Celebrating the life of Dorothy Day: Catholic, Anarchist, Socialist

Last updated on: November 30, 2015 at 3:04 am by Justin Whitaker

Celebrating the life of Dorothy Day: Catholic, Anarchist, Socialist 2015-11-30T03:04:20-07:00 Justin Whitaker

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Dorothy Day died on November 29, 1980. She lived a truly remarkable life, but one that has not earned the recognition it deserves.

PBS created a wonderful short documentary on her life and work in 2013, available here: The Life of Dorothy Day. I have written about her before but feel that the battles she fought are still very much with us today. As with many people I admire deeply, she took from her religion a strong conviction to help those around her, taking seriously the Christian commandment to “love thy neighbor as thyself.” And as the shopping holiday season settles in upon us once more, let us think first about the humanity in the world connected to all of the material goods around us, the people suffering near and far for whom a few dollars or a sympathetic ear can bring respite.

If you don’t already subscribe to PBS’s Religion and Ethics News Weekly, I highly recommend that you do. This story alone is worth it.

It focuses on the life of Dorothy Day, a devout Catholic, a socialist, an anarchist, and, perhaps one day a Saint.

Dorothy Day has always loomed large in the back of my mind. Growing up Catholic, to two very liberal parents (my mother marched with and had dinner with a member of the Chicago Seven), I was drawn to the idea that Catholics could also be radicals. My parents faded away from the Church, sometimes recalling that the most vicious people they had ever encountered were Catholic nuns in primary schools. And as they faded they focused on direct action through social work for my mother and volunteering and simply helping those who needed it for my father – sometimes including giving cars away to people who needed one. Meanwhile, I faded as well drawn to science, atheism and existentialism, then humanism, and eventually Buddhism, all the while doing volunteer work of one sort or another on the side.

The very name of Day’s movement, the Catholic Worker Movement, clearly echoes her Communist sympathies (or at least shared interests) – noting that we humans are workers as much as anything and that work deserves respect and the recognition of the dignity of each and every one of us. Of course this is distinguished from the way we all are typically described, as consumers. Here our value is determined by how much we take, not by what we give.

I’m no orthodox Marxist, but I believe Day was on to something. We need balance, and these days things seem far from balanced.

At Day’s Catholic Worker soup kitchen I am heartened to see (in the video) that one of the volunteers interviewed openly admits to not being a Christian. Yet his ability to work, to give, is still valued. He is accepted based on that, on his practices rather than his beliefs.

Others, Christian and not, Socialist and not, were drawn to her “pacifist anarchist movement” through their own conscience as much as to holding any particular beliefs, and it has been this common conscience, a shared sense of the rightness of helping those in need, which has kept the movement alive for 83 years now.

When I mentioned this on facebook, a friend reminded me of Thomas Merton and Simone Weil, two fellow radicals and inspirations to all of us from the 20th century.

If you would like to pray for Day’s intercession, a website has been set up to guide you. But keep in mind this is the woman who reportedly said, “Don’t trivialize me by trying to make me a saint,” and in her own words about miracles in 1934 wrote:

Our lives are made up of little miracles day by day. That splendid globe of sun, one street wide, framed at the foot of East Fourteenth street in early morning mists that greeted me this morning in my way out to mass was a miracle that lifted up my heart. I was reminded of a little song of Teresa’s, composed and sung at the age of two.

“I’ll sing a song,” (she warbled)
Of sunshine on a little house.
And the sunshine is a present for the little house.”

Sunshine in the middle of January is indeed a present.

Indeed. Sunshine any time is a present.

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