DOROTHY DAY
Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker movement, was born in
Brooklyn, New York, November 8, 1897. After surviving the San Francisco
earthquake in 1906, the Day family moved into a tenement flat in Chicago's
South Side. It was a big step down in the world made necessary because
John Day was out of work. Day's understanding of the shame people feel
when they fail in their efforts dated from this time.
It was in Chicago that Day began to form positive impressions of
Catholicism. Later in life she would recall her discovery of a friend's
mother, a devout Catholic, praying at the side of her bed. Without
embarrassment, she looked up at Day, told her where to find her daughter,
and returned to her prayers. "I felt a burst of love toward [her] that I
have never forgotten," Day recalled.
When John Day was appointed sports editor of a Chicago newspaper, the Day
family moved into a comfortable house on the North Side. Here Dorothy
began to read books that stirred her conscience. Upton Sinclair's novel,
The Jungle, inspired Day to take long walks in poor neighborhoods in
Chicago's South Side. It was the start of a life-long attraction to areas
many people avoid.
Day had a gift for finding beauty in the midst of urban desolation. Drab
streets were transformed by pungent odors: geranium and tomato plants,
garlic, olive oil, roasting coffee, bread and rolls in bakery ovens.
"Here," she said, "was enough beauty to satisfy me."
Day won a scholarship that brought her to the University of Illinois
campus at Urbana in the fall of 1914. But she was a reluctant scholar. Her
reading was chiefly in a radical social direction. She avoided campus
social life and insisted on supporting herself rather than live on money
from her father.
Dropping out of college two years later, she moved to New York where she
found a job as a reporter for The Call, the city's only socialist daily.
She covered rallies and demonstrations and interviewed people ranging from
butlers and butlers to labor organizers and revolutionaries.
She next worked for The Masses, a magazine that opposed American
involvement in the European war. In September, the Post Office rescinded
the magazine's mailing permit. Federal officers seized back issues,
manuscripts, subscriber lists and correspondence. Five editors were
charged with sedition.
In November 1917 Day went to prison for being one of forty women in front
of the White House protesting women's exclusion from the electorate.
Arriving at a rural workhouse, the women were roughly handled. The women
responded with a hunger strike. Finally they were freed by presidential
order.
Returning to New York, Day felt that journalism was a meager response to a
world at war. In the spring of 1918, she signed up for a nurse's training
program in Brooklyn.
Her conviction that the social order was unjust changed in no substantial
way from her adolescence until her death, though she never identified
herself with any political party.
Her religious development was a slower process. As a child she had
attended services at an Episcopal Church. As a young journalist in New
York, she would sometimes make late-at-night visits to St. Joseph's
Catholic Church on Sixth Avenue.
The Catholic climate of worship appealed to her. While she knew little
about Catholic belief, Catholic spiritual discipline fascinated her. She
saw the Catholic Church as "the church of the immigrants, the church of
the poor."
In 1922, in Chicago working as a reporter, she roomed with three young
women who went to Mass every Sunday and holy day and set aside time each
day for prayer. It was clear to her that "worship, adoration,
thanksgiving, supplication ... were the noblest acts of which we are
capable in this life."
Her next job was with a newspaper in New Orleans. Living near St. Louis
Cathedral, Day often attended evening Benediction services.
Back in New York in 1924, Day bought a beach cottage on Staten Island
using money from the sale of movie rights for a novel. She also began a
four-year common-law marriage with Forster Batterham, an English botanist
she had met through friends in Manhattan. Batterham was an anarchist
opposed to marriage and religion. In a world of such cruelty, he found it
impossible to believe in a God. By this time Day's belief in God was
unshakable. It grieved her that Batterham didn't sense God's presence
within the natural world. "How can there be no God," she asked, "when
there are all these beautiful things?" His irritation with her "absorption
in the supernatural" would lead them to quarrel.
What moved everything to a different plane for her was pregnancy. She had
been pregnant once before, years earlier, as the result of a love affair
with a journalist. This resulted in the great tragedy of her life, an
abortion. The affair and its awful aftermath had been the subject of her
novel, The Eleventh Virgin. The abortion, Day concluded in the years
following, had left her barren. "For a long time I had thought I could not
bear a child, and the longing in my heart for a baby had been growing,"she
confided in her autobiography, The Long Loneliness. "My home, I felt, was
not a home without one."
