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Archways Spring 2019
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DOROTHY DAY - Journalist, Single Mother, Servant of God -Is a Saint for Our Time
Illustrations by Vinny Bove
On December 29, 1927, at Our Lady Help of Christians on Staten Island, Dorothy Day was baptized a Catholic. She was 30 years old.
Though her family was not religious, since childhood she had felt drawn to the Church, and her bap-tism was the culmination of that lifelong yearning. She would go on to become, through her works and her writings, one of the most influential American Christians of the 20th century – editor of The Catholic Worker and co-founder of a network of “hospitality houses” offering aid to the poor and homeless in towns and cities across the United States and around the world – but her mission was not clear to her on the day of her conversion. Her call to a life of heroic virtue came not through a divine vision or dramatic revelation, but through years of ardent searching, study and prayer.
EDUCATED BY HISTORY
A child of the industrial age whose family crisscrossed the country as her journalist father moved from job to job, Dorothy saw firsthand many upheavals of early 20th century America. She witnessed the San Francisco earthquake in 1906, after which her family shared clothing and food with the displaced; the miserable conditions of immigrant families in the stockyards of Chicago, made famous by Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle; and cruel suppression of labor activists and suffragists in the Northeast. In the process, she developed a deep affinity for people living in poverty and oppression and a lifelong practice of directly helping those in need.
She was also a gifted writer. By the age of 20, Dorothy was on her own in Greenwich Village, writing professionally, one of the youngest members of a bohemian circle of writers and artists that included the playwright Eugene O’Neill and socialist John Reed. As a journalist, she often wrote about nascent movements for social justice, and she sometimes participated instead of chronicled: marching, picketing, even getting arrested and enduring a hunger strike in a Maryland prison.
Dorothy Day in the 1920s. Photos courtesy of the Department of Special Collections
and University Archives, Marquette University Libraries.
SEARCHING FOR THE WAY
Her Catholic baptism, when it finally came, brought her tremendous joy, but it also occasioned a painful loss. Many of her activist friends considered religion untenable and the Church the enemy of progress. Dorothy was forced to part ways with her common-law husband, the father of her child, who would not marry within the Church or accept Dorothy’s ties to it. Her first years as a Catholic were lonely and marked by a desperate longing to unite her religious fervor with her commitment to those who were abused and forgotten in the industrialized economy of the time.
In 1932 – the deepest days of the Depression – on assignment to cover the Hunger March, a protest by unemployed workers who traveled from New York to Washington, D.C., Dorothy’s despair threatened to overwhelm her. Kneeling in the crypt of Washington’s new National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, she “offered up a special prayer,” as she describes it in a memoir, The Long Loneliness: “a prayer that came with tears and with anguish, that some way would open up for me to use what talents I possessed for my fellow workers, for the poor.”
A PRAYER ANSWERED
On her return to New York, Dorothy found a stranger waiting for her: Peter Maurin, an itinerant scholar, a onetime Christian Brother who had worked on farms and railroads, in brickyards, steel mills and coal mines. In a heavy French accent, Peter told Dorothy he had come to see her on the recommendation of George Shuster, editor of Commonweal, and presented her with a grand plan: to create a program of “round-table discussions, houses of hospitality and agronomic universities.” The part that caught her attention was his plan to create “a paper for the man in the street.”
“But where do we get the money?” Dorothy asked.
“God sends you what you need when you need it,” Peter promptly answered. “You will be able to pay the printer. Just read the lives of the saints.”
And so began a movement.
Dorothy Day meets Peter Maurin, December 1932