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Introducing Dorothy Day
Over the next several weeks, I want to introduce us to Dorothy Day. Much has been written about Day: I’ll offer my suggestions about where to begin below. Dorothy is, like many famous figures, a bit of a Rorschach test: you see in her what you want to see in her. I say this in advance to signal that I love Dorothy, and if I were to ever be Catholic, and if she were to be recognized as a canonical saint, she would undoubtedly be my patron saint.
In popular memory, she is best remembered as the co-founder of the Catholic Worker Movement, as one of four Americans mentioned by Pope Francis in his speech to Congress. She was, and is, an inspiring figure, who devoted her life to the poor. If you’ve heard of her, the words “social activist” or “social reformer” are usually attached. She was (kind of) those things, but it’s a bit reductionist to describe her that way.
But first things first: some basic details.
Dorothy May Day1 was born on November 8, 1897 in Brooklyn, New York to nominal Episcopalian, working-class parents. She and her family moved to the San Francisco Bay area, where her father worked for the newspaper, before the building was demolished in the 1906 earthquake. Relocating to Chicago proved to be a turning point for Dorothy, who became interested in religious matters. While in California, she recalls attending local Baptist2 and Methodist churches, lighting a spark in her that led to her being received into Church of Our Savior, an Episcopal church in the Lincoln Park area of Chicago.
All of this is public record, and to be honest, none of it all that interesting.
In the 19th century, there were relocations en masse across America. The migrations for labor are well-known to us, as are the migrations to escape segregation in the South. As for her coming to faith, it’s not as if a person coming to Christian faith, even over the objections of their parents, is all that amazing: it is, after all, the miracle of the Gospel, that anyone comes to faith.
Beyond the bare bones, her life story becomes more exotic. Dorothy tells stories about her interactions with famous people and ordinary people, of major events and of imprisonments, of being present with Cesar Chavez and Eugene O’Neill and of participating in Mass alongside the homeless.
But telling her life story was not an occasion for glamorizing it so much as telling how, through an ordinary history, she became a Christian.
This process is the focal point of both of her major biographies, The Long Loneliness and From Union Square to Rome. It is the unspoken thesis of Houses of Hospitality and Loaves and Fishes, her works on the founding of the Catholic Worker movement. Dorothy wrote of her own life frequently, in newspaper pieces, in her journals. But the focus of her stories is rarely on her own development or intellectual journey: it is on how, through an ordinary story, she became a Christian.
By this, I do not just mean “how she entered the church as a Catholic” entering the Church as a single mother and in many ways, as one drawn up into the faith of the Church. I mean “how she worked out her salvation in fear and trembling.”
So, as we begin to listen to Dorothy, let’s tie some things together:
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