It is that notion of working to fix a problem rather than simply sitting back and writing polemics that separates the legacy of the Catholic Worker from so many other idealistic movements. Whereas liberals and radicals have for decades written about poverty issues from a place of privilege, Day advocated for a different approach. She left a high-paying career as a Hollywood screenwriter to live in the Bowery with the poor. When her socialist comrades abandoned politics, Day rolled up her sleeves and kept serving soup. When Maurin died and multiple Worker farms imploded due to personality clashes and the hard realities of living off the land, Day re-focused her energies on the urban poor, traveling by bus and hitchhiking around the country in her seventies in order to report on and expose the conditions people were forced to live in. She became active in the anti-war movement in the sixties and was an ardent supporter of Cesar Chavez and the farm worker’s rights movement.  All the while she remained fervently faithful and convinced that her work was being done in the spirit of Christ, even while she was not afraid to lob a verbal grenade or two at the Vatican.

So Dorothy Day – writer, single mother, agitator for change — is the most modern of saints. Today, there are over a hundred Catholic Worker houses across the U.S. and more of them abroad. Each has a Christ room, and many have unlocked front doors (and most of them are located in marginal neighborhoods where this might be perceived as lunacy). Volunteers can pitch in part time with cooking, serving food, tutoring neighborhood kids and participating in demonstrations, or they can make a commitment to the house and live there full time for several years, giving up whatever careers or material goods they formerly had. It’s not a life for the wishy-washy. I’ve met several Workers via my own volunteer work with the Berkeley Food and Housing Project.

Like any volunteers, Workers are susceptible to about the inevitable danger of burnout, the temptations of capitalism and the “compassion fatigue” that anyone who works in a helping profession is all too familiar with. Yet each Worker I’ve met addresses Day as if she were still alive today: Dorothy says, Dorothy thinks. Not every Worker is Catholic; in fact, many of them are only marginally connected with the religion. They devotion to the cause is rooted in our collective human desire to reach out and help the people around us, a propensity it is all too easy to forget that we share.  To be a Worker is to live in solidarity with the poor, not just in service to them. The Worker movement has survived for decades after Day’s death, and canonization or not, it looks like it will continue.

Towards the end of her life, Day attempted to explain exactly what she thought young people who joined the Worker would gain from it in one of her columns. “They learn not only to love, with compassion,” she wrote “but to overcome fear.” At a moment in our culture when the Catholic church tends to inspire more fear and loathing than devotion and faith, there is an increasing cry from the pews to turn back to the days of the primitive church, when women had a greater role in the liturgy, communities were small and closely knit and Christ’s message that “whatever you have done unto the least of these, you have done unto me” was taken as a credo for living instead of a lofty ideal. If that change comes, it is the Workers who will be leading the way.

^{Works cited:}

^{Paul Elie, The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage, FSG, 2003}

^{Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness, HarperOne (reprint), 1997}

^{Dorothy Day, Catholic Worker columns and articles, via the Catholic Worker web archives}

^{Peter Maurin, Easy Essays, via the Catholic Worker web archives}

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