Dorothy Day

From Philosopedia

Day, Dorothy (8 November 1897 - 29 November 1980)

Day, a nonbeliever-turned-Catholic, started as a young beauty who was known for drinking and intellectualizing with the radicals in a Greenwich Village bar called the Hell Hole.

She became a paramour of Eugene O’Neill, who modeled a character in his Moon for the Misbegotten after her. The New York Times described her The Eleventh Virgin (1923) as “one more adolescent novel.”

An anarchist and pacifist, she detailed her bohemianism and radical ways in a memoir, The Long Loneliness. Day did not become a Catholic until she was thirty. Entertaining Angels, a 1996 movie about her, implies that she embraced Catholicism not from an understanding of its theology but, rather, from her romantic disappointment. Her lover, Lionel Moise, is shown dropping her off at an abortionist’s before skipping town; and her common-law husband, Forster Batterham - an English atheist - is shown refusing to marry her after she gave birth to their daughter in 1927. She called the infant Tamar, Hebrew for “little palm tree.” “I did not want my child to flounder as I had often floundered,” she explained upon deciding to have the infant baptized a Catholic.

Although terrified that any of her radical friends would catch her in prayer, she nevertheless attended catechism classes and, upon meeting an itinerant French intellectual - Peter Maurin, who urged her to live “little, simple, and poor” à la St. Francis of Assisi - adopted Catholicism and started publishing.

The Catholic Worker, which cost her $57 to found in 1933, sold for one penny. Its circulation grew from 2,500 to 200,000 by the time the U. S. entered World War II. Day’s left-wing religious movement was devoted to humanistic causes, feeding and housing the poor. Her precepts were elementary: Feed the hungry; give drink to the thirsty; clothe the naked; shelter the homeless; care for the sick; visit prisoners; comfort the afflicted; and afflict the comfortable.

Leading thinkers - Jacques Maritain, John LaFarge, Hilaire Belloc, Thomas Merton, Cesar Chavez, Daniel and Philip Berrigan - found her an inspiration. Abbie Hoffman, the flower-child of Vietnam war resistance, called her “the first hippie.” A priest called her “a trumpet calling for all of us to find Christ in the breadlines.”

Day visited Fidel Castro in Cuba, fasted in St. Peter’s Square for peace, and worked with the poor mainly at St. Joseph House on Manhattan’s East 1 Street. The newspaper she founded has not raised its cost - it still costs one penny.

(See entry for Greenwich Village Humanist Club.)

{Brian Kates, New York Daily News, 12 April 1999}