By now, Catholic Worker alumni and alumnae are numerous, and their ideas have acted as a leaven on the American Catholic community. There are not many nuns and priests in the United States who have not heard of Dorothy Day. Not long ago, her old friend Mary Heaton Vorse, the labor reporter, was visiting a patient in a small Catholic hospital in Anderson, Indiana, and when the nursing sisters there learned that she knew Miss Day, they crowded excitedly around her, eager to hear more about this woman they all knew and admired by reputation. Although, on principle, Miss Day makes no effort to convert people to her cause, she is an extremely successful evangelist. The effect she produces has been described in this excerpt from a letter written by one of her disciples:
I was a year out of Harvard, working in Boston, and had been reading the Catholic Worker a few months. Dorothy came to Boston and gave a talk at the local C.W. headquarters, a dingy room on lower Washington Street. Before she was through, I had made up my mind. There was nothing spectacular about her oratory—in fact, technically, she was a rather poor speaker. It was a conversational style that stumbled at times but could be enormously direct and forceful. But I think what persuaded me to make a decision that turned my whole life upside down was the fact revealed to me of a humorous, civilized, honest person who was doing a Christian piece of work and having a good time doing it.… So, though I had had no such intention when I went to the meeting, I joined up.
The Catholic Workers are religious in a way that is hard for most people even to understand, let alone sympathize with. They practice their faith on Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays, as well as on Sundays. An eminent theologian has written that for the Anabaptists and Methodists, sects that the Catholic Workers in some ways resemble, religion ceases to be “a matter of outward forms and ordinances” and becomes “an affair of the heart.” For the Catholic Workers, too, religion is an affair of the heart, but, far from wanting to free themselves from outward forms and ordinances, they infuse their zeal into their reception of the sacraments and gladly accept the Pope’s authority. As one of their admirers recently put it, “Their inner light is refracted through the hard, intricately cut prism of Catholic dogma.” This does not mean that they hold Catholics to be any better than anyone else; indeed, on one occasion, Miss Day, in drawing up a list of six of “our representative thinkers and strugglers,” named not only the Catholic Saint Vincent de Paul, Saint Francis of Assisi, and Baron von Hügel but three non-Catholics—Gandhi, Tolstoy, and Martin Buber. Catholic Workers believe quite literally in the supernatural. One of their paper’s editors, for example, in describing a performance of Gounod’s Faust he had attended, wrote that he had found it “a terrifying ordeal” because of the way Mephistopheles carried on. “That creature with his machinations took on a lifelike reality,” the editor reported, and added that before he retired that night, he took the precaution of sprinkling holy water on his bed. Miss Day knows how the man felt. “I believe in devils as I do in angels,” she once wrote in the Commonweal.
In some ways, the Catholic Workers do not see eye to eye with their ecclesiastical leaders, a fact that has led to much curious speculation among sideline observers. “How do they stay in the Church?” is the question most often asked about the organization, the runner-up being “What does Spellman think of them?” The latter question, at least, cannot be authoritatively answered, for the Cardinal has maintained a discreet silence on the subject. Like his predecessor, the late Cardinal Hayes, he has endorsed their works of mercy, but he will not be drawn further. Some time ago, at a reception, Miss Day tried. She asked him outright how he felt about the Workers. “You’ll find that many of the bishops are on your side,” the Cardinal answered, with a diplomatic smile. He could not have been pleased when the Catholic Worker attacked him, three years ago, for breaking a gravediggers’ strike in a local Catholic cemetery, and added injury to insult by raising funds to meet the rent and grocery bills of the strikers, who were, incidentally, pious Catholics themselves. On most secular issues, from pacifism to psychoanalysis, the Cardinal and the Workers disagree. Perhaps one reason he doesn’t “do something about it,” as some people keep expecting him to, is that his disciplinary and supervisory powers over laymen are more limited than many non-Catholics realize. Like the Pope’s, they are confined to sitting in judgment on such “matters of faith and morals” as divorce and contraception and ruling on cases of error in connection with such theological dogmas as the Immaculate Conception and the recently proclaimed Assumption of the Virgin. It is true that, as Archbishop of New York, the Cardinal exercises much the same authority over his diocese as the Pope does over the whole Church (any layman has the right to appeal to Rome, but Rome almost always backs up its bishops); it is also true that by stretching a point, or several points, he might get the Workers on a faith-and-morals charge, since they not only advocate radical ideas—not in itself prohibited—but edge into theological territory by presenting these ideas as a logical development of Catholic doctrine. However, he has stayed his hand, whether from conscience or from expediency or because the Church is a house of more mansions than are dreamed of in Paul Blanshard’s philosophy.
