Dorothy Day was born on Pineapple Street in Brooklyn Heights on November 8, 1897. On the hundredth anniversary of her birth, her spirit is alive in the Catholic Worker movement she and Peter Maurin founded in 1933. The movement is still building, a rather remarkable feat in the history of American religious communities, now with over 125 houses and farming communes in the United States and in seven other countries. There are a variety of Catholic Worker publications that display strong writing and intellectual vitality: critical voices in the midst of the capitalist state, and lively antidotes to the spirit of bourgeois Christianity. Day and Maurin would be pleased.
In a real sense, Day was an Augustinian figure. She was a captivating, commanding presence, full of personal paradoxes (vulnerable and yet like steel) and inconsistencies (patient but fretful), who nonetheless cohered and remained consistently stalwart. She had been around (as she attests in her classic spiritual autobiography, The Long Loneliness), knew the full joys and sorrows of life from her harsh experience, and had gone through a life-searing conversion. She possessed marvelous observational skills and wrote with uncommon beauty and alacrity about her times: describing the challenge of living good, and yes, holy lives in an era of warring empires. She loved heroic figures, and aspired to be one. She hoped that her books would be read by millions and would lead to nonviolent, revolutionary change. She had a sense of humor about herself and her work, and told the story of having been asked to speak at a college on the topic “Saints and Heroes.” She was greatly surprised (and delighted) when she found the lecture hall packed. Only later did she discover the reason: her talk had been mistakenly billed “Saints and Eros.”
For me, Dorothy Day was the most engaging and engaged person I have ever met. Even now, seventeen years after her death in 1980, I think of her almost daily, with deep affection. What would she have thought of this moral dilemma, this political situation, this church teaching? How would she have approached a certain crisis, dealt with that obnoxious person? If the problem happens to be several-sided and particularly dicey, I can be sure her response would be challenging, distinct, and unpredictable. Not that it would necessarily come as a surprise (she used to love to repeat the phrase, based on her sense of the Gospels, “There are always answers; they are just not calculated to soothe”). Her principles were doggedly clear: The admonitions of the Gospels, the Psalms, and Saint Paul. These ran so deeply in her that they seemed to issue from her marrow. When TV newsman Mike Wallace asked her, “Does God love murderers, does he love a Hitler, a Stalin?” she responded reflexively: “God loves all men, and all men are brothers.”
In person, even in her seventies, Day was physically striking: tall, lean, her pale blue eyes keen but not intrusive. In the ideal movie of Dorothy’s life, Jessica Lange would be cast in the part. Dorothy was one of those individuals whose presence can affect the tone of whole gatherings. When she entered a crowded room, people with their backs to the door would turn spontaneously. Yet she was unfailingly modest, and almost painfully shy in public.
Dorothy’s mind, while not that of a trained intellectual, was one of the most acute and supple I have seen at work; she was highly intuitive, shrewd when it came to money, morally rugged. She seemed to know herself with perfect clarity, the fruit of a lifetime of self-examination: “Cleanse us of our unknown faults,” she would repeat often. Lecturing about the Catholic Worker, she would say of herself: “There is always a subtle self-aggrandizement. One may not intend it, yet there it crops out to humiliate one. Perhaps it is good to have this come out in the open.” Both spiritually and personally, she was the genuine article.
If you went to talk to Dorothy in her small room on the third floor of the East First Street house, where she lived from 1968-76, you might be ensnared for hours. She would regale you with stories. In her early years as a reporter she had interviewed everyone from Trotsky to Jack Dempsey. She knew Eugene O’Neill and Dos Passos, and had inspired Auden. She had testified before Congress on conscientious objection, and while in Moscow in 1971, had defended Solzhenitsyn before the Soviet writers’ group, breaking up their meeting. She had been shot at for her civil rights protests, been thrown into solitary confinement; she had taken on both church and state, loved both the opera and folk singer Joan Baez, was a doting mother, grandmother, great-grandmother, received Communion from the hands of the pope, and was a voracious reader. Yet for all that, when you were with her you felt perfectly at home; so much so you wanted to stay, maybe forever—at least I wanted to.
