I first met Dorothy Day a few days before Christmas in 1960. On leave from my work with the U.S. Navy in Washington, I had come to New York to visit the Catholic Worker community after reading copies of The Catholic Worker that I found stacked on a table in a parish library.
Arriving in Manhattan, I made my way to Saint Joseph’s House — then in a loft on Spring Street, on the north edge of Little Italy in the Lower East Side. Discovering that it was moving day, I joined in helping carry boxes from the loft to a three-storey brick building on Chrystie Street, a few blocks to the east. My nights on those early visits were spent on the floor of a two-room Catholic Worker apartment in the same neighborhood.
I also visited the community’s rural outpost on Staten Island, Peter Maurin Farm. Crossing Upper New York Bay by ferry (at five-cents a ride the best buy in the city), I made my way to an old farmhouse on a rural road in Tottenville, near the island’s southern tip. In its large, faded dining room, I found half-a-dozen people, Dorothy among them, gathered around a pot of tea at one end of a large table. I gave Dorothy a bag of mail addressed to her that had been received in Manhattan. Within minutes, she was reading letters aloud to all of us.
What a handsome woman! Her face was long, with high, prominent cheekbones underlining large, quick eyes, deep blue and almond shaped, that could be teasing one moment, laughing the next, then turn grave an instant later. Her gray hair, parted in the middle, was braided and circled the top of her head like a garland of silver flowers. She had a fresh, scrubbed look with no trace of cosmetics. The woolen suit she wore was plain and well-tailored, good quality, yet almost certainly retrieved from the Catholic Worker’s free clothing room.
The only letter I still recall from that day’s reading was one from Thomas Merton, the famous monk whose autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, had held many people in its grip, including me. In 1941, Merton had withdrawn from “the world” to a Trappist monastery in Kentucky with a slam of the door that eventually was heard around the world. I had assumed that he wrote to no one outside his family. Yet here he was in correspondence with someone who was not only in the thick of the world, but one of its more engaged and controversial figures.
In his letter, Merton told Dorothy that he was deeply touched by her witness for peace, which had several times resulted in arrest and imprisonment. “You are right going along the lines of satyagraha [Gandhi’s term for nonviolent action; literally the power of truth]. I see no other way. … Nowadays it is no longer a question of who is right but who is at least not criminal…. It has never been more true than now that the world is lost in its own falsity and cannot see true values…. God bless you.” This was one of Merton’s first letters to Dorothy. Only ten months later, he published his first essay in The Catholic Worker — “The Root of War is Fear” — and immediately got into trouble for doing so.
Merton was one of countless people drawn to Dorothy and influenced by her. She had a great gift for making those who met her, even if only through letters or her published writings, look at themselves in a new light, questioning previously held ideas, allegiances and choices.
Dorothy was 63 when I met her and, to my young eyes, seemed venerable. Half a year later, after being discharged from the Navy as a conscientious objector, I joined the Catholic Worker staff in New York at Dorothy’s invitation.
While doing research for this book, I read an account by Jack English of Dorothy as she had been in 1935, 25 years before I met her and only two years after the founding of the Catholic Worker. Jack had missed the talk Dorothy had given at his college, but the next day he found discussion about her raging in the cafeteria. “They were talking about how beautiful she was. She had talked the entire lecture with a cigarette hanging out of the corner of her mouth, with a beret on, and someone said it looked as if she needed her neck washed.” Jack was so intrigued that he decided to attend a meeting Dorothy was addressing that night in a nearby town. He found her amazing. “What impressed me so much was that she said, ‘You can do this work wherever you are’.” Afterward Dorothy and Jack talked briefly. She urged him to read The Catholic Worker. “That was the beginning of it. Something happened in my life. It wasn’t a profound thing at the moment. She was not the kind of person that had been described to me that morning in the coffee room. I had read some of the lives of holy people and saints, but I had the feeling of the same education and even — I hate to use the word — holiness about Dorothy.”
Recalling his first impressions about Dorothy in a taped interview with Deane Mowrer in 1970, Jack said he was still impressed with Dorothy’s ability to engage herself with so many individuals. “She occasionally talks in terms of the abstract, but she never talks or operates except person to person.” Jack had learned from her that “each human being is unique, totally unique, and that each time I meet and have a real encounter with another human being, I am changed somehow, whether for good or bad.”
The Dorothy Day I encountered was a quarter century older than the Dorothy Jack had met in the mid-1930s. The cigarette and beret were long gone. Dorothy, still handsome, had become even more formidable and was on the edge of being venerable. But the main qualities that so impressed Jack were just as striking to me: her ability to focus on the person she was talking to, not to see just a young face but your young face, not discerning just a vague, general promise, but your particular gifts. Through Dorothy, you saw exciting possibilities in yourself you hadn’t seen before.
