Dorothy Day -- a modern prophet

Dorothy Day was born in New York in 1897. Her father was Irish and her mother was English. Dorothy’s parents were nominal Christians who rarely attended church. By contrast, Dorothy displayed a strong religious streak as a young child. When she was ten she went to an Episcopalian church and was captivated by it liturgy and its music.

    Dorothy first worked as a journalist but is better known for her social activism. For example, she was imprisoned in 1917 as a member of the non-violent suffragist movement, the ‘Silent Sentinels’.

    She converted to Catholicism, which she described movingly in her autobiography, The Long Loneliness. She later became a Dominican tertiary. Being a Catholic brought her into contact with a wide array of activists so, in 1932, she helped found the Catholic Worker Movement. It was a pacifist society combining direct aid for the poor and the homeless with nonviolent direct action on their behalf. Its vision was a form of social justice and its connection with the poor that was strongly inspired by Francis of Assisi.

     She later worked very closely with the Trappist monk and writer Thomas Merton, whose writings many consider to be the spiritual justification and underpinning to Dorothy’s work.

To supplement the Catholic Worker Movement, she founded the Catholic Worker newspaper in 1933 and was its editor until her death. The paper said it was aimed at those suffering the most in the depths of the Great Depression, ‘those who think there is no hope for the future’ and announced to them that ‘The Church has a social program ... there are men of God who are working not only for their spiritual but for their material welfare’.

Love and ever more love is the only solution to every problem that comes up. If we love each other enough, we will bear with each other’s faults and burdens. If we love enough, we are going to light a fire in the hearts of others. And it is love that will burn out the sins and hatreds that sadden us. It is love that will make us want to do great things for each other. No sacrifice and no suffering will then seem too much. The Long Loneliness  

     Using the newspaper as her mouthpiece, Dorothy advocated the economic theory called ‘distributism’ which she considered a third way between capitalism and socialism. From the publishing enterprise came a ‘house of hospitality’ — a shelter providing food and clothing to the poor of New York’s Lower East Side and then a series of farms for communal living. The movement quickly spread to other cities in the United States and to Canada and Britain.

     She denounced sins against the poor. Using similar language to the Epistle of James, she said that ‘depriving the labourer’ was a deadly sin. And one of the major roots of sin, she said, was to deny that we are all interconnected spiritually. Using words St Paul could have written, she said,

True love is delicate and kind, full of gentle perception and understanding, full of beauty and grace, full of joy unutterable. There should be some flavour of this in all our love for others. We are all one. We are one flesh in the Mystical Body as man and woman are said to be one flesh in marriage. With such a love one would see all things new; we would begin to see people as they really are, as God sees them.

 

    Throughout the 1960s, Dorothy Day was one of the most vocal advocates of nuclear disarmament and pacifism, demanding American withdrawal from Korea and Vietnam

Dorothy Day’s life has inspired many Christians. Pope Francis
recently compared her to Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King.

She died in 1980.