At the beginning of August 1973, in California, hundreds of members of the Farm Workers Union of Cesar Chavez took part in a forbidden manifestation in support of their claim for fairer working conditions. About 150 of them were arrested by the police. Among the people arrested were thirty Sisters and two priests. Extraordinary among the arrested was the tall figure of a very old woman, the Catholic radical journalist and activist Dorothy Day.
The photo of Dorothy seated on her folding chair and discussing amiably with scores of policemen armed to the teeth, appeared in the press of the whole nation. In prison, Dorothy very quickly became a legend. There was a lot of media coverage and Joan Baez visited them and sang for them in the prison. Most of the guards were Catholic, and they came to Dorothy and had their Bibles blessed and their rosaries kissed. At the moment of the release of the arrested, two weeks later, Dorothy refused to give back the prison uniform on which her friends had scribbled their names.
That was the last time Dorothy was arrested for taking part in an episode of civil disobedience. She was 75. Innumerable other times she had been arrested during her long life from that November 1917 when she went to prison for being one of the forty soufragettes in front of the White House, protesting women’s exclusion from the electorate. On November 29, 1980, at the age of 83, Dorothy Day died peacefully at home, in the Catholic Worker community. At her side was her daughter Tamar Theresa representing also the eight grandchildren and many great grandchildren. After a lifetime of voluntary poverty, she left no money for her funeral. It was paid for by the archdiocese of New York.
SURPRISED BY JOY
Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker Movement, was born in Brooklyn, New York, on November 8, 1897. After surviving the San Francisco earthquake in 1906, the Day family moved to a tenement flat in Chicago’s South Side. It was a big step down in the world made necessary because Dorothy’s father, John Day, was out of work. When John Day was appointed sports editor of a Chicago newspaper, the Day family moved to a comfortable house on the North Side. Young Dorothy 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.”
Dorothy 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. Dropping out of college two years later, she moved to New York where she found a job as a reporter for different socialist papers. She covered rallies and demonstrations, often taking part herself, and interviewed radicals and revolutionaries. 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 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. In 1924, Dorothy bought a beach cottage on Staten Island and began a common-law marriage with Forster Batterham, an English anarchist, opposed to marriage and religion.
They loved each other very much. They fished together, they walked everyday for miles and, little by little, an entire new world opened up for Dorothy. She started reading the Bible. Later she wrote: “I was happy but my very happiness made me know that there was a greater happiness to be obtained from life. It was in this time that I began consciously to pray more”. A terrible doubt came over her. “Here you are” – she told herself – “in a stupor of content. You are biological. Like a cow. Prayer with you is like the opiate of the people.” But she reasoned: “I am praying because I am happy, not because I am unhappy, I did not turn to God in grief, in despair – to get consolation, to get something from God.”
Every hesitation ended in Dorothy when she realized in ecstasy that she was pregnant: “I will never forget my blissful joy when I was first sure that I was pregnant. Immediately I knew that I was going to have my baby baptized, cost what it may. I felt it was the greatest thing I could do for my child.” The cost was devastating: Foster did not like the pregnancy in the first place and said that if the baby was going to be baptized, he was going to leave her for good. The baby was born, a girl. The preparation for the baptism went ahead. When the day approached, Foster went out at sea to catch lobster for the celebration. The day itself came, in July 1927, and the baby was baptized by the name of Tamar Theresa. All Dorothy’s friends, anarchists and communists included, were invited and they came.
On the eve of the celebration, Foster had left never to appear in Dorothy’s life again. That was the start of the long loneliness that Dorothy describes in her autobiography. She wrote: “I loved him in every way – as a wife, as a mother even. I loved him for all he knew and pitied him for what he didn’t know. I loved him for the odds and ends I had to fish out of his sweater pockets and for the sand and shells he brought in with his fishing. I loved his integrity and stubborn pride.”
The cost of the separation and loss lasted a lifetime. She wrote: “A woman doesn’t feel whole without a man… For a woman who has experienced the joy of marriage, it is really hard. It took years for me not to wake up with the acute longing of a head leaning on my breast and an arm around my shoulders. I was experiencing a great sense of emptiness.” Fifty-three years later, Foster appeared – at Dorothy’s funeral.
FAITH AND SOCIAL VALUES
On December 28, 1927, Dorothy was received into the Catholic Church. A special period commenced in her life as she tried to find a way to bring together her religious faith and her radical social values. She was praying to the Blessed Virgin Mary, with tears and anguish, that some way would open up for her to use what talents she possessed for her fellow workers, for the poor. In 1932, Dorothy met a Frenchman, Peter Maurin, an eccentric kindred spirit, a vagabond visionary, twenty years older than her. A strange team, they got along immediately like a house on fire.
Together, they started the Catholic Worker newspaper and later opened Hospitality Houses for the poor and homeless whom Peter called the “ambassadors of God.” It was the time of the Great Depression and thousands of people found themselves jobless and soon crowded the Hospitality Houses all over the United States. The Catholic Worker became a national movement. Over 100 of these houses are still functioning nowadays.
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 Dorothy how long the “clients” were permitted to stay. “We let them stay forever,” Dorothy 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 were always members of the family. They are our brothers and sisters in Christ.”
The Catholic Worker also experimented with farming communes. But what got Dorothy 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 Peter: “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.
Wars did not lack during Dorothy’s lifetime: the Spanish civil war, the Second World War, the Vietnam War. Every time she renewed her pacifist commitment, unmindful of the cost. Hospitality Houses had to be closed, the Catholic Worker lost thousands of readers.
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 Dorothy part of an attempt to promote nuclear war as survivable and winnable and to justify spending billions on the military. Dorothy 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. Then, every year until the rehearsal was cancelled in 1961, there were arrests.
Concern with the Church’s response to war led Dorothy 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, she was one of 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, Dorothy 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.” She 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.
Dorothy had reason to rejoice in December when the Constitution on the Church in the Modern World was approved by the bishops. The Council 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 that condemn the innocent and defenseless.
ON THE WAY TO SAINTHOOD
Dorothy 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 that is worn only by fully-professed members of the Missionary Sisters of Charity. Long before her death, Dorothy 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. In 2000, Cardinal John O’Connor, Archbishop of New York, initiated her cause for canonization with the following words: “If any woman ever loved God and neighbor, it was Dorothy Day!” She worked for, lived with, and died among the poorest and most abandoned. In the drama of her life, she first found beauty, then truth and, ultimately, God in the poor. “Those who cannot see the face of Christ in the poor are atheists indeed,” she said. “I firmly believe that our salvation depends on the poor.”
Photos: Courtesy of the Marquette University Archives
