THE NEWYORKER, APRIL 13, 2020 73Day, devout and left-wing, believed we needed “a revolution of the heart.”
BOOKS
A RADICAL FAITH
The life and legacy of Dorothy Day.BYCASEYCEPT
he Federal Bureau of Investigation
didn’t know what to do about Dor-
othy Day. It was 1941, and Director
J. Edgar Hoover was concerned about
Day’s onetime communism, sometime
socialism, and all-the-time anarchism.
After months of investigating—inter-
viewing her known associates, obtain-
ing her driving record and vital statis-
tics, collecting her clips from newspaper
morgues, and reviewing the first of her
autobiographies, “From Union Square
to Rome” (“an interesting, running ac-
count of the life of the authoress”)—
the F.B.I. decided that the subject of
Bureau File 100-2403-1 would not need
to be detained in the event of a national
emergency. Day would have disagreed
with them: not because she felt she was
dangerous but because she knew that
the nation was already in an emergency,
and had been for some time.
The emergency was poverty, and Day
had been alarmed by it her whole life.
She first encountered it in the slums of
Chicago, where she lived as a teen-ager,
and she saw it all around her in New
York City, where she moved after drop-
ping out of college, and lived for more
than six decades. Even before the Great
Depression, Day had been sensitive to
the plight of the poor, a sensitivity that
ultimately shaped her calling. At thirty,
she converted to Catholicism. In theyears that followed, she started a radi-
cal newspaper and began opening what
she called “houses of hospitality” for
those who needed something to eat and
somewhere to stay.
Eventually, Day’s Catholic Worker
Movement would serve the poor in more
than two hundred communities. Under
her guidance, it would also develop a cu-
riously dichotomous political agenda,
taking prophetic stands against racial
segregation, nuclear warfare, the draft,
and armed conflict around the world,
while opposing abortion, birth control,
and the welfare state. That dichotomy
seems especially stark today, when most
people’s beliefs come more neatly pack-
aged by partisan affiliation. But by the
time she died, in 1980, Day had become
one of the most prominent thinkers of
the left and doers of the right. In her
lifetime, it was the secularists—includ-
ing Dwight Macdonald, in a two-part
Profile published in this magazine, in
1952—who called Day a saint. Now,
though, the cause of her sainthood is
officially advancing within the Catholic
Church, a development that has occa-
sioned a new biography and a documen-
tary, both of which explore the conten-
tious question of who owns her legacy.S
he wasn’t sure if she was afraid of
God or the ground, but the night-
mares Dorothy Day had as a child fea-
tured a noise that got louder and nearer
until she woke up sweaty and terrified.
She had been born in New York, in 1897,
but her family relocated to California
in 1904, and they were living in Oak-
land two years later, when the San Fran-
cisco earthquake struck. That tragedy
changed Day’s life in two ways. First, it
affirmed her preëxisting fears about an-
nihilation, while simultaneously stirring
in her a theory of mercy based on her
mother’s nightly reassurances and the
broader response of collectivity and char-
ity. Why, she wondered, couldn’t the
community care for all its members so
generously the rest of the time? The
second change was more pragmatic: her
father, John, was a sportswriter who
could barely support his wife and five
children on his salary, so when the earth-
quake destroyed the press that printed
his newspaper he moved the family
again, this time to Chicago.
John and Grace, his wife, had been