November 8 marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of
Dorothy Day, uncanonized saint of the homeless. She was also
one of America's most inspired complainers. For most of her
life she kept saying things aren't the way they should be,
and that it would be a far less cruel world if those who go
to church cared for the poor half as well as they take care
of their Bibles.
The driving force in her life was her intense awareness of
beauty. In her mid-20s, trying to explain the religious
conversion going on in her own life, she would ask atheist
friends, "How can there be no God when there are all
these beautiful things?" From age 15 until her death,
she found beauty in places and faces that most people are
glad to avoid. It started in Chicago after reading Upton
Sinclair's novel The Jungle, a story set in an area of
stockyards and slaughterhouses of the city's South Side.
Sinclair's vivid description of filth in the meat industry so
shocked its readers that the book is given credit for
congressional passage of tough meat inspection laws, although
what Sinclair had hoped for was to stimulate more profound
social change. "I aimed at the public's heart," he
said, "and by accident hit it in the stomach."
He reached Dorothy's heart. She often strolled the newest
addition to her family, her brother John. "I walked for
miles, exploring interminable gray streets, fascinating in
their dreary sameness, past tavern after tavern, where I
envisioned such scenes as the Polish wedding party in
Sinclair's story." In the midst of urban desolation, she
found "tiny gardens and vegetable patches in the
yards." Drab streets were transformed by pungent odors:
geranium and tomato plants, garlic, olive oil, roasting
coffee, bread and rolls in bakery ovens. "Here,"
she said, "was enough beauty to satisfy me."
AN EXCEPTIONALLY BRIGHT student, at age 17 she was in
college on a scholarship, but she found classrooms less
engaging than slums. She dropped out and moved to New York
City. At age 18, she was one of the few female reporters
working for a New York daily newspaper and probably the only
one writing about strikes and homelessness rather than
engagements and weddings. At the same time she rented a tiny
apartment on the Lower East Side. The kind of neighborhoods
she had been attracted to as an adventurous adolescent became
her home for life. When she died 64 years later, in 1980, she
was still living in the same neighborhood, but by then part
of a community of hospitality.
Another turning point in her life was pregnancy. Feeling
that she was in the middle of a miracle, she was overcome
with a longing for her child, once born, to be baptized in
the Catholic Church. For her radical friends, this was among
the world's most benighted, oppressive institutions. For
Dorothy, it was the church of the poor, a church with roots
reaching back to the beginning of Christianity, a world
rather than a national church, a church in which sacraments
were more important than sermons.
Both mother and daughter were baptized in 1927, which
brought to an end her common-law marriage. Dorothy remained
single for the rest of her life, which in part explains the
title of her autobiography, The Long Loneliness.
For six years Dorothy looked for a way to connect her
social conscience with her religious conversion, a search
that gave birth to the Catholic Worker movement in May 1933.
Originally it was just a newspaper, but within weeks of its
publication the first house of hospitality-her apartment-came
into being simply because Dorothy couldn't turn away a
homeless woman who had seen the paper and came asking for
help. Today there are nearly 175 Catholic Worker houses of
hospitality, not to mention the many more places of welcome
that wouldn't exist had it not been for Dorothy Day's
struggle to live the gospel with directness and simplicity.
"We are here to celebrate Christ through the works of
mercy," she said. This meant for her not only feeding
the hungry and providing shelter to the homeless but refusing
to cause anyone to go hungry, refusing to destroy anyone's
home-thus her opposition to war, a source of intense
controversy in a time when American Catholics were busy
proving their patriotism. It was largely thanks to the impact
of Dorothy Day that the Catholic Church produced more
conscientious objectors during the Vietnam War than any other
church in America.
At the core of her life was her experience of ultimate
beauty-Christ's face hidden in the faces of America's human
castoffs. "Those who cannot see the face of Christ in
the poor," she used to say, "are atheists
indeed."
JIM FOREST, a Sojourners contributing editor, wrote Love
is the Measure: A Biography of Dorothy Day and co-edited A
Penny a Copy: Readings From The Catholic Worker. His
latest book is Praying With Icons (Orbis).
Read other articles by:
Forest, Jim
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