Street Saint

Dorothy Day: 1897-1980

"Go, sell what you have, and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me." For 2,000 years Christians have wrestled un successfully with the import of Jesus' words to the Rich Young Ruler. For her part, Roman Catholic Activist Dorothy Day took the command literally. Over two generations, idealistic young Catholics came to work at her soup kitchens, helping the poor for a while and then departing for families and careers. Dorothy Day stayed on. And on. When she died at age 83 in "Maryhouse," a residence for the destitute on New York City's Lower East Side, she was living in a small room next door to a shopping-bag lady.

To admirers like Historian David J. O'Brien, writing in Commonweal, she was "the most significant, interesting and influential person in the history of American Catholicism."

If so, it is because her Catholic Worker movement blended zeal for reforming the whole social system with practical concern for helping the individual poor. She was arrested a dozen times, the first as a suffragette in 1917, the last during a workers' demonstration in California in 1973, and took part in scores of labor and antimilitary protests.

Daughter of a nonreligious sportswriter, Dorothy was confirmed in the Episcopal Church. She became a socialist agnostic in 1915 at the University of Illinois. "For me Christ no longer walked the streets of this world. He was 2,000 years dead and new prophets had risen up in His place," she recalled in her finely crafted autobiography, The Long Loneliness (1952). At 18 she moved to New York City, befriended young writers like Eugene O'Neill and Hart Crane, took a Marxist lover, joined the young labor movement and wrote for far-left newspapers like the Masses.

Conversion to Catholicism came through odd circumstances. She lived with an atheist whose "ardent love of creation brought me to the Creator of all things." But when she bore the man's daughter, she sought baptism: "I was not going to have her floundering through many years as I had done, doubting, un disciplined and amoral. For myself I prayed for the gift of faith." It came. In 1927 she left the father of her child and was baptized in the Catholic Church.

Still she longed to find some way of applying her new faith to help the poor. In the depths of the Depression, she met a wandering French philosopher-laborer named Peter Maurin. On May Day 1933 to challenge their church's social conservatism, they launched the monthly Catholic Worker (price per copy, to this day 1-c-). Circulation reached 150,000 by 1936 (though it is now 96,000).

Their social philosophy was neither Communist nor capitalist--nor overly lucid. Among its elements: rigid pacifism opposition to the revolutionary class struggle, acceptance of private property but with industry owned by workers and generally, the less government the better. Day and Maurin called it Christian "anarchism."

Its goal, Maurin said, was "a society in which it is easier for people to be good."

The Worker sided with striking workers (including New York City gravediggers who walked out on Cardinal Spellman in 1949). It encouraged communal living, ecumenism and the concept of laymen as missioners. The movement is still best known for its "direct action" on behalf of the poor. Day and Maurin started by setting up lodgings for a handful of down-and-outers. In time, dozens of loosely linked "Houses of Hospitality" around the U.S. were offering free food, shelter and used clothing to derelicts. Day and the other workers always lived and ate alongside their "guests." Eventually twelve farms were established. When the shoestring operation ran out of funds, the staff simply prayed to their patron St. Joseph for help, and donations somehow appeared.

Dorothy Day's funeral, held in the linoleum-floored Church of the Nativity where she worshiped daily for years, drew hundreds--from Priest-Activist Daniel Berrigan and Farm Worker Leader Cesar Chavez to Terence Cardinal Cooke, who blessed the plain pine coffin. Former Yippie Abbie Hoffman was there, too: "She is the nearest thing this Jewish boy is ever going to get to a saint." Also in the overflow, which spread along the sidewalk outside the church, was a drifter who gave his name as Lazarus. Said he, with tears oozing down his seamed cheeks: "That fine lady gave me love."

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