The pilgrimage of Dorothy Day
O'Brien, David J.
NOT ON THE FRINGE BUT AT THE CHURCH'S CENTER The pilgrimage of Dorothy Day DAVID J. O'BRIEN DOROTHY DAY, in my view, was the most significant, interesting, and influential,person in the history...
...A loyal daughter of the church, she accepted the clerical domination of Catholic life...
...Devout and loyal, their religion was inextricably linked to the culture of families, neighborhoods, ethnic groups...
...As Dorothy Day once asked,' 'Who knows who reads the paper or who will be influenced by the paper, that they too will try to see things in the light of faith, in the light of the history of the church, and the history of the poor...
...It is said of movements that they sting, and then they die, their causes taken up by organizations, parties, or institutions and translated into substantial change...
...As Julian Pleasants once put it, the Catholic Worker is "a correspondence course in the theory and practice of Christian living...
...Once, after describing in detail how the church seemed so often to be on the wrong side, she wrote: "Yet it is to the church we must go or starve for the bread of life...
...The Catholic Worker movement and its founder, in contrast, had little use for nationalism, status, or success...
...DOROTHY day always had a strong, realistic, clear-sighted love for ordinary people...
...The Catholic Worker platform of voluntary poverty, the works of mercy, personal, not state, responsibility, and some form of communitarianism may still have problems, as wise and eminent commentators frequently suggest, but it has produced a consistently interesting and stimulating commentary on modern history, one which could stand quite well, on economic and political as well as religious grounds, in comparison with any other position available for the last forty years...
...The continuing renewal of the church, in the lives and communities of its people, as a servant to all humankind in the struggle for peace and freedom, justice and peace, is what the life and work of Dorothy Day, and her death, are all about...
...This is not for everyone—this life, this way of doing things...
...they will learn at no other...
...It would be awful if we started looking down on people who are different, who are called to live lives so different from ours...
...even fewer have excited enough controversy to win followers and critics in all sections of the country...
...In the setting of Catholicism at its best, this meant a willingness to do what they could without rejecting or belittling the lives of others...
...In its pages were the teachings of Peter Maurin, his own "easy essays" and long commentaries by others exploring his version of the "Green Revolution...
...They must bear their own crosses...
...She could show anger without being judgmental, she could be simple without being simplistic, hopeful without being naive...
...Those who come to the House for help she regards as representatives of Christ...
...We are small, necessarily so...
...Maurin's "cult, culture, and cultivation" had to do with worship, the primacy of the spiritual, reason, the willingness to care about, seek, and live the truth, and work, the use of one's talents to fulfill one's potential and in the process contribute to the common life...
...In her earlier years, Miss Day recalls, "I was in love with the masses...
...Once, when a Catholic Worker told an audience that he wasn't sure whether it was impossible or only difficult for families to reside in Catholic...
...With death, the myth of Dorothy Day as Catholic heroine will no longer have to contest the reality either of Dorothy herself or of her church...
...works of mercy merely bandaged capitalism, she argued that the practice of love was integral to the search for justice...
...What we can do is to understand, to love, to sympathize in the sense of trying to bear a little of the suffering, and leave them—not to intrude on them with the corroding pity which is often self-centered and obtuse...
...YET THE DISTANCE, and the difficulty, could be exaggerated...
...We have enough to do 19 December 1980: 711 to bear our own, and how we bear our own will achieve something for those around us...
...We are united, however, as people in marriage are united, by the deepest spiritual bond, participation in the sacraments so that we become "one flesh" in the Mystical Body...
...Longevity breeds its own respectability...
...As long as she was alive, Catholics always had to hedge a bit in praising Dorothy Day...
...to other work, young persons came and continue to come: the work goes on...
...Thus, too, the ever-present distinction between poverty, a simplicity and concern for basics which grounds and disciplines life and frees persons from the tyranny of things, and destitution, an absence of necessities and of hope, that creates an even more demonic obsession with things...
