Abstract
Dorothy Day’s integration of radical politics and Catholic identity reveals the challenges and opportunities of forging a tradition inclusive of religion and the left. Day and Peter Maurin founded the Catholic Worker movement as a Christian anarchist community that emphasized subsidiarity (local decision making), freedom of conscience, and the works of mercy (direct service to the economically and politically disenfranchised). In doing so, Day demonstrated to skeptics on the left and among her coreligionists that radical politics and Catholic practice could be harmonized. Her emphasis on freedom of conscience and the works of mercy created a context within which people of varying backgrounds could collaborate in social justice endeavors.
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Notes
- 1.
Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness (1952; repr., San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1997), 165.
- 2.
Ibid. Peter Maurin , an immigrant to North America from France, was an itinerant laborer who adopted a life of poverty. He combined his knowledge of Catholicism with his experience as a manual worker to fashion a unique vision for Catholic social thought and practice. He shared this vision with Day, and they subsequently formed the Catholic Worker.
- 3.
Robert Coles, Dorothy Day: A Radical Devotion (Boston: Da Capo Press, 1987), 59–60; Dan McKanan, Prophetic Encounters: Religion and the American Radical Tradition (Boston: Beacon Press, 2011), 4.
- 4.
Mel Piehl, “The Politics of Free Obedience,” A Revolution of the Heart: Essays on the Catholic Worker, ed. Patrick G. Coy (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988), 177–216; Fred Boehrer, “Diversity, Plurality, and Ambiguity: Anarchism in the Catholic Worker Movement,” in Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker: Centenary Essays, ed., William Thorn, Phillip Runkel, and Susan Mountin (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 2001), 95–127; Anne Klejment, “War Resistance and Property Destruction: The Catonsville Nine Draft Board Raid and Catholic Worker Pacifism,” in Coy, Revolution of the Heart, 272–312; McKanan, Prophetic Encounters.
- 5.
John Patrick Diggins, The Rise and Fall of the American Left (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1992), 201, 43, 44.
- 6.
See ibid., 93–113, for a general overview of the “Lyrical Left .” The quotes in this paragraph can be found on 94 and 98, respectively.
- 7.
The general contours of Day’s life are recounted frequently in her autobiographical writing and histories written about her and the Catholic Worker movement.
- 8.
McKanan, Prophetic Encounters, 8; Piehl, “The Politics of Free Obedience,” 179; Keith Morton and John Saltmarsh, “Cultural Context for Understanding Dorothy Day’s Social & Political Thought,” in Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker: Centenary Essays, ed. William Thorn, Phillip Runkel, and Susan Mountin (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 2001), 244.
- 9.
See Dorothy Day, Duties of Delight: The Diaries of Dorothy Day (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 2008), 7, entry from May 18, 1934; and Day, From Union Square to Rome (Silver Spring, MD: Preservation of the Faith Press, 1938; Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2006), 156–177. Citations are to the Orbis edition. Coles, A Radical Devotion, 52–54.
- 10.
Day, From Union Square to Rome, 126; Dan McKanan, The Catholic Worker After Dorothy: Practicing the Works of Mercy in a New Generation (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2008), 22–23.
- 11.
Day, From Union Square to Rome, 137.
- 12.
Michael Baxter, “‘Blowing the Dynamite of the Church’: Catholic Radicalism from a Catholic Radicalist Perspective” in Thorn, Runkel, and Mountin, Dorothy Day, 93.
- 13.
Robert Coles, The Secular Mind (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 162 (emphasis in the original), 163, 164.
- 14.
Dorothy Day, Duty of Delight, 33–34, entry from September 10, 1938.
- 15.
See John A. Ryan , A Living Wage: Its Ethical and Economic Aspects (New York: Macmillan, 1906) and his Distributive Justice: The Right and Wrong of our Present Distribution of Wealth (New York: Macmillan, 1916).
- 16.
Debra Campbell, “Reformers and Activists,” in American Catholic Women: A Historical Exploration, ed. Karen Kennelly, 152–181 (New York: Macmillan, 1989), 175.
- 17.
Joseph P. Chinnici, Living Stones: The History and Structure of Catholic Spiritual Life in the United States (New York: Macmillan, 1989), 145, 144, 145.
- 18.
Ibid., 189, 190–191, 193. See also James T. Fisher, The Catholic Counterculture in America, 1933–1962 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 51.
- 19.
Day, Duty of Delight, 212, entry from 22 June 1956; Day, Long Loneliness, 55–56.
- 20.
See Mark and Louise Zwick, The Catholic Worker Movement: Intellectual and Spiritual Origins (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 2005), 157–160; Day, Long Loneliness, 55; Day, “The Case of Father Duffy,” Catholic Worker (December 1949): 1, 4; cited in Zwick, 158. See also Boehrer, “Diversity, Plurality, and Ambiguity,” 96–97.
- 21.
Boehrer, “Diversity, Plurality, and Ambiguity,” 98, 98–99; Zwick, The Catholic Worker Movement, 91–92. See also Piehl, “Politics of Free Obedience,” 210; Klejment, “War Resistance and Property Destruction,” 294. By taking this approach, Day did enter into disagreements with church authorities over matters related to Catholic social teaching just as she was arrested on numerous occasions for acts of civil disobedience.
- 22.
Day, Loaves and Fishes (1963; repr., Maryknoll, New York: Orbis, 1997), 23–25. Peter Maurin authored numerous “easy essays,” short compositions that typically addressed a particular social problem in response to which he would recommend a specific Christian course of action to address it.
- 23.
Ibid., 198, 188–189.
- 24.
Ibid., 198; Day, The Long Loneliness, 243.
- 25.
Robert Coles, A Radical Devotion, 25, 29, 30–31; McKanan, The Catholic Worker after Dorothy, 11.
- 26.
Day, “The Scandal of the Works of Mercy,” in Dorothy Day: Writings from Commonweal, ed. Patrick Jordan (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2002), 104. Originally published in Commonweal, November 4, 1949.
- 27.
Catherine De Hueck to Dorothy Day, May 18, 1936, in Comrades Stumbling Along: The Friendship of Catherine de Hueck Doherty and Dorothy Day as Revealed through Their Letters, ed., Robert Wild (Staten Island, NY: Alba House, 2009), 38, 37. Fuller detail on this episode can be found in Nicholas K. Rademacher, “‘Allow me to disappear… in the fetid slums’: Catherine de Hueck , Catholic Action, and the Growing End of Catholic Radicalism,” U.S. Catholic Historian 32:3 (Summer 2014): 71–100.
- 28.
Day to de Hueck, August 9, 1936, in ibid., 46.
- 29.
Boehrer, 104; Zwick, 92; Klejment, 294. See Boehrer, 105.
- 30.
Piehl, 201, 211. For women’s leadership see: Ibid., 208–209; on the radical critique of capitalism see: Ibid., 199–200.
- 31.
Coles, Secular Mind, 165.
- 32.
Day, Duty of Delight, 165–166. Diary entry August 13, 1951.
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Rademacher, N. (2018). Dorothy Day, Religion, and the Left. In: Danielson, L., Mollin, M., Rossinow, D. (eds) The Religious Left in Modern America. Palgrave Studies in the History of Social Movements. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73120-9_5
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