This is not to say that the Workers’ relations with the Chancery—the administrative offices of the diocese, which occupy the old Whitelaw Reid house, across Madison Avenue from St. Patrick’s—are always smooth. For a Catholic, a summons to the Chancery is a summons to the headmaster’s study. Miss Day has received three such summonses. Once, it was because a priest who had conducted a retreat—that is, a gathering for the purpose of prayer, meditation, and instruction—at one of the organization’s farms had fallen into the error of “too vigorous spirituality” through the vehemence with which he denounced liquor, lipsticks, and the movies. Once, it was because some influential laymen had complained about the Workers’ anti-capitalist propaganda. In both these instances, Msgr. Edward R. Gaffney, one of the diocesan Vicars-General, simply notified her of the complaints and added his personal admonition. The third time was more serious. In 1948, the Catholic Worker advised young men not to register for the draft. Although this was clearly illegal, the editors didn’t hear from the F.B.I., but they did hear from Msgr. Gaffney, who summoned Miss Day and “corrected” her—that is, ordered her to cease and desist, which she did.
On a number of occasions, the Workers feel, the Chancery has also exerted indirect pressure. They believe, for example, that its influence was a factor in the removal of the Catholic Worker from sale in many Catholic churches in the city when the paper refused to support Franco in 1938. To cite another instance of polite animosity, at one time the Workers’ local House of Hospitality was in a building on Mott Street that they rented from a woman active in Catholic charities, and when it was sold, in 1949, they were not offered an opportunity to bid on it. Obliged by the change of ownership to look around for other quarters, the Workers arranged to buy a building from the Paulist Fathers, but at the last minute the deal fell through—because, the Workers are convinced, the Chancery forbade the Fathers to sell. (The New York Workers finally bought their present House of Hospitality, at 223 Chrystie Street, from an Oriental.) There was also the case of the late Father Onesimus Lacouture, a French-Canadian priest who used to hold a famous retreat that was extremist in tendency and greatly influenced the Catholic Workers. His teachings were attacked as Jansenism (a seventeenth-century French heresy similar to Puritanism), and he was accused of exalting grace to far above nature, of overstressing the supernatural, and of “putting the natural to death”—in a word, of being too spiritual. Perhaps a weightier, though unexpressed, objection was that by implication he criticized the higher clergy for drinking, smoking, and living luxuriously instead of sharing their food with the hungry and taking the homeless into their episcopal dwellings. At any rate, the hierarchy finally “silenced” Father Lacouture (as it has also silenced a very different sort of priest, Father Coughlin)—in other words, he was forbidden to teach or preach his special doctri
nes, though he could still perform the ordinary duties of a parish priest.
For all her brushes with authority, however, Miss Day is a Catholic first and a radical second. “The hierarchy permits a priest to say Mass in our chapel,” she remarked to a friend not long ago. “They have given us the most precious thing of all—the Blessed Sacrament. If the Chancery ordered me to stop publishing the Catholic Worker tomorrow, I would.”
The Catholic Worker was started, as the name suggests, as a competitor of the Communist Daily Worker, and it was no accident that most of its first issue, in 1933, was distributed in Union Square on May Day. In their maiden editorial, which asked, in effect, “Why should the Devil have all the good tunes?,” Maurin and Miss Day wrote, “It’s time there was a Catholic paper printed for the unemployed. The fundamental aim of most radical sheets is conversion of its readers to radicalism and atheism. Is it not possible to be radical and not atheist?” The Church’s social program is contained largely in two papal encyclical letters—the Rerum novarum, of Leo XIII (1891), and the Quadragesimo anno, of Pius XI (1931). These rebuke the greed of unrestrained capitalism, encourage labor unions, and in general put the interests of the worker above the interests of private property. “Our job is to make the encyclicals click,” Maurin once said.