...THEN THERE IS the corpus of Dorothy Day's writings, books, essays, literally thousands of columns...
...Like Thomas Merton, Dorothy Day was a convert who became more Catholic than the Catholics, who gloried in its traditions, symbols, and rituals...
...Not all are called to the vocation of the Worker itself, but all are called to work, "to do what we can, and the whole field of all the works of mercy is open to us...
...NOT ON THE FRINGE BUT AT THE CHURCH'S CENTER The pilgrimage of Dorothy Day DAVID J. O'BRIEN DOROTHY DAY, in my view, was the most significant, interesting, and influential,person in the history of American Catholicism...
...today, they seem prophetic...
...they rejected compromise and organization and they called upon each person to undertake a life of Christian love, voluntary poverty, and struggle for a new social order...
...In the early years she occasionally seemed to suggest that everyone should sell their goods and join a Catholic Worker community...
...rarely did they display the evangelical, moralistic qualities so common among their Protestant neighbors...
...Certainly few others have received as wide and respectful attention from persons outside the church, and none has matched her stature in the eyes of Catholics from outside the United States...
...If, on the other hand, the church and its people by and large accept the reality of nuclear weapons and leave it to the government to minister to those in need, then the movement and Miss Day will remain interesting but minor sidelights in the religious history of the nation...
...Catholics have always defended the dignity of labor and have argued that each person has a responsibility for the common good...
...Positions once considered radical seemed to become obvious with events...
...Now that she is gone, no greater tribute can be paid to her memory than to love the church enough to take its traditions and its teachings, its Gospel and its Founder, as seriously as she did...
...So she talked, to bishops and students, to middle-class Catholics and trade unionists, to all who would listen, asking them to take seriously the message of the Gospel, practice voluntary poverty, and search for the new society within the specific contexts of their own Kves...
...The forty-odd years of the paper represent perhaps the most significant cultural achievement of the American church, certainly the most surprising...
...For all the paper's elaboration of Maurin's Green Revolution and the labored discussions of Catholic anarchism and Christian communism, for Dorothy Day the basic truths remained simple...
...To readers it brought news that the church has a social doctrine, as much a shock to many Catholics today as it was to the leftist workers in Union Square when the Catholic Worker first appeared on May Day, 1933...
...Again and again she tells her readers of the people of the neighborhood where she grew up, the ordinary people around the lower East Side storefronts which housed the Worker, her companions on buses, the people she meets on her trips...
...Whatever may be the final determination of the significance of Dorothy Day, there are some things about her that badly need to be said at a time when her saintliness will be taken for granted...
...William Miller has effectively demonstrated that these charges are far less justified than a casual reading of Dorothy Day's writings would suggest...
...yet few loved Catholics more...
...From this involvement in the lives of people flowed a second feature, seldom recognized, of Dorothy Day's witness, her belief that all persons, rich and poor, educated and uneducated, are indeed capable of recognizing their own humanity and responding to the demands of the common good and the love of God...
...it was the daily discovery of goodness and continuing creation in homes and families and neighborhoods that raised her reporting above the categories of political ideology and provided a basis for judgment and action...
...We have all known the long loneliness, and we have learned that the only true solution is love, and love comes with community...
...Her writings, her support for such persons as Thomas Meiton and the Berrigans, her presence at Vatican II, and her own personal witness have had their impact both on the church at large and on American Catholic opinion...
...Their perseverance in worship, week after week, holyday after holyday, has always impressed me and filled my heart with a sense of love for all my fellow Catholics, even Birchites, bigots, racists, priests and lay people alike, whom I could term "my enemies" whom I am bidden to love...
...That the Catholic Worker paper survived is little short of miraculous: sold for a penny a copy and a quarter a year, produced by a movement with no members and whose participants practice voluntary poverty, dependent on the free-will writing of its contributors, ignored, even banned at times, through large sectors of the church, it not only survived but prospered, and maintained an incredible level of excellence in writing, art work, and editorial direction...
...Always a fine reporter, her skills sharpened and her insights deepened over the years...