Her pregnancy with Batterham seemed to Day nothing less than a miracle.
But Batterham didn't believe in bringing children into such a violent
world.
On March 3, 1927, Tamar Theresa Day was born. Day could think of nothing
better to do with the gratitude that overwhelmed her than arrange Tamar's
baptism in the Catholic Church. "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."
After Tamar's baptism, there was a permanent break with Batterham. On
December 28, Day was received into the Catholic Church. A period commenced
in her life as she tried to find a way to bring together her religious
faith and her radical social values.
In the winter of 1932 Day travelled to Washington, D.C., to report for
Commonweal and America magazines on the Hunger March. Day watched the
protesters parade down the streets of Washington carrying signs calling
for jobs, unemployment insurance, old age pensions, relief for mothers and
children, health care and housing. What kept Day in the sidelines was that
she was a Catholic and the march had been organized by Communists, a party
at war with not only with capitalism but religion.
It was December 8, the Feast of the Immaculate Conception. After
witnessing the march, Day went to the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception
where she expressed her torment in prayer: "I offered up a special prayer,
a prayer which 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."
Back in her apartment in New York the next day, Day met Peter Maurin, a
French immigrant 20 years her senior.
Maurin, a former Christian Brother, had left France for Canada in 1908 and
later made his way to the United States. When he met Day, he was handyman
at a Catholic boys' camp in upstate New York, receiving meals, use of the
chaplain's library, living space in the barn and occasional pocket money.
During his years of wandering, Maurin had come to a Franciscan attitude,
embracing poverty as a vocation. His celibate, unencumbered life offered
time for study and prayer, out of which a vision had taken form of a
social order instilled with basic values of the Gospel "in which it would
be easier for men to be good." A born teacher, he found willing listeners,
among them George Shuster, editor of Commonweal magazine, who gave him
Day's address.
As remarkable as the providence of their meeting was Day's willingness to
listen. It seemed to her he was an answer to her prayers, someone who
could help her discover what she was supposed to do.
What Day should do, Maurin said, was start a paper to publicize Catholic
social teaching and promote steps to bring about the peaceful
transformation of society. Day readily embraced the idea. If family past,
work experience and religious faith had prepared her for anything, it was
this.
Day found that the Paulist Press was willing to print 2,500 copies of an
eight-page tabloid paper for $57. Her kitchen was the new paper's
editorial office. She decided to sell the paper for a penny a copy, "so
cheap that anyone could afford to buy it."
On May 1, the first copies of The Catholic Worker were handed out on Union
Square.
Few publishing ventures meet with such immediate success. By December,
100,000 copies were being printed each month. Readers found a unique voice
in The Catholic Worker. It expressed dissatisfaction with the social order
and took the side of labor unions, but its vision of the ideal future
challenged both urbanization and industrialism. It wasn't only radical but
religious. The paper didn't merely complain but called on its readers to
make personal responses.
For the first half year The Catholic Worker was only a newspaper, but as
winter approached, homeless people began to knock on the door. Maurin's
essays in the paper were calling for renewal of the ancient Christian
practice of hospitality to those who were homeless. In this way followers
of Christ could respond to Jesus' words: "I was a stranger and you took me
in." Maurin opposed the idea that Christians should take care only of
their friends and leave care of strangers to impersonal charitable
agencies. Every home should have its "Christ Room" and every parish a
house of hospitality ready to receive the "ambassadors of God."
Surrounded by people in need and attracting volunteers excited about ideas
they discovered in The Catholic Worker, it was inevitable that the editors
would soon be given the chance to put their principles into practice.
Day's apartment was the seed of many houses of hospitality to come.
By the wintertime, an apartment was rented with space for ten women, soon
after a place for men. Next came a house in Greenwich Village. In 1936 the
community moved into two buildings in Chinatown, but no enlargement could
possibly find room for all those in need. Mainly they were men, Day wrote,
"grey men, 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."
