This month marks the fifth anniversary of the death of Dorothy Day. At the time of her passing (November 29, 1980), the historian David J. O’Brien wrote in these pages (December 19, 1980) that she was “the most signifi- cant, interesting, and influential person in the history of Amer- ican Catholicism.” Perhaps too expansive an appraisal, par- ticularly in calculating her influence, and one O’Brien tem- pered later in his article. Yet the fact is that in the five years since her death, Dorothy Day has been mentioned as a possible candidate for canonization, she and the Catholic Worker movement have been cited in drafts of both the U.S. Catholic bishops’ recent landmark pastoral letters on peace and the economy, and she and the Catholic Worker have been subjected to something of a publishing renaissance: the reissuing of two of Day’s own books, the publication of her “selected writings,” a major biographical effort, two fine studies of her social, religious, and journalistic significance, several children’s books, a score of magazine articles, and a growing number of dissertations, scholarly convocations, and film documentaries.
As for Dorothy Day’s newspaper, The Catholic Worker, O’Brien raised the question whether it could maintain its remarkable integrity and continuity without her presence. That remains to be seen, but in the time since 1980 it has generally done so. Its managing editors at the time of Day’s death assumed the editorship, and while there has been some change on the editorial masthead, there has been surprisingly little for a movement characterized by its general fluidity. The paper’s circulation has remained constant at slightly over a hundred thousand. One delightful change has occurred in the paper’s makeup. On the fiftieth anniversary of the paper’s logo (May 1985), artist Ade Bethune created a new one, updating her original version. Instead of two working men of different races united by the risen Jesus before his cross, the new logo pictures a migrant woman with child, a laboring man of differing race, and Christ joining them all. The number of Catholic Worker houses and farms is today more than seventy-five, perhaps the movement’s all-time high. The various houses produce their own independent papers and newsletters, often of considerable vigor and quality, and are supported through generous individuals in their particular locales.
When Dorothy Day entered the Catholic church as a convert in 1927, she said it was because (among other things) she wanted to enter the church of the poor. It would be hard to characterize the Catholic church in the United States today in that fashion. One might be tempted to judge that just as the church has entered the mainstream of American society, so the notoriety that has come to Dorothy Day since her death has had the effect of temporizing and mollifying her prophetic life and vision. In 1972 Bill Moyers conducted an interview with Day for public television. He called it, “Still a Rebel.” At seventy-five, Day radiated that. The film was an arresting presentation of her charm and bite. Five years after her death, it would be a mistake to mainstream Dorothy Day. As Ammon Hennacy wrote years before her death in his study of American radicalism, “Dorothy Day chose that difficult way of battling inside an autocratic and corrupt organization [the Catholic church] and by her life encouraging others to fight their battles in a peaceful way. She chose only pure weapons; and she stands as one of the most basic of radicals.”
Dorothy Day saw her primary work as that of a writer. She hoped to find her books on bus station racks all across the country expounding the message of Peter Maurin and the Catholic Worker. She wrote with a point of view, and admitted to being didactic. (Her writing has come under criticism of late for being unstructured, discursive, of uneven quality, and according to one author,” the bulk of it is ephemeral.”) Yet in all the recent studies that deal with Day (and the same will hold true here), the passages that invariably stand out for their notable insight, clarity, and grace are those from her hand.
Much has been made of the paradoxes in her life, and much should be. There was in it not a little of what Baron von Hugel called “that tenderness in austerity, and that austerity in ten- derness , which is the very genius of Christianity.” She seemed to have experienced nearly every human failure of the untamed life (“I see only too clearly how bad people are,” she wrote. “It’s my own sins that give me such clarity”), and yet she could revel that where sin once abounded, grace prevailed. Her writing was always related to her person. One would be hard put to suggest anyone whose purpose, deeds, and being were so completely integrated. When John Cort first met Day at a talk she was giving in Boston in 1936, he remarked at her “quality of humor and laughter that seemed to reach down to the secret, hidden places of the soul, promising at any moment to explain the mysteries of life and human striving.” She preached the cross and suffering voluntarily undertaken for the sake of others (’ “The most effective action we can take is to try to conform our lives to the folly of the cross”). And yet, according to Cort and many others who met her,’ ‘This woman was getting a lot of fun out of life.”
Hers was a quiet but commanding presence. She had a way of making you adjust to some purpose she had set out for herself. Two divergent examples: I remember being driven in her Volkswagen bug to the Tivoli Farm, about a hundred miles north of New York City on the Hudson. Dorothy was in her early seventies at the time, and by then was not a particularly skilled driver. (I have my doubts whether she ever was.) After a number of harrowing experiences that culminated in her nearly driving us under the body of a moving semi, she asked, ” Would you like to say the rosary?” I was out of practice at the time, but it was easy to respond in the affirmative. The option has returned as an easy one many times since.