Even after over forty years of the hard Catholic Worker life, Dorothy’s voice was young and there was merriment in her laughter. Vivian Gornick, the feminist writer, did a perspective on Day for the Village Voice in November 1969. At one point during their four-hour conversation, Gornick sensed that Dorothy had read her thoughts—a not uncommon experience if you spent time with her. While Day had not been critical of Gornick, the experience had raised questions for the latter. According to Martin Buber, the zaddik (or righteous teacher) responds to people’s needs but first elevates them. Sitting there in the soup kitchen at 36 First Street, Gornick observed in Day “a love that categorically refuses to deny the irreducible humanity” of each person. “I felt in her a woman who has done many things she would wish not to have done;…been alone a long, long time in a curious, exalted, exhausting manner; and more important, that all of this was not a comfortable matter of the past; all of this was an ongoing affair…[in which Day’s] faith is put through the fires daily.” What comes through in Gornick’s article is the journalist’s keen respect for the older woman.
Dorothy once told Robert Coles—in a different context—“I have never wanted to lecture people; I have hoped to act in such a way that I will be reaching out to many others who will never be part of the Catholic Worker movement.” It seems to have worked with Gornick and countless others.
I recently asked Tom Sullivan and Nina Polcyn Moore, both old friends and Catholic Workers, what made Day tick.
Sullivan, now in his eighties and in poor health in New York City, told me ”her spirituality is basic. She started with the saints, and was oriented to the early Christians.” For Moore, who now lives in Illinois, it was a matter of ”love, divine and human.” Dorothy ”was not content with anything but the best,” Moore told me. ”She loved God with all her heart.”
But it was Day’s constancy in the hard vocation she had chosen that most amazed Moore: ”Her availability to people and events, her fidelity to the Gospels, and her embracing the precariousness of the Worker life are keys to her greatness.” According to Moore, who traveled with her here and abroad, Day evolved from a young radical to a person of international significance ”because she was on fire with the love of God.”
In From Union Square to Rome, Dorothy’s first book about her conversion, she defines a mystic as someone in love with God: “Not one who loves God, but who is in love with God.” Years later, she quoted with relish Sonya’s last line in Uncle Vanya: “I have faith, Uncle, I have fervent, passionate faith.”
That faith was evident in every aspect of Day’s life. I suppose it is what attracted so many of us to her: In seeing her faith we experienced our own hoped-for faith being validated and strengthened. “Every act of faith increases your faith,” she instructed me over and over. But her faith was not a cold series of propositions or legalisms. It was rather a vital relationship. “More and more I see [that] prayer is the answer,” she wrote in 1970. “It is the clasp of the hand, the joy and keen delight in the consciousness of that Other. Indeed, it is like falling in love.” Not many people can write or speak of prayer that way because we don’t practice it. C.S. Lewis advised that we develop not simply a spirituality, but an “appetite for God.”
To see Dorothy at prayer was to observe someone completely engrossed. I can vividly picture her praying, off to the left side in one of the pews at Nativity Church in Manhattan. Coupled with this memory is another of my walking into her room one Saturday afternoon as she was listening to the opera. It was Wagner, and Dorothy’s face was transfixed. She didn’t know I was there, and I retreated hastily, almost embarrassed to have intruded at such a private moment. But from those instances I learned something about the intercourse between prayer and ecstasy, and how they relate to beauty and love, human and divine.
For Nina Moore, it was Day’s constancy in prayer, study, and reading that explained what could be explained about her continued spiritual growth. Lacking the structure of a formal monastic regimen (she was a Benedictine oblate and attached to the Jesu Caritas fellowship), Day had to steal the early morning hours for her spiritual exercises. She did this almost daily, year in and out: “My strength…returns to me with my cup of coffee and the reading of the psalms,” she said.
Dorothy’s take on the life of the soul was anything but “spiritualized.” It was sacramental and sensual, but it was not romantic. “I can’t bear the romantics,” she told Gornick. “I want a religious realist. I want one who prays to see things as they are and do something about it.” Her own faith had required a terrible price: the end of her marriage and the breakup of her family: “For me, Christ was not bought for thirty pieces of silver,” she wrote forty years after her conversion, “but with my heart’s blood. We buy not cheap in this market.”