Many were surprised that, in contrast with most charitable centers, no one
at the Catholic Worker set about reforming them. A crucifix on the wall
was the only unmistakable evidence of the faith of those welcoming them.
The staff received only food, board and occasional pocket money.
The Catholic Worker became a national movement. By 1936 there were 33
Catholic Worker houses spread across the country. Due to the Depression,
there were plenty of people needing them.
The Catholic Worker attitude toward those who were welcomed wasn't always
appreciated. These weren't the "deserving poor," it was sometimes
objected, but drunkards and good-for-nothings. A visiting social worker
asked Day how long the "clients" were permitted to stay. "We let them stay
forever," Day answered with a fierce look in her eye. "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."
Some justified their objections with biblical quotations. Didn't Jesus say
that the poor would be with us always? "Yes," Day once replied, "but we
are not content that there should be so many of them. The class structure
is our making and by our consent, not God's, and we must do what we can to
change it. We are urging revolutionary change."
The Catholic Worker also experimented with farming communes. In 1935 a
house with a garden was rented on Staten Island. Soon after came Mary Farm
in Easton, Pennsylvania, a property finally given up because of strife
within the community. Another farm was purchased in upstate New York near
Newburgh. Called the Maryfarm Retreat House, it was destined for a longer
life. Later came the Maurin Peter Farm on Staten Island, which later moved
to Tivoli and then to Marlborough, both in the Hudson Valley. Day came to
see the vocation of the Catholic Worker was not so much to found model
agricultural communities as rural houses of hospitality.
What got Day into the most trouble was pacifism. A nonviolent way of life,
as she saw it, was at the heart of the Gospel. She took as seriously as
the early Church the command of Jesus to Maurin: "Put away your sword, for
whoever lives by the sword shall perish by the sword."
For many centuries the Catholic Church had accommodated itself to war.
Popes had blessed armies and preached Crusades. In the thirteenth century
St. Francis of Assisi had revived the pacifist way, but by the twentieth
century, it was unknown for Catholics to take such a position.
The Catholic Worker's first expression of pacifism, published in 1935, was
a dialogue between a patriot and Christ, the patriot dismissing Christ's
teaching as a noble but impractical doctrine. Few readers were troubled by
such articles until the Spanish Civil War in 1936. The fascist side, led
by Franco, presented itself as defender of the Catholic faith. Nearly
every Catholic bishop and publication rallied behind Franco. The Catholic
Worker, refusing to support either side in the war, lost two-thirds of its
readers.
Those backing Franco, Day warned early in the war, ought to "take another
look at recent events in [Nazi] Germany." She expressed anxiety for the
Jews and later was among the founders of the Committee of Catholics to
Fight Anti-Semitism.
Following Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor and America's declaration of war,
Dorothy announced that the paper would maintain its pacifist stand. "We
will print the words of Christ who is with us always," Day wrote. "Our
manifesto is the Sermon on the Mount." Opposition to the war, she added,
had nothing to do with sympathy for America's enemies. "We love our
country.... We have been the only country in the world where men and women
of all nations have taken refuge from oppression." But the means of action
the Catholic Worker movement supported were the works of mercy rather than
the works of war. She urged "our friends and associates to care for the
sick and the wounded, to the growing of food for the hungry, to the
continuance of all our works of mercy in our houses and on our farms."
Not all members of Catholic Worker communities agreed. Fifteen houses of
hospitality closed in the months following the U.S. entry into the war.
But Day's view prevailed. Every issue of TheCatholic Worker reaffirmed her
understanding of the Christian life. The young men who identified with the
Catholic Worker movement during the war generally spent much of the war
years either in prison, or in rural work camps. Some did unarmed military
service as medics.
The world war ended in 1945, but out of it emerged the Cold war, the
nuclear-armed "warfare state," and a series of smaller wars in which
America was often involved.
One of the rituals of life for the New York Catholic Worker community
beginning in the late 1950s was the refusal to participate in the state's
annual civil defense drill. Such preparation for attack seemed to Day part
of an attempt to promote nuclear war as survivable and winnable and to
justify spending billions on the military. When the sirens sounded June
15, 1955, Day was among a small group of people sitting in front of City
Hall. "In the name of Jesus, who is God, who is Love, we will not obey
this order to pretend, to evacuate, to hide. We will not be drilled into
fear. We do not have faith in God if we depend upon the Atom Bomb," a
Catholic Worker leaflet explained. Day described her civil disobedience as
an act of penance for America's use of nuclear weapons on Japanese cities.