The second: She could be very indirect in answering a person’s query for advice, but if you were listening hard, it was there. On the other hand, she could ask very direct and unsettling questions. While visiting the Soviet Union in 1971 she was invited to attend a gathering of the Soviet Writers Guild. When given the opportunity to present an observation, she asked those assembled why they had allowed Solzhenitsyn to be expelled from their group. The meeting broke up rather quickly thereafter.
It was this ability to get to the point that always left people a little uncomfortable with what might be coming next. I think it is best summed up in the first line of what are known as the Catholic Worker Positions: “The general aim of the Catholic Worker movement is to realize in the individual and in society the expressed and implied teachings of Christ.” We don’t hear many people taking that approach, talking that way, much less trying literally to live accordingly. Dorothy Day had a zest for such things, a great deal of common sense, and the desire and concern to discern what those “implied teachings of Christ” might be when it came to world events as well as the situation down the hall.
The understanding of human nature expounded by the Catholic Worker has its basis in Christian personalism. Both Peter Maurin and Dorothy Day were taken by the writings of Nicholas Berdyaev and Emmanuel Mounier, and both were influenced by the “anarchist prince,” Peter Kropotkin. His Mutual Aid appeared in 1902. It was a scientific attempt to prove that cooperation among the members of a given species is as much a factor in survival and evolution as were Darwin’s concepts of competition and the survival of the fittest. Kropot- kin believed in the regeneration of human society through personal responsibility and the creation of cooperative, com- munitarian structures. He was influenced by closely observing such religious communities as the Dukhobors, which likewise had a deep effect on both Maurin and Day.
When it came to the great matters of war and peace, Day and The Catholic Worker took this cooperative insight about human nature and staked it to a divine revelation. Jesus Christ had gone well beyond mere natural ethics, and even beyond the precepts of the Old Dispensation in the matter of violence and war, teaching nonviolence by his very life. “People want peace,” Day wrote, “but not the things that make for peace”—the daily, dedicated practice of the “works of mercy.” Day listed these works in a 1949 article for Commonweal, “The Spiritual Works of Mercy are: to admonish the sinner, to instruct the ignorant, to counsel the doubtful, to comfort the sorrowful, to bear wrongs patiently, to forgive all injuries, and to pray for the living and the dead. The Corporal Works are to feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, to clothe the naked, to ransom the captive, to harbor the harborless, to visit the sick, and to bury the dead.” The artist Rita Corbin later contrasted the works of mercy and the works of war, effectively evoking the Catholic Worker’s basic insight into the means of promoting and sustaining peace.
Day called nonviolence “a great ideal to be worked to- ward.” She had no illusions that it was going to be easy to accomplish. In January 1942 she took The Catholic Worker, and those who cared to remain with her, into the anomalous and unpopular stance of opposing American participation in World War II. Christians who resorted to violence, she said, were like those who asked Jesus to come down from his cross. “Shall we ask him, with the unbelieving world, to come down from the cross? Or shall we joyfully … ‘complete the sufferings of Christ’?” She implored her government and readers of The Catholic Worker to “permit us to continue to use our paper to ‘preach Christ crucified.’ ” She said later, ” We confess to being fools [for Christ], and wish that we were more so. … dear God, please enlarge our hearts to love each other, to love our neighbor, to love our enemy as well as our friend.”
It was that last phrase that threw not only many national priorities and policies into question, but even the use of vio- lence for those revolutions she supported and considered legitimate. Having spoken positively of the Cuban Revolution in the early 1960s, she wrote to clarify the matter of revolutionary violence in September 1962. “Several of our old editors have accused us of giving up our pacifism. What nonsense. We are unalterably opposed to armed resistance and armed revolt from the admittedly intolerable conditions all through Latin America as we ever were.” Such a tenet is one present-day Christians, not to mention Catholic Workers, will have to continue to ponder, a very clear dividing line between absolute pacifism and other approaches.
Day reminded her readers of what Jesus said of his followers who wished to call down fire on the Samaritans: “You do not know of what spirit you are.” She would point out to Catholic Americans that a nuclear deterrent policy which relies on the threat of annihilating others could only be considered unjustifiable. No doubt she would have found much to applaud in the 1983 pastoral letter, The Challenge of Peace. But at the heart of it, she would have found its deterrent premise less than the Gospel truth. In whom, she would ask, do we place our trust?
