Next year is the 20th anniversary of the death of Dorothy Day. One of the great ‘saints’ of the century. Dorothy lived voluntarily in the slums of New York and from there her light has shone out throughout the world.

Dorothy Day of New York (1897-1980)

Dorothy Day helped found the Catholic Worker movement. She spent the last 48 years of her life as a Christian anarchist on the margins of society. In a church organized like a pyramid, her Catholic worker houses were small, informal and decentralized. She traveled alternative paths where other members of the church often found it difficult to go. “The only way to live in any true security”, she would point out, “is to live so close to the bottom that when you fall you do not have far to drop, you do not have much to lose. “

She and her companions live the beatitudes, embracing voluntary poverty. Their poverty included bedbugs, roaches and rats. She often spokes of foolishness for Christ’ sake, and, like St. Paul, called herself such a fool. “To attack poverty by preaching voluntary poverty seems like madness,” she said. “But again, it is direct action.”

Bishop O’Hara of Kansas City once told her, “You lead and we will follow.” Dorothy did lead. When bishops were wrong, she told them so. As prophet she opposed any use of religion as a prop for nationalism, capitalism or militarism.

Even when religious leaders opposed her vision, and their lifestyles scandalized her, Dorothy remained fiercely loyal to the Church she was not only a faithful follower of the gospel but also perhaps this century’s most powerful witness.

Don’t call me a saint!” she once said. “I don’t want to be dismissed so easily.” Dorothy Day died on November 30, 1980. Now although Christians of many confessions easily recognize her as a saint and prophet no one can dismiss the profound impact of her and contribution.

She wrote the following thoughts on poverty in 1953:

Poverty

Poverty is a strange and elusive thing. I have tried to write about it, its joys and its sorrows, for twenty years now: I could probably write about it for another twenty years without conveying what I feel about it as well as I would like. I condemn poverty and I advocate it; poverty is simple and complex at once; it is a social phenomenon and a personal matter. It is a paradox. St. Francis was the “little poor man’ and none was more joyful than he. Yet Francis began with tears, with fear and trembling, hiding in a cave from his irate father. He had expropriated some of his father’s goods (which he considered his rightful inheritance) in order to repair a church and rectory where he meant to live. It was only later that he came to love Lady Poverty. He took it little by little; it seemed to grow on him. Perhaps kissing the leper was the great step that freed him not to only from fastidiousness and fear if disease but attachment to worldly goods as well.

Many Small Steps

Sometimes it takes but one step. We would like to think so. And yet the older I get, the more I see that life is made up of many steps, and they are very small affairs, not giant strides. I have “kissed the leper,” not once but twice-----consciously and I cannot say I am much the better for it.

The first time was early one morning on the steps of Precious Blood Church. A woman with cancer of the face was begging (beggars are followed only in the slums) and when I gave her money (no sacrifice on my part but merely passing on alms which someone had given me) she tried to kiss my hand. The only thing I could do is kiss her dirty old face with the gaping hole in it where an eye and a nose had been. It sounds like a heroic deed but it was not. One gets used to ugliness quickly. What we avert our eye from one day is easily borne the next when we have learned a little more about love. Nurses know this, and so do mothers.

Another time I was refusing to bed a drunken prostitute with a huge, toothless, rouged mouth, a nightmare of a mouth. She had been raising a disturbance in the house. I kept remembering how St. Therese said that when you had to refuse anyone anything, you could at least do it so that the person went away a bit happier. I had to deny her a bed but when that woman asked me to kiss her, I did, and it was a loathsome thing, the way she did it. It was scarcely a mark of normal human affection.

Daily cross

We suffer these things and they fade from memory but daily, hourly, to give up our own possessions and especially to subordinate our own impulses and wishes to others-----these are hard, hard things. I don’t think they ever get any easier.
You can strip yourself, you can be stripped, but still you will reach out like an octopus to seek your own comfort, you untroubled time, your ease, and your refreshment. It may mean books or music---- the gratification of the inner senses of it may mean food and drink, coffee and cigarettes. The one kind of giving up is not easier than the other.

The merchant counting his profits in pennies, the millionaire with his efficiency experts, have learned how to amass wealth. By following their example-----and profiting by the war boom----there is no necessity for anyone to be poor nowadays. So they say.

But the fact remains that every House of Hospitality is full. This is a breadline outside our door, twice a day, and two or three hundred strong. Families write to us pitifully for help. This is not poverty this is destitution.

In front of me as I write is Fritz Eichenbrg’s picture of St. Vincent de Paul. He holds a chubby child in his arms and a thin pale child is clinging to him. Yes, the poor are always going to be with us-----Our Lord told us that-----and there will always be a need for our sharing, for stripping ourselves to help others. It will always be a lifetime job.

But I am sure that God did not intend that there be so many poor. The class structure is of our making and by our consent, not His, and we must do what we can to change it. So we are urging revolutionary change.

The Cross

So many sins against the poor cry out to high heaven! One of the most deadly sins is to deprive the laborer of his hire. There is another: to unstill in him paltry desires so compulsive that he is willing to sell his liberty and his honor to satisfy them. We are all guilty of concupiscence, but newspapers, radios, television, and battalions of advertising men (woe to that generation) deliberately stimulate our desires, the satisfaction of which so often means the degradation of the family.

Because of these factors of modern life, the only way we can write about poverty is in terms of ourselves, our own personal responsibility. The message we have been given is the Cross.

Love of Poverty

We have seen the depths of the faithlessness and stubbornness of the human soul----we are surrounded by sin and failure-----and it is a mark of our faith in Christ that we continue to hope, to write, to appeal and beg for help for our work. And we pray also for increase in the love of poverty, which goes with love of our brothers and sisters.

The only thing I could do is kiss her dirty old face with the gaping hole in it where an eye and a nose had been. It sounds like a heroic deed but it was not. One gets used to ugliness quickly. What we avert our eye from one day is easily borne the next when we have learned a little more about love. Nurses know this, and so do mothers.