Dorothy Day went from bohemian radical to the Catholic Worker's founding editor
In 1933 a one-cent newspaper appeared on New York streets promising that the Catholic Church had a social program. Its editor had picketed the White House for suffrage, befriended Communists and written a novel she later called very bad. Dorothy Day would edit that paper for 47 years, and the church now calls her Servant of God.
Day was born in Brooklyn in 1897 to parents who seldom went to church. The family moved west for her father's sportswriting job, and when the 1906 San Francisco earthquake wrecked his newspaper, they ended up in Chicago. Watching neighbours help each other after the quake left her with a lasting sense of what ordinary people could do in a crisis. As a teenager she devoured Upton Sinclair and Peter Kropotkin, and after two reluctant years at the University of Illinois she moved to New York's Lower East Side to write for socialist papers.
Those years were restless. She described herself as wavering between socialism, the Industrial Workers of the World and anarchism, depending on what she was reading. In November 1917 she was arrested with Alice Paul's Silent Sentinels outside the White House and spent 15 days of a 30-day sentence in jail, ten of them on hunger strike. She drank with Eugene O'Neill in Greenwich Village, had a long affair with the radical writer Mike Gold, and used film-rights money from her novel to buy a beach cottage on Staten Island.
Motherhood changed her direction. After her daughter Tamar was born in 1926, Day had the child baptised and then was received into the Catholic Church herself, ending her relationship with Tamar's father, who loathed organised religion. Reporting on a hunger march in Washington in 1932, she felt frustrated that Catholics offered no organised response to poverty, and prayed for a way to help. That same year she met Peter Maurin, a French immigrant steeped in church social teaching, whom she always credited as the real founder of what followed.
The Catholic Worker first appeared on May 1, 1933, carrying no advertising and paying no staff. The movement around it mixed houses of hospitality for the poor with nonviolent protest, and Day kept getting arrested for civil disobedience, the last time at 75. She promoted distributism as a path between capitalism and socialism. Pope Francis later named her before Congress as one of four exemplary Americans.
Source: Dorothy Day