More challenging yet is the Catholic Worker approach to economics. It is one based largely on a negative criticism of materialism in its present capitalist and Marxist formulations. While the Catholic Worker failed to develop a practical alternative of its own to these systems, the broad outlines for doing so have been present from the movement’s inception. They rely on the English Distributists and a return to a rather uninviting medievalism. The Catholic Worker has championed the insights of such economists and historians as R.H. Tawney, Lewis Mumford, and E.F. Schumacher, and experiments in communitarian socialism, worker ownership, and cooperatives. Catholic Worker farms were meant to provide the productive economic element of the movement’s program. For very good reasons these farms have become instead islands of refuge for the poor fleeing the alienation of industrialized society, asylums of hospitality on the land. Day wrote herself of these places: “As farmers, perhaps, we were ridiculous.” Yet there is a distinct usefulness to the Catholic Worker’s espousal of an economics as if people mattered, one that employs Christian principles for determining the ends and means of production, and sets the goals of economic life.” The stink of the world’s injustice and the world’s indifference are all around us,” wrote Day. The Catholic Worker was (is) a different economic school because it locates itself in the poorest pockets of society. From there, it has a very different perspective of Wall Street. “We cannot even see our brothers in need without first stripping ourselves,” wrote Day. “ ‘The poor will always be with us.’ But I am sure that God did not intend that there be so many poor. The class structure is of our making and by our consent, not His, and we must do what we can to change it. So we are urging revolutionary change.”
Part of that change was to disavow a system based on money-lending at interest. The Catholic Worker maintained that the church’s ancient tradition of condemning usury in all its guises should be dusted off and reinstated. Christian eco- nomics means producing and distributing what is adequate to meet society’s legitimate needs. Surpluses are to help those who remain in need, not to enlarge one’s acquisitive drives. The injunction of Saint Basil underlines the vision: “To the starving belongs the bread that you store away, to the naked belongs the cloak that you keep in your cupboard, to the barefoot the shoes that rot in your possession, to the needy the money that you bury away. So you commit as many injustices as there are people you could help.”
Dorothy Day said that when it comes to economic matters, economists (and even prelates?) apply the candlelight of common sense where the flaming heat of the sun of justice was what is needed. “What is worst of all is using God and religion to bolster up our own greed, our attachment to property, and putting God and country on an equality.” This led to the terrible injustices of the capitalist industrial system that lives by war and by preparation for war. Unlike William E. Simon who recently declared at Notre Dame that, “There isn’t any contradiction between my Catholic faith, and the principles of American life …,” Day would point out their very real disjunction: “We are un-American; We are Catholics,” she editorialized in 1949. She was trying to teach that we live better when we know the real source of our daily bread. Such an understanding is more likely to occur where poverty is esteemed. “We want more than a weekly wage,” she said. “We want God to teach us love.”
While there would be much in the present draft of the bishops’ economic pastoral that Day would support (the dignity of human labor, the emphasis on the common good, the right of workers to organize, the so-termed preferential option for the poor, the encouragement for cooperatives, and the letter’s condemnation of materialism), there would remain fundamental disparities. The bishops do not, in Peter Maurin’s phrase, blow the dynamite of the church. They settle for less than they should by lobbying for reform rather than urging the adoption of a fundamentally different economic entity, one based on a Christian social order, which would foster not merely a well-satisfied acquisitive society, but a holy people. The pastoral fails to encourage a “disposition toward poverty,” one that would allow the church to think and act in radically different terms about its own investments and our militarized economy. In Maurin’s stark language, today “No-body drives the money lenders from the temple because the money lenders have the mortgage on the temple.” Such a disposition toward radical trust in God, the sharing of goods, and the simplification of needs would offer support to families and communities trying to live the fullest aspects of the Gospel.
Because of her great love of the church, Dorothy Day always felt the freedom and responsibility to criticize it. She frequently quoted Romano Guardini: “The church is the cross on which Christ was crucified; one could not separate Christ from his cross, and one must live in a state of permanent dissatisfaction with the church.” This two-edged sword is a source of consternation to those who see sin and injustice in the church itself. I remember hearing a particularly pitiful sermon from a monsignor, one of those performances that leaves you nauseated and angry, a not uncommon experience for most churchgoers. Dorothy’s only comment on the way home was, “If the church can survive priests like that, it just goes to prove God must be with it.” She used every experience, negative as well as positive, to foster her belief. Faith, hope, love are acts of the will:” Every act of faith increases your faith,” she said.
Her repeated admonition was: pray and endure. She wished to induce others to daily Mass, Scripture reading, and the practice of the presence of God.” Prayer is the answer. It is the clasp of the hand, the joy and keen delight of the consciousness of that Other. Indeed, it is like falling in love.” To those with whom she worked, she was constantly giving prayerbooks, psalters, the Scriptures, C.S. Lewis’s Reflections on the Psalms, or Charles de Foucauld’s Spiritual Autobiography. She said that going on retreat was the hardest work one could do. I recall her looking forward to one to which the Quaker elder Douglas Steere had invited her. The luxury of a weekend of prayer and reflection! When she returned home on Sunday night she looked exhausted. She was. Steere had divided the large group of retreatants and assigned half of them to Dorothy for spiritual direction. She had spent the weekend listening to and advising others. She never again accepted one of Steere’s invitations.