What was essential for Dorothy—and what a popular mid-century retreat movement and the Catholic Worker fostered—was the serious attention and self-discipline required for growth in the life of the spirit. In this matter, I believe, Dorothy’s mentor was Friedrich von Hügel, who wrote, in Victorian style, of the “costingness” of such growth. “Plant yourself,” von Hügel counseled, “on foundations that are secure: God, Christ, suffering, the Cross.” I often saw Dorothy with his short classic, The Life of Prayer.
But the life of the spirit has to be cultivated, not merely for the sake of one’s own self-improvement, but for the well-being of the whole church. As Dorothy prayed in Rome in 1965: “Give us, O Lord, peace, strength, and joy, so that we in turn may give them to others.”
Theologically, Dorothy Day’s chief contributions have to do with the issues of freedom, poverty, and violence.
Freedom
Perhaps her deepest personal, intuitive insight. Without freedom, there can be neither faith nor love.
When Dorothy first met Peter Maurin in 1932, she was impressed that he was carrying two books in his bulging pockets: Saint Francis and Peter Kropotkin. Kropotkin, known as the anarchist prince, was, like Charles de Foucauld, a soldier and scientist. He had forsaken his title and had been jailed and exiled for agitating for reform in Czarist Russia. Even before meeting Maurin, Day held nonviolent anarchist views (she was a decentralist who felt more at home with the Wobblies than the Communists). The theoretical value Day saw in anarchism was its emphasis on personal freedom and responsibility, and on developing social patterns that foster them.
On the spiritual level, the highest rung of being, God gives freedom so that men and women can become human; thus the story of Adam and Eve. Charles Peguy, poet and essayist, and an influence on both Maurin and Day, has God address the issue this way: “But what kind of salvation would it be that was not free?” And then God validates “man’s” power “to decide” by declaring: “And that freedom of his is my creation” (and therefore good).
Along with freedom comes the possibility—the inevitability—of sin. On this point Day would refer to Augustine and Julian of Norwich: God has already repaired the worst possible catastrophe (the Fall) by taking on our human flesh, suffering our fate, and redeeming us.
Unlike many birthright Catholics, Day did not feel constrained by the institution. She took as her own Saint Paul’s phrase—“You are no longer foreigners and aliens, but fellow citizens with the saints” (Ephesians 2:19)—and placed her trust in the church, which she loved and which is itself held accountable to the Gospels. For encouragement, Day looked to the lives of the saints, whom she found to be anything but toadies. Patriarchy? When it came to “this business of ‘asking Father’ what to do about something,” she said, it “never occurred to us.”
At Vatican II, she noted her admiration for John Courtney Murray. She felt grateful for the church’s clear but long overdue statement on religious freedom and the primacy of conscience.
Poverty
As noted above, Maurin brought with him Kropotkin and Francis. For the Christian, poverty is not only a matter of the soul—it is a social concern. It entails not only personal spiritual obligations, but matters of strict justice and compassion.
We begin by looking at our own lives. When asked to address the relations between individuals, Day said, Jesus always emphasized the problems of wealth and poverty. Looking at society this way, Day was explicit: “It is impossible, save by heroic charity, to live in the present social order and be a Christian.” After reading Abbie Hoffman’s Revolution for the Hell of It in 1968, she commented: “A terrifying book; bitterness, hatred, hell unleashed. The fruits of war, materialism, prosperity….God help our children.”
Dorothy Day’s own approach was twofold. First, there was a line she repeated often from Saint John of the Cross: “Where there is no love, put love, and you will find love.” And second, cultivate a life of detachment and share the plight of the poor: “We [Catholic Workers] believe in an economy based on human needs, rather than the profit motive….We are not judging [wealthy] individuals, but are trying to make a judgment on the system…which we try to withdraw from as much as possible….What is worst of all is using God and religion to bolster up our own greed, our own attachment to property, and putting God and country on an equality.” Finally, she pointed out, “we are not going to win the masses to Christianity until we live it,” and that included having a willingness to embrace poverty.
