A Humbling Admission

Remember those awkward middle school photos where your hair is askew and your fashion is dreadful? Most of us have them, but why admit it or bother to remember? In my intellectual and Christian development, I have an embarrassing confession nearly on par with my middle school photos, but I must admit it in order to explain the motivation behind this post. Eight years ago, I was a young and idealistic college student who wanted to change the world. I was also determined to do so by Christian means, and by Christian, I meant my own fairly narrow Evangelical understanding of the faith. Knowing me, and my zeal to help the marginalized, one of my favorite English professors at Hillsdale recommended I read 20^th century Catholic authors Henri Nouwen and Dorothy Day. I’m ashamed to admit, but over the course of my sophomore through senior years, this professor suggested these authors not once, but several times; yet I politely (read: blithely) dismissed Dorothy Day as too much of a radical and socialist to be helpful. Never bothering to examine her life, I was sure that she was much too far left to be of any use to me as a role model. Now, a mere four years later, Henri Nouwen has become one of my very favorite authors, and Dorothy Day one of my heroes. I admire her commitment to the marginalized, love of writing, and deeply held convictions, and now must humbly admit: I was wrong. Do I agree with everything she said or did? No. Have I become a socialist? No. But then again, despite her vocal criticism of capitalism, she was not one either. As this post, and especially the following one will show, young and idealistic evangelicals, like me, have a lot to learn from the likes of Dorothy Day.

A Radical For God

A Catholic convert, radical, suffragette, civil rights activist, and pacifist, Dorothy Day was one of the most influential lay Catholics of the twentieth century. Her conversion to Catholicism consciously shaped her response to social justice and the issues of her day. Accused of being a Communist, Day’s concern for the poor and marginalized, as well as her commitment to pacifism, baffled many and made them uncomfortable.

Early Social Concern and Atheism

As a young girl, Day was drawn to the class-conscious fiction of Upton Sinclair and Jack London; she dreamt of writing books to convince readers of “the injustice of things as they were.”[1] While attending the University of Illinois, Day joined the Socialist party because she wanted “everyone to be kind” and “every home to be open to the lame.”[2] Interpreting religion as preaching “peace and meekness and joy” or rather, more plainly, “pie in the sky,” Day rejected it in favor of the Marxist promise to rid workers of their chains in the here and now.[3] She writes, “I wanted to have nothing to do with the religion of those whom I saw all around me.”[4]

Independence and Radical Affiliations

After a couple of years of independence from her family and university education, Day decided to drop out of college and move with her family from Chicago to New York to work.[5] Hindered by her dad’s influence among his journalist peers and his views of “womanly respectability,” Day struggled to find employment as a journalist; finally receiving an offer to write for the socialist paper the Call in 1916.[6] Dorothy Day’s radicalism led to her involvement with political protests, hunger-strikes, the women’s suffrage movement, and later, the Civil Rights movement.

By 1919, drawn to the bohemian lifestyle of her socialist friends, Day fell madly in love with Lionel Moise, and, defying social conventions, moved in with him. Their affair ended when Day discovered she was pregnant and Moise urged her to have an abortion. She did, but Moise left anyway.[7] After a subsequent marriage failed, Day wrote a novel and sold the movie rights, making enough money to buy a cottage on Staten Island where she began living with Forester Batterham.

Conversion to Catholicism

Day’s second pregnancy led to her conversion to Catholicism because she was determined to have her baby baptized whatever the cost; during her pregnancy, Day explains that she began to pray “for the gift of faith.”[8] For years, Day had been fearful she was sterile after her abortion, so she was understandably elated to be pregnant a second time, and interpreted it as a sign of God’s blessing. Yet, knowing nothing of the social teaching of church, Day felt torn between her attraction to the faith and betraying her loyalty to the poor, so deciding to convert was a struggle.[9] First baptizing her daughter, Tamar, Day herself eventually received the sacraments of baptism, first communion, and confirmation. Afterward, she began to lose her radical friends and parted from Forester.[10]

