Dorothy Day, Writer and Worker of Mercy

Today the Greater Church commemorates Dorothy Day, who sought Christ in prayer and the Eucharist and shared her life with people who needed food, shelter, and companionship.

Dorothy was born in Brooklyn, New York, on November 8, 1897. When she was a child, her family lived in California. After the earthquake of 1906, she watched her mother and their neighbors care for people who had lost their homes. The family later moved to Chicago, where Dorothy began attending an Episcopal church. She learnt its hymns and prayers and received baptism.

At university she turned away from organized religion and joined socialist movements. She wanted to understand why people remained hungry while others possessed so much. In 1916 she moved to New York and became a journalist, writing about workers and joining protests. During a love affair she became pregnant and had an abortion. The man she loved left her. Her grief over the abortion remained with her.

In the 1920s she made a home on Staten Island with Forster Batterham. She loved him and found happiness in their life beside the sea. In 1926 their daughter, Tamar Teresa, was born. Dorothy had feared that she could never have a child. Now gratitude moved her towards the God she had resisted.

She wanted Tamar to receive baptism in the Roman Catholic Church. Sister Aloysia, a local nun, helped her prepare and instructed Dorothy herself. Forster opposed religion and would not marry her in the Church. Dorothy’s decision to become a Catholic brought their life together to an end. In December 1927 she received conditional baptism in the Roman Catholic Church. She continued to raise Tamar, but she had lost the home she had hoped they would share with Forster.

For five years Dorothy worked and studied, seeking a way to join her faith to the needs she had known as a journalist. In December 1932 she went to Washington to report on a march by unemployed people. She watched cold, hungry workers asking for the means to live. At the national Shrine of the Immaculate Conception she attended the Eucharist and prayed for a way to serve them.

When she returned to New York, Peter Maurin was waiting to meet her. He was a French immigrant who had been a teaching Brother and then a laborer. He spoke of a life in which Christians received the homeless into their houses, shared work, and gave what they had to people in need. Dorothy brought her experience as a journalist to his proposals.

On May 1, 1933, they began selling The Catholic Worker in Union Square for a penny a copy. The paper carried news of working people and accounts of the Christian life Peter urged. Soon people came to its office needing more than a newspaper. Dorothy and her companions kept stew and coffee ready in the kitchen. They helped families move when landlords put them out and asked readers for clothing and furniture.

That first winter they opened an apartment for unemployed women. They needed fifteen beds and had only three, but Dorothy announced that they could wait no longer. She offered the editors’ blankets for the guests and recalled that Christ’s first bed had been straw. Other houses of hospitality followed, and farms where people could work and live together.

Through these years Dorothy went to the daily Eucharist, read the Scriptures, and returned to confession. Christ’s presence claimed her in the church and among her neighbors. In the crowded houses she shared the food, work, and discomfort of the people who came.

After the United States entered the Second World War, Dorothy upheld her refusal to take part in war. In January 1942 she wrote from a church on Mott Street and recalled Christ’s command to love enemies. She urged prayer, fasting, care for the wounded, and food for the hungry. Some Catholic Workers disagreed with her. She asked them to remain charitable towards one another while their disagreements continued.

The demands of the work also reached her daughter. Tamar had grown up among the Catholic Workers and spent periods at boarding schools. In 1943 Dorothy took leave from the community and stayed near Tamar’s school, wanting to be closer to her as she grew up.

In 1948 Dorothy helped in Tamar’s household while the family awaited another baby’s birth. She cooked, washed clothes, fetched water, and tended the children. Snow sometimes prevented them from reaching church, and they read the day’s Epistle and Gospel at home. Amid the work she offered short prayers, remembering Mary’s appeal to Jesus at Cana when the wine had failed.

In the 1950s Dorothy protested against preparations for nuclear war. When New York held civil defense drills, she and other protesters refused to take shelter. Police arrested her. She also continued to support workers seeking fair treatment, and in 1973 she went to prison again after joining farmworkers in California. Her work for peace remained joined to the daily needs of the people in the houses.

As her health failed she needed the care she had so often given. She lived at Maryhouse, a Catholic Worker home for women in New York. Tamar and her grandchildren visited. On November 29, 1980, Dorothy died with Tamar beside her.

Christ’s welcome had made a home for Dorothy in the Church. In the people who came to her door, she welcomed him again. His life at the altar sustains the love that makes strangers members of one household.