Her impact on Jack was similar to her impact on me. We both became involved in Catholic Worker houses of hospitality, which were found then, as now, in many cities and occasionally in the countryside.
When I became part of the New York Catholic Worker community, there was only one house in Manhattan, Saint Joseph’s. Only one person actually lived there, a recluse named Keith who had a room in the rear of the third floor. He was rarely seen, and then only briefly. The rest of us, Dorothy as well, lived in $25-a-month cold-water flats located nearby. By chance, Dorothy’s room was next to the one I shared with Stuart Sandberg. We were on the sixth floor of a tenement on Spring Street. Each floor had four apartments, the occupants of which shared a toilet located in a closet in the hallway.
There are nearly two hundred Catholic Worker houses. While each has unique aspects, they have a lot in common. Like Saint Joseph’s House in Manhattan, the houses tend to be in run-down neighborhoods where people who have fallen on hard times are received and made welcome and necessities provided, all without forms, inquisitors or unsought advice. Perhaps there is an angel in heaven who knows exactly how many bowls of soup have been served in Catholic Worker houses since 1933. Millions, that’s certain. The remarkable thing about Catholic Worker soup is that it has a way of making you ask questions — Dorothy Day’s questions — about what brings about a social order in which so many people have to line up at the doors of soup kitchens. Most houses offer places to stay and whatever other practical help is needed and that the staff can manage. Most houses are also involved in occasional acts of protest of war, and preparations for war, as well as other aspects of the social order that cause suffering rather than relieve it.
As I had discovered that first day at the farm on Staten Island, Dorothy was a tireless story-teller. She didn’t just read to herself the letters she received, but read them aloud to co-workers who happened to be there, oftentimes telling about the people who sent them. If a letter didn’t have to be answered by her personally, she would pass it on to others for response.
I recall her reading a letter from the Gauchat family, founders of a Catholic Worker community in Ohio. Dorothy told us how the Gauchats had taken in a six-month-old child who was expected to die at any time. The child was deaf and blind, with a fluid-filled lump on his head larger than a baseball. “Bill Gauchat made the sign of the cross over that child’s face,” Dorothy said, “and he saw those dull eyes followed the motion of his hand. The child could see! Within a year David — that was his name — was well enough to be taken home by his real parents. His life was saved by the love in the Gauchat home.”
Hearing stories like these day after day, we were learning something about life that you don’t get in newspapers, classrooms or even in many churches. At the core of each story there were always just a few people, maybe just one person, for whom following Christ was the most important thing in the world. Astonishing things often came from that kind of discipleship.
A letter from one Catholic Worker community that was trying to help a prostitute get free of her pimp reminded Dorothy of a prostitute named Mary Ann whom Dorothy had been in jail with in Chicago in the early 1920s. At the time, Dorothy had been living a bohemian life with no plans of ever becoming Catholic. She hadn’t intended to be arrested and was terrified of the guards. “You must hold your head high,” Mary Ann advised her, “and give them no clue that you’re afraid of them or ready to beg for anything, any favors whatsoever. But you must see them for what they are — never forget that they’re in jail too.”
The stories she told also gave Dorothy occasion to draw on her massive supply of proverbs and sayings. How many times have I heard her repeat Saint Catherine of Siena’s remark, “All the way to heaven is heaven, because Jesus said, ‘I am the way’.” There was a line from George Bernanos that she often used: “Hell is not to love anymore.” Just as often, she made use of a saying from Saint John of the Cross, “Love is the measure by which we will be judged.”
One of her favorites was this sentence from Dostoevsky: “The world will be saved by beauty.” There was also Saint Augustine’s parallel insight: “All beauty is a revelation of God.”
Dorothy had a rare gift for finding beauty in places where it was often overlooked — in nature, in the smell of garlic or some herb drifting out a tenement window, in resourceful flowers blooming in a slum neighborhood, in the battered faces of people who survived on the fringes of society. Dorothy saw news of the resurrection in grass battling upward toward the sky between blocks of concrete.
Music was important in her life, especially opera. One had to have a very good reason for knocking on her door on a Saturday afternoon when she was listening to the weekly radio broadcast of the Metropolitan Opera.
Then there was Dorothy the writer. She had become a working journalist at an early age — at age 19, she got a job with The Call, a daily newspaper published in lower Manhattan. From that point on, she seemed to be endlessly taking notes and writing, interconnecting activities. There was always a notebook in her bag. Her note-taking and journal-keeping were as much a part of Dorothy as breathing. Time and again every day she made note of something that had been said or jotted down a passage from the book she was then reading. During the weekly Friday night meetings at the Catholic Worker, Dorothy’s note-taking was nonstop. When she traveled, she kept track of whom she had met and what had been said. Her notes in turn became raw material for her monthly column, “On Pilgrimage.” What has become of all those notebooks? There must be hundreds of them.
