Editor's note: Dorothy Day was born on this date, Nov. 8, in 1897. This essay is adapted from Robert Ellsberg's recently published collection, Dorothy Day: Spiritual Writings.
On June 15, 1955, at the sound of a wailing siren signaling an imminent nuclear attack, the entire population of New York City obediently sought shelter in basements and subway stations, or, in the case of school children, under their desks. According to the authorities, this first in a series of annual “civil defense” drills was a “complete success.”
Well, almost. It was marred by a middle-aged, white-haired woman and 26 others who refused to play along with this war game. Rather than take shelter, Dorothy Day and her companions instead sat in City Hall Park, where they were arrested and later sentenced to jail. The judge who imposed bail likened the protesters to “murderers” who had contributed to the “utter destruction of these three million theoretically killed in our city.”
That clear spring day in 1955 was more than 20 years after Dorothy Day had founded the Catholic Worker—at first a newspaper, and then a movement consisting of “houses of hospitality” in New York City and across the country. In such communities the “works of mercy” (feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, sheltering the homeless) were combined with a commitment to social justice and the vision of a new society based on values of generosity, compassion and solidarity, rather than selfishness, greed and fear.
There were many who had initially admired her work among the poor. Among the original subscribers to her newspaper, founded in the heart of the Depression, there were also plenty who sympathized with her critique of an economic system that produced such poverty and desperation. Yet few in those early years joined Day in her conviction that the way of Jesus was incompatible with any kind of killing. On the day of that first civil defense drill, the number of Catholics in New York City who agreed that preparation for nuclear war was a crime against God and humanity could evidently fit inside a single police wagon.
And yet for Dorothy, it all went together. The Catholic Worker was an effort to live out the radical implications of the teaching of Christ: that what we do for the least of our brothers and sisters—whether feed them, shelter them or bomb them—we do directly for him.
It might seem curious to begin with an account of Dorothy’s civil disobedience, rather than with her discipline of prayer, her veneration of the saints or her devotion to the sacraments. All these things and more sustained her. Yet what caused Dorothy to stand out in her time, as it does still, is the way her spiritual life was expressed not only in her daily prayer but in her response to the needs of her neighbors, to the poor and to the demands of history.
Spiritual writings
The writings of Dorothy Day are a reminder that the activism and public witness for which she is best remembered were merely the more visible expression of the deep spiritual synthesis that guided her daily life. Much of that centered on the practice of her traditional Catholic faith: daily Mass, the rosary, recitation of the Psalms in morning and evening prayer, observance of the feasts and fasts of the liturgical calendar. She drew inspiration from the example of favorite saints, including Francis of Assisi, Teresa of Ávila and Thérèse of Lisieux. But it would be hard to describe Dorothy Day simply in terms of continuity with previous models of holiness.
Like the great saints she revered, she also devised her own path. That path was marked by a number of favorite maxims: “All the way to Heaven is heaven” (St. Catherine of Siena); “The world will be saved by beauty” (Dostoevsky); “The sacrament of the present moment” (Jean Pierre de Caussade); “The practice of the presence of God” (Brother Lawrence).
Such phrases pointed to the deep significance of all the incidents, encounters and circumstances of our daily life when viewed in light of the Gospel. Everyday life could be a school of love. Eternal life was rooted in the here and now. And the lessons mastered in small and intimate ways equipped her for larger, public challenges. Overall, she summed up her mission as a response to “the greatest challenge of the day”: “How to bring about a revolution of the heart, a revolution which has to start with each one of us?”
Dorothy’s revolution of the heart was rooted in two primary stories. The first of these, of course, was the Gospel story of Jesus. Along with the Eucharist, the Gospel texts were the staple of her daily life: the parables, the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus’ encounters with the poor and sick, his conflicts with the religious and political authorities of his time, his Passion and Resurrection. In these stories, she did not encounter a figure from 2,000 years ago, but a lens for reading the ordinary events of life, the news of the day and her encounters with those in need.
To be a Christian, she believed, was to live in a constant confrontation with the living Christ: “It is no use to say that we are born two thousand years too late to give room to Christ. Nor will those who live at the end of the world have been born too late. Christ is always with us, always asking for room in our hearts.”
And then there was her own story, which she shared in two memoirs, From Union Square to Rome (1938) and The Long Loneliness (1952). In both cases, she was eager to relate the story of those events, encounters and experiences in her early life that brought her to the knowledge of God. Chief among these was her engagement with the cause of the poor and the struggle for social justice: “Because I sincerely loved His poor, He taught me to know Him. And when I think of the little I ever did, I am filled with hope and love for all those others devoted to the cause of social justice.”
