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Mystery and Myth: Dorothy Day, the Catholic Worker, and the Peace Movement
Photographic etchings of Day young and old by Tom Lewis-Borbely
By Rosalie G. Riegle
t is easy to mythologize Dorothy Day (1897-1980), co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement, especially during this centennial year of her birth. "Dorothy stories" abound. She gave a valuable diamond ring to a woman on the streets. She refused a grant from the Ford Foundation. She was jailed for not taking shelter during the air raid drills of the 1950s. She was arrested in support of the United Farm Workers when she was seventy-five. These and other midrash, told and retold in person and in print, give cohesiveness to the Catholic Worker movement she founded and insure her place in the annals of peacemaking.
They could also create an unapproachable saint. David Stein of the Chicago Catholic Worker told me, "There's a real danger of making an idol out of Dorothy Day.... As long as you genuflect before the image of the saint, as long as you pay lip service to this superhuman, heroic figure, then you don't have to worry about the way you're living." In fact, Day herself worried that people would dismiss her.
It is also easy to mythologize the Catholic Worker movement, given its diversity, mysterious cohesiveness and growth, and longevity despite a lack of central authority. While The Catholic Worker revises and prints a philosophical statement of "Aims and Means" every year or so, there is no doctrine to which one has to subscribe when becoming a Catholic Worker and no hierarchy which gives approval when a group opens a hospitality house and adopts the name.
One's view of the Worker is thus often tied to personal experience and beliefs. And so I give you this overview of Day and the movement as seen through my eyes, subjective and perhaps myopic, living as I do in a Catholic Worker house of hospitality in Saginaw, Michigan.
The Catholic Worker is a lay community of women and men dedicated to living the social dimension of the Gospel in a radical way by serving the poor, struggling for social and economic justice, and working for peace. Co-founder Peter Maurin's three-point program called for informed social criticism, houses of hospitality, and communal farms where the unemployed could learn a skill. To this, Day added the unyielding pacifism which first attracted my interest. When I was introduced to Day and the Catholic Worker at the height of the Vietnam War, I was impressed with the Worker commitment to nonviolence and its insistence on a personalist response to political problems. When I began to meet individual Catholic Workers, I learned of Day's hundreds of friendships and of her very human weaknesses-a craving for coffee, a sometime abruptness in conclusion, a leadership style that caused friends to refer to her as "the abbess." I came to know someone more human and approachable.
Last spring, I reread her autobiography, The Long Loneliness, for the first time in several years. With my own greater experience, I see another, more complex Dorothy, one whose deep spirituality speaks centrally to her beliefs and actions. Her abhorrence of armed conflict and her commitment to using nonviolence to achieve justice were firmly grounded in prayer. As Jim Forest says, "Dorothy was a praying person," and The Long Loneliness is a story of a woman's journey to the God she loved.
hen I reread the autobiography, it is this love that I see, love for the people with whom she spent her life, both those who came to the Catholic Worker out of physical need and those who came to fulfill spiritual needs; love for Forster Batterham, the father of her child; most of all, love for God. Putting that love into action, even loving those who were diametrically opposed to her in belief and work, took her to the New York streets as well as around the world. It also propelled her to write and lecture indefatigably and to join in or support many nonviolent resistance actions. Day frequently quoted Father Zossima in Crime and Punishment that "Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing," and she lived that truism in a way that almost compels myth-making. This love continues to speak to us today, inspiring Catholic Workers and the entire Christian community, including the thousands who know her only through her writing or her reputation.
After a peripatetic childhood and a turbulent young adulthood as a Greenwich Village habitué and a reporter for Socialist periodicals, Day became a Catholic in 1927, left the father of her child, and continued as a professional journalist until 1932 when she met Peter Maurin, a French emigré educated by the Christian Brothers, whose philosophy developed in the decentralist and personalist tradition of Emmanuel Mournier and Nicolas Berdayev. Maurin introduced her to the social teachings of Roman Catholicism and together they published a lay newspaper, The Catholic Worker. Out of that newspaper grew houses of hospitality which provided meals and often lodging to those made homeless by the Great Depression.
The newspaper expanded rapidly. One hundred and fifty thousand copies were printed in 1936, the year the movement publicized its neutrality in the Spanish Civil War-thereby opposing the US government, the Roman Catholic hierarchy, and those who took a position on either the left or the right of the conflict. But the idea of laypeople applying basic Christianity to social problems spread anyway, with thirty-one houses of hospitality operating by 1941. Both Day and Maurin traveled widely, visiting Catholic Worker communities and speaking at colleges and churches-wherever they could find audiences. These audiences diminished, however, as the clouds of World War II shadowed the country. Day's uncompromising pacifism was hard listening for a nation angered by the excesses of totalitarianism; the burgeoning war economy diminished the need for hospitality to the unemployed, and many Catholic Worker houses closed.
Early in the war, Day and Worker Joseph Zarrella testified against conscription and argued for the classification of conscientious objectors before a US Senate Committee. She spoke eloquently of the duty of Christians to disobey laws which they in conscience considered unjust. When the Selective Service Act of 1940 was passed, however, conscientious objectors who were not members of the traditional peace churches found it difficult to gain CO status. Nevertheless, a small band were successful-and the Catholic Worker supported a short-lived camp for them while a New York Worker coordinated the Association of Catholic COs.