...unsuspected acts of kindness from these deeply wounded people, revelation of a forgotten education from one dying of an addiction, stories of lost happiness and prosperity from the forgotten of the earth...
...Most of those who have examined Dorothy's writings have gone there looking for a coherent ideology, an approach to social ethics, or a theology...
...The Sermon on the Mount and not the Catholic Worker platform places the call to radical love at the heart of human history...
...As a result, her literary work remains the least appreciated aspect of her life...
...Always Dorothy Day challenges the cynicism of those who appeal only to selfishness...
...When in the sixties many critics charged that the...
...Because of her faith and her strength, the movement has been open but always Catholic, free but rarely chaotic, principled but never fanatical...
...Other Catholics should not be surprised...
...Similarly, one suspects that the paper, the local Catholic Worker houses, Dorothy's appearances in local communities have touched the consciences of Catholic parishioners, who might wonder if they are doing enough for the needy in their own midst, or of Catholic charities officials, who might ask why, while they are working so hard, there are always long lines at the local house of hospitality...
...she changed over the years, she had a history...
...Some great writers whom Dorothy loved created characters who engage the reader and force him to say that yes, they are true...
...Dorothy Day was like the rest of us...
...Today, the very fact that these options can be stated, to suggest without seeming incredibly naive that the church might in concrete ways take the side of peace and of the poor, is in part the result of Dorothy Day's life and work...
...This assessment of Dorothy Day may be debatable, but one thing is certain: her fame will grow even greater now that she is gone...
...As Emma Goldman wrote Ammon H#nnacy in 1939: "I confess that it is a new one on me, for I have never heard of Catholics being radical...
...His cultural critique of industrial society and his call for decentralization, a philosophy of work, and a restoration of the person to the center of the social order once seemed quaint...
...Much of what has been said might seem to soften the radicalness of the message which Dorothy Day attempted to communicate over five decades...
...Thousands of Catholics read the paper...
...There were moments of confusion, doubt and uncertainty, times when practice outran theory, or when theory was itself confused, inconsistent, even wrong-headed...
...The importance of the movement needs no emphasis: it provides a witness to the Gospel message in which all Christians can take pride, an outlet for heroic idealism for generations of young lay people, an important goad to the official church and its ministers to live up to the Gospel, a seed bed for reviving the Catholic doctrine of peace and providing means for giving it flesh, a creative and spiritually rooted center for dealing with every major issue of justice which has arisen in the last two generations...
...EQUALLY remarkable, Dorothy Day founded and edited the Catholic Worker newspaper, that unique radical paper...
...A handful of Catholics participated actively in the Catholic Worker apostolate she led for over forty-five years, but millions came to admire her witness, to be proud of her work, and to stand in awe of her dedication, her persistence, and her profound religious faith...
...Another time she wrote: "I feel that all families should have the conveniences and comforts which modern life brings and which do simplify life, and give time to read, to study, to think, and to pray...
...Her style was direct, clear, and precise...
...Who, indeed...
...Then there is the simplicity of the ideas that informed her writing...
...If, in the year 2000, the Catholic church is officially and unequivocally opposed to nuclear war and large numbers of American Catholics are refusing to pay a portion of their taxes, serve in the armed forces, or work in defenserelated industries, scholars will give Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker a large place in their histories...
...Since finishing his book, Miller has been given access to diaries and letters Commonweal: 714 unavailable earlier and he is now at work on "a spiritual biography'' which should be of great interest when completed...
...If local Catholic parishes, building on such initiatives as the parish outreach project of Catholic Charities and the call to community care and compassion of so many new sacramental rites, are closer to being themselves the centers of hospitality Maurin thought they should be and the centers of fraternity called for by Pope Paul VI, then, again, the life of Dorothy Day will be seen as having been immensely significant...
...After listening to a speaker who stressed self-interest, Dorothy recalled: "I could not resist talking about other motives that move men, that inspire their actions...