A lonely path
But there were many other experiences along the way. She wrote about her childhood piety, and how, during her two years in college, this was supplanted by a new faith in the struggle for justice. She wrote about her work in New York as a journalist with left-wing newspapers and magazines, her arrest with suffragists in Washington, D.C., and the dejection she experienced in her brief stints in jail. She wrote of late nights in saloons listening to Eugene O’Neill recite “The Hound of Heaven,” and the impulse that often drove her, afterward, to sit at the back of St. Joseph’s Church in Greenwich Village, “not knowing what was going on at the altar, but warmed and comforted by the lights and silence, the kneeling people, and the atmosphere of worship.”
She also referred to other experiences of “the tragic aspect of life in general,” though she did not go into detail. As we now know, this included a desperate love affair that ended with her having an abortion and twice attempting to commit suicide. All this, of course, was before becoming a Catholic. Yet, from the perspective of her conversion, she came to believe that God had been present throughout this story, hovering over her life, in times of doubt and confusion as much as in joy and conviction.
In 2000, the Archdiocese of New York initiated Dorothy Day’s cause for canonization and she was named a Servant of God. Thus began a long process that may one day result in her becoming known as St. Dorothy. If so, no doubt she will be a saint with an unusual backstory. Yet even the circumstances of her conversion are unique in the annals of the saints.
This occurred while she was living on Staten Island with a man she deeply loved, Forster Batterham, and discovered that she was once again pregnant. This time, in her gratitude, she welcomed the new life within her, and found herself praying and wishing to have her child baptized—a step she eventually followed in 1927, at the age of 30.
She believed that the Catholic Church, for all its failures, was the church of the poor. She was attracted by its appeal to the senses: “The music speaking to the ear, the incense to the sense of smell, the appeal of color to the eye, stained glass, ikons and statues, the bread and wine to the taste, the touch of rich vestments and altar linens, the touch of holy water, oils, the sign of the cross, the beating of the breast.”
And though she had passed through many times of sorrow, her conversion was ultimately born not from sadness but from the experience of what she called “natural happiness”: her love for Forster, her awakening to the beauty of nature, and the joy she felt in knowing that she was going to have a baby. Her happiness made her believe in a still greater happiness. She experienced a sense of gratitude so immense that only God could receive it.
And yet her daughter’s baptism, followed later by her own entry to the church, did not provide an immediate sense of arrival. For one thing, it meant separation from Forster, who, as an atheist and anarchist, refused on principle to get married. At the same time, in becoming a Catholic, she felt that she was betraying her comrades in the struggle for the poor and oppressed. If the church was the home of the poor, it also seemed all too often the defender of the status quo, a friend of the rich and powerful. Thus, she embarked on a lonely path for the next five years, searching for some higher purpose.
Meeting Maurin
The turning point came in December 1932, when she traveled to Washington, D.C. to write about a “hunger march” of the unemployed, organized by her former Communist friends. Why were Catholics not leading such a march, she wondered. Heading for the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, she offered a prayer that came “with tears and with anguish” that she might find her vocation—some way of using her talents in the service of the poor. And when she returned to New York, she met Peter Maurin, an itinerant French apostle in search of a collaborator, whose personalist philosophy seemed an answer to her prayer.
It took a while for Dorothy to comprehend Maurin’s vision and to see how it related to her own search. Yet, one of his suggestions immediately caught her attention: that she start a newspaper to promote the radical social message of the Gospel. Almost immediately, she got to work. The result was The Catholic Worker, an eight-page tabloid composed on her kitchen table. The first issue was launched at a May Day rally in Union Square in 1933.
It is striking how quickly Dorothy’s life changed. Within a few months of her meeting Peter Maurin, she had found not only a new work, but a new vitality and energy. As the editor of a newspaper and the leader of a growing movement, she was suddenly thrust onto a public stage, confidently addressing bishops, labor priests and union leaders. She had a voice and a message—one that drew particular authority from the fact that she was living it out.
Other lay Catholics quickly answered her call and gathered to join the work. Before long, they had implemented the second plank in Maurin’s program, opening a “house of hospitality” where she and her fellow “Catholic Workers” would live among the poor, in voluntary poverty, practicing the works of mercy. Before meeting Maurin, Dorothy had been searching for a “synthesis” of her own: between the spiritual and the material, this world and the next.
The solution to that synthesis, she came to realize, was in the radical implications of the Incarnation. God, in Jesus, had entered our flesh and our history. All of creation, the whole material world, was thereby hallowed. We could not separate the love of God from the love of our neighbors. Jesus said that what we did for the poor, we did directly for him. In effect, this teaching became the first spiritual foundation of the Catholic Worker, expressed not only in the works of mercy, but in work for justice and peace.
The little flower
Of course, she did not believe that by feeding a few hundred hungry people each morning, she could solve the problems of the Depression. Nor, years later, when she sat out the civil defense drills and went to jail, did she believe that such gestures would bring an end to war. But like Jesus, who spoke of the mysterious potential of a mustard seed, Dorothy believed in the power hidden in small and humble means. And this was a second, essential foundation of Dorothy’s spirituality. In this she drew surprising lessons from her favorite saint, Thérèse of Lisieux.