Dorothy’s more substantial work, the several books she wrote, were mainly written on the large office typewriter at the beach house on Staten Island, her place of retreat and — most of the time — solitude.
Dorothy was a fervent reader. Since childhood, she had loved books. She once told me that “the hardest part of living in community is the loss of so many books.” Her engagement in the world seemed only to fuel the reading side of her life — or was it that her reading fueled her engagement? She read certain books over and over again — among them Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov and other Russians classics. She also loved almost anything written by Charles Dickens. Bleak House was one of her favorites.
Some of the books had a huge impact in her life. One can wonder whether Father Zosima in The Brothers Karamazov — a book she had first read in her teens — shouldn’t be regarded as a co-founder of the Catholic Worker, so much did Dorothy value the elder’s teaching on active love and her understanding of Christ’s Gospel. (Zosima was inspired in part by an actual monk, Father Amvrosy of Optina Pustin, to whom Dostoevsky had turned in a time of personal tragedy. In Dostoevsky’s novel, it is Zosima who says, “Love in practice is often a harsh and dreadful thing compared to love in dreams,” words Dorothy seemed to repeat nearly every day of her life. When I took part in the canonization of Father Amvrosy at a monastery near Moscow in 1988, I thought that surely Dorothy was among the saints invisibly present to celebrate the day with us.)
Dorothy had an intense devotion to the saints — Christ’s mother Mary, first of all, but then to so many others. One of the least likely was Joan of Arc, famous for her military exploits (though she never wielded a sword) and finally for being burned at the stake. I once noticed a small statue of Joan, clad in armor, on the table next to Dorothy’s bed. Responding to my surprise, Dorothy explained that “Joan of Arc is a saint of fidelity to conscience.”
One could easily edit a book of Dorothy’s writings about saints. Joseph, the foster father of Jesus and patron saint of all working people, was among the most important. The oldest Catholic Worker house of hospitality, the one I had become part of after leaving the Navy, was dedicated to Saint Joseph. We had a finely carved wooden statue of him that the artist had donated. Under it, during periods when the community’s financial well was nearly dry, Dorothy would place all the bills awaiting payment. “Keeping us going is your responsibility,” she would remind Saint Joseph.
Dorothy had much in common with another of her favorite saints, Teresa of Avila. Both had animated the foundation of many religious communities, and both were tireless travelers. Both were reformers who went through periods of being regarded with suspicion by the hierarchy. Both were outspoken and fearless.
Another saint that greatly inspired her was Therese of Lisieux, a contemplative Carmelite nun of the 19th century who after her death came to be known as “the Little Flower.” She lived an obscure life, never traveling and never founding anything. Yet so significant was she to Dorothy that the only biography Dorothy ever published was about Therese and her “Little Way.” What most impressed Dorothy was Therese’s certainty that nothing, even the most hidden action, is ever wasted. (The book, Therese, is out of print, but major sections of it are included in Dorothy Day: Selected Writings.)
Again and again in her writing and talks, Dorothy would stress the “little way.” It was at the heart of everything she valued. As she put in her “On Pilgrimage” column for the December 1965 issue of The Catholic Worker: “Paper work, cleaning the house, dealing with the innumerable visitors who come all through the day, answering the phone, keeping patience and acting intelligently, which is to find some meaning in all that happens ─ these things, too, are the works of peace, and often seem like a very little way.”
When I think of Dorothy, I first of all recall the many times I saw her on her knees at prayer at a nearby parish church or at the chapel at the Catholic Worker farm. (The archdiocese had permitted a chapel on the farm and reservation of the Blessed Sacrament within it.) Times of prayer were a basic element of her daily life.
One afternoon, Dorothy having been summoned for an urgent phone call, I looked in the prayer books she had left on the bench of the farm chapel and discovered page after page of names, all written in her careful italic script, of people, living and dead, for whom she was praying. She prayed as if lives depended on it. The physician Robert Coles of the Harvard Medical School credited Dorothy’s prayers with the miraculous cure of his wife, who had been dying of cancer and suddenly recovered.
There was a special list with the names of people who had committed suicide. I once asked Dorothy, “But isn’t it too late?” “With God there is no time,” she responded. She went on to say how a lot can happen in a person’s thoughts between initiating an action that will result in death and death itself — that even the tiny fraction of a second that passes between pulling a trigger and the bullet striking the brain might, in the infinity of time that exists deep within us, be time enough for regretting what it was now too late to stop, and to cry out for God’s mercy.
I recall a story Dorothy once told me about persistence in prayer. For many years, she said, she had been a heavy smoker. Her day began with lighting up a cigarette. Her big sacrifice every Lent was giving up smoking, but having to get by without a cigarette made her increasingly irritable as the days passed, until the rest of the Catholic Worker was praying she would light up a smoke. One year, as Lent approached, the priest who ordinarily heard her confessions urged her not to give up cigarettes that year but instead to pray daily, “Dear God, help me stop smoking.” She used that prayer for several years without it having any impact on her addiction. Then one morning she woke up, reached for a cigarette, and realized she didn’t want it. She never smoked another.