For Day, to live poorly meant to share the life of the poor: “Let us love to live with the poor because they are especially loved by Christ.” Each person who presents himself or herself to us—rich, middle class, or poor—must be given love, “not because it might be Christ…but because they are Christ.”
How did she know for sure? “Because we have seen his hands and his feet in the poor around us….We start by loving them for him, and soon we love them for themselves, each one a unique person, most special…It is through such exercises that we grow, and the joy of our vocation assures us we are on the right path.” According to Kate Hennessy, Dayvs granddaughter, “she turned the life of poverty into something dynamic, full of richly simple moments for those who have nothing.” How Dorothy Day managed to keep her psychological wholeness over the years in the disorder, disease, mental confusion, and violence that mark Catholic Worker houses was a practical miracle to me. “Pray and endure,” she would repeat. Some of her stamina came from knowing the critical distinction between love and pity. “The law of love is reciprocity,” Georges Bernanos had written, “and reciprocity is not possible where there is pity.” Martin Buber explained it more eloquently: “Help is no virtue, but an artery of existence.” To really help someone, however, “the helper must live with the other; only help that arises out of living with the other can stand before the eyes of God.” Day insisted that she “would not dare write or speak or follow the vocation God has given me to work with the poor and for peace if I did not have the constant reassurance of the Mass.”
Violence
I need not recount at length Day’s work for justice, peace, and nonviolence. Historically, she had a critical if indirect bearing on Vatican II’s condemnation of nuclear war and its endorsement of the right to conscientious objection. Her pacifist stand in World War II was intensely controversial, not only among Americans in general but even among Catholic Workers; Mike Wallace’s question indicates that it still is today. Day’s repeated stints in jail for protesting war preparation and the war economy—including her challenge that people withdraw from participating in both—achieved modest success, symbolically—by helping to end the air-raid drills in New York City during the fifties and sixties—and practically in the lives of not a few individuals who refused induction, changed their jobs, or resisted paying war taxes.
Day’s staunch views on pacifism drew a deep line between just-war teaching and gospel nonviolence. She shared with Saint James the view that the roots of violence are fear, lack of forgiveness, and greed. Fear leads us to strike out at enemies; it may even help to create them. Day believed the Catholic Worker must be a school of nonviolence. The young volunteers who came in search of their vocation, she wrote, “learn not only to love with compassion, but to overcome fear, that dangerous emotion that precipitates violence. They may go on feeling fear, but they know the means [the ‘spiritual weapons,’ as she called them, of self-discipline, willingness to take up the cross, forgiving ‘seventy times seven,’ and readiness to lay down one’s life for one’s fellows] to overcome it.” Here, prayer and daily Mass were the best offense. From her own testimony of sitting through nights of threatened violence in the racially divided South in the 1960s, it is prayer that “gives courage.”
Was she critical of her own track record? Always. Repeatedly I heard her say of herself and her co-workers, quoting the Letter to the Hebrews: “We have not yet resisted unto blood.” She felt she might yet prove to be as avenging as any potential adversary.
One of Day’s most notable achievements for peace took place quietly and behind the scenes. In Rome in 1965 for the last session of the council, she joined a small group of women at a convent to fast for ten days, on water only, as the conciliar debate raged over what would be the Church’s official teaching on modern war. Dorothy did not like to fast (she said her besetting sins were gluttony and sloth), and made sure she had filled her senses by going to the opera (Cavalleria Rusticana) before the fast. Her report in the November 1965 Catholic Worker included the daily schedule of the group and concluded as follows:
As for me, I did not suffer at all from the hunger or headache or nausea which usually accompany the first few days of a fast, but I had offered my fast in part for the victims of famine all over the world, and it seemed to me that I had very special pains. They were certainly of a kind I have never had before, and they seemed to pierce the vary marrow of my bones….They were not like the arthritic pains, which, aggravated by tension and fatigue, are part of my life now that I am sixty-eight. One accepts them as part of age, and also part and parcel of the life of work, which is the lot of the poor. So often I see grandmothers in Puerto Rican families bearing the burden of children, the home, cooking, sewing, and contributing to the work of mother and father, who are trying to make a better life for their children. I am glad to share their fatigue with them.