The first year the dissidents were reprimanded. The next year Day and
others were sent to jail for five days. Arrested again the next year, the
judge jailed her for thirty days. In 1958, a different judge suspended
sentence. In 1959, Day was back in prison, but only for five days. Then
came 1960, when instead of a handful of people coming to City Hall Park,
500 turned up. The police arrested only a few, Day conspicuously not among
those singled out. In 1961 the crowd swelled to 2,000. This time 40 were
arrested, but again Day was exempted. It proved to be the last year of
dress rehearsals for nuclear war in New York.
Another Catholic Worker stress was the civil rights movement. As usual Day
wanted to visit people who were setting an example and therefore went to
Koinonia, a Christian agricultural community in rural Georgia where blacks
and whites lived peacefully together. The community was under attack when
Day visited in 1957. One of the community houses had been hit by
machine-gun fire and Ku Klux Klan members had burned crosses on community
land. Day insisted on taking a turn at the sentry post. Noticing an
approaching car had reduced its speed, she ducked just as a bullet struck
the steering column in front of her face. Concern with the Church's
response to war led Day to Rome during the Second Vatican Council, an
event Pope John XXIII hoped would restore "the simple and pure lines that
the face of the Church of Jesus had at its birth." In 1963 Day was one 50
"Mothers for Peace" who went to Rome to thank Pope John for his encyclical
Pacem in Terris. Close to death, the pope couldn't meet them privately,
but at one of his last public audiences blessed the pilgrims, asking them
to continue their labors.
In 1965, Day returned to Rome to take part in a fast expressing "our
prayer and our hope" that the Council would issue "a clear statement, `Put
away thy sword.'" Day saw the unpublicized fast as a "widow's mite" in
support of the bishops' effort to speak with a pure voice to the modern
world.
The fasters had reason to rejoice in December when the Constitution on the
Church in the Modern World was approved by the bishops. The Council's
described as "a crime against God and humanity" any act of war "directed
to the indiscriminate destruction of whole cities or vast areas with their
inhabitants." The Council called on states to make legal provision for
conscientious objectors while describing as "criminal" those who obey
commands which condemn the innocent and defenseless.
Acts of war causing "the indiscriminate destruction of ... vast areas with
their inhabitants" were the order of the day in regions of Vietnam under
intense U.S. bombardment in 1965 and the years following. Many young
Catholic Workers went to prison for refusing to cooperate with
conscription, while others did alternative service. Nearly everyone in
Catholic Worker communities took part in protests. Many went to prison for
acts of civil disobedience.
Probably there has never been a newspaper so many of whose editors have
been jailed for acts of conscience. Day herself was last jailed in 1973
for taking part in a banned picket line in support of farmworkers. She was
75.
Day lived long enough to see her achievements honored. In 1967, when she
made her last visit to Rome to take part in the International Congress of
the Laity, she found she was one of two Americans -- the other an
astronaut -- invited to receive Communion from the hands of Pope Paul VI.
On her 75th birthday the Jesuit magazine America devoted a special issue
to her, finding in her the individual who best exemplified "the aspiration
and action of the American Catholic community during the past forty
years." Notre Dame University presented her with its Laetare Medal,
thanking her for "comforting the afflicted and afflicting the
comfortable."
Among those who came to visit her when she was no longer able to travel
was Mother Theresa of Calcutta, who had once pinned on Day's dress the
cross worn only by fully professed members of the Missionary Sisters of
Charity.
Long before her death November 29, 1980, Day found herself regarded by
many as a saint. No words of hers are better known than her brusque
response, "Don't call me a saint. I don't want to be dismissed so easily."
Nonetheless, having herself treasured the memory and witness of many
saints, she is a candidate for inclusion in the calendar of saints. The
Claretians have launched an effort to have her canonized.
"If I have achieved anything in my life," she once remarked, "it is
because I have not been embarrassed to talk about God."
Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker movement, was born in
Brooklyn, New York, November 8, 1897. After surviving the San Francisco
earthquake in 1906, the Day family moved into a tenement flat in Chicago's
South Side. It was a big step down in the world made necessary because
John Day was out of work. Day's understanding of the shame people feel
when they fail in their efforts dated from this time.
It was in Chicago that Day began to form positive impressions of
Catholicism. Later in life she would recall her discovery of a friend's
mother, a devout Catholic, praying at the side of her bed. Without
embarrassment, she looked up at Day, told her where to find her daughter,
and returned to her prayers. "I felt a burst of love toward [her] that I
have never forgotten," Day recalled.
When John Day was appointed sports editor of a Chicago newspaper, the Day
family moved into a comfortable house on the North Side. Here Dorothy
began to read books that stirred her conscience. Upton Sinclair's novel,
The Jungle, inspired Day to take long walks in poor neighborhoods in
Chicago's South Side. It was the start of a life-long attraction to areas
many people avoid.
Day had a gift for finding beauty in the midst of urban desolation. Drab
streets were transformed by pungent odors: geranium and tomato plants,
garlic, olive oil, roasting coffee, bread and rolls in bakery ovens.
"Here," she said, "was enough beauty to satisfy me."
Day won a scholarship that brought her to the University of Illinois
campus at Urbana in the fall of 1914. But she was a reluctant scholar. Her
reading was chiefly in a radical social direction. She avoided campus
social life and insisted on supporting herself rather than live on money
from her father.
Dropping out of college two years later, she moved to New York where she
found a job as a reporter for The Call, the city's only socialist daily.
She covered rallies and demonstrations and interviewed people ranging from
butlers and butlers to labor organizers and revolutionaries.
She next worked for The Masses, a magazine that opposed American
involvement in the European war. In September, the Post Office rescinded
the magazine's mailing permit. Federal officers seized back issues,
manuscripts, subscriber lists and correspondence. Five editors were
charged with sedition.
In November 1917 Day went to prison for being one of forty women in front
of the White House protesting women's exclusion from the electorate.
Arriving at a rural workhouse, the women were roughly handled. The women
responded with a hunger strike. Finally they were freed by presidential
order.
Returning to New York, Day felt that journalism was a meager response to a
world at war. In the spring of 1918, she signed up for a nurse's training
program in Brooklyn.
Her conviction that the social order was unjust changed in no substantial
way from her adolescence until her death, though she never identified
herself with any political party.
Her religious development was a slower process. As a child she had
attended services at an Episcopal Church. As a young journalist in New
York, she would sometimes make late-at-night visits to St. Joseph's
Catholic Church on Sixth Avenue.
The Catholic climate of worship appealed to her. While she knew little
about Catholic belief, Catholic spiritual discipline fascinated her. She
saw the Catholic Church as "the church of the immigrants, the church of
the poor."
In 1922, in Chicago working as a reporter, she roomed with three young
women who went to Mass every Sunday and holy day and set aside time each
day for prayer. It was clear to her that "worship, adoration,
thanksgiving, supplication ... were the noblest acts of which we are
capable in this life."
Her next job was with a newspaper in New Orleans. Living near St. Louis
Cathedral, Day often attended evening Benediction services.
Back in New York in 1924, Day bought a beach cottage on Staten Island
using money from the sale of movie rights for a novel. She also began a
four-year common-law marriage with Forster Batterham, an English botanist
she had met through friends in Manhattan. Batterham was an anarchist
opposed to marriage and religion. In a world of such cruelty, he found it
impossible to believe in a God. By this time Day's belief in God was
unshakable. It grieved her that Batterham didn't sense God's presence
within the natural world. "How can there be no God," she asked, "when
there are all these beautiful things?" His irritation with her "absorption
in the supernatural" would lead them to quarrel.
What moved everything to a different plane for her was pregnancy. She had
been pregnant once before, years earlier, as the result of a love affair
with a journalist. This resulted in the great tragedy of her life, an
abortion. The affair and its awful aftermath had been the subject of her
novel, The Eleventh Virgin. The abortion, Day concluded in the years
following, had left her barren. "For a long time I had thought I could not
bear a child, and the longing in my heart for a baby had been growing,"she
confided in her autobiography, The Long Loneliness. "My home, I felt, was
not a home without one."