When it came to being a woman in the church, Day likened herself to John Wesley’s wife who was occasionally allowed to preach. Day held in honor those who had advanced the place of women, once inscribing a book to Sister Luke Tobin by simply thanking her “for all you have done for women.” She saw change in the church coming generally not from theological reformulations, but from groups of people living differently.
Some have said that Day offered little vision for democratizing the church. In one sense this is quite true. Yet in another it widely misses the mark. As an anarchist (she never voted, and did not have a social security number), Day had little truck in assenting to majority rule. What she wanted to promote was personal responsibility, both in the church and in society.
Sally Cunneen (Cross Currents, Fall 1984), tells of an incident that underscores Day’s relation to the women’s movement.
It is ironic that Dorothy and the women’s movement passed each other by. One reason may have been Dorothy’s anecdotal way of talking … I heard her speak on a panel at a large conference on women’s liberation and the church in the early ’70s. She told of the organized life at the Worker, saying that the cook was the only authority there. The audience seemed not to know what to make of this story and passed it by with polite applause and no response.
Hoping to hear Dorothy’s dry, ironic voice, I replayed the tapes of that conference and found that her story had been removed. Yet it had been the only thing I remembered. It seemed to me a parable for women, telling us we must not needlessly confront authority, for it is sometimes useful—particularly in feeding people. The primary creative responsibility for any change, Dorothy implied, lay in our own hands.
When it came to matters of sexuality and changing the church’s teaching, Day was reticent but adamant. She would quote a Portuguese proverb in this regard: “Do whatever you want, but pay.” “For me, Christ was not to be bought for thirty pieces of silver, but with my heart’s blood. We buy not cheap in this market.” She called it heroic virtue in the life of a family to welcome each child as from the hand of God, to practice continence or celibacy within marriage. “The teach- ing of the church in regard to marriage and its indissolubility demands over and over again heroic sanctity.”
On matters of lesbianism and homosexuality, she said she stood with Saint Paul. She was derided for this, and felt the wounds of rejection from those within her own household. Her advice: If we are not being persecuted for our beliefs and life, there is something wrong with us: “May the Lord direct our hearts and bodies in the love of God and the patience of Christ” (2Thess. 3:5).
As it sometimes happened, in opposing the institutional church Dorothy seemed relegated to the fringe. Yet his- tory and theology have generally vindicated her. There is a common misunderstanding that holds if Cardinal Spell man had told Day to shut down The Catholic Worker, she would have. After all, she literally said so herself. On the other hand, she made it clear to those who shared the work that she never seriously entertained the possibility. She believed Spellman was too American to do such a thing, and she was right. Had it actually happened, she believed someone else would have carried on the work, either by not paying attention to the cardinal, or by moving across the river to a different diocese.
Dorothy Day was so steeped in the lives of the saints that she had no fear of unsettling clerical sensibilities. She never betrayed her composure. In 1935 when the Child Labor Amendment was short eight states for passage, most of the Catholic hierarchy and the diocesan press were arrayed against its adoption. According to social historial Mel Piehl, “Only a few liberal bishops, social reformers, and liberal publications like Commonweal and The Catholic Worker stood against the tide.” Monsignor Patrick Scanlan, the New York archdiocesan censor, told Father Joseph McSorley, Day’s confessor and advisor to The Catholic Worker, to have her tone down the paper’s support for the amendment. Day protested that the issue was not one of dogma. “The stand we take is also the stand taken by Monsignor John Ryan,” she pointed out. “It is, after all, a matter of opinion.” Today we refer to such incidents as the application of prudential judgments; some church officials continue to confuse the process with dogma.
But the chief gift of Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker, to both the church and society, was the creation of a community from which it is practically impossible to be expelled. Many have left the Worker, it is true, for ideological reasons, and many more because they couldn’t stand its failures. Those living in its houses and farms have sometimes worn out their welcome because of violent acts, sexual misconduct, or substance abuse. But the guiding leitmotif of the Catholic Worker movement has consistently been the parable of the wheat and the weeds. No one really knows until the final judgment which is which. The sinner will always be welcomed back, seventy times seven. After all, we are all members or potential members of Christ’s Body. What a remarkable realization of freedom this grants. No one can be separated from the love of Christ, neither by principalities nor powers, by church or state.
It is five years since the death of Dorothy Day. The church on Staten Island where she was baptized burned down several months ago. The beaches where she used to walk so freely are now being converted into millionaires’ enclaves. The Catholic Worker remains on the margins of church and society, precisely where it should be. And Dorothy Day’s message is as radical and prophetic as when she expressed it herself. She died on the Saturday evening before Advent. She and her message remain there, awaiting the season of expectation.
