A Vision of Justice
DOROTHY DAY
20th c. journalist and social activist who co-founded the Catholic Worker Movement.
As a journalist, social activist, and peace advocate, Dorothy Day spent the majority of her life working toward a vision of social justice that affirmed the human dignity of all people. By engaging in corporal works of mercy—feeding the hungry, giving drink to the thirsty, sheltering the homeless, visiting the sick and imprisoned, burying the dead, and giving alms to the poor—Day’s daily outreach not only served to support those in need, but also provided a material example of how to treat all members of our communities. The Catholic Worker Movement, a simple program advocating for direct action, modeled for its participants true acts of mercy by giving from the heart through personal sacrifice.
Dorothy Day was born on November 8, 1897, in New York. Her nominally Protestant family moved from city to city to accommodate her father’s job as a sportswriter. While living in San Francisco, Day learned early lessons of generosity and social justice through her parents’ example—in particular, from her mother. In 1906, after the devastation wrought in the San Francisco earthquake, Day remembered how those displaced from their homes were helped by strangers and neighbors in a spirit of loving kindness. “All the neighbors joined my mother in serving the homeless,” Day later wrote. “Every stitch of available clothes was given away.” This moment held particular significance for the young girl, who would try to recapture this sense of community and humanity in the world, for the rest of her life.
Looking down Sacramento Street after the San Francisco earthquake. As a result of the quake, a fire broke out in the city. Occupants of homes in San Francisco watch helplessly as the fire rages.
Arnold Genthe, San Francisco earthquake of 1906, April 18 1906, Library of Congress. Retrieved from https://commons.wikimedia.org
While the crisis lasted, people loved each other. It was as though they were united in Christian solidarity. It makes one think of how people could, if they would, care for each other in times of stress, unjudgingly in pity and love.
Later the family moved to Chicago where Day proved to be a bright student and voracious reader, spending much of her adolescence reading the Bible and other literary classics. The writings of Upton Sinclair helped form Day’s interest in the labor movement and deepen her awareness of the struggle between economic classes. Day would stroll through the West Side neighborhoods described by Sinclair, investigating the ways humanity could be found among profound poverty and personal hardship. Discovering beauty in the smells of the bakeries, the colors of the tiny vegetable gardens, or the music coming from a home inspired Day to see how the lives of the destitute were inextricably linked to hers.
I felt, even at fifteen, that God meant man to be happy, that He meant to provide him with what he needed to maintain life in order to be happy, and that we did not need to have quite so much destitution and misery as I saw all around and read of in the daily press.
In 1916, Day’s family moved to New York City. Appalled by the living conditions of those less fortunate, she felt called to live in voluntary poverty amongst those in need. Day moved into the slums, and built for herself a simple life of meager meals, no electricity or hot water, and meaningful relationships with her neighbors. Working as a journalist, she reported about the social injustices she discovered in her neighborhood, including child labor, starvation, and joblessness. Yet she also focused on the resilience of the people she met in her community, writing about ways to live a joyful and dignified life despite destitution.
In 1917 Day was arrested with 39 others at a protest in support of women’s suffrage in Washington, D.C. She was sentenced to 30 days labor on a work farm in Virginia. In protest of their treatment, Day and eleven other women went on a seven-day hunger strike. During the strike, Day turned to the Psalms for solace and contemplated the plight of the prisoner, which brought her comfort and strength during this period of suffering. “Solitude and hunger and weariness of spirit—these sharpened my perceptions so that I suffered not only my own sorrow but the sorrows of those about me,” she later wrote. Released after an outpouring of support and media attention, Day returned to New York a changed person. She became determined to accept voluntary hardship and poverty as a way of life in order to be of greater service to others.
In 1924, after a series of personal hardships, Day began a relationship with William Forster Batterham. An English progressive, Batterham did not believe in formal religion or traditional marriage. When Day discovered she was pregnant a year later, Batterham was apprehensive about bringing a child into what he perceived as a chaotic world, but ultimately supported the addition to their household.
After the birth of her daughter, Tamar, Day’s faith journey deepened. Her decision to have Tamar baptized in the Catholic Church, followed by her own decision to enter the Catholic faith a year later, ultimately led her to end her cohabitation with Batterham. Shortly after her own baptism, Day wrote to Batterham about her conflicting feelings between her religious calling and her relationship with him. “I do love you more than anything in the world,” she wrote, “but I cannot help my religious sense, which tortures me unless I do as I believe right.”
