Dorothy Day lived from 1897 to 1980. In her lifetime she became an icon of Catholic social justice and nonviolence. To the poor and disenfranchised, she was the heart and hand of Jesus’ compassion. As a prophet, she never let us avert our eyes from the painful truth.
I met her in my freshman year in the college and that meeting has endured with me all my life.
Our Approach:
By profession, Dorothy Day was a journalist. She wrote prodigiously. So, as much as possible, I am attempting to tell her story in her own words. Her autobiography, The Long Loneliness, offers insights into her inner journey.
In our Wisdom Archetype session, I hope to illustrate Dorothy Day’s evolving image of God in her life and, at the same time, show how anyone who has the discipline to be a seeker – that is someone who has the courage to question all – will find in Dorothy Day a companion for their journey.
Searching
As a result of her reading and being aware of the plight of the workers, Dorothy Day became aware of her vocation.
“[Prince Peter] Kropotkin especially brought to my mind the plight of the poor, of the workers, and though my only experience of the destitute was in books, the very fact that [Upton Sinclair’s] The Jungle was about Chicago where I lived, whose streets I walked, made me feel that from then on my life was to be linked to theirs, their interests were to be mine; I had received a call, a vocation, a direction in my life.
“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.”
“Both Dostoevski and Tolstoi made me cling to a faith in God, and yet I could not endure feeling an alien in it. I felt that my faith had nothing in common with that of Christians around me.”
Yet . . .
“I felt at the time that religion would only impede my work. I wanted to have nothing to do with the religion of those whom I saw all about me. I felt that I must turn from it as from a drug. I felt it indeed to be an opiate of the people and not a very attractive one, so I hardened my heart. It was a conscious and deliberate process.”
At age 17 …
“There was a great question in my mind. Why was so much done in remedying social evils instead of avoiding them in the first place? . . . . Where were the saints to try to change the social order, not just to minister to the slaves but to do away with slavery?
The East Side
“There is a smell in the walls of such tenements, a damp ooze coming from them in the halls. One’s very clothes smell of it. It is not the smell of life, but the smell of the grave.
“And yet, as I walked these streets back in 1917 I wanted to go and live among these surroundings; in some mysterious way I felt that I would never be freed from this burden of loneliness and sorrow unless I did.”
Journalism – awakening to Catholic social agenda:
Regarding an interview with Fr. O’Rourke, a Jesuit preacher: “I was surprised to find many quotations form Rerum Novarum [On the Condition of Labor, 1891] of Pope Leo XIII and a very fair exposition of the Church’s social teachings. I paid no attention to it at the time. Catholics were a world apart, a people within a people, making little impression on the tremendous non-Catholic population of the country.
“There was no attack on religion because people were generally indifferent to religion. They were neither hot nor cold. They were the tepid, the materialistic, who hoped that by Sunday churchgoing they would be taking care of the afterlife, if there were an afterlife. Meanwhile they would get everything they could in this.
“On the other hand, the Marxist, the I.W.W.’s [Industrial Workers of the World] who looked upon religion as the opiate of the people, who thought they had only this one life to live and then oblivion – they were the ones who were eager to sacrifice themselves here and now, thus doing without now and for all eternity the good things of the world which they were fighting to obtain for their brothers. It was then, and still is, a paradox that confounds me. God love them! And God pity the lukewarm of whom St. John said harshly (though he was the disciple of love) that God would spew them out of His mouth.”
Guerin Family 