Dorothy Day

Noelle Crowe (0:02)

[♪Music playing.♪ Hello, and welcome to American Catholic History, brought to you by Listeners Like You. If you like our podcast, please become a supporter at americancatholichistory.org/support.

Also, if you like our podcast, be sure to rate us five stars and give us a great review wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Noelle Hester Crowe.

Tom Crowe (0:26)

And I'm Tom Crowe.

Noelle Crowe (0:27)

Today we're talking about Servant of God Dorothy Day.

She is a complex and controversial figure, best remembered for co-founding the Catholic Worker Movement. She is an interesting person to talk about because she presents a challenge to so many of us.

Tom Crowe (0:43)

Right. She holds together things that may seem to be intention. Earlier in life, she pushed socialism. She was always concerned for the plight of the poor and the worker and thought socialism had the answer. For years, she lived a very bohemian lifestyle. She had multiple lovers and even had an abortion.

But eventually, she became a devout Catholic and a devoted mother. In this later portion of her life, she found the ultimate why for the principles that originally drew her to socialism. She found in Catholicism's advocacy for the dignity of every person a substantial reason to advocate for the poor and the working man.

Noelle Crowe (1:21)

And now she's on the path to sainthood, which is somewhat ironic given her difficulty with the hierarchy. Now, we need to tread lightly here as in other areas of this discussion. Day certainly believed that the church could declare men and women saints. And she certainly believed that those declared saints were before the throne of God. It's just that she had issues with bishops and the processes of the institutional church.

She's probably not alone there.

Tom Crowe (1:50)

Nope.

Noelle Crowe (1:51)

She believed that movements and actions of an institution should originate from the lower echelons from the people and work their way up.

Tom Crowe (1:59)

Which frankly is how sainthood causes generally start. People in the pews recognize the incredible sanctity of a person and maintain a devotion to them from early after their death. Eventually the institutional church, the bishops kind of catch on and a cause opens formally. But that's where she would begin to have the problem.

Noelle Crowe (2:17)

Seriously, the idea of having her life combed through by bishops and priests would possibly have been the most distasteful things, one of the most distasteful things she could imagine.

Tom Crowe (2:27)

Oh yeah. If you had asked her if she were trying to become a saint, she likely would have said she was simply trying to help the next person in need.

And that effort led to some of the most important advocacy and aid for the poor, the worker and the indigent that the church has seen in the last 100 years.

Noelle Crowe (2:43)

Alright, so let's talk about where Dorothy Day came from. She was born in Brooklyn Heights, New York, in 1897

She had three brothers and a sister.

Tom Crowe (2:52)

Her father was a sports journalist, and in 1904, the whole family moved cross country when he got a job with the newspaper in San Francisco.

He lost his job, however, when the great earthquake and fire of 1906 destroyed San Francisco and the newspaper he worked for. So they moved to Chicago.

Noelle Crowe (3:09)

But before leaving San Francisco, the young Dorothy had an experience which would affect her whole life. In the midst of the suffering and devastation that followed the earthquake and fire, she saw heroic acts of charity, people just helping each other purely and simply.

Tom Crowe (3:25)

Yes, the great outpouring of mutual support that characterized the relief and rebuilding efforts had a deep and lasting effect on her.

Noelle Crowe (3:33)

She also became a voracious reader, and in spite of the fact that her family really wasn't religious, the Bible was one of her favorite books to read.

Tom Crowe (3:41)

Yes, and this was something that would characterize her life. She seemed to have a deeper sense of religion and its importance than her family and really her peers. In Chicago, she actually started to attend liturgies at a nearby Episcopal church when she was 10, and four years later in 1911, she was baptized and confirmed there.

Noelle Crowe (4:00)

During these teen years, her reading went in different directions. While in high school, she read Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, plus works by Jack London, Herbert Spencer, Aldous Huxley, Charles Darwin, Peter Kropotkin, and others. And then in college, she got into Russian literature, including Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Gorky.

Tom Crowe (4:21)

Can you imagine teens nowadays reading that list of their own volition? I mean, like anybody has, it's just, it's an incredible list.