Too much?
Is enough actually too much? This question was what I began to ponder after watching this video by John Green. His point that we insulate ourselves from suffering by trying to avoid suffering is valid.
I seem to work under the assumption that where there is suffering, there is misery. Do we add to any misery by causing loneliness to those that suffer? We know that illness and death are unavoidable, but loneliness isn’t. How would the poor and suffering feel if we were there with them? How would we feel? I expect that we would realize that there isn’t them and us. There is only us.
Many people try to alleviate suffering by offering financial support. That is an amazing thing to do, but how would the world would look if instead of running away from the very possibility of suffering, we banded together near the precipice and offered emotional support? Maybe instead of writing a check, we seek to hold a hand or have a conversation. Scratch that. If we can, we should write a check AND seek to hold a hand or have a conversation.
Dorothy Day
Early Life
Dorothy Day was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1897 to parents John and Grace Day. She was the third of five children. Her parents were non-practicing members of the Episcopal Church and they did not baptize any of their children. John Day was a sports journalist, which led to the family moving multiple times during Dorothy’s childhood. The family moved from New York to Oakland, California when Dorothy was 8 years old. The family was forced to move to Chicago, Illinois after the Great 1906 San Francisco Earthquake destroyed the building where John Day worked, and the family’s home was left unlivable.
It was in Chicago that Dorothy was first personally exposed to the Christian faith. She began to hear about Christianity from a neighbor and her inquisitive nature led her to learn more. With the approval of her parent’s, Dorothy was baptized into the Episcopal Church. She was an active churchgoer for about a year when her interest finally waned.
Dorothy’s writing won her a scholarship to the University of Illinois, where she attended for a couple years. In June 1916, her family moved back to New York, where John Day began working at the Morning Telegraph. Dorothy left school after her sophomore year to follow her family back to New York. She searched for work as a journalist, even though her father was against the idea of women working in that field.
Social Awareness
Dorothy was fond of the radical thinkers of the time and her early jobs as a journalist were for socialist publications. She lost her job writing for the publication called Masses when its stance against the draft led to it being shut down by the government. She was also socializing with the many bohemians that were living in Greenwich Village and was engaging with their social activism.
Dorothy participated in a 1917 suffragist protest march in Washington DC, even though she was not passionate about the issues. “In fact, once suffrage was achieved, she never voted in her life.”[1] She was arrested with many other women that day. The conditions in jail were poor and Dorothy participated in a hunger strike along with other women to protest these conditions. This experience “deepened her identification with an even larger group: the poor and abused in society.”[2] Even though her time in prison was short, Dorothy stated that she “would never be free again, never free when I knew that behind bars all over the world there were women and men, young girls and boys, suffering constraint, punishment, isolation and hardship for crimes of which all of us were guilty.”[3]
In January 1918, Dorothy was out socializing with a group of friends when a man named Louis Holladay overdosed on heroin. Louis died in Dorothy’s arms. The man Dorothy was dating at the time reacted to his friend’s death by leaving and avoiding the mess. The bohemian lifestyle was becoming problematic for her. In her autobiography, Dorothy wrote about this time in her life by saying that “suddenly a succession of incidents and the tragic aspect of life in general began to overwhelm me and I could no longer endure the life I was leading.”[4]
Relationships
Dorothy fell in love with a man name Lionel Moise. Lionel was a well-known and talented journalist. Lionel “taught Dorothy how to write as a journalist.”[5] Dorothy became pregnant but did not tell Lionel about the pregnancy initially because he was not interested in being committed to Dorothy in the way that she desired. When Dorothy finally told him of the pregnancy, he rejected her and moved away. She followed him to Chicago, but the relationship was over. Dorothy had the pregnancy terminated. The abortion was performed in her apartment and traumatized her enough that she attempted suicide twice.
The other man with whom Dorothy would fall in love was named Forster Batterham. Forster was an actor and was an anarchist. Forster and Dorothy had a relationship intermittently for several years. Forster, like Lionel before, refused to marry Dorothy. Together they had a daughter named Tamar. Forster was an atheist, and this was a source of friction in their relationship. Ultimately, Dorothy decided that a sexual relationship outside of marriage was not something in which she could further participate.