I doubt there was a day of her life, after her conversion, when she didn’t recommend prayer. Without prayer and the sacraments, she felt the Catholic Worker would be blown away like smoke in the wind. “We feed the hungry, yes,” she told one friend. “We try to shelter the homeless and give them clothes, but there is strong faith at work; we pray. If an outsider who comes to visit us doesn’t pay attention to our prayings and what that means, then he’ll miss the whole point.”
She went to Mass every day until her body wasn’t up to it and even then still received daily communion, carefully preparing before and giving plenty time afterward for thanksgiving. She loved the rosary and prayed it often. “If we love enough,” she once noted, “we are importunate: we repeat our love as we repeat Hail Marys on the rosary.”
Yet to describe Dorothy only in terms of her piety would be to leave out a great deal. There is some hesitancy these days to say anyone is or ever was feminine, but Dorothy certainly was that. As she was usually ill at ease when anyone pointed a camera at her, her femininity rarely shows in her photos. But hers was an earthy femininity, such as you find in Chaucer’s Wife of Bath in The Canterbury Tales. To the surprise of some and the dismay of others, she wasn’t quite the puritan many had imagined her to be. She was also, at times, surprisingly shy, almost girlish, long after she had acquired grey hair.
Then again, she could be as fierce and determined as one of those resolute Russian women who repaired the streets and kept going to church even in the years of Stalin. “I don’t believe in reincarnation,” a longtime Catholic Worker once told me, “but if there is such a thing, Dorothy must have been a lion in her last life.”
Dorothy’s direct, at times electrifying way of getting to the heart of things was much in evidence one night when she was speaking to a Catholic student group at New York University in a packed and smoky room in a building near Washington Square Park. It was in the fall of 1961 — the Cold War was at its most frozen. The explosion of nuclear weapons in the Nevada desert was so ordinary as to hardly qualify as news. A much repeated slogan of the time was, “The only good Red is a dead Red.” Clearly some of those present considered Dorothy a Red, meaning a faithful servant of the Kremlin. One student demanded to know what Dorothy would do if the Russians invaded the United States. Would she not admit that in this extreme, at least, killing was justified, even a sacred duty? “We are taught by Our Lord to love our enemies,” Dorothy responded without batting an eye. “I hope I could open my heart to them with love, the same as anyone else. We are all children of the same Father.” There was a brief but profound stillness in the room before Dorothy went on to speak about nonviolent resistance and efforts to convert opponents rather than kill them. What enemies had Christ slain?
But not everyone was hostile. As often happened, there were some in the room who looked at Dorothy as if they could see a halo shining above her head. Nothing made Dorothy more nervous than adulation. I don’t know when or how often Dorothy made her famous remark, “Don’t call me a saint — I don’t want to be dismissed so easily.” Perhaps it was only once. But even the briefest article about her is almost certain to include it.
Anyone who knew Dorothy was aware of how she would flee from those who treated her as a model disciple of Christ. Joe Zarrella tells the story of someone approaching Dorothy and asking, “Miss Day, do you have visions?” Dorothy’s response, according to Joe, was, “Oh, shit!” On another occasion she responded to the same question: “Yes, visions of unpaid bills.” (These are the kind of stories you find in Rosalie Riegle Troester’s superb oral histories, Voices from the Catholic Worker and Dorothy Day: Portraits by Those Who Knew Her.)
Yet, however aware Dorothy was of her own unsaintliness, she strongly believed sanctity is what each of us is called to. In 1967, when Tom Cornell and I were editing the first edition of A Penny a Copy, an anthology of Catholic Worker writings, we read through 35 years of back issues. The front page that most impressed me had a banner headline — the kind of ultra-bold, all-caps headline that in a conventional newspaper would be used only for the assassination of a president or the outbreak of war — that declared “WE ARE ALL CALLED TO BE SAINTS.” The headline sums up something Dorothy regarded as basic. Why else would anyone receive communion? Why receive Christ unless you hope to become more Christ-like? Why call yourself a Christian if you have no interest in trying to live the Gospel? (If someday Dorothy is added to the church’s calendar, one benefit is that we will have a saint whose sins and shortcomings will be hard to airbrush out. She will be a saint who really bears witness to the possibility of flawed people, with pasts that embarrass them, never giving up in their efforts to rise from their falls and stumble along in the general direction of the kingdom of God.)
Dorothy’s embarrassment and annoyance in the face of admiration was only in part due to modesty. Rather she felt that many people would view her more critically if they knew her better — knew her faults, and knew more about her past. She felt she had helped create an idealized image of herself by leaving out of her autobiographical writings events preceding her entrance into the Catholic Church that she found particularly shameful, and also the persistent faults she struggled with every day of her life.