Advocacy For And Friendship With The Poor

During the Great Depression, not long after her conversion, Dorothy Day met Peter Maurin, whose friendship catalyzed her newfound faith and proclivity for writing, uniting them with her vocation oriented towards the poor. In 1933, Dorothy Day founded a newspaper, the Catholic Worker. It was “designed to raise consciousness about the church’s social mission, expose systemic and structural injustices, and appeal to workers who were being exploited by the industries they served.”[11] Including editorials, accounts of current happenings, and personal interviews, the Catholic Worker decried injustice in its many manifestations, including racism, which was woven into the very fabric of the American culture. From its founding, the Catholic Worker was clear “that racism could not be ignored when addressing the root causes of poverty and alternative Christian visions for society.” [12] Recording interviews, articles, and editorials, the paper “confronted head on unjust laws such as the Jim Crow laws in the South”[13] It also covered exploited women, child labor, labor strikes, anti-Semitism, and issues abroad.[14]

Not content to write about the condition of the poor, Day felt that to have an authentic witness, she must both live with them and share in their suffering.[15] To this end, she and others from the Catholic Worker founded a house of hospitality to provide shelter and food for anyone in need. In her house of hospitality, Day adamantly refused to allow others to post rules mandating anything; she insisted that everyone is equal and that all enter on the same level, arguing that they needed to help of their own volition. In this, she disputed the notion about the deserving or undeserving poor, which inherently classifies and attributes the value of individuals based on their contribution potential to society.[16] In the spirit of inclusion, operating from the belief that everyone is made in the image of God, the hospitality houses “embraced ecumenism and multiculturalism as a part of their identity,” welcoming immigrants and anyone in need, regardless of religious affiliation.[17]

Religious Belief As Motivation

After her conversion, the motivation behind Day’s involvement in political protests, pacifism, women’s suffrage, and civil rights changed. She believed that taking one’s baptismal vows seriously means putting “off the old person and [putting] on Christ, [growing] constantly in our capacity for love through the exercise of mercy, compassion, and forgiveness.” [18] Thus, in her perspective, we are all called to be saints by “living out and bearing witness to [the gospel] in our daily lives.[19] Day’s writings reveal this deeply held conviction; in her choice of vocabulary, Day uses the word “love” more than “justice.” While her “daily activities were focused on charity and advocacy for people pushed to the margins of society,” she sees this as her way of loving her neighbor and living out her Catholic faith.[20] She wrote that “vigils, fasting, prayer, and marches were all indispensable,” but ultimately, she insisted, “[a]ll these means are useless unless animated by love.”[21] Day’s pacifistic stance rested on this love of neighbor; when Jesus tells us to love our enemies, Day insisted that he really meant it. Officially, the Catholic Church’s stance permits just war. Yet, even though Day’s pacifism was wildly unpopular during her lifetime, since her death, Day has been “widely credited with having restored the ideal of gospel nonviolence to a place of honor within the Catholic church.”[22]

Over the decades, Day went to prison multiple times; she always actively protested war and forms of oppression. In the 40s she vocally opposed Japanese internment camps;[23] in the 50s she refused to comply with air raids, was troubled by the public castigation of Communists, and protested capital punishment of Communist spies;[24] in the 60s she decried nuclear weapons and the Vietnam War in the 70s. Just shy of 75 years old, Day was jailed in 1973 for supporting Caesar Chavez and his protests supporting Mexican itinerant workers’ rights, standing up for the poor until the end of her days.[25]

The Catholic Worker

The Catholic Worker is more than a newspaper, more than Dorothy Day’s brainchild; still in existence today, it is a movement rooted in Catholic social teaching. Its houses of hospitality and farms host men and women who embrace “voluntary poverty as they minister to the destitute.”[26] Voluntary poverty is the central, orienting point of the movement; Catholic Workers see detachment from material possessions a way of resisting the current social order and visibly identifying with Jesus’ Kingdom.[27] They believe in “poverty freely chosen in community” as a way to protest pervasive destitution without community prevalent in the United States.[28] Their kitchens, breadlines, soup kitchens, and farms are places in which they practice the presence of God.[29] In them, they also pray the rosary, have study groups and forums, and spiritual readings at meals.[30] According to their website, today there are 236 Catholic Worker communities which “remain committed to nonviolence, voluntary poverty, prayer, and hospitality for the homeless, exiled, hungry, and forsaken. Catholic Workers continue to protest injustice, war, racism, and violence of all forms.”[31] As they continue to promote these ideas and stances for which Day so vocally advocated, Catholic Workers continue to work for justice, striving to live lives consistent with the message of the gospel.