Faith
Dorothy was baptized into the Episcopalian Church when she was 12 years old but had completely rejected faith by college. She described religion as an “opiate of the people.”[6] By her mid-twenties, Dorothy was known as someone with “religious leanings.”[7] Dorothy had her infant daughter Tamar baptized into the Catholic Church in 1927. Not sure if she “had any faith or belief or just wanted to believe”[8], Dorothy was conditionally baptized into the Catholic Church later that year. This was a time of confusion and doubt for Dorothy and not a joyous celebration. She was confirmed into the Catholic Church on Pentecost 1929. This time it was a joyous celebration.[9]
Catholic Worker
In the early 1930s, Dorothy met a man named Peter Maurin. Peter was similar to many of the radical thinkers that lived in New York City at the time, but he was different. He was a Catholic radical. Peter had big ideas and loved to tell everyone about them. He also encouraged others to share their ideas in an environment of debate and discussion. Peter, like St Francis of Assisi of whom he often spoke, promoted living the gospel in a radical way and lived a life of voluntary poverty. Peter attended mass daily and often spent time meditating in front of the tabernacle, although he did not talk about religion in personal terms.[10]
Peter and Dorothy discussed Catholic social teaching and the need for people to have “work, food, clothing, and shelter”. Peter encouraged Dorothy to use her journalistic experience to make a newspaper. “The paper would offer solidarity with the workers and a critique of the status quo from the perspective of the Gospels.”[11] Dorothy “wanted people to know that the Catholic Church had a social program, and that it had both their spiritual and material welfare in mind.”[12]
The first issue of the Catholic Worker was published on May 1, 1933 and circulation reached 25,000 by the end of the year. The paper grew in popularity quickly. Circulation was over 100,000 by the middle of 1935.[13] Dorothy quickly had to rent space to turn into an office for the Catholic Worker. The paper discussed strikes from many industries across the country, as well as lynchings and the plight of sharecroppers. “By the sixth issue, Dorothy was tackling Hitler’s persecution of the Jews and anti-Semitism not only in Germany but also in the United States.”[14] They were writing at a time when it seemed that only the communists cared about justice for the oppressed and Dorothy wanted to change that.
The Catholic Worker did not just write about social justice, they also soon began serving meals to people that came there in need. They received food donations and began serving coffee, bread, and soup in the first of the movement’s hospitality houses. “By 1937 the house was serving one hundred fifty loaves of bread and seventy-five gallons of coffee a day.”[15] The Catholic Worker began renting out apartment space so they could provide housing for some that needed it. “As people arrived, Dorothy realized the Workers were accepting the responsibility of caring for many of them for good.”[16]
Word began to spread about the movement. Similar houses were started in locations across the globe with no prompting from Dorothy. Dorothy was invited to speak at many schools and convents, which took her away from the Catholic Worker and her daughter, but those speaking engagements also helped to raise funds for the workers
Easton Farm
Peter Maurin was also a believer in building a farming community that would be self-sufficient and allow people to work and provide for their own needs. In April 1936, the Catholic Worker purchased a farm in Easton, Pennsylvania. The farm was quickly filled with many people of different faiths and cultures living and working there. The farm hosted a summer camp for children from Harlem.
The Easton Farm began holding spiritual retreats in 1939. These retreats promoted “a life of asceticism and detachment from worldly pleasures, and the need for penance, without which you could not see God.”[17] Dorothy did not quite understand Peter’s vision for a farming community, but she was a big proponent of the spiritual retreats. The retreat was meant to be a shock to the system and Dorothy wanted everyone to attend. The farm was filled with retreats through 1946. It was at this that “Dorothy restated in the paper the Catholic Worker program of action, but this time at the top, before the works of mercy, she put the retreats. In response, some people claimed she was turning the Catholic Worker into a religious community.”[18] She felt that the retreats were important in providing strength for the workers and helping them “to know, to love, and to serve God.”[19] Early the next year Dorothy left the farm. The farm existed as a Catholic Worker farm for eleven years, but it broke “everyone’s hearts, including Dorothy’s and Tamar’s.”[20]
Activism
The speaking engagements that Dorothy made were not without controversy. Dorothy led mass demonstrations when she felt that was necessary. The Catholic Worker joined with the communist party to protest Germany’s persecution of the Jewish people in 1935.[21] These controversies lead to many cancellations of the newspaper. The Catholic Worker spoke out about the Holocaust at a time when people did not want to believe the reports or people were participating in anti-Semitic activities themselves.
