St Dorothy Day?

When Pope Francis addressed the U.S. Congress in 2015, he chose to single out four 'morally exemplary Americans'. The first two were obvious, known choices; Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King. However, the second two, Catholic choices, probably had many of the journalists present scrambling for Google search. They were the Trappist contemplative monk, Thomas Merton; and, the founder of the Catholic Worker, Dorothy Day.

None were chosen as moral exemplars of family life but of their social witness grounded in a living faith. This may have been part of Francis's point as he repositions the Church from a focus on the bedroom towards social action. They all remind us that to be an exemplar does not mean for us to be perfect.

Dorothy Day, for example, had, to put it in the vernacular, 'one heck of a life' that is ably told in John Loughery and Blythe Randolph's new biography, 'Dorothy Day: Dissenting Voice of the American Century'.

She was born into a peripatetic, agnostic household of fluctuating fortunes in 1897. Her father was a sports journalist and race track aficionado. It disrupted her education (which she tended to despise in any case preferring her voluminous reading, a lifelong habit) and gives no obvious background to the continual promptings of the Spirit, she fell prey to and was curious about (except perhaps stimulated by straightforward rebellion against parental indifference).

Equally, from an early age, she leaned left politically (a source of abiding disgust to her Republican father) and it was to the socialist circles of early twentieth-century America that she gravitated. Eventually finding herself a journalist on a number of left-wing newspapers/magazines, able, just, to manage the rent of some spartan, broken down apartment; and, the opportunity to plunge into Bohemian New York.

Plunge she did - both into the struggle for labor rights, against US involvement in the First World War and for Women's Sufferage (though ultimately as a Christian anarchist, she never ended up actually voting); and, into a life of alcohol, cigarettes, cussing and a fair amount of sex. Needless to say later in life, she tended to focus her memory on the former rather than the latter!  She did, however, acquire a common-law husband and a beloved daughter, Tamar, who was the trigger for her conversion.

By this stage, periodic mass attendance, scattered if intense reading, and attempts at prayer convinced her of the need to have Tamar baptized and she bumped, literally, into the right nun and subsequently the right priest to have that unusual conversation with. A non-Catholic mother, in an illicit relationship, and with a past abortion to boot, wanting their child baptized. As later was Dorothy herself, she was putting a strain on her marriage from which it never recovered.

This life as a journalist-activist (and author of a novel) morphed into something more profound when she met Peter Maurin, a French autodidact, itinerant, intellectual, a Christian personalist searching for grassroots communities of faith that could live close to the land, in shared autonomy. Out of this critical relationship the Catholic Worker was born. A newspaper, still extant, still sold for a penny a copy and houses of hospitality for the homeless and destitute, over a hundred of which still function.

Both were unique ventures - a serious Christian radical voice against injustice and violence - bold, argumentative, educational - and houses that would provide hospitality to just about anyone who needed it whether they were grateful for it or not or whether they made any contribution to the house or not (that leads to some quite extraordinary, hair raising stories of navigating the most distressingly broken people imaginable, skillfully, compassionately told by the authors).

Both of these ventures brought out the striking paradoxes in which Dorothy lived. Permanently disappointed by the Church failing to take a more radical stance but a loyal daughter of the Church who said that she would close the Catholic Worker at once if told by the hierarchy to do so (though sorely tempted, they never have). A pro-life, anti-birth control card carrier who was a passionate voice against racism, war, inequality, often, and still, ahead of her time. A woman who had freely mixed in her youth with gays and lesbians but who came to operate what can only be described as a 'don't ask, don't tell' policy in Catholic Worker houses. A doting mother in print, genuinely caring for Tamar who, in practice, was often too busy, too engaged with the struggle to be an effective mother.  A runner of houses of hospitality meant to be led by example but where, usually, her voice was final.

All of these, and more, are well-charted (as is the surrounding historical context) by the authors in lucid, informative, readable prose. You most certainly get a taste of New York in its more shadowy aspects in its pages (as an additional extra)!

In the end, what to make of her? Is she a saint? She is a  formal candidate for canonization. It is a pathway hotly contested within the Catholic Worker movement itself - will it make her more institutional or will it raise her inspiringly, awkward life to greater prominence? It does show the dilemmas of contemporary saint-making - the more you know of a life, the more complicated, paradoxical, and flawed it can be seen as. It would certainly be a disrupting choice, lobbed into the Church's own culture wars.

I came away a qualified admirer, most especially for the quality of her conscience (and her ultimate sense that each person must always be free to follow their own, even if she reserved judgment on whether they had come to the right conclusion); and, her extraordinary resolution in both confronting the most challenging issues of the day, often directly on the picket line, courting and achieving arrest, and at the same time caring directly for some of the most vulnerable.

You may never agree with her but her life was a fiery light into anyone's conscience - and perhaps that is the essential quality of saintliness.