In the thirties, the Catholic Workers were in the thick of events and Miss Day, despite a solid Republican and Episcopalian family background, was in the thickest of them. Whenever she could spare the time, she was out in the streets selling copies of the Catholic Worker. “Selling the paper in front of Macy’s…made one indeed look the fool,” she later noted in her autobiography, The Long Loneliness, which was published by Harper early this year. (Looking the fool has never bothered Miss Day, one of whose favorite quotations is Saint Paul’s pronouncement: “The foolish things of the world hath God chosen, that He may confound the wise.”) In a single year—1936—she travelled to Detroit to report on and help along the sitdown strikes out of which came the United Automobile Workers; to Lowell, Massachusetts, where there was a textile strike (the Catholic Workers fed the pickets and supported the strike so enthusiastically that the mayor of Lowell phoned the Chancery in Boston to check up on this crowd of Catholics who were making a noise like Communists; the Chancery reassured him—firmly, if with resignation—that they were Catholics, all right); to Pittsburgh, where the C.I.O. was beginning to organize steel (she and Mary Heaton Vorse, the labor journalist, took a hotel room for a dollar and a half a day and visited every liberal priest in the district, including old Father Adalbert Kazincy, who had been almost alone among the Catholic clergy in backing the 1919 steel strike but now had many priests to keep him company); to Akron, where the rubber workers were striking; to Birmingham, where more steel workers were organizing; and to the Gulf Coast, where there was “trouble” in the shrimp fisheries. That year, the Catholic Workers in New York City spent thousands of dollars feeding and lodging pickets during the seamen’s strike that led to the establishing of the National Maritime Union; the fact that Joseph Curran, who became the head of the union, and most of the other leaders were then enjoying active support from the Communists didn’t bother them at all. In March, 1937, the Association of Catholic Trade Unionists was formed around a kitchen table in one of the Workers’ early headquarters.
· · ·
The varied and strenuous activities Miss Day engaged in at that time were not of a kind likely to give comfort to the other members of her family, but then few of her activities ever have been. In the eyes of her father, she was a black sheep almost from the start. She was born in Brooklyn Heights in 1897, the daughter of John I. Day, a peripatetic sportswriter, who later became racing editor of the Morning Telegraph and who was instrumental in establishing the Hialeah race track in Florida. Essentially a conservative, Mr. Day contrived to combine respectability with journalism, as have his three sons; one of them is managing editor of the New York Journal-American, another is publicity director of the Thoroughbred Racing Association, and the third was, for many years, Riga correspondent for the Chicago Tribune. There were also two daughters, one of whom early settled down to married life in Rye. The other found the family pattern unsatisfying. “There was never any kissing in our family, and never a close embrace,” Miss Day says in her autobiography. “There was only a firm and austere kiss from my mother every night.… We were like most Anglo-Saxons. We could never be free with others, never put our arms around them casually. We were never handholders. We were always withdrawn and alone, unlike Italians, Poles, Jews.” Unable to embrace her parents, Miss Day embraced the poor and oppressed. As a young girl in Chicago, where her father was then sports editor of Inter Ocean, she began reading radical literature. “Kropotkin especially brought to my mind the plight of the poor, of the workers…and made me feel that…my life was to be linked to theirs,” she writes. “I had received a call, a vocation, a direction to my life. I felt, even at fifteen, that God meant man to be happy.” In 1914, shortly before her seventeenth birthday, Miss Day entered the University of Illinois on a scholarship, which she supplemented by caring for children and doing housework. There she joined the Socialist Party—“I was in love with the masses,” she says—and made a close friend of a classmate and fellow-rebel, the wealthy and brilliant Rayna Prohme, who later became a Communist, worked with Michael Borodin in China in the middle twenties, died at the age of thirty-three in Moscow, and ended up as the romantic heroine of Vincent Sheean’s Personal History. In 1916, after two years at the university, Miss Day moved with her family to New York, where her father had taken the job on the Telegraph. Soon after they arrived, she went to work as a reporter and columnist on the Socialist Call. Her father, who disapproved of career women and was definitely not in love with the masses, tried without success to persuade the editor to fire her. She rented a room on Cherry Street, in the slums of the lower East Side, and never again lived with her family.