...In later years, Dorothy tended to cut through the rhetoric of both the social doctrine of the church and agrarianism of the Worker's own tradition and concentrate on these basics...
...19 December 1980: 715...
...No one could be more incisive on exposing the hypocrisy and self-deception of conventional Christianity than Dorothy Day...
...Miller hints at Dorothy's personal changes: a crisis in the forties marked by her temporary withdrawal from the work in favor of prayer and reflection, returning deeper, more at ease with herself, with a more spiritual and less political tone to her writing...
...After Pearl Harbor she insisted on the peace witness, no matter the cost...
...She urged recognition of the spiritual dimension of human life, with its corollaries of care for the poor and suffering and rejection of dehumanization by means of voluntary poverty and the works of mercy...
...Throughout her life she sought with determination and occasional defiance, and in many ways she finally achieved, solidarity with her church and its people...
...Surprisingly, this most conservative Catholic woman reached the most radical conclusions regarding the mission of the church...
...They thought of themselves, sometimes, as a sign of contradiction, and they were...
...Within the American church, only a very few individuals have become nationally prominent...
...she did this, contrary to the opinion of some, without arrogance or self-righteousness...
...Rejection of violence, at the very least recognition that violence is an evil, to be resisted and replaced by love, is not a harebrained, lunatic-fringe part of the Christian inheritance...
...Even more shocking, she was not in the least repelled by renewal...
...We know Him in the breaking of bread and we know each other in the breaking of bread, and we are not alone anymore...
...Dorothy Day, more than most bishops, priests, religious, and laity, loved the church...
...Perhaps these persons are only minority traditions within the rich pluralism of Christianity...
...She did not demand adoption of one or another Catholic ideology, but retention of the basic Catholic notion that faith has implications for life, that the Gospel provides a basis for resistance to contemporary evils and suggests directions for change for both individuals and communities...
...Her evolving religious faith, mystical and proJbund, always focused on concrete symbols and specific people...
...As, over the years, older men and women moved on from Catholic Worker communities DAVID J. O'BRIEN teaches history at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts...
...Acknowledging always the complexity and ambiguity of life, she nevertheless cut directly to the heart of the matter, to the mysteries of good and evil, to the clarity of most moral issues, and the persistent ambiguity of our response...
...FINALLY, THERE IS the perennial relevance of Catholicism itself...
...It was not Dorothy Day or Peter Maurin, but Jesus Christ who said that the works of mercy provide the criteria of salvation...
...And to work in the apostolate, too...
...that liturgy was not invented by Dorothy Day...
...yet there is no romance...
...the question might arise why they and their church were not imitating her...
...Catholics in the United States have been deeply patriotic, justifiably grateful to the nation and system that gave them freedom and made their progress, even success, possible...
...In many ways the outcome of that possibility lies in the hands of contemporary Catholics, and that is as it should be...
...Our lives, the salvation of souls, depend upon our thoughts, words, and deeds in relation to them...
...In the South, in Cuba, in her response to what she read and heard about Vietnam, it was ordinary people and their lives which caught and held her attention...
...It is the priest with his anointed hands who serves us in the great moments of life and love and death throughout our lives...
...There was nothing Dorothy Day did or advocated that did not have a solid basis in church teaching and tradition...
...The thing Peter was trying hardest to express," Dorothy once wrote, "was man's dignity, in that he was free—free to accept or reject the God that made him, free to serve him by developing his talents and capacities for service...
...So I began quoting Claudel: 'Youth loves the heroic!' " Father McSorley, one of the early chaplains, told her that she should accept all speaking invitations, and Peter Maurin hoped she would be a modern Catherine of Siena, persuading the leaders of the church to take the Gospel seriously...
...To Miller's bold and challenging analysis of "the radical idea of the Catholic Worker" I would only add some reflections on the American flavor of her thought, her position as an American radical, and the nature of her challenge to both the church and the nation...
...Application of Christian symbols to real life demands study and a willingness to experiment, courage, and hard work...
