Dorothy was inspired by journalists like Jack London and Uptown Sinclair who detailed the horrors and injustices of America’s industrial age. She loved the Russian anarchist Kropotkin and was inspired by the stories of saints. “Whatever I had read as a child about the saints had thrilled me. I could see the nobility of giving one’s life for the sick, the maimed, the leper,” she said. She recognized that American religion lacked the saints’ heroic witness. Preachers did not make a connection between Sunday services and the pain of working men and women. “Where were the saints to try to change the social order, not just to minister to the slaves but to do away with slavery?” Dorothy wondered. In 1916, she got a reporting job at the socialist newspaper The Call. After many tragic relationships and becoming a single mother, Dorothy began to pray daily, which eventually led to her and her daughter being baptized.
On October 24—Black Friday—the stock market crashed. The Great Depression brought mass evictions, crop destruction, and hunger. Dorothy was forbidden by her confessors from taking part in Communist-organized actions, protesting government inaction and demanding relief for workers. So she wrote about these efforts for Catholic magazines. In December 1932, Dorothy covered the Hunger Marches and Farmer’s Strike in Washington D.C. for Commonweal and America Magazine. This march would change her life. “Where was the Catholic leadership?” she wondered as she wrote about the desperate, hungry marchers and their brutal treatment by riot police and soldiers. The next day, she prayed after Mass in the recently dedicated National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, D.C. “I offered up a special prayer, a prayer which 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,” she said.
When Dorothy returned to New York City, a man named Peter Maurin was waiting for her. Peter Maurin began educating her in Catholic Social Teaching and personalism: a Catholic alternative to communism. Peter believed that U.S. Catholics, instead of becoming assimilated into the dominant WASP culture, could set about creating a new society based in cult (worship of God), culture, and cultivation—just like the Irish monks who evangelized Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire. Together, Peter and Dorothy started The Catholic Worker newspaper: “an attempt to popularize and make known the encyclicals of the Popes in regard to social justice and the program put forth by the Church for the ‘reconstruction of the social order,’” as they wrote in their first editorial in May of 1933. They would not send away homeless or hungry visitors from their newspaper offices without first giving them a cup of coffee or bowl of soup. Hungry workers began to flock to The Catholic Worker for bread—and hope. Soon, they opened up a cooperative apartment for women who were out of work and homeless.
“The Catholic Worker grew from an intense desire to realize the Mystical Body of Christ in a way which was new and attentive to the hard-working marginalized,” wrote Professor Katharine Harmon of Holy Cross College. Dorothy and Peter were in close contact with Rev. Virgil Michel, O.S.B., one of the Benedictines who was an architect of the Liturgical Movement in the United States. The Liturgical Movement drew inspiration from Scripture and the writings and practice of the early Church to help Catholics understand “the heart of the liturgy as the worship of the Body of Christ, inextricably linked with the Church’s teaching on service to the poor and social justice for the suffering members of the Body of Christ,” according to Catholic Workers Mark and Louise Zwick.
Dorothy took seriously the Mystical Body of Christ: the Church on earth and in heaven, united in the Eucharistic Lord. “We cannot live alone. We cannot go to Heaven alone. Otherwise, as Péguy said, God will say to us, ‘Where are the others?’” Day wrote in 1940. Dorothy felt deeply that to be baptized into Christ was to be part of this Mystical Body of Christ. She connected the Mystical Body of Christ to Catholics’ economic life and work. The Catholic Worker highlighted cooperative businesses, credit unions, and an economy based on human dignity. “It is with all these means that we can live as though we believed indeed that we are all members one of another,” she wrote. The mystical Body of Christ was the foundation of Dorothy’s objection to war: from the Spanish Civil War to World War II to the Vietnam War. She even testified at the Second Vatican Council against nuclear weapons. At the last Eucharistic Congress in the United States, in Philadelphia in 1976, Dorothy Day spoke on the Eucharist, the brotherhood of all men, and the perversion of our function as co-creators by making and waging terrible war. “Our Creator gave us life, and the Eucharist to sustain our life. But we gave the world instruments of death of inconceivable magnitude,” she said.
“It is not human efforts or stratagems that bring people closer to God,” Pope Francis recently wrote of Dorothy Day, “but rather the grace that flows from charity, the beauty that flows from witness, the love that becomes concrete acts.” Dorothy was fond of the Russian author Dostoevsky’s words “the world will be saved by beauty.” And Dorothy Day’s life shines with the great beauty that comes from love that chooses to be poor for others, just like Jesus, who did not deem equality with God something to be grasped, but takes on our humble humanity—and the even more humble appearances of bread and wine—to draw near to us, out of love for us.
Roden, Renée Darline. “American Eucharistic Witnesses: Servant of God Dorothy Day and Her Revolution of Love.” National Eucharistic Revival. November 2, 2023. https://www.eucharisticrevival.org/post/american-eucharistic-witnesses-dorothy-day
BACK TO LIST