St. Thérèse called her spiritual path the “Little Way.” It consisted of performing all the small deeds and obligations of daily life in a spirit of love and in the presence of God. In this way, she believed, daily life could become an arena for holiness. You didn’t have to be in a convent or face lions in the Roman Coliseum. Everyday life provided the means for sanctification.
Furthermore, Thérèse believed strongly in the spiritual connections that bind all members of the mystical Body of Christ. Thus, each sacrifice endured in love, each work of mercy, did not just advance one’s own path to holiness—it might increase the balance of love in the world. As Dorothy wrote, “We can throw our pebble in the pond and be confident that its ever-widening circle will reach around the world.”
Dorothy’s diaries record the discipline of her spiritual life: daily Mass, the rosary, and meditation on Scripture. But above all they show a woman who held her everyday life against the standard of the Gospel—measuring and testing her own capacity for love, forgiveness and patience.
It was the exercise of her faith in small ways, the effort to live her daily life in the conscious presence of God, that equipped her for the extraordinary actions she performed on a wider stage.
Here too, the teaching of St. Thérèse came into play. In the 1950s, at the same time as her protests of the civil defense drills, she was actually writing a book about Thérèse, motivated, she said, by her desire to call attention to the “social implications” of Thérèse’s teachings: the significance of all the little things we do—or fail to do. This included the protests we make: appearing foolish while standing on a street corner with a sign for peace, handing out a leaflet or going to jail for a few days. There was no calculating the potential effect of such gestures, no matter how apparently foolish and ineffective.
It may be that Dorothy’s application of St. Thérèse’s “Little Way” to the social arena is one of the most significant and at the same time underappreciated aspects of her spirituality.
In a time when so many feel overwhelmed by the vast powers of this world, Dorothy Day bore witness to another power—the power disguised in what is apparently small and weak. Who can measure such power? As she noted, “We know that one impulse of grace is of infinitely more power than a cobalt bomb.”
Upon her death on Nov. 29, 1980, the historian David O’Brien, writing in Commonweal, called her “the most important, interesting, and influential figure in the history of American Catholicism.” As it turned out, this judgment received some confirmation from Pope Francis himself in his address to the U.S. Congress in 2015, where he included Dorothy Day in the ranks of Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr. and her friend Thomas Merton as one of the four “great Americans” around whom he organized his speech.
“In these times when social concerns are so important,” he said, “I cannot fail to mention the Servant of God Dorothy Day, who founded the Catholic Worker Movement. Her social activism, her passion for justice and for the cause of the oppressed, were inspired by the Gospel, her faith, and the example of the saints.”
Doubtless she would have viewed all this attention with suspicion. As she often said, “Too much praise makes you feel that you must be doing something terribly wrong.” In that light, it is fair to wonder what she would have thought of efforts to declare her a saint.
The saint in all of us
For some, the answer is clear: “Don’t call me a saint,” she is famously quoted as saying, “I don’t want to be dismissed that easily.” Putting aside the fact that no actual saint would possibly say otherwise, there are still other reasons why this quote should not represent the last word on the subject.
No one took saints more seriously than Dorothy Day. For her, they were not idealized superhumans, but constant companions and daily guides in the imitation of Christ. She relished the human details of their struggles to be faithful, realizing full well that in their own time they were often regarded as eccentrics or dangerous troublemakers.
Yet she was aware of the tendency to put saints on a pedestal, far above the usual standard of humanity. When people referred to her as a living saint, she supposed that they imagined that things came easily for her—living with the poor, going to jail—that would be unthinkable for ordinary people. If that is what it meant to be called a saint, she would have none of it.
For Dorothy, the challenge was not to be called a saint but to be a saint. She believed this was not only her own vocation but the calling of all Christians. “We might as well get over our bourgeois fear of the name,” she wrote. “We might also get used to recognizing the fact that there is some of the saint in all of us. Inasmuch as we are growing, putting off the old man and putting on Christ, there is some of the saint, the holy, the divine right there.”
At the same time, however, she believed in the need for a new model of holiness in our time. This intuition came to her even as a child. Recalling her first discovery of stories about saints, she described her admiration for their heroic ministry to the poor, the weak and the infirm. But, already, there was another question in her mind: “Why was so much done in remedying the evil instead of avoiding it in the first place?... Where were the saints to try to change the social order, not just to minister to the slaves, but to do away with slavery?” It was a question she would answer with her own life.
The relevance of Dorothy Day’s life and witness is not likely to fade. Her great themes are no less urgent today: the quest for freedom, community and peace; the sacredness of life; the dignity of the poor; the practice of mercy; the hope for “a new social order in which justice dwelleth.”
To reflect on her life today, more than 40 years after her death, brings to mind the words she wrote about her mentor Peter Maurin, words that could apply as well to herself. She noted that some people criticized Peter for having a holier-than-thou attitude. Well, Peter was “holier than thou,” she said. “Holier than anyone we ever knew.”