Day turned to her writing for solace after separating from Batterham. She began to question how much time she had spent indulging her personal faith without expanding her focus in assisting others in need. Contemplating Jesus’s many works of mercy in the Bible, she prayed that she might also find a way to combine her faith with her desire to help her fellow brothers and sisters.
I wanted, though I did not know it then, a synthesis. I wanted life and I wanted the abundant life. I wanted it for others too. I did not want just the few, the missionary-minded people like the Salvation Army, to be kind to the poor, as the poor. I wanted everyone to be kind. I wanted every home to be open to the lame, the halt and the blind, the way it had been after the San Francisco earthquake. Only then did people really live, really love their brothers. In such love was abundant life and I did not have the slightest idea how to find it.
Shortly thereafter she met French immigrant and former monastic Christian Brother Peter Maurin. Having previously read much of Day’s work, Maurin felt convinced she was the person he needed to work with in order to promote spiritual and corporal works of mercy. To popularize this movement, Maurin believed, they would need to create a publication with a new Catholic voice, one that related the gospel to the current conditions of the poor and the struggles for social justice.
Together, Day and Maurin founded The Catholic Worker in 1933, a newspaper that promoted Catholic teachings, expressed dissatisfaction with the social order and heralded a vision of an ideal future marked by justice and equality. Priced at a penny to make it affordable, the first issue was planned, written, and edited in the kitchen of Day’s tenement on 15th Street, without a board of directors, salaries, a telephone, or electricity. To subsidize the first print run of 2,500 copies, Day deferred the payment of her utilities and funneled her freelance income into the new endeavor.
Day’s rousing editorial to the readers was “printed to call their attention to the fact that the Catholic Church has a social program—to let them know that there are men of God who are working not only for their spiritual but for their material welfare.”
Released at the height of the Great Depression, The Catholic Worker’s progressive stance appealed to a population seeking solutions to the nation’s overwhelming poverty, unemployment, and homelessness. Believing in Day and Maurin’s messages of hospitality and mercy, readers began showing up at the offices of The Catholic Worker asking for food, shelter, and opportunities to volunteer.
In response, Day and Maurin founded their first house of hospitality—St. Joseph's House of Hospitality. By 1936 they housed nearly 70 people, and ran a regular soup line that served more than 1,000 people a day. That same year, they expanded their reach to a farm in eastern Pennsylvania, where people could live and work on the land. Day also called on others to form their own houses and farms, as part of what became The Catholic Worker Movement. By 1940, the Catholic Worker Movement had spread to include more than 30 hospitality homes and farms.
Day did not limit her justice work to housing and employment. She also actively engaged in peaceful protests throughout her life concerning workers’ rights, racial integration, and nuclear proliferation. Of all her protests, Day’s pacifism proved the most controversial to her followers. Her unpopular pacifist stances during the Spanish Civil War, World War II, and Vietnam lost her many of her closest supporters. Unfazed, Day continued to oppose war and violence, referencing the Sermon on the Mount as her manifesto for peace.
I do not see why we must accept the inevitability of war. It was only in the last century that slavery was done away with here in this country, and I suppose that everybody thought it was inevitable, something to be accepted, before that time. If we are working toward peace, we must look with hope that in a future generation we will do away with war.
Although ailing in health during her later years, Day continued to champion justice. Her pilgrimages during this time led her to Rome to receive Communion from Pope Paul VI, to India to meet Mother Teresa and speak with novice nuns about nonviolent protest, and finally to California where she was jailed in her final protest, supporting the United Farm Workers along with Cesar Chavez.
In 1976, Day converted a former New York City music school into Maryhouse, a shelter for homeless women. On November 29, 1980, Day died among the poor she served at Maryhouse, with her daughter holding her hand. In honor of the work she accomplished through the Catholic Worker Movement, Cardinal John O’Connor of New York initiated the Cause for her Sainthood in 2000. The Vatican approved the cause, granting her the title “Servant of God,” and in 2012 the United States Catholic Bishops unanimously endorsed the cause of canonization for Dorothy Day.
The impact of Day’s vision of justice in the United States, inspired the formation of more than 200 communities still thriving under her message, as well as another 28 communities espousing her vision internationally. Her life provides a contemporary model for integrating faith and action through prayer. She also demonstrates that the issues of poverty, racism, and war can be addressed by a community willing to accept personal sacrifice as a means to achieve social justice.
