Are you waiting to talk with one of us?” One of us: with those three words she cut through layers of self-importance, a lifetime of bourgeois privilege, and scraped the hard bone of pride. With those three words, so quietly and politely spoken, she had indirectly told me what the Catholic Worker Movement is all about and what she herself was like.

What made Dorothy Day a living saint, however, was not just her extraordinary charity work for the poor, but her determination to find the causes of poverty and change the system that leaves billions of people impoverished, which crucifies Christ all over again. She made the connection between poverty, injustice, and war. She demanded not only charity for the poor, but justice as well. She knew that the billions of dollars that should be spent on food, homes, healthcare, education, and jobs for the poor were spent instead on war and weapons. She realized that war not only made people poor and hungry, it killed them. Therefore she advocated the works of mercy, and also the works of peace and justice.

In her solidarity with the poor, she stood up to defend them against the evils of war, weapons, and injustice. She was arrested repeatedly throughout her life for civil disobedience against war and injustice. She even said that we can measure our discipleship only by how much trouble we are in for our stand for peace and justice. In the late 1950s, she joined a small group in New York City that refused to go underground during mandatory air-raid drills in preparation for a nuclear attack. Each year, the group repeated their civil disobedience and spent a month in prison. Then, in 1961, when 2,000 people refused to go underground, the air-raid drills were stopped. She supported those who resisted the Vietnam War, and famously proposed that the best resistance was to “fill the jails!” By 1972, at age 75, she was arrested in California for protesting with Cesar Chavez on behalf of exploited farm workers.

“All our talks about peace and the weapons of the Spirit are meaningless,” she wrote, “unless we try in every way to embrace voluntary poverty and not work in any position, any job, that contributes to war, not to take any job whose pay comes from the fear of war, or the atomic bomb.”

Dorothy consistently denounced every war during her lifetime, at a time when no other Catholic was even questioning the idea of war. She publicly denounced both World Wars, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and the U.S. wars in Central America. Instead, she upheld the unpopular, widely ignored Gospel mandate that we love our enemies, serve the poor, feed the hungry, house the homeless, and welcome Christ in the stranger. She advocated voluntary poverty, radical nonviolence, personalism, direct service of those in need, and public witnessing on behalf of the Gospel. Almost single-handedly she broke new ground for the Church. Her influence is far greater than we can measure.

“As we come to know the seriousness of the situation--the wars, the racism, the poverty, the nuclear weapons,” Dorothy Day once wrote, “we come to realize that things will not be changed simply by words or demonstrations. Rather it’s a question of living one’s life in a drastically different way.”

“Becoming a saint is the revolution,” Dorothy wrote. As the Church proceeds to canonize her, the rest of us need to take up her challenge and become saints like her--by serving Christ in the poor, resisting war, and advocating Christ’s reign of peace.

This stunning icon is based on a photo of Dorothy Day when she was in her thirties. She looks at us, questioning the way we love, inviting us to join her Gospel experiment, and summoning us to the holiness of voluntary poverty and creative nonviolence.

“All my prayer, my own suffering, my reading, my study would lead me to this conclusion, that love is a great and holy force and must be used as a spiritual weapon,” she wrote. “Love against hate. Suffering against violence. What is two thousand years in the history of the world? We have scarcely begun to love. We have scarcely begun to know Christ, to see him in others around us.”

In Loaves and Fishes, she names our challenge: “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 was the feet of others, to love our brothers and sisters with that burning love, that passion, which led to the cross, then we can truly say, ‘Now I have begun.’”

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This is an excerpt from “You Will Be My Witnesses” by John Dear, with icons by William Hart McNichols, (available from Orbis Books). For further information, see: www.fatherjohndear.org