Only years later did I come to realize that nothing in her past distressed Dorothy more than the abortion of her first child, an event that had occurred in her early twenties, a period in which she had also attempted suicide. I recall how anguished she was when I asked her if I might read her first book, The Eleventh Virgin. Somehow I had become aware that, long before her conversion, she had written a novel with that title. She didn’t have a copy, she told me, regretted that it had ever been written, appealed to me not to mention it again, and asked me not to look for it. It wasn’t until years later that a friend who dealt in rare books and was aware of my Catholic Worker background presented me with a copy of The Eleventh Virgin. Only when I read it did I at last understand why Dorothy had responded to my question with such unhappiness. The end point of this highly autobiographical novel was an abortion, carried out in the desperate hope that the man she was in love with at the time, her unborn child’s unwilling father, would not leave her. He left her even so.
Dorothy once told her friend Bob Coles about the effort she had made earlier in her life to find and destroy every copy of the novel. Finally Dorothy brought her book-burning effort to the attention of her confessor. The priest laughed. “My, my,” he said. “I thought he was going to tell me to stop being so silly and mixed up in my priorities,” Dorothy said to Coles. “I will remember to my last day here on God’s earth what the priest said: ‘You can’t have much faith in God if you’re taking the life He has given you and using it that way.’ I didn’t say a word in reply. The priest added, ‘God is the one who forgives us, if we ask Him; but it sounds like you don’t even want forgiveness — just to get rid of the books’.” (The story comes from Bob Coles’s book, Dorothy Day: A Radical Devotion, which is mainly made up of Coles’ reconstructions of many conversations with Dorothy.)
It wasn’t only the knowledge that she had been responsible for the death of her first child, but so many other things that made her feel that the Dorothy Day admired by so many people wasn’t the Dorothy Day she saw when she examined her conscience, which she did regularly and unflinchingly. She went to confession every Saturday night, not simply because it was, at that time, common Catholic practice, but because she always found that by the end of the week she had a lot to confess.
Confession was part of the basic architecture of Dorothy’s life. On the first page of her autobiography, The Long Loneliness, she writes about what hard work it was going to confession, “hard when you have sins to confess, hard when you haven’t … you wrack your brain for even the beginnings of sins against charity, chastity, sins of distraction, sloth or gluttony. You do not want to make too much of your constant imperfections and venial sins, but you want to drag them out to the light of day as the first step in getting rid of them.” Sins against love are at the top of her list.
Confession was, for Dorothy, a means of overcoming the sense that she was fighting a losing battle. She once gave co-worker Joe Zarrella a card on which she had written: “We should not be discouraged at our own lapses … but continue. If we are discouraged, it shows vanity and pride. Trusting too much to ourselves. It takes a lifetime of endurance, of patience, of learning through mistakes. We all are on the way.” Rosalie Riegle tells me that Joe carried the card in his wallet until his death.
No one knew her shortcomings better than Dorothy herself, as has become clearer than ever following the publication of her journals, The Duty of Delight. She was, she knew, often impatient, sometimes manipulative, could be judgmental, and at times, if provoked or overtired or exasperated, could lose her temper. She was painfully aware that there were those who came to live in community with her who looked back on the experience with more regret than gratitude, nor could she blame them. She also felt that, due to the demands of leading the Catholic Worker movement, she had at times failed at being the ever-attentive, patient mother to her daughter Tamar that she so wanted to be. On the other hand, given the circumstances and the fact that she was a single parent, it’s remarkable how good a mother Dorothy was, and later how devoted a grandmother. (In 1964, she took off four months to take care of her grandchildren in Vermont while Tamar was taking a course in practical nursing.)
One of Dorothy’s gifts was that she was never reluctant to apologize when she felt she had been either wrong or too harsh. She could do so with passion and without reservation or excuses. I am among those who received letters from Dorothy in which she begged forgiveness for something she had said or written or done which, on reflection, she deeply regretted. The last such letter I had from her along these lines was spattered with tears that had made the ink run. It had been written, she said, on her knees.
I doubt anyone at St. Joseph’s House in those days thought of Dorothy as a saint, though no doubt most of the staff greatly admired her and had been hugely influenced by her. But she was much too real and unpredictable to think of her as anything but the formidable woman she was.
If you study photos of Dorothy in her later years, you might form the idea that she had rather a dour personality. She rarely smiled when facing a camera. Her expression was sometimes austere. It’s not hard to see that she was at times a person of the utmost seriousness, but it’s harder to imagine her warmth. Those who never met her but have seen one of the sterner photos can’t begin to understand the impact Dorothy had on others unless they can imagine how easy it was to be with her, how welcome one felt in her company. Much of her time was spent sitting at a table, just sipping tea or coffee, in comfortable conversation with whoever happened to join her — friend or stranger, sane or not so sane, young or old — sometimes speaking in an animated way, but more often mainly listening.
