Dorothy Day is a woman to whom history has not yet given the attention she deserves. Her name is mentioned a lot in Catholic circles in the United States, but she is barely known in Spain. In this article we are going to try to bring the readers of Centinela Magazine closer to her life and work.
Dorothy was born in Brooklyn (New York) in 1897 within a working family. His father was a convinced anticlerical. During his youth he moved in communist, anarchist and bohemian circles. He began his studies at University of Illinois and during this time he joined the Socialist Party of America. Shortly after, he dropped out of college and dedicated himself entirely to working as a columnist for various leftist publications. As a revolutionary journalist, she actively defended women’s rights, free love and abortion. She herself aborted her first child for fear of being abandoned by her lover.
However, when he was in his twenties he began to suffer a deep inner conflict that led him to rethink his convictions. His love for the poor and the marginalized led him to enter the Catholic Church. This is how he explains it in his memoirs: “I will not deny that, many times, the love of the communist towards his brother, towards the poor and the oppressed, is more real than that of many who call themselves Christians. But when, by word and deed, the communist incites a brother to kill his brother, a class to destroy and hate other classes, I cannot believe that his love is authentic. He loves his friend, but not his enemy, who is also his brother. There is no human brotherhood in this: it cannot exist without the fatherhood of God.”.
Dorothy Day narrates in My conversion: from Union Square to Rome his passage from communism to Catholicism. As Benedict XVI highlighted in his canonization process, Dorothy Day knew “oppose the ideological flattery of your time to choose the search for truth and open yourself to the discovery of faith”.
The Catholic Worker
Dorothy Day founded, along with Peter Maurin the movement The Catholic Worker in the period between the two world wars. In a world that suffered from the excesses of capitalism, many sought protection in the arms of communism or fascism.
Encouraged by papal encyclicals, Day and Maurin looked to the United States a third way inspired by the social doctrine of the Church. In this adventure, they opened a school for workers, shelters for the homeless and farm-communes for the unemployed.
Small Christian communities grew around these self-managed farms that prayed, trained and worked the land (cult, culture and cultivation). The communism that was experienced on those farms was not that of Marx, but that of a medieval monastery. Day and Maurin created a network of oases, a long-term political project, outside the major parties, that sought to save as many people as possible from shipwreck.
Day was the leader and organizer of the project. Maurin was a bohemian and unpredictable prophet who could disappear from the map for weeks. But like every prophet, Maurin had a golden beak and something to say to the world. He was kind of Jeremiah capable of combining orthodoxy in faith with a healthy “revolutionary” spirit. He could spend hours talking to his people about the dignity of work, cooperativism, social justice, the Thomist doctrine of the common good or the papal encyclical. rerum Novarum.
In addition, Day founded (at the age of 36) a newspaper to give voice to the excluded, the unemployed, women who were unable to integrate into society and unborn children. The Catholic Worker He published articles on child labor, racial segregation, fair wages, evictions and strikes.
Maurin and Day did not opt for the Benedictine option or the option of Saint Josemaría. They opted for both. They were capable of being planting tomatoes at seven in the morning in the fields and handing out leaflets in Times Square at seven in the afternoon.
Social justice and wealth redistribution
In the same years, on the other side of the ocean Chesterton and Belloc They were experimenting with another third way which they called distributism. These two thinkers reached results similar to those of Day and Maurin: political refoundation, promotion of dignity at work, cooperativism, return to the land, better access to private property for all.
This convergence of positions from the left and right banks should be studied politically because it may contain some interesting keys to overcome the old conceptual corsets. Both projects were inspired by Christian social doctrine, which is based on the principles of solidarity, subsidiarity, social justice and private property (not absolute, but limited by its social function).
Therefore, the artificial controversy that some liberal media have mounted in recent days after Garcia-Gallardo would open to facilitate a distribution “as wide as possible of the property” and? Milei charged against social justice as if it were an invention of socialism. Claiming (as certain journalists have done) that the social right now defends the same thing as Podemos is a deliberate attempt to generate confusion.
Christian social doctrine has always called bread, bread, and wine, wine. Pope Pius XI pointed out that “Higher and nobler principles must be sought that severely and comprehensively regulate said dictatorship. [económica]that is, social justice and social charity.” John Paul II, who was a champion against communism, noted that “The Marxist solution has failed, but (…) there is a risk that a radical capitalist-type ideology will spread.”
The bishop Munilla He settled the issue a few days ago on X (formerly Twitter) with a lot of salt when he said that “handing over the flag of social justice to Marxism is like handing over the flag of love to the porn industry”.
The loaves and the fishes
I would like to end this article by sharing an idea that Dorothy Day reflected a lot on in her later years: the value of the individual share. For Day, each of us must do what is within our power and God will take care of the rest. She tried to combat, by all possible means, the paralyzing pessimism.
“The feeling of uselessness is one of the greatest evils. Young people say: ‘What good can one person do? What is the meaning of our small effort?’ “They can’t see that we must lay brick by brick, advance step by step.”.
For Day, hope lies in the miracle of multiplication. It is enough for a small group of volunteers with faith to bring five loaves and two fish to Jesus for God to feed the multitudes with them. It is no coincidence that the book in which he summarized the origins of the movement The Catholic Worker was called Loaves and Fishes.
“I feel like I haven’t done anything right. But I have done what I could”noted Dorothy Day in one of her last writings.
And what he did was something great. Currently there are almost two hundred communities attached to The Catholic Movement, mainly in the United States. There are probably more, because it is a horizontal, decentralized movement, without a main headquarters or a hierarchy. Pure faith in action.