Dorothy was a pacifist and would not waiver from that position. Her pacifist position on the Spanish Civil War put her at odds with the local Bishop.[22] As the entry of the United States into World War II became imminent, Dorothy spoke to the Senate against the institution of the draft. She also urged men to not register for the draft and fought for the right of Catholics to be conscientious objectors.[23] These stances did not go well with all in the Catholic Worker movement. There were reports of Catholic Worker houses destroying copies of the newspaper instead of distributing it because of the pacifist writings included in the paper.
Dorothy’s pacifist stance did not end with World War II. She was arrested three times in the 1950s for refusing to participate in air-raid drills in New York City. She was sentenced to thirty days in jail for the third arrest. She spoke out against the Vietnam War and was invited to visit Vietnam on three occasions.[24] In 1965, she traveled to Rome to observe the Second Vatican Council. While there, “she made a ten-day fast for peace.”[25]
Dorothy’s activism in her later years was not limited to pacifism. She participated in protests in support of the United Farm Workers. One of these protests led to her being arrested for the eighth and final time, at the age of seventy-six. “She spent ‘a delightful retreat’ in a farm labor camp with a group of Mexican women and thirty nuns who had also been arrested.”[26]
End of Life
On September 3, 1976 Dorothy suffered a mild heart attack. It was finally time for her to slow down. “She was increasingly confined to her room. During those difficult times she would say, ‘My job is prayer.’”[27] Dorothy Day died of a heart attack on November 29, 1980.
Legacy
When Pope Francis addressed the United States Congress in 2015, he mentioned four people that he felt demonstrated the “spirit of the American people.”[28] Dorothy Day was the only woman among the four. He stated:
“In these times when social concerns are so important, I cannot fail to mention the Servant of God Dorothy Day, who founded the Catholic Worker Movement. Her social activism, her passion for justice and for the cause of the oppressed, were inspired by the Gospel, her faith, and the example of the saints.”[29]
Dorothy Day was a servant. She spoke up for those with no voice while tirelessly working to provide for the material needs of those that she served. She served the poor while living a life of voluntary poverty. She did this because it was “a basic necessity if you wanted to help others without hypocrisy.”[30]
Dorothy Day was a faith filled woman that unintentionally started a Catholic movement. She was someone that was hard even for her friends to classify. She was raised around people of little to know faith but came to find the Catholic Church. “The Catholic Church bound together Dorothy’s love for the poor, her desire to be in communion with God, her search for moral clarity, and her hope for a life of humility and obedience.”[31] Dorothy attended mass daily and accepted Catholic teaching on the controversial topics of the time such as birth control and abortion.
Dorothy Day was someone who did not mind publicly criticizing those in power. She would make harsh remarks against those in the Catholic Church who did not live up to her standards. She would criticize priests with nice rectories or who allowed racial segregation in their parish.[32] She would also criticize Bishops “who were allies of the rich and powerful.”[33]
Dorothy Day fought for the rights of men to not go to war while openly criticizing the social structures that bring about war. “She told college lecture audiences in 1962 that President John F. Kennedy was as much to blame for the horror of the Cuban missile crisis as Nikita Khrushchev.”[34] This kind of criticism is what led to the federal government investigating the Catholic Worker movement on multiple occasions.[35]
Dorothy Day was not afraid of being seen as un-American. She came of age in a time and place where many were engaging with the ideals of communism and socialism. She saw through the shallowness of many of these ideals but did not blindly condemn them. Patriotism is so strong in the United States that American Catholics run the risk of being unpatriotic if they do not condemn their enemies. Dorothy’s friend Thomas Merton recognized that she would get criticized for offering the idea that Fidel Castro might not have been as bad as everyone made him out to be.[36]
Dorothy Day was a pacifist. The “Catholic Worker remained as the only publication articulating a clear cut anti-war ideology both before and after Pearl Harbor.”[37] This stance was the cause of her arrest on multiple occasions.