Her pregnancy with Batterham seemed to Day nothing less than a miracle.
But Batterham didn't believe in bringing children into such a violent
world.
On March 3, 1927, Tamar Theresa Day was born. Day could think of nothing
better to do with the gratitude that overwhelmed her than arrange Tamar's
baptism in the Catholic Church. "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."
After Tamar's baptism, there was a permanent break with Batterham. On
December 28, Day was received into the Catholic Church. A period commenced
in her life as she tried to find a way to bring together her religious
faith and her radical social values.
In the winter of 1932 Day travelled to Washington, D.C., to report for
Commonweal and America magazines on the Hunger March. Day watched the
protesters parade down the streets of Washington carrying signs calling
for jobs, unemployment insurance, old age pensions, relief for mothers and
children, health care and housing. What kept Day in the sidelines was that
she was a Catholic and the march had been organized by Communists, a party
at war with not only with capitalism but religion.
It was December 8, the Feast of the Immaculate Conception. After
witnessing the march, Day went to the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception
where she expressed her torment in prayer: "I offered up a special prayer,
a prayer which 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."
Back in her apartment in New York the next day, Day met Peter Maurin, a
French immigrant 20 years her senior.
Maurin, a former Christian Brother, had left France for Canada in 1908 and
later made his way to the United States. When he met Day, he was handyman
at a Catholic boys' camp in upstate New York, receiving meals, use of the
chaplain's library, living space in the barn and occasional pocket money.
During his years of wandering, Maurin had come to a Franciscan attitude,
embracing poverty as a vocation. His celibate, unencumbered life offered
time for study and prayer, out of which a vision had taken form of a
social order instilled with basic values of the Gospel "in which it would
be easier for men to be good." A born teacher, he found willing listeners,
among them George Shuster, editor of Commonweal magazine, who gave him
Day's address.
As remarkable as the providence of their meeting was Day's willingness to
listen. It seemed to her he was an answer to her prayers, someone who
could help her discover what she was supposed to do.
What Day should do, Maurin said, was start a paper to publicize Catholic
social teaching and promote steps to bring about the peaceful
transformation of society. Day readily embraced the idea. If family past,
work experience and religious faith had prepared her for anything, it was
this.
Day found that the Paulist Press was willing to print 2,500 copies of an
eight-page tabloid paper for $57. Her kitchen was the new paper's
editorial office. She decided to sell the paper for a penny a copy, "so
cheap that anyone could afford to buy it."
On May 1, the first copies of The Catholic Worker were handed out on Union
Square.
Few publishing ventures meet with such immediate success. By December,
100,000 copies were being printed each month. Readers found a unique voice
in The Catholic Worker. It expressed dissatisfaction with the social order
and took the side of labor unions, but its vision of the ideal future
challenged both urbanization and industrialism. It wasn't only radical but
religious. The paper didn't merely complain but called on its readers to
make personal responses.
For the first half year The Catholic Worker was only a newspaper, but as
winter approached, homeless people began to knock on the door. Maurin's
essays in the paper were calling for renewal of the ancient Christian
practice of hospitality to those who were homeless. In this way followers
of Christ could respond to Jesus' words: "I was a stranger and you took me
in." Maurin opposed the idea that Christians should take care only of
their friends and leave care of strangers to impersonal charitable
agencies. Every home should have its "Christ Room" and every parish a
house of hospitality ready to receive the "ambassadors of God."
Surrounded by people in need and attracting volunteers excited about ideas
they discovered in The Catholic Worker, it was inevitable that the editors
would soon be given the chance to put their principles into practice.
Day's apartment was the seed of many houses of hospitality to come.
By the wintertime, an apartment was rented with space for ten women, soon
after a place for men. Next came a house in Greenwich Village. In 1936 the
community moved into two buildings in Chinatown, but no enlargement could
possibly find room for all those in need. Mainly they were men, Day wrote,
"grey men, 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."
