Dorothy Day

Dorothy Day was born on November 8, 1897, in Brooklyn Heights, New York, the third of five children in a family that was nominally Episcopalian and largely indifferent to religion. Her father, a sportswriter, moved the family to San Francisco and then to Chicago as work required; the 1906 earthquake, which she witnessed as a child, left an early impression of both catastrophe and the spontaneous generosity of people toward one another in disaster. She entered the University of Illinois at Urbana on a scholarship at sixteen but left after two years, drawn to journalism and to the radical politics of New York's Lower East Side. There she wrote for socialist and communist papers — The Call, The Masses, The Liberator — reported on strikes and breadlines, was jailed for suffrage protest, and moved among the bohemian left, counting Eugene O'Neill among her friends.

Those years held what she later called her time in the wilderness. She had an abortion after an affair ended, entered a brief unhappy marriage, and lived with Forster Batterham, a biologist and anarchist, in a common-law union on Staten Island. It was the birth of her daughter Tamar in 1926 that undid her unbelief. The gratitude she felt was so overwhelming that it demanded an object, and she found herself praying. She had Tamar baptized Catholic and, in December 1927, was received into the Roman Catholic Church herself — a decision that cost her Forster, who would not marry and would not tolerate her faith, and that estranged her from the radical friends who saw the Church as the enemy of the poor.

For five years she was a Catholic without a vocation, a convert who could not reconcile her faith with her hunger for justice. That reconciliation arrived in the person of Peter Maurin, an itinerant French peasant-philosopher who found her in 1932 and gave her a program.

His Writing and Its Influence

Out of Maurin's vision came The Catholic Worker, a newspaper first sold for a penny a copy in Union Square on May 1, 1933. It combined uncompromising Catholic orthodoxy with radical social teaching drawn from the Gospels, the encyclicals, and the works of mercy. The paper was never merely journalism; it generated houses of hospitality where the poor were fed and sheltered, and agrarian communes where a new social order might be lived rather than argued. Day edited the paper for nearly fifty years and wrote its columns until her death, keeping the price at a penny throughout.

Her autobiography, The Long Loneliness (1952), remains her enduring book — its title borrowed from a line she attributed to the mystic experience of solitude, its narrative tracing conversion not as escape from the world but as descent into it. Loaves and Fishes (1963) told the movement's story; her columns, gathered posthumously, extended it. Her formation was drawn from the saints she read constantly — Thérèse of Lisieux, on whom she wrote a study, taught her the little way; Teresa of Ávila, John of the Cross, and the Russian novelists, especially Dostoevsky, whose line that love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared to love in dreams she quoted as a rule of life.

Her pacifism during the Second World War cost the movement much of its readership and drew the anger of many Catholics. Her repeated arrests, her refusal of civil-defense drills, and her sympathy for labor made her suspect to the hierarchy even as she insisted on perfect obedience to the Church. She resisted being called a saint — "Don't call me a saint. I don't want to be dismissed so easily" — yet the cause for her canonization was opened in 2000, and Rome now names her Servant of God. In 2015 Pope Francis placed her before Congress among four great Americans.

Who should read Dorothy Day: Readers who suspect that the Gospel makes claims on money, property, and comfort that most churches have quietly declined to press. She is essential for those drawn to social justice who fear it must be secular, and for the pious who fear it must be worldly — Day insists these are the same fidelity. She is not for readers seeking a tidy conversion story or a spirituality that leaves daily life undisturbed. She is for those willing to consider that love of God is measured by what one is prepared to do for the person at the door.