...At each moment of crisis, she kept the Catholic Worker movement firmly planted on the soil of love and freedom she and Maurin prepared...
...hundreds contributed on one way or another to the work...
...Today, as in the thirties, Catholic Worker communities contain a bewildering variety of personalities and support many "causes," but they are always clearly Catholic Worker communities, where the poor are served, the Gospel and the church are taken seriously, and all who come in the door are treated as important persons...
...Worker houses, Dorothy remarked that it was impossible...
...Dorothy put clearly the distinctive Worker approach to people: Who are we to change anyone, and why cannot we leave them to themselves and God...
...It was her confidence in the ordinary people of the world, whose care for family and land and shelter and food disciplined the sinfulness they shared with their betters, which informed her anarchism, far more than Maurin's agrarianism or a Christian suspicion of the state...
...People must live their lives...
...But it is at least possible that they are something more, the architects of a new era in Christian history...
...While the renewal sought by the Worker required conversion, its adherents knew with Edmund Burke that "example is the school of mankind...
...WHO CAN MEASURE the impact of Dorothy Day on American Catholic life...
...Certainly our peace of mind does...
...Informed by an important synthesis of ideas drawn from Scripture, the tradition of the church, and the American radical tradition in which she was nurtured, her essays and columns provide a thoughtful, reflective, and spiritually rich illumination of the history of our times...
...In many ways she was the most conservative of Catholics, devoted to the Mass, the sacraments, the saints, clutching her rosary when making her first plane trip, using the missal because she wanted to know the feast of the day and could not make out the priest's mumbled speech...
...Most important, food, clothing, shelter, and hope have been made available to the poor, to those whom Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin called ' 'the first children of the church.'' To that movement Dorothy gave inspiration, direction, and a kind of leadership rare in any community...
...Impact, always hard to measure, is decisively shaped by subsequent events...
...She is one of those people, together with Emmanuel Mounier, Lanzo del Vasto, Danilo Dolci, Cesar Chavez, Mother Teresa, Dom Helder Camara, and so many others, who have made it seem possible that the Catholic church might be a peace-making community and its parishes, centers of affirmation, care, and love...
...In the shared faith and common life of Christians, in the ordinary community of the church, lies the key to human history: We cannot love God unless we love each other, and to love we must know each other...
...Surely the Catholic Worker and Dorothy Day have contributed to the evolving peace position of the Catholic church...
...She describes these men and women lovingly, with their flaws and blemishes, often crabby and 19 December 1980: 713 eccentric, and often deeply hurt by the pressures of modern life...
...The liturgy of the church has always demanded a community of shared faith and life, a losing of self for others...
...I've never wanted to be far away from the people I sit beside in church," she wrote...
...In Dorothy Day's own writing we engage the scenes and events she experienced, and through them the writer, herself, and we are forced to acknowledge again that her feelings, her sensitivity is human, and correct, and should be our own...
...in later years the official church sought Dorothy Day's counsel, and most Catholics who learned of her life responded with pride and affection...
...Like us, too, when she told her own story retrospectively, there was a unity and wholeness to it: the young girl with deep but undefined religious impulses, pursued by God, being found and finding during the birth of her child, at peace as a Catholic but restless for meaningful work, meeting Peter Maurin, accepting his message and, again and again over the years, explaining that she is only trying in little ways to live as a Christian should...
...Nevertheless, as William Miller's marvelous study of the movement makes clear, it was not as smooth and consistent as that...
...Finally, cultivation means useful work, unavailable to the unemployed during the Depression, to idealistic youth in the sixties, to everyone in the midst of a society concerned only about self-advancement and material Commonweal: 712 advantages...
...Even the most enthusiastic of Christian just warriors must refer to "last resorts" and the tragic sinfulness of armed conflict...
...Our worst enemies are those of our own household, Scripture says...
...Some carping criticism or, more likely, a passing reference to her supposed utopianism, always had to accompany celebration of her goodness, reservations made awkward by the ordinariness of the woman and, in comparison with the Gospel, the modesty of her challenge...