Many were surprised that, in contrast with most charitable centers, no one
at the Catholic Worker set about reforming them. A crucifix on the wall
was the only unmistakable evidence of the faith of those welcoming them.
The staff received only food, board and occasional pocket money.
The Catholic Worker became a national movement. By 1936 there were 33
Catholic Worker houses spread across the country. Due to the Depression,
there were plenty of people needing them.
The Catholic Worker attitude toward those who were welcomed wasn't always
appreciated. These weren't the "deserving poor," it was sometimes
objected, but drunkards and good-for-nothings. A visiting social worker
asked Day how long the "clients" were permitted to stay. "We let them stay
forever," Day answered with a fierce look in her eye. "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."
Some justified their objections with biblical quotations. Didn't Jesus say
that the poor would be with us always? "Yes," Day once replied, "but we
are not content that there should be so many of them. The class structure
is our making and by our consent, not God's, and we must do what we can to
change it. We are urging revolutionary change."
The Catholic Worker also experimented with farming communes. In 1935 a
house with a garden was rented on Staten Island. Soon after came Mary Farm
in Easton, Pennsylvania, a property finally given up because of strife
within the community. Another farm was purchased in upstate New York near
Newburgh. Called the Maryfarm Retreat House, it was destined for a longer
life. Later came the Maurin Peter Farm on Staten Island, which later moved
to Tivoli and then to Marlborough, both in the Hudson Valley. Day came to
see the vocation of the Catholic Worker was not so much to found model
agricultural communities as rural houses of hospitality.
What got Day into the most trouble was pacifism. A nonviolent way of life,
as she saw it, was at the heart of the Gospel. She took as seriously as
the early Church the command of Jesus to Maurin: "Put away your sword, for
whoever lives by the sword shall perish by the sword."
For many centuries the Catholic Church had accommodated itself to war.
Popes had blessed armies and preached Crusades. In the thirteenth century
St. Francis of Assisi had revived the pacifist way, but by the twentieth
century, it was unknown for Catholics to take such a position.
The Catholic Worker's first expression of pacifism, published in 1935, was
a dialogue between a patriot and Christ, the patriot dismissing Christ's
teaching as a noble but impractical doctrine. Few readers were troubled by
such articles until the Spanish Civil War in 1936. The fascist side, led
by Franco, presented itself as defender of the Catholic faith. Nearly
every Catholic bishop and publication rallied behind Franco. The Catholic
Worker, refusing to support either side in the war, lost two-thirds of its
readers.
Those backing Franco, Day warned early in the war, ought to "take another
look at recent events in [Nazi] Germany." She expressed anxiety for the
Jews and later was among the founders of the Committee of Catholics to
Fight Anti-Semitism.
Following Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor and America's declaration of war,
Dorothy announced that the paper would maintain its pacifist stand. "We
will print the words of Christ who is with us always," Day wrote. "Our
manifesto is the Sermon on the Mount." Opposition to the war, she added,
had nothing to do with sympathy for America's enemies. "We love our
country.... We have been the only country in the world where men and women
of all nations have taken refuge from oppression." But the means of action
the Catholic Worker movement supported were the works of mercy rather than
the works of war. She urged "our friends and associates to care for the
sick and the wounded, to the growing of food for the hungry, to the
continuance of all our works of mercy in our houses and on our farms."
Not all members of Catholic Worker communities agreed. Fifteen houses of
hospitality closed in the months following the U.S. entry into the war.
But Day's view prevailed. Every issue of TheCatholic Worker reaffirmed her
understanding of the Christian life. The young men who identified with the
Catholic Worker movement during the war generally spent much of the war
years either in prison, or in rural work camps. Some did unarmed military
service as medics.
The world war ended in 1945, but out of it emerged the Cold war, the
nuclear-armed "warfare state," and a series of smaller wars in which
America was often involved.
One of the rituals of life for the New York Catholic Worker community
beginning in the late 1950s was the refusal to participate in the state's
annual civil defense drill. Such preparation for attack seemed to Day part
of an attempt to promote nuclear war as survivable and winnable and to
justify spending billions on the military. When the sirens sounded June
15, 1955, Day was among a small group of people sitting in front of City
Hall. "In the name of Jesus, who is God, who is Love, we will not obey
this order to pretend, to evacuate, to hide. We will not be drilled into
fear. We do not have faith in God if we depend upon the Atom Bomb," a
Catholic Worker leaflet explained. Day described her civil disobedience as
an act of penance for America's use of nuclear weapons on Japanese cities.