On her own at nineteen, Miss Day spent the next ten years in the tumult of Greenwich Village life, which in those days, under the newly ascendant stars of Marx and Freud, was often very tumultuous indeed. The job on the Call was followed by one with the Anti-Conscription League; the United States was at war with Germany by then, and she was assigned the enjoyable task of pasting “peace” stickers on the venerable façade of the Union League Club. Presently, she joined the Industrial Workers of the World, because she liked its anarchistic verve and shared its members’ distrust of Marx. In the summer of 1917, she became Floyd Dell’s assistant on the Masses, a lively radical monthly that he and Max Eastman were editing. Her job ended that fall, when the magazine was suppressed and Eastman indicted under the Espionage Act. She was one of about sixty women who in 1917 picketed the White House in protest against the treatment of some suffragettes who had been imprisoned in Washington after staging a demonstration; a batch of the pickets, Miss Day among them, were arrested and sentenced to terms of up to six months in a women’s workhouse, where they were manhandled until they staged a hunger strike. Her next job was on the Liberator, which Max Eastman’s sister Crystal was running as a successor to the Masses. Miss Day liked it there well enough but says she found it “more fun to hang around the Provincetown Playhouse, on Macdougal Street, where Eugene O’Neill and others of my friends had plays in rehearsal.” The crowd also hung around a Village saloon called the Golden Swan. (“It was a crowd that did a lot of sitting around,” according to Miss Day.) In the back room, O’Neill could easily be persuaded to recite “The Hound of Heaven” to the assemblage, which often included the Hudson Dusters, a local gang of mildly sinister repute.
Miss Day spent 1918 as a probationary nurse at Kings County Hospital. (“I hate being Utopian and trying to escape from reality,” she wrote to a friend at the time. “Now that we are in the thick of the war and there is so much to be done, I might as well try to do it instead of sitting around playing at writing. And what is my writing now but book reviews, editing, toying with a novel of social significance?”) When
the war ended, she returned to her Village haunts, throwing herself into the life there with the adventurous ardor that has always been characteristic of her, and without which she almost surely would not have had the courage to start so thankless an enterprise as the Catholic Worker movement. “We made friends with the world,” she says, recalling how she and her companions used to pick up interesting-looking strangers in Washington Square and take them home to dinner. “Dorothy did some foolish things, but she was always protected by the armor of innocence,” one of her acquaintances of that period said the other day. Floyd Dell once described her as “somewhat elfin—that is, not quite human—and very friendly, with a sort of pre-adolescent charm. She was an awkward and charming young enthusiast, tall and slim, with beautiful slanting eyes.” A young poet wrote about her eyes in the Masses, and the sitters-around thought she looked like the famous bust of the Egyptian queen Nefretete. Her admirers included Donn Byrne, who later became a novelist, and Mike Gold, then as now a dedicated Communist, to whom she was engaged for several years. They never got married, because Gold, whose ideas on family life were completely bourgeois, thought she was too flighty to make a good mother and housewife.
· · ·
In the early twenties, Miss Day divided her time between New York and Chicago, working as a reporter, a proofreader, a librarian, and, during one interlude, a clerk at Montgomery Ward’s. She also underwent one of the most painful experiences of her life when, the victim of a ghastly series of coincidences, she was arrested in Chicago on a charge of prostitution. This occurred one night when she went to stay with a woman friend who, down on her luck, had been exhibiting suicidal tendencies and had taken refuge in a local I.W.W. lodging house ordinarily reserved for visiting male members of the organization. Unfortunately, as Miss Day discovered later, the woman had a police record as a prostitute, and, even more unfortunately, some of United States Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer’s “Red raiders” stormed the wobblies’ headquarters that night. Finding two women there, the police decided that prostitution would prove to be a tougher rap than revolution, and booked them accordingly. After four days in a cell with a number of real and quite unrevolutionary prostitutes, whom she came to like, if not admire, Miss Day got out on bail, and the case was subsequently dropped. The episode intensified her lifelong sympathy for the underdog.
The 50s Page 29