...Once, when criticized for writing about Castro's Cuba, she responded: "After all, I am the editor of a monthly paper, presenting a point of view about what is going on in the world, and these events are vital happenings...
...she sees and dislikes the theft, the deceptions, the dirt...
...How many persons less well known than John Cogley or Michael Harrington spent some time around a Catholic Worker house, or read the paper, or heard Miss Day and had their lives permanently altered by the experience...
...Originally outsiders, battling for a place, Catholics have been realistic, tough-minded, prepared to achieve their goals through organization, coalitions, and compromise...
...So she traveled and spoke and listened, fascinated by people's lives, almost never self-righteous or demanding...
...She can be called a saint, a visionary, a prophet, knowing full well that only rather strange sorts think of saints as real persons whose lives might be models for their own...
...It all happened while we sat there talking, and it is still going on...
...And, for Dorothy Day, that history was very important...
...Continuing the tradition of excellence in the paper will be a major test of the movement in the years ahead...
...and, at least until William Miller published A Harsh and Dreadful Love, they have, perhaps incorrectly, been disappointed...
...So, too, her politics were a politics of people...
...But experience chastened her...
...Placing her and her movement less on the fringe and more at the center of the church and its tradition, which is where the Worker always hoped to be, reveals that the most radical demands of that tradition upon contemporary Catholics come not from outside or from the periphery of the church, but from its center...
...Sober commentators will praise her witness but note the all too frequently repeated criticisms: the unsystematic character of her thought, the occasional utopianism and disdain for complexity, the seemingly romantic trust in divine providence...
...For Catholics this could best be learned through worship, prayer, and study of the lives of the saints and the writings of Catholic thinkers...
...What are the concrete historical achievements of Dorothy Day...
...After all, she reminded her readers, ' 'Our salvation depends on whether or not we perform these works...
...Yet, amid the abstractions of her radical friends, Dorothy showed her preoccupation with the concrete, the particular...
...In her own sense of her life she was no heroine, no leader, but was pushed into new ventures by events, by friends, by Providence...
...She founded a movement which is now forty-seven years old, with houses of hospitality and rural communities in over forty locations around the country...
...Her love of the beauty of die land echoes Thoreau, her sense of the hidden beauty of people is perhaps unmatched in our literature...
...Yet she was a writer of grace and power, able to illuminate the events of daily life and interpret the events of her time...
...When asked by Robert Coles about her demands on people she responded angrily: "I have never expected, I have never wanted, everyone to become part of the Catholic Worker family...
...Only those persons, not unknown to the church, who celebrate compromise and value only concrete results, while forgetting what it is that is compromised, and what price is paid for effectiveness, can look upon the central themes of Dorothy Day's life and work without admiration and without a recognition that she, more than any other among us, lived and worked at the heart of all that is noble and human and good about Catholic Christianity...
...But," she added a little sadly, "poverty is my vocation, to live as simply and as poorly as I can, and to never cease talking and writing of poverty and destitution...
...If so, they will be heroes for some, and their inspiration will affect significant minorities of Catholics...
...All work, whether building, increasing food production, running credit unions, working in factories which produce for real human needs, working in the smallest of industries, the handicrafts, all these things can come under the heading of the works of mercy, which are the opposite of the works of war.'' Prayer, study, and work were the basic Catholic Worker program...
...Heaven is a banquet, too, even with a crust, where there is companionship...
...She sees, too, those who stay on to help, the men and women off the line who prepare the soup, sweep the house, till the soil at the farm...
...I've hoped to act in such a way that I will be reaching out to many others who will never be part of the Catholic Worker movement...
...The Catholic Worker papers at Marquette University contain her massive correspondence with the famous and the ordinary and a remarkable collection of journals and diaries...
...In so many ways Dorothy Day appears almost a biological sport, an attractive, courageous exception in the annals of American Catholic history...
Vol. 107 • December 1980 • No. 23