The first year the dissidents were reprimanded. The next year Day and
others were sent to jail for five days. Arrested again the next year, the
judge jailed her for thirty days. In 1958, a different judge suspended
sentence. In 1959, Day was back in prison, but only for five days. Then
came 1960, when instead of a handful of people coming to City Hall Park,
500 turned up. The police arrested only a few, Day conspicuously not among
those singled out. In 1961 the crowd swelled to 2,000. This time 40 were
arrested, but again Day was exempted. It proved to be the last year of
dress rehearsals for nuclear war in New York.
Another Catholic Worker stress was the civil rights movement. As usual Day
wanted to visit people who were setting an example and therefore went to
Koinonia, a Christian agricultural community in rural Georgia where blacks
and whites lived peacefully together. The community was under attack when
Day visited in 1957. One of the community houses had been hit by
machine-gun fire and Ku Klux Klan members had burned crosses on community
land. Day insisted on taking a turn at the sentry post. Noticing an
approaching car had reduced its speed, she ducked just as a bullet struck
the steering column in front of her face. Concern with the Church's
response to war led Day to Rome during the Second Vatican Council, an
event Pope John XXIII hoped would restore "the simple and pure lines that
the face of the Church of Jesus had at its birth." In 1963 Day was one 50
"Mothers for Peace" who went to Rome to thank Pope John for his encyclical
Pacem in Terris. Close to death, the pope couldn't meet them privately,
but at one of his last public audiences blessed the pilgrims, asking them
to continue their labors.
In 1965, Day returned to Rome to take part in a fast expressing "our
prayer and our hope" that the Council would issue "a clear statement, `Put
away thy sword.'" Day saw the unpublicized fast as a "widow's mite" in
support of the bishops' effort to speak with a pure voice to the modern
world.
The fasters had reason to rejoice in December when the Constitution on the
Church in the Modern World was approved by the bishops. The Council's
described as "a crime against God and humanity" any act of war "directed
to the indiscriminate destruction of whole cities or vast areas with their
inhabitants." The Council called on states to make legal provision for
conscientious objectors while describing as "criminal" those who obey
commands which condemn the innocent and defenseless.
Acts of war causing "the indiscriminate destruction of ... vast areas with
their inhabitants" were the order of the day in regions of Vietnam under
intense U.S. bombardment in 1965 and the years following. Many young
Catholic Workers went to prison for refusing to cooperate with
conscription, while others did alternative service. Nearly everyone in
Catholic Worker communities took part in protests. Many went to prison for
acts of civil disobedience.
Probably there has never been a newspaper so many of whose editors have
been jailed for acts of conscience. Day herself was last jailed in 1973
for taking part in a banned picket line in support of farmworkers. She was
75.
Day lived long enough to see her achievements honored. In 1967, when she
made her last visit to Rome to take part in the International Congress of
the Laity, she found she was one of two Americans -- the other an
astronaut -- invited to receive Communion from the hands of Pope Paul VI.
On her 75th birthday the Jesuit magazine America devoted a special issue
to her, finding in her the individual who best exemplified "the aspiration
and action of the American Catholic community during the past forty
years." Notre Dame University presented her with its Laetare Medal,
thanking her for "comforting the afflicted and afflicting the
comfortable."
Among those who came to visit her when she was no longer able to travel
was Mother Theresa of Calcutta, who had once pinned on Day's dress the
cross worn only by fully professed members of the Missionary Sisters of
Charity.
Long before her death November 29, 1980, Day found herself regarded by
many as a saint. No words of hers are better known than her brusque
response, "Don't call me a saint. I don't want to be dismissed so easily."
Nonetheless, having herself treasured the memory and witness of many
saints, she is a candidate for inclusion in the calendar of saints. The
Claretians have launched an effort to have her canonized.
"If I have achieved anything in my life," she once remarked, "it is
because I have not been embarrassed to talk about God."