When Dorothy was present, she was completely present. But often she wasn’t there at all. She was away visiting other Catholic Worker houses, speaking at churches and colleges, writing at her tiny beach cottage on Staten Island, or enjoying the relative peace and quiet that reigned at Peter Maurin Farm.
In the New York house, being as centered on Dorothy as it was during the time I was part of it, her periods away left a hole that no one else could fill. She had delegated to each member of the staff particular responsibilities: having charge of the kitchen, managing the paper (though, even in absentia, she was definitely the editor and publisher), taking care of the address list, writing thank you notes, handling the household money. But no one was in a position to make a decision in her absence that everyone else would accept. In the New York house, in our somewhat splintered state, she alone could lay down the law, which at times was urgently needed.
Being part of the Catholic Worker in New York City was a blessing, but not an easy blessing. At that time, the New York house probably was one of the less happy communities in the Catholic Worker movement. In fact we were hardly a community at all. We had no community meetings and not all of us got along with each other. There was no formation program and few conditions of engagement. (Nor was there any pay – though whoever handled community money could dispense small amounts as needed.) It was exhilarating and exhausting, inspiring and discouraging.
During the period I was part of Saint Joseph’s House, we went through stressful periods during times when Dorothy was away. The worst was brought on by a decision made by our two-person kitchen crew to give the occasional pound of butter or box of eggs that was contributed to those coming on “the line” rather than to “the family.” This was a change in custom, they recognized, but was in line with the Gospel verse, “The last shall be first.”
“The line” referred to those people who turned up for meals but whose names were unknown to most of us. “The family” was the much smaller group of people who had become regulars, were known by name, were living at the Catholic Worker and, in many cases, had chores to do within the household. “The family” ate after “the line.” Traditionally anything special that turned up in small quantities was a treat for them. Members of the family, who had seen many volunteers come and go, were outraged, and the staff itself — six or eight people at the time — bitterly divided.
Conflicting quotations from Dorothy’s writings began to appear on the community bulletin board, each faction hurling fragments of Dorothy at the other. On the one hand there might be a quotation from Dorothy declaring that we must be ready to roll up in old newspapers, giving our beds to those who needed them; and on the other hand a text in which Dorothy humbly reflected that we must accept our limitations; that this too was voluntary poverty.
After a week or two, Dorothy was back again. Without bothering to sort out the paradoxes posed by the quotations from her writings, she said — with the finality of a monastery’s abbess — that the butter and eggs were to go, as before, to the family. In the end, two people resigned, convinced that Dorothy Day was no friend of the New Testament. She had even failed to live up to her own quotations.
Such events, while petty and even comical when viewed from the outside, were grueling from the inside. There were many staff blow-ups during the 47 years that lay between the founding of the Catholic Worker and Dorothy’s death in 1980, not to mention divisive controversies within the Catholic Worker movement as a whole, such as the debate about pacifism during World War II.
It is an endless cause of wonder to me that, despite all these trials, she nonetheless retained her capacity for faith, hope and love down to the last day of her life. A phrase she often used was “the duty of hope.” Perhaps her survival was not only thanks to remaining resolutely hopeful, but also to her taking time away, whether in the solitude of her Staten Island beach cottage or going to visit Tamar and her grandchildren in Vermont.
It was in the aftermath of “the great butter crisis,” late in 1961, that Dorothy appointed me as managing editor of the paper. She had to find someone — one of the two who had just left was my predecessor. I had just turned 20.
Eventually, I too became a casualty of the early-sixties stress within the New York Catholic Worker community. When I was poised to get arrested for participating in an act of civil disobedience protesting US resumption of nuclear weapon tests, Dorothy insisted that instead I go south to Tennessee and write about a civil rights project she admired. I said that, having been one of the organizers of the protest, I couldn’t back out. I would have to go to Tennessee afterward. It wasn’t a good moment for working out a compromise with Dorothy — earlier that day she had been outraged by the irresponsible actions of several other staff members. She gave me an ultimatum: “Either go to Tennessee or you are no longer part of this community.” At the time, I felt I had no option but to do what I had helped plan and had promised to take part in. From Dorothy’s point of view, I was simply being self-willed.
Only later in life, having gone through the white water of my own children’s teen-age years, did I realize that, had I gone back to Chrystie Street once I got out of jail, no one would have been happier to see me than Dorothy. But I was too young to realize the about-face adults can make after a good night’s sleep or a Saturday night confession. It took me perhaps the better part of a year to renew my relationship with Dorothy.
Dorothy often described the Catholic Worker as a school. One of the things I learned at the Catholic Worker as a student was that the poverty-stricken, the addicted and the insane — the people for whom our house of hospitality existed — were often easier to live with, and more patient and compassionate, than young volunteers who knew more about ideology than love, patience or defeat in life.
