Dorothy Day facing her last arrest, photo by Bob Fitch

Dorothy Day was an anarchist and a pacifist who was arrested multiple times throughout her life (the last time when she was in her 70s).  The FBI had a 500 page file on her, and Herbert Hoover J. Edgar Hoover hoped to see her arrested for sedition.  She’s also been called “the most significant, interesting and influential person in the history of American Catholicism” (by historian David O’Brien in “Commonweal” magazine), and the Vatican has approved considering her cause for canonization.

That’s my kind of saint.  I love Dorothy Day.  In the great communion of saints, there are a handful of people that I look to as my heroes and role models, my “household saints”.  Dorothy Day is one of them, and today is her birthday.  She  was a “sign of contradiction”, “holiness not easily domesticated”, to quote Robert Ellsberg.  She managed to defy stereotypes, and confound both supporters and opponents over the course of her life.

Her radical politics came before her conversion to Catholicism, but her political commitments only grew deeper when she came to faith.  In the gospel she found a rejection of power, oppression and violence and a call not only to serve the poor, but to be one of them.  Her advocacy for justice was now accompanied by a devotion to works of mercy and to life in community.   Along with the eccentric French peasant and itinerant teacher Peter Maurin, Dorothy founded the Catholic Worker movement.  I am reminded of Frederick Buechner’s line that “God makes saints out of fools and sinners because He has nothing else to work with.”  I think Dorothy would have enjoyed that, and agreed, seeing what came from the partnership she had with Peter Maurin.  There are now over 185 Catholic Worker houses of hospitality, including three in St. Louis, and it all started with soup and coffee in Dorothy’s kitchen.

Dorothy Day never abandoned her anarchism or pacifism.  Her politics were a scandal to Christians who felt the church should serve as chaplain to the state and maintain the status quo.  Her religion was incomprehensible to the anarchists, Socialists and Communists with whom she’d spent her youth.  But Dorothy continued to reach out to both sides, seeing herself as a faithful daughter of the church, and yet a radical called to disturb the comfortable - even when the comfortable were in the pews, or the prelate’s office.  And so she often found herself, as she once wrote in her column “On Pilgrimage”, talking “economics to the rich and Jesus to the anarchists.”  It wasn’t an easy path.

“Don’t call me a saint,” Dorothy Day once said. “I don’t want to be dismissed that easily.”  Perhaps she recognized that we often try to add a soft-focus glow to our heroes, and avoid dealing both with their real humanity and the real challenges they present to us.  As much as I admire Dorothy, I know that she wasn’t perfect.  Her early assessment of the Cuban revolution turned out to be far too optimistic, for instance.  On a personal level she struggled with anger and when once asked to hold her temper replied, “I hold more temper in one minute that you will in a lifetime.”  That, too, makes her my kind of saint.  Her imperfections didn’t prevent her from following Christ with a devotion and determination that is astonishing to me.  As Robert Ellsberg said of her, she spent her life “giving proof that the gospel could be lived.”

Painting by Fr. William McNichol

What we would like to do is change the world–make it a little simpler for people to feed, clothe, and shelter themselves as God intended them to do. And, by fighting for better conditions, by crying out unceasingly for the rights of the workers, the poor, of the destitute–the rights of the worthy and the unworthy poor, in other words–we can, to a certain extent, change the world; we can work for the oasis, the little cell of joy and peace in a harried world. We can throw our pebble in the pond and be confident that its ever widening circle will reach around the world. We repeat, there is nothing we can do but love, and, dear God, please enlarge our hearts to love each other, to love our neighbor, to love our enemy as our friend.
— Dorothy Day