Dorothy Day

In my youth there were two Catholic Christians who particularly influenced me. The first of these was Thomas Merton. The second was Dorothy Day.

Dorothy was, like her father, a journalist, who during the first world war also trained as a nurse. She had twin passions, radical politics and a spiritual journey that led her from her Episcopalian childhood through a romance with atheism back to Christianity and finally with the birth of her daughter, a fervent embrace of Catholicism.

Together with her co-conspirator Peter Maruin she developed the Catholic Worker movement. Catholic workers embrace an unlikely theology of Christian anarchism, which can be seen at least in some ways as a precursor to liberation theology.

Frankly, at this time in my life there is little in the theory of Christian anarchism that I find even vaguely appealing. However its manifestation particularly in Catholic Worker Houses of Hospitality is a horse of another color. At the heart of human suffering, there they are, giving their whole hearts and bodies to something larger, something beautiful.

There are now some 185 Catholic Worker communities of various sorts, “committed,” as they say “to nonviolence, voluntary poverty, prayer, and hospitality for the homeles, exiled, hungry, and foresaken. Catholic Workers continue to protest injustice, war, racisim, and violence of all forms.”

Good people, doing good.

Their founder, Dorothy Day was born on this day in 1897.