Dorothy Day: A Saint?
by Sylvia Weinstein (December 1997)

Dorothy Day died in 1980. If she had lived until today, she would be 100 years old. She was born on November 8, 1897.

The Archbishop of New York, Cardinal John O’Connor, has plans to make her a saint. But I doubt if this will fly. Dorothy Day was too good to be a saint. She was a founder of The Catholic Worker, and really believed in the Christian idea that the meek should inherit the earth.

Five years after she converted to Catholicism, in 1933, she founded The Catholic Worker, a radical newspaper. She made her own home a place for the poor to obtain food and shelter. In a short time, many such “Houses of Hospitality” were established across the country. There are still 141 here and overseas, more than when she was alive.

The monthly newspaper reached hundreds of thousands with its message of absolute pacifism, personal responsibility for helping the poor, and utopian communitarian anarchism. In other words, she was almost a communist. This was being preached during the Depression, when the majority of working people did not have much confidence in capitalism.

The message of pacifism and helping the poor led Catholic workers to endure imprisonment as draft resisters in World War II and the war in Vietnam, to join picket lines and hunger strikes for civil rights and union recognition, and to court arrest for refusing to pay war-related taxes or participate in civil-defense exercises.

Dwight MacDonald wrote a profile of Dorothy Day 45 years ago for The New Yorker magazine. He said at the time that “many people think that Dorothy Day is a saint and that some day she will be canonized.” But Dorothy Day shook this off. “When they call you a saint,” she said, “it means basically that you are not taken seriously.”

However, J. Edgar Hoover took her seriously. He called her “a very erratic and irresponsible person,” whose activities “strongly suggest she is consciously or unconsciously being used by Communist groups.” Of course, J. Edgar tried to slander as a Red anyone who spoke up for civil rights or against war.

He forgot the story in the “Good Book” about feeding the multitude with bread and fishes. If Hoover had been alive in the time of Christ, I’m sure he would have driven in the nails.

Dorothy Day’s life before she became a Catholic was quite eventful. She had a stormy love affair, a pregnancy that ended in abortion, and a brief marriage to a wealthy Greenwich Village writer.

In other words, she lived the life of a lot of women who have undergone many disappointments and survived them all. It was certainly a test for her work in the Catholic Worker organization.

Historically, many utopian societies were based on the Christian faith. They believed that mankind and womankind could live and work together in harmony, grow their own food, weave their own cloth, and tend their own cattle.

But these communities were based on agriculture, not capitalism, which believes that profit comes first and humanity last.

December is the month to celebrate the birth of Christian beliefs. Unfortunately, we live in a society that represents the worst of capitalism. And portly priests and televangelists represent the most eager capitalist spokesmen.

Today child poverty in the United States is the worst among the richest nations. More than one in five children go to bed hungry—if they have a bed. Capitalism does believe in “suffer the little children.”

The Dorothy Days of the world are still out fighting hunger, homelessness, and the exploitation of working people. We do have the power to change the world so that we can live in harmony and eliminate hunger, wars, and poverty everywhere. But a saint will not do the job.

Only the power of the working class and all of the oppressed, united, can change the world. —December 1997


FIGHTBACK! A Collection of Socialist Essays
By Sylvia Weinstein

Socialist Viewpoint Publishing Association
ISBN: 0-9763570-0-3    
360 pp.

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