Dorothy Day: In Her Own Words

The story of one of the most courageous, unconventional, holy women of the 20th century

House of Hospitality. Dorothy Day. Our Sunday Visitor; 75th Anniversary Edition edition,  2015.

For those who are not already acquainted with Dorothy Day, this book, the 75th anniversary edition, provides an excellent introduction to one of the most courageous, unconventional and holy women of the 20th century. First published in 1939, it is composed of jottings, notes and personal reflections about the daunting vocation to which Day believed she had been called: to live a life of radical Christian loving witness among the homeless and unemployed of New York.

It had been a long journey for its author, including setbacks, sorrow and failure. Born in 1897 into a family that was only formally Christian, yet longing to find meaning to life, a cause to which she could commit herself wholeheartedly, Day became a journalist involved in socialist political issues. During this period she experienced a brief, failed marriage, an abortion, which she later much regretted, then settled on Staten Island along with her lover, Forster Batterham, a self-styled anarchist. In 1927, pregnant by him and determined to have her baby baptized, even though she knew it would end their relationship, Day found herself a single mother as well as a Catholic convert.

For the next five years she took an assortment of jobs, sometimes in journalism, at other times more menial work, in order to support herself and her daughter, Tamar Teresa. In 1932, still unsure of her life’s purpose, but knowing it was bound up with the social misery she saw all around her, she happened to be in Washington where, on December 8th, the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, she prayed to know the concrete form of her vocation. She relates, “When I got back to New York, Peter Maurin was at the house waiting for me."

This eccentric figure, from a French peasant background, who had worked as a farm laborer for years in the US and Canada, had already developed his own response to the Gospel, arguing it with anyone who would listen: this was the conviction that only “voluntary poverty," practised by those who had means, would answer the needs of the poor—and also change society. He was the response to Day’s prayer, providing her with the theoretical basis for her vocation. Between them, along with a few well-wishers and supporters, they opened the first “House of Hospitality” in a New York tenement block. It was the start of a venture which still continues today.

The book describes the first five years of the movement, from May 1933, when the first issue of The Catholic Worker, the newspaper Day started in order to spread their ideas, was published, until 1938. Written with understated humour, resignation and a passionate commitment to her newfound apostolate, Day is honest about the difficulties—which sometimes threatened to overwhelm her—of this arduous Christian witness. The House of Hospitality, operating along the lines of a medieval hospice, did not turn away anyone who knocked on its doors; this meant constant noise, day and night (“one gets used to these things”); the ever-present uncertainty of how to afford their daily bread—as well as beds, blankets, sheets and pillows—in keeping with the principle of giving help to those who asked for it; the acceptance of complete lack of privacy along with ever-growing demands on her time; and becoming familiar with the smell of unwashed bodies (“I do penance through my nose” Day commented wryly).

She gradually came to accept that if God wanted her to undertake this task, he would provide the means. “It is lacking in faith in God to be discouraged," she wrote. Much recourse was made to the ever-reliable St Joseph. “Our lives are made up of little miracles day by day” Day notes. Peter Maurin suggested having a big pot of vegetable soup on the stove, a continual supply that would be renewed daily, alongside a pot of coffee.  It made the kitchen, the only heated room in the house, the focus of discussions, fellowship and welcome.

This was the era of the Great Depression, with thousands out of work and with Communist agitators fomenting unrest and strikes. The Catholic Worker, which at its zenith had a circulation of 100,000, sought to combat Communist ideology with its own radical Christian alternative: recognising the human dignity of the workers rather than exploiting them for the purpose of class warfare. Day never forgot that the movement was intended to care for the spiritual welfare of the poor as well as their material needs. For her they were not the faceless “proletariat," cogs in the machinery of politics but individuals, with their own personal history, their sorrows and their needs; in her own phrase, they were “the Ambassadors of God.”

Sometimes the book chronicles its author’s “feelings of almost hopelessness and desperation." She has to remind herself that “just because I feel that everything is useless and going to pieces and badly done and futile, it is not really that way at all. Everything…is in the hands of God.” Day also worried about not giving enough time to her daughter’s needs, “being constantly on the go, having to leave her in the care of others," and admitting, “Never before have I had such a complete sense of failure, of utter misery.”

Yet slowly the mustard seed, begun with the first House of Hospitality, expanded. As Day writes, “We began with a store, expanded into an apartment rented…from there to a 12-roomed house and now we have 24 rooms here in Mott Street.” The movement grew to 23 hospices around the US as well as four farming communities. 5000 people came to be fed daily from the soup kitchens provided by Day and those who joined her.

Dorothy Day’s cause for canonization has been opened in New York. This moving journal, which provides a vivid account of the trials and tribulations of a saint-in-the making, should be read by all who would like to know her better.

Francis Phillips writes from Buckinghamshire in the UK. This article was first published at Mercatornet.