Yet for all our shortcomings, we volunteers managed to get a great deal done: food begged or purchased, meals cooked and served, clothes received and given away, dishes washed, floors scrubbed, sheets laundered, the paper mailed out to about 65,000 addresses, those with medical needs assisted, hospital patients visited, and thank-you notes sent out to each and every donor, no matter how small the gift — all that and much more.
Not the smallest problem in the house was the noise. I recall one day trying to carry on a conversation with Dorothy about an article we were thinking about using in the next issue. We were at her desk in her tiny office next to the front door of the house on Chrystie Street, right next to the area in which meals were served. It was easily the noisiest part of the house. That morning we could hardly hear each other. In the middle of a sentence, Dorothy got out of her chair, opened the door, and then yelled loud enough to rouse the dead: “Holy silence!” Silence briefly reigned at Saint Joseph’s House such as a Trappist monk might admire.
One of Dorothy’s striking qualities was her respect and love for Christians of other churches, especially those in the Orthodox Church. What was at the root of her affinity to Orthodoxy, I don’t know. Perhaps it had to do with her Russian friendships, and the special role Dostoevsky had played in the formation of her faith and vocation. The first time I visited an Orthodox church, it was with Dorothy, and the first time I attended the magnificent Orthodox Liturgy, it was with her as well. In the early 1960s, she was a friend of a priest serving at the Russian Orthodox Cathedral on East 97th Street in Manhattan, Father Matthew Stadniuk from Moscow, who became an occasional visitor both to Saint Joseph’s House and the farm. (Back in Moscow in later years, in 1987 he was the first priest in Russia who got his parishioners into voluntary service at a local hospital in the new climate of religious tolerance inaugurated by Gorbachev. For the first time since Lenin, religious believers were no longer excluded from a social role.)
Dorothy’s longing for the repair of the rift dividing Eastern and Western Christianity drew her into the Third Hour group, founded by her friend Helen Iswolsky. It was the only association in New York at the time in which people of various churches met who had in common a love of the Orthodox Church. I can remember sitting next to Dorothy at a Third Hour meeting at an apartment in mid-town Manhattan, trying to make sense of the Russian words and phrases she and others used so comfortably. Among those present were the poet W.H. Auden, the Orthodox theologian, Fr. Alexander Schmemann, and Alexander Kerensky, who nearly half-a-century earlier had been Prime Minister of Russia, after the last tsar’s abdication and just before the Bolshevik Revolution.
Dorothy’s commitment to the Catholic Church was never at issue – she was never window-shopping for another, better church. In fact it disturbed many people, including some in Catholic Worker communities, that Dorothy was so conservative a Catholic — so uncritical in her acceptance of Catholic teaching and structure. She was critical not of what the church taught, but rather of its failures in living out its own teaching.
“I didn’t become a Catholic in order to purify the church,” Dorothy once explained to Robert Coles. “I knew someone, years ago, who kept telling me that if we [Catholic Workers] could purify the church, then she would convert. I thought she was teasing me when she first said that, but after a while I realized she meant what she was saying. Finally, I told her I wasn’t trying to reform the church or take sides on all the issues the church was involved in; I was trying to be a loyal servant of the church Jesus had founded. She thought I was being facetious. She reminded me that I had been critical of capitalism and America, so why not Catholicism and Rome? … My answer was that I had no reason to criticize Catholicism as a religion or Rome as the place where the Vatican is located. … As for Catholics all over the world, including members of the church, they are no better than lots of their worst critics, and maybe some of us Catholics are worse than our worst critics.”
Though there are millions of Catholics who seem to be more nationalist than Christian, Dorothy found Catholicism the Christian body least contaminated by nationalism. Even the most nation-centered, flag-waving Catholic was at least vaguely aware of being part of a Church that was confined by no national or linguistic borders. Still more significant to Dorothy, it was the church most crowded with the poor. Most important of all, it was a dispenser of sacraments without which life, for her, was barren.
Part of the value of the Church for her was that it brought people together across many lines of division — political, ideological, economic, geographic, even the borders drawn by time. She agreed with G.K. Chesterton’s remark about “tradition being democracy extended through time” — a democracy in which not only the living vote, but the dead as well.
Dorothy often stressed obedience (the root meaning of which is “listening”), insisting that if she were ordered by her bishop to stop publishing The Catholic Worker, she would do so, though not without trying first to change his mind. “You mean,” I asked her one day, “if the cardinal says we have to give up our stand on war, we give it up?” “Not at all,” she said. “But then we might only use quotations from the Bible, the sayings of the saints, extracts from papal encyclicals, just nothing of our own.” But she said that if there was no alternative but to stop publishing the paper, she would do so, hoping others might carry on in some way under another name. Then she quoted the Gospel: “Unless the seed fall into the ground and die, it cannot bring forth new life.” (In fact in 1949, the then-archbishop of New York, Cardinal Francis Spellman, had made an effort to get Dorothy either to change the paper’s name or cease publication. Dorothy responded by pointing out the notoriety and scandal that compliance with such a demand would cause. She also said that, if any theological errors had been made in the journal, please point them out and she would correct them. At last the matter was quietly dropped.)