But these pains…seemed to reach into my very bones, and I could only feel that I had been given some little intimation of the hunger of the world. God help us, living as we do, in the richest country in the world, and so far from approaching the voluntary poverty we esteem and reach toward….May we try harder to do more in the future.
This is vintage Dorothy Day: the immediacy of concerns; the challenge, complexity, and interrelation of the big issues (war and poverty); the incorporation of her personal experience; the self-criticism and pledge to do better; and the radical, foundational nature of her Christian perspective.
No retrospective of Dorothy Day’s spirituality would be complete without mentioning her tremendous personal struggles. These centered, in her later years, on two related areas: discouragement and perseverance. From her earliest Catholic Worker writings, Day speaks of discouragement in the work (see, House of Hospitality). The utter hopelessness of the situation of some of the people with whom she lived (“we are a community of need, not an intentional community”) included physical violence, broken families, addiction, suicides, evictions, fires, poor food, attrition of co-workers. All of these could be overwhelming. Dorothy was sometimes so jangled by them—and by family concerns, overwork, travel, writing, speechmaking, and innumerable obligations—that she would break into tears. “Don’t let yourself get into this state!” she would tell me, before escaping for a reprieve to her sister’s or daughter’s.
Dorothy also told me that twice in her life she had overcome serious bouts of depression by reading herself out of them (she recommended Dickens), but said that if she ever were to experience such depression again, she would consider shock treatment.
Another line of cure—which she had learned from her mother—was to clean the house. And then there were the theater and music: “Saw My Fair Lady. A very good cure for melancholy. Theme: Man’s capacity to change.” Again, “I am now listening to a concert, Brahms’s Second Symphony, joyful music to heal my sadness. All day I have felt sad. I am oppressed by a sense of failure, of sin.”
On the conjunction between what Dorothy called “the dark night of the senses and the dark night of the soul,” she reflected: “It seems to me that they often intermingle.” This led her to prescribe Ruskin’s “Duty of Delight”: “I found a copy of Ruskin, The True and the Beautiful,” she wrote while visiting her daughter in Vermont, and “the beautiful quotation on the duty of delight. Making cucumber pickles, chili sauce, and grape juice. Delightful smells.” And the “duty” must be taken seriously, not only for oneself but “for the sake of others who are on the verge of desperation.”
And then there was use of the other serious spiritual weapons: prayer, Scripture, community, the sacraments. The ancient Christian writers had long been concerned with acedia, spiritual sloth, which is associated with a failure against hope. Depression, a modern manifestation, is, in part, a constricting of that virtue, and of the power of the will to act. Day often prayed to Saint Ephraim, one of the desert fathers. He seemed to have struggled with the problem of discouragement, and spoke of the distress caused by his own procrastination. The best practical remedy for such a condition, Day noted, was “faithfulness to the means to overcome it: recitation of the psalms each day, prayer and solitude, and by these means arriving—or hoping to arrive—at a state of well-being.” The psalms she found particularly helpful in this regard: “I have stilled and quieted my soul” (Ps. 131), and “Relieve the troubles of my heart” (Ps. 25). She would also quote Saint Paul’s Letter to the Romans, chapter 8—“Nothing can separate us from the love of Christ”—and his advice not to judge others or even oneself, for Christ understands our failures: he was, after all, the world’s greatest failure.
Among contemporary spiritual writings, she recommended in this regard Dom Hubert van Zeller’s Approach to Calvary. “Awoke at 5:30,” she penned in 1965. “Usual depression over failures, inefficiency, incapacity to cope. Van Zeller’s book invaluable, teaching on how to accept all this discouragement, which he says will increase with age….One must just keep going.”