Dorothy Day believed in educating the populous. She cautioned, "If we do not keep indoctrinating, we lose the vision. And if we lose the vision, we become merely philanthropists, doling out palliatives."[38] This was the motivation of the Catholic Worker newspaper.
Dorothy Day “disliked ‘being venerated’ and had little time for people who treated her as the Legendary Dorothy Day.”[39] Today she has the title “Servant of God” within the Catholic Church and she is a symbol to all those who think that their mistakes are too great for God to use for his glory.
References
Al Jazeera (Qatar). 2015. “Full Text of Pope Francis’ Speech to US Congress,” September 24. http://search.ebscohost.com.saintleo.idm.oclc.org/login.aspx?direct=true&db=n5h&AN=2W61416179122&site=ehost-live&scope=site.
Day, Dorothy. The Long Loneliness. Harper, NY: Harper Collins, 1997.
Hennessy, Catherine. Dorothy Day: The World Will Be Saved by Beauty. New York, NY: Scribner, 2017.
Loughery, John, and Blythe Randolph. Dorothy Day: Dissenting Voice of the American Century. New York, NY: Simon and Schuster, 2020.
Martin, James. My Life with the Saints. Chicago, IL: Loyola Press, 2006.
Roberts, Nancy L. Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1984.
[1] Loughery and Blythe, Dorothy Day: Dissenting Voice of the American Century, 56.
[2] Martin, My Life with the Saints, 212.
[3] Day, The Long Loneliness, 77-78.
[4]Ibid., 87.
[5] Hennessy, Dorothy Day: The World Will Be Saved by Beauty, 27.
[6] Day, The Long Loneliness, 43.
[7] Hennessy, Dorothy Day: The World Will Be Saved by Beauty, 43.
[8] Hennessy, Dorothy Day: The World Will Be Saved by Beauty, 50.
[9] Ibid., 55.
[10] Ibid., 69.
[11] Martin, My Life with the Saints, 216.
[12] Hennessy, Dorothy Day: The World Will Be Saved by Beauty, 74.
[13] Roberts, Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker, 48.
[14] Hennessy, Dorothy Day: The World Will Be Saved by Beauty, 76.
[15] Ibid., 92.
[16] Ibid., 110.
[17] Hennessy, Dorothy Day: The World Will Be Saved by Beauty, 125.
[18] Ibid., 160-161.
[19] Ibid., 161.
[20] Ibid., 102.
[21] Hennessy, Dorothy Day: The World Will Be Saved by Beauty, 112.
[22] Ibid., 130.
[23] Loughery and Randolph, Dorothy Day: Dissenting Voice of the American Century, 4.
[24] Hennessy, Dorothy Day: The World Will Be Saved by Beauty, 253.
[25] Roberts, Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker, 163.
[26] Hennessy, Dorothy Day: The World Will Be Saved by Beauty, 278.
[27] Martin, My Life with the Saints, 221.
[28] Al Jazeera.
[29] Ibid.
[30] Hennessy, Dorothy Day: The World Will Be Saved by Beauty, 271.
[31] Martin, My Life with the Saints, 214.
[32] Loughery and Randolph, Dorothy Day: Dissenting Voice of the American Century, 5.
[33] Ibid., 5.
[34] Loughery and Randolph, Dorothy Day: Dissenting Voice of the American Century, 4.
[35] Roberts, Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker, 7.
[36] Ibid., 164.
[37] Ibid., 176.
[38] Ibid.,14.
[39] Martin, My Life with the Saint, 217.
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