Dorothy Day’s Legacy

Willing to risk controversy and take unpopular stances, Day never cowered, always ready to ask hard questions. In a film on her life, Entertaining Angels, Day declares, “‘If you feed the poor, you’re a saint. If you ask why they’re poor, you’re a communist. Well, we do both here. But we’re neither saints nor communists.’”[32] Staunch in both her pacifism and concern for social justice, Day is “widely admired as a heroic, even holy woman, uncompromisingly committed to social justice and the cause of the poor. She left a deep impact on the American Catholic church.”[33] Day “did not believe holiness was just for a few,” but held that it was a “common calling for all Christians.” [34] Her unique way of living out and bearing witness to the gospel was empowered by her religious devotion wherein she prayed, meditated on scripture, and said the rosary daily in her “continuous conversation with God.”[35]

[1] Dorothy Day, Dorothy Day: Selected Writings, Ed. Robert Ellsberg, (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1992), xv.

[2] Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness: The Autobiography of the Legendary Catholic Social Activist Dorothy Day, (New York: HarperOne, 1997), 39.

[3] Day, The Long Loneliness, 39, 41-2.

[4] Ibid., 43.

[5] Ibid., 50.

[6] William D. Miller, Dorothy Day: A Biography, (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1982), 56.

[7] Miller, Dorothy Day, 140-2.

[8] Day, The Long Loneliness, 136.

[9] Ibid., 150.

[10] Ibid., 162.

            [11] Elizabeth Hinson-Hasty, Dorothy Day for Armchair Theologians, (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2014), 53.

[12] Hinson-Hasty, Dorothy Day, 57.

[13] Ibid.

[14] Day, The Long Loneliness, 205.

[15] Ibid., 214.

[16] Hinson-Hasty, Dorothy Day, 61.

[17] Ibid., 62-3.

[18] Robert Ellsberg, “Day by Day.” U.S. Catholic 75, no. 11 (November 2010): 36. Academic Search Premier, EBSCOhost (accessed April 16, 2016).

[19] Ellsberg, “Day by Day,” 36

            [20] Hinson-Hasty, Dorothy Day, 91.

[21] Quoted in Ellsberg, “Day by Day,” 36.

[22] Ellsberg, “Day, Dorothy,” 269.

[23] Miller, Dorothy Day, 353.

[24] Ibid., 434-9.

[25] Ibid., 500.

[26] Nancy L. Roberts, Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker, (Albany: State University of New York

Press, 1984), 5. Roberts notes that these volunteers often enter fields focused on the greater good, including “social work, editing, labor organizing and politics, teaching, writing, and nursing.”

[27] Rogers, Catholic Worker, 11.

[28] Ibid., 10.

[29] Mark and Louise Zwick, The Catholic Worker Movement: Intellectual and Spiritual Origins, (New York: Paulist Press, 2005), 322.

[30] Zwick, The Catholic Worker Movement, 322.

[31] http://www.catholicworker.org/index.html. Accessed 28 April 2016.

[32] Dean G. Peerman, “A people’s saint.” The Christian Century 114, no. 7 (February 26, 1997): 224-227. ATLA Religion Database with ATLASerials, EBSCOhost (accessed April 16, 2016). 225-26.

[33] Ellsberg, Robert. “DAY, DOROTHY.” Reader’s Companion To American History (January 1991): 268-269. History Reference Center, EBSCOhost (accessed March 24, 2016). 268.

[34] Ellsberg, “Day by Day,” 36

[35] Ibid., 34.