And that connects with the matter of perseverance, a subject on which she corresponded sporadically with Thomas Merton: “I am often full of fear about my final perseverance,” she told him in 1960. But then, during his own long struggles with the problem, she advised: Your work “is the work God wants of you, no matter how much you want to run away from it.”
She eventually came to terms with the fact that her difficulties were not going to end in this life. In the last book she gave me, Spiritual Autobiography of Charles de Foucauld (she was always giving gifts and books, prayer books and Bibles especially), she had underlined the following passage from de Foucauld: “Our difficulties are not a transitory state of affairs….No, they are the normal state of affairs and we should reckon on being in angustia temporum [‘in straightness of times,’ Dan. 9:21] all our lives, so far as the good we want to do is concerned.”
In 1960, Dorothy Day commented favorably on a then-current appraisal of the state of the American Catholic Church, rendered by the Jesuit theologian, Gustave Weigel. Three things were most needed in the U.S. church, said Weigel: austerity, preached and lived; a deeper awareness of the reality of God; and a truer and more effective love for all people, including those who are our enemies. One could not find a more succinct summary of Day’s own views. In 1968, she complained that the Catholic press in the United States was too much concerned with the problems of authority, birth control, and celibacy, whereas the real problems were “war, race, poverty and wealth, violence, sex, and drugs.” Some things change slowly. Or not at all.
Without the saints, Bernanos said fifty years ago, the church is only dead stones: Without them, the very grace lying within the Church’s institutional and sacramental forms remains fallow. Despite the unparalleled upheavals of our times, grace has not remained hidden. We have seen its appealing power.
The Lacouture Retreat
Recently, a discussion has arisen concerning Dorothy Day’s association with the so-called Lacouture retreat (see Brigid O’Shea Merriman’s Searching for Christ: The Spirituality of Dorothy Day, University of Notre Dame Press; and David Scott and Mike Aquilina’s Weapons of the Spirit: Selected Writings of Father John Hugo, Our Sunday Visitor Books).
Onesimus Lacouture (1881-1951) was a Canadian Jesuit who preached a retreat based on his reading of the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius Loyola. The retreat—characterized by some as rigorist—called all Christians to a life of heroic charity and self-sacrifice.
Dorothy Day was introduced to the retreat in the late 1930s and it played a significant role in her life and that of the Catholic Worker for the next fifteen years. One of the chief U.S. practitioners of the retreat was John Hugo (1911-85), a priest of the Pittsburgh diocese. Dorothy made the retreat under his direction a number of times, the last being in 1976.
In 1939, under episcopal pressure, Lacouture’s Jesuit superiors forbade him to preach the retreat and exiled him. Father Hugo was also reassigned to the hinterlands, and was, for a period, precluded from preaching the retreat. Despite these setbacks, Day continued to foster the retreat. She called it “the bread of the strong” and “the great retreat,” and wrote that it had given “a new meaning and vigor to our lives.” She told her friend Sister Peter Claver Fahy that “at last I have found what I was looking for when I left my Communist friends and became a Catholic.”
For all that, Nina Polcyn Moore recalls that the retreat was “harsh” and “wooden,” and that it was Day herself who made it “more livable and lovable. Dorothy brought to it her own long loneliness.” Tom Sullivan concurs. He told me that Day “bought” the retreat but that “she had her own approach” to it. His conclusion: “She took what she wanted from the retreat.”
Some years later, in the sixties—and let me emphasize that she was not writing about Hugo—Day noted concerning her spiritual guides that she must “be grateful, uncritical of God’s direction of me, even if I see with my human, critical faculties, the limitations of my advisers.” My sense was that she surpassed most if not all of them.
Reading Hugo in the collection cited above, I felt I had fallen into a time warp. What comes through is a certain rigidity and literalness. The writing struck me as lacking the expansive catholicity of Dorothy Day, so rich in language, musicality, and the human touch. Perhaps that is too harsh a judgment, but how different the Hugo book is from reading John XXIII’s Journal of a Soul, for which Dorothy also had the highest regard. Pope John, too, was steeped in the formalism of post-Tridentine spiritual theology, but what a different table he spread!—P.J.
