THE NEWYORKER, APRIL 13, 2020 75haunted her life, but she could never
fully explain why she was so suddenly
and urgently drawn to Catholicism. The
nun she stopped, Sister Aloysia Mary
Mulhern, didn’t agree to the baptism
right away, because Day was not yet
Catholic; over the next few months, the
pair studied the catechism together, and
talked about the faith into which the
activist had become convinced that she
and her daughter needed to be received.B
atterham did not believe in mar-
riage, and, after converting to Ca-
tholicism, Day left him. Then she met
someone else: a fellow-Catholic named
Peter Maurin, who, although never ro-
mantically involved with Day, was, in
the deepest sense, her soul mate. Mau-
rin liked to call himself a French peas-
ant but in reality he was equal parts phi-
losopher, troubadour, and troublemaker.
He had heard about Day from some
other Catholic radicals and was wait-
ing in her apartment when she came
home one day in December, 1932. Most
people would have called the police, but
she listened patiently as he expounded
on his many ideas and theories and
dreams and programs and plans.
Day had just returned from cover-
ing the Communist Party’s hunger
march in Washington, D.C. What Mau-
rin couldn’t have known is that, before
leaving the city, she had gone to the ba-
silica at Catholic University and prayed
to find a way to alleviate the suffering
of the hungry. The country was three
years into the Great Depression, and
Day worried that her writing was not
doing enough to help; it seemed obvi-
ous that Maurin was the answer to her
prayer. She quickly agreed to the first
of many of his ideas: a newspaper to
serve the poor.
The first issue of the Catholic Worker
came out on May Day, 1933, and asked,
“Is it not possible to be radical and not
atheist?” A religious press printed twenty-
five hundred copies, and, at a time when
the economy was so constricted that
there were literally no new nickels and
dimes in circulation, Day sold the paper
for a penny each in Union Square. She
had written most of its eight pages her-
self—arts coverage, exposés on child
labor and racial discrimination, an arti-
cle about the Scottsboro Boys going to
trial, and a list of upcoming strikes forthose who wanted to support the labor
movement. The editors confessed that
it wasn’t “yet known whether it will be
a monthly, a fortnightly, or a weekly,”
since they had no idea if any subscrip-
tions or donations would follow.
Trusting in what Christ preached
about the lilies of the field, Day and
Maurin focussed on the present, letting
God provide for their future. That didn’t
mean money wasn’t an issue; it always
was. They wouldn’t hoard it,
so an endowment was a non-
starter, and relying on gov-
ernment funds was anath-
ema to them both, so they
often went begging, which
they felt helped them live in
solidarity with those they
served. Grocery bills, print-
er’s bills, electric bills: they
asked for money to pay them
all, and for extensions or for-
giveness when they could not. (Years
later, when they faced a substantial fine
from the city for the allegedly slumlike
and hazardous conditions of their head-
quarters, the entire amount was paid by
W. H. Auden.)
Day and Maurin sent the Catholic
Worker to parishes and priests around
the country, and it soon had a circulation
of a hundred thousand. They published
the paper monthly, and it became a mix-
ture of articles that Day thought would
promote and influence the political left
and what Maurin called his “easy essays,”
prose poems that amounted to apho-
risms: “The world would be better off /
if people tried to become better. / And
people would become better / if they
stopped trying to become better off.”
It was Maurin who began writing
about how the early followers of Jesus
had kept “Christ rooms” in their homes,
offering rest and hospitality to strangers.
He lamented the end of that culture of
welcome, and implored priests and bish-
ops to use their rectories and diocesan
properties for such a purpose. With more
than ten million Americans unemployed,
more than half the country living below
the poverty line, and two million people
without homes, Maurin asked why the
Catholic Church wasn’t doing more to
address the crisis. The newspaper had se-
cured an office and enough of a budget
that he and Day could occasionally rent
apartments for people who had been laidoff. But there were more than twenty
thousand people living on the street in
New York City alone, and the Catholic
Workers, as the paper’s writers and read-
ers came to call themselves, knew that
far more sweeping action was needed.
In the winter of 1934, Day and Mau-
rin rented a four-story, eleven-bedroom
building on Charles Street, the first of
their hospitality houses. From the start,
the Catholic Workers served the sorts
of individuals even other so-
cial reformers might not
have allowed through the
door: the mentally ill, the
drunk, the offensive, the dis-
obedient, the ungrateful.
When challenged by an-
other Catholic activist about
an encounter with a racist
and anti-Semitic guest on
Charles Street, Day said she
would not remove him: “He,
after all, is Christ.” The man, an alco-
holic with dementia, lived with the Cath-
olic Workers until he died.
Within a few years, there were thirty-
two hospitality houses, from Buffalo
and Baltimore to St. Louis and Seattle.
Day and Maurin continued to publish
their newspaper and to organize for
labor rights, racial integration, and rad-
ical equality. Hardly a protest took place
in New York without at least a few Cath-
olic Workers showing up. Not even the
Bishop of Rome was spared: when the
gravediggers of Calvary Cemetery went
on strike against the trustees of St. Pat-
rick’s Cathedral and the Archbishop of
New York, the workers supported them,
including by picketing the office of the
chancery. The Church hierarchy was
even more vexed by Day’s pacificism,
which was so unpopular during the Sec-
ond World War that the newspaper’s
circulation collapsed and Church offi-
cials tried to have “Catholic” removed
from its title.B
ut Dorothy Day was always equal
parts “Catholic” and “worker.” Many
followers of the Pope found her politics
inconvenient and offensive; many left-
ists thought her faith oppressive and ab-
surd. Day’s family initially mistook her
conversion for an emotional crisis, and
her friends suspected that she had sim-
ply traded her political fanaticism for
the religious variety; both camps were