When war was declared, Day's Catholic Worker headline read, "We Continue Our Pacifist Stance." Instead of warfare, Dorothy urged prayer, fasting, almsgiving and non-participation in the business of war. She quoted the New Testament as well as the early fathers of the church in support of her stance.
The issue of pacifism caused deep conflict within the movement, and by the end of the war only ten houses of hospitality remained. Day was saddened and shocked at the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and wrote forcefully against the jubilation of the secular press. She urged instead that the US should "destroy the two billion dollars worth of equipment,...destroy all the formulas, put on sackcloth and ashes, weep and repent."
Eileen Egan tells us how Day suffered on learning of the Holocaust and wondered aloud, "If I had known all this, known it while it was happening, would I have been able to maintain my pacifism?" Then she added, "But all the violence didn't save the Jews."
Day wrote in The Catholic Worker of December, 1948: "Love of brother means voluntary poverty, stripping oneself.... It also means nonparticipation in those comforts and luxuries which have been manufactured by the exploitation of others.... If our jobs do not contribute to the common good, we pray God for the grace to give them up." Strong words to a nation gearing up for postwar materialism and a new enemy in Russia.
Before the Cold War had a name, Day expressed her opposition to it, reiterating her pacifist convictions when the Korean War broke out. She traveled to Cuba, giving Cubans a human face while the government was demonizing them. Meanwhile, Catholic Workers continued to live in voluntary poverty throughout the country, serving soup and solidarity to those in need.
When one reads Day's writing, much of it still in print, it becomes clear that she was able to survive the difficulties of Catholic Worker hospitality-particularly when times were financially difficult for the houses and she received no public recognition-not only by traveling, but also by maintaining a rich intellectual and spiritual life.
One former editor of The Catholic Worker, Tom Cornell, told me that Day's love for Christ and depth of commitment to the most vulnerable of the world grew during the isolation of the Fifties, when the Catholic Worker (along with the Fellowship of Reconciliation and other peace groups) existed on the fringe of society. It wasn't until the anti-war movement of the Vietnam era that the Worker again grew in numbers and influence.
uring the Sixties, idealistic young people flocked to the New York house or started houses of their own where they resisted the draft, fed the hungry, and engaged in nonviolent resistance. Increasingly, Day and her movement tested the theory of nonviolence with the nitty-gritty of practice as they dealt with the psychosis, addiction, frustration, and anger of their disenfranchised guests. This day-to-day schooling in the principles of nonviolence continues in most houses; Catholic Workers attempt to practice nonviolence both as a tactic for social and political change and as a lifestyle.
Day and other Workers were among the first and most forceful voices against the Vietnam War. Day inspired the founders of the Catholic Peace Fellowship, which was started in 1964 as an affiliate of the Fellowship of Reconciliation and was godmother to the organization which became Pax Christi. She traveled frequently in the 1960s, to Australia and Russia and Rome, praying and publicly fasting for a strong peace statement at the Second Vatican Council. Her life's witness to nonviolence was rewarded when the bishops condemned nuclear warfare in the final Council document.
With seminarians from Dun Scotus College serving soup at St. Francis House in Detroit. Photo courtesy of Marquette University Archives.
When Day died in 1980, there were eighty Worker houses. Many predicted the demise of the movement-but as Peggy Scherer, then editor of The Catholic Worker said, "We may have lost Dorothy, but we still have the Gospel." Instead of shrinking, the movement continues to grow, with approximately 140 Worker houses now open, including communities in Australia, New Zealand, Germany, and England.
At the Catholic Worker, the Gospel is lived out in ways that reflect the communities in which the individual houses are situated. Some minister to persons with AIDS, some to illegal immigrants, some to women. Some run large soup kitchens, some survive on isolated farms, trying to live Peter Maurin's Green Revolution. There is probably more diversity than conformity among the houses, but most exist by way of private donations instead of government aid, are enchanted with personalism and disenchanted with the state, and share varying degrees of commitment to community, simplicity, poverty and anti-materialism. One hundred years after Dorothy Day's birth, these communities stand as the heart and soul of Dorothy Day's legacy.
Many Catholic Workers participate in the peace movement. They leaflet, conduct prayer vigils, and protest at air bases, the Pentagon, and other centers of war-making. Some participate in the symbolic disarmament of the Ploughshares actions, for which they frequently serve significant jail terms. Following Day's own rejection of the war-making state's tax system, many Catholic Workers resist the federal telephone tax and federal income taxes, either directly or by living below the poverty line.
Myth and mystery: on the surface, the biggest mystery may be how Day and the Catholic Worker movement continue to appeal to young and old in an age of violence and consumerism. But perhaps it isn't a mystery after all when we recognize our hunger-a hunger for meaning, a hunger for hope, a hunger to do something that matters. Dorothy Day's love in action continues to show us what matters.
Rosalie G. Riegle is professor of English at Saginaw Valley State University. She is the author of an oral history of the Catholic Worker movement, Voices from the Catholic Worker (Temple University Press, 1993), and lives at the Mustard Seed Catholic Worker in Saginaw, Michigan.
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