Dorothy had very little sense of owning anything — she regarded what she possessed as being “on loan.” What she had was often given away, occasionally even her beloved books. A friend complained that none of the sweaters she had specially knit as gifts remained with Dorothy for long — sooner or later, usually sooner, each was given away. One might say these were self-mortifying actions of voluntary poverty, and perhaps they were, but the gifts seemed to me simply gestures of love or spontaneous kindness. As far as I could see, Dorothy never indulged herself, though sometimes she accused herself of being self-indulgent, as she did one afternoon when we had gone for a walk in the Catholic Worker neighborhood. I don’t recall any goal, only that it was a warm day. Passing a small Jewish dairy restaurant at a corner somewhere along Ridge Street, Dorothy suggested we stop for a glass of cold borscht with a spoonful of sour cream. Once it had been served, Dorothy was slightly scandalized at herself – “Borscht with sour cream! What luxury! This isn’t voluntary poverty.” But then she laughed. The luxurious beet borscht was only ten cents a glass.
Dorothy’s devotion to the Church, however, was not without a critical edge. Borrowing from Romano Guardini, she sometimes spoke of the Church as being “the cross on which Christ was crucified.” Though the metaphor sounds poetic, it was no compliment. Similarly Dorothy occasionally remarked that the net Peter had lowered into the human sea, once Jesus made him a fisher of men, “caught many blowfish and quite a few sharks.” There were priests and bishops who reminded her “far more of Cain than of Abel.”
While Dorothy was an enthusiastic borrower in the realm of ideas, her way of seeing was very much her own. I think, for example, of what happened one day when my room-mate and fellow volunteer, Stuart Sandberg, and I were clearing out rubbish from a small apartment one flight up in a cold-water tenement on Ridge Street. Dorothy was having increasing trouble managing the five flights to the apartment she had been living in on Spring Street. These two rooms could be reached more easily, but first many layers of linoleum and wallpaper had to removed and white paint applied to the walls.
Stuart and I dragged box after box of debris down to the street, including a hideous — so it seemed to us — painting on plywood of the Holy Family. Mary, Joseph and Jesus had been painted in a few bright colors against a battleship grey background. We shook our heads, deposited it in the trash along the curb, and went back to continue cleaning. Not long after Dorothy arrived, the plywood painting in hand. “Look what I found! The Holy Family! It’s a providential sign, a blessing.” She put it on the mantle of the apartment’s extinct fireplace. I looked at it again and this time saw it was a work of love and faith, however simply rendered. If it was no Renaissance masterpiece, it had its own unlettered beauty. But I wouldn’t have thought so if Dorothy hadn’t seen it first.
Dorothy is no longer with us. We can’t sit down and have a cup of coffee with her anymore, or send her a letter and look forward to her response. But she remains a vital presence. Many regard her as a saint, and not as a way of keeping her at a safe distance or because of ignorance regarding the darker moments in her life. A decade before his death in 2000, New York’s archbishop, Cardinal John O’Connor, initiated a process that may in time result in her formal canonization. The Vatican has already given her the title “Servant of God Dorothy Day.” There are historians who describe her as the most influential American Catholic of the last hundred years. Perhaps it’s true.
What is certain is that Dorothy set a Christ-like example that continues to influence many people. She helped bring about a reformation that greatly influenced the Catholic Church, Church, especially in America, but has reached far beyond it. It is not a reformation of theological doctrine, but one rooted in the sacredness of life. Dorothy has helped us better understand one of the primary biblical truths: that each person, no matter how damaged or battered, is a bearer of the image of God and deserves to be recognized and treated as such. She has reminded us of the real presence of Christ in the least person. “Those who fail to see Christ in the poor,” Dorothy said, “are atheists indeed.” She has helped many of us realize that the opposite of the works of mercy are the works of war. She gave an astonishing example of hospitality and mercy as a way of life. “We are here to celebrate Him,” she declared, “through the works of mercy.”
In 1997, seventeen years after Dorothy’s death, one of her grandchildren, Kate Hennessy, wrote in The Catholic Worker: “To have known Dorothy means spending the rest of your life wondering what hit you. On the one hand, she has given so many of us a home, physically and spiritually; on the other, she has shaken our very foundations.”
I am one of the many people who knew Dorothy, whose foundations were – fortunately – shaken. Grateful, I am still wondering what hit me.
Jim Forest
(draft – text as of August 10, 2009)
