Dorothy Day and religion in American politics

Southern Illinoisan, November 12, 2015

In his recent address to Congress, Pope Francis praised the American tradition of liberty and equality, citing such well-known figures as Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr. But he also referred to two lesser-known names: Thomas Merton, a Cistercian monk, poet, pacifist, social activist and author of the autobiography The Seven-Storey Mountain (1948), a surprise best-seller in an America searching for meaning in the aftermath of World War II.

The other person Francis named was Dorothy Day (1897-1980), an exemplar of American Catholicism’s tradition of social justice. A young, Greenwich Village bohemian in the 1920s, Day converted to Catholicism after the birth of her daughter. At the height of the Great Depression, she met Peter Maurin, a French immigrant who had spent decades bumming around the United States and Canada working at various manual labor jobs and educating himself in local libraries, acquiring an extraordinary knowledge of theology and political theory. Together they formed the Catholic Worker movement and began publishing a monthly paper, The Catholic Worker.

The movement expounded a radical, pacifist Catholicism. As Dwight Macdonald wrote in a 1952 New Yorker profile, "Politically, the Catholic Workers are hard to classify. They are for the poor and against the rich, so the capitalists call them Communists; they believe in private property and don't believe in class struggle, so the Communists call them capitalists; and they are hostile to war and to the State, so both capitalists and Communists consider them crackpots." They supported labor unions in strikes, created soup kitchens to feed the homeless, and organized against war. They also established Houses of Hospitality in cities across the country where they fed, clothed and housed the poor, the unemployed, the homeless, the mentally ill—in other words, the kind of people with whom Jesus would associate.

Catholic Workers sought to live their faith, avoiding political posturing in favor of propaganda by the deed. As one veteran of the movement’s early years told Macdonald, "We just went out and did things. We didn't form a Committee to Promote Improved Interracial Relations. We took Negroes into our homes and lived with them. We didn't get up big-name letterheads to raise funds for strikers. We went out on the picket lines ourselves."

The Catholic Worker often featured Maurin's "Easy Essays," compact discourses based on repetition of short, stylized lines: for example, "The world would be better off/if people tried to become better/And people would become better/if they stopped trying to be better off."

The Catholic Worker movement attracted volunteers—all of whom took a vow of poverty—who came to live and work at the various movement houses and farms around the country. In such a way the movement trained many organizers who would later work in the civil rights, anti-war and various other social movements. Michael Harrington, for instance, whose 1962 book The Other America helped inspire the federal antipoverty programs of the 1960s, was a product of the Catholic Worker movement.

The Catholic Workers did not ask the religion of those they helped. Nor did they believe in coercion or proselytizing. This democratic, non-doctrinaire tolerance occasionally created problems, such as the time a passerby asked a Worker on a picket line what it was about and she replied, "None of your business."

Day's views belie the facile categorization of what passes for political thought today. She was anti-abortion, for instance, but her pro-life vision included opposition to war, militarism and capital punishment, and, in a broader sense, opposition to a culture based on greed and consumerism, and a commitment to serve the poor, the despised, the outcast.

Americans often claim they want religion to be a more integral part of the nation's life. But the religion most Americans want is the feel-good type that calls for little sacrifice, the prosperity gospel that dares not disturb the universe of complacency.

Day reminds us that a life of religious commitment requires sacrifice. As the Catholic intellectual Garry Wills has said, Day was a saint. But being a saint, Wills continues, "is a job description, not a vague tribute to a person's supposed perfection.... What is a saint's job? To be in all circumstances so focused on the divine presence that the world gets lit through from the other side by the intensity of one's gaze at and beyond immediate surroundings. It is a thankless job, since real saints scare people—who try to 'tame' them by reducing them to 'saintliness.'"