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Catholic Saints
What Dorothy Day Teaches Us Today
00:30:52
Dr. Tim Gray and Dr. Elizabeth Klein, professor of Theology at the Augustine Institute Graduate School, sit down to talk about Servant of God, Dorothy Day—who she was as a woman, her conversion, what she can teach us today, and her fascinating place in the tumultuous 20th century. Watch Catholic Saints on FORMED. Sign Up for FORMED. Support this podcast and the Augustine Institute on the Mission Circle.
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- [00:03]
A
You're listening to a podcast on Catholic saints. This podcast is produced by the Augustine Institute, an apostolate helping Catholics understand, live, and share their faith. Welcome to form Now. I'm Tim Gray, president of the Augustine Institute, and joining me is Elizabeth Klein, who's a professor of theology here at the Augusta Newton. We're going to talk about Dorothy Day, who is really a famous American Catholic. She spent most of her life in New York, although she was born in Chicago. And she has a fascinating story, and I think it's a story that gives people hope. And that's why I want to talk about Dorothy, her amazing virtues, her amazing life. She lived at a very tumultuous time in the 20th century.
- [00:52]
B
And.
- [00:53]
A
And she, as an American, she was an atheist who becomes Catholic. And so there's a great part of the story of her conversion that we want to talk about, but there's also many other things about Dorothy Day that are really remarkable. One of them is that she had an abortion. She had a child out of wedlock and was a single mother. And yet many. And there's an argument and a movement going forward right now to make her a canonized saint. And so I think that we give a lot of hope to so many people in our country and so many women who maybe struggle as a single mom in our plague of divorce and broken marriages or with this pandemic of abortion. So many people, and of course, women are victims of abortion, too. And, you know, our culture just makes it for so many young women, that's the alternative that they kind of get driven to. And I think it's easy for a lot of women who suffered an abortion, who had an abortion, to just despair, to think that, you know, they're just so filled with guilt and despair that they can't amount to anything and that God can't love them. And Dorothy Day really gives a great ray of hope for that. And so I think she's really an example, a model that I think can attract a lot of people, Elizabeth, to hope and bring them to inspiration. She was an inspiring story.
- [02:07]
B
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, Dorothy's story is so great, and her personal holiness is so inspiring. I really love Dorothy Day personally, so I hope she. Her cause goes for. And she, as you know, she is a servant of God because her. Her cause has been accepted for review. Yeah. So I actually just recently reread the Long Loneliness, which is one of her autobiographies, and her story isn't really what you'd expect. You know, she has this child out of Wedlock, which I knew about her and I had thought, oh, it must be like an emergency situation. And then she had this conversion, but really it was coming out. She had this abortion previously and she thought that she was sterile and she wouldn't be able to have a child. And so when she had a common law husband and when she got pregnant, she was really excited and she was really happy that she was able to have this child. And it was bringing that child into the world that then caused her to kind of go towards conversion. Because as soon as her daughter was born, she knew she wanted to give her religion, she wanted her to be baptized, and that was really the cause. She said, man is made for worship. I really want this. This is for my daughter. And so her daughter was baptized before Dorothy actually became Catholic. She became Catholic a little while later.
- [03:10]
A
It's a fascinating pointer story because, you know, reading some different data from the Barna group, most people who make a lifetime commitment to Christ God do so from age 12 or younger. The next time after the age of 12, that people, you know, the largest moment in someone's life where they make a lifetime commitment to Christ is after the birth of their first child. That there's something about nature where you have a child and it's such an existential experience that people realize that there's got to be something bigger than just me and that there's something bigger in the universe that there is a God.
- [03:46]
B
And.
- [03:46]
A
And it's so fascinating that it was the birth of her child that really led her, opened her up to search for God.
- [03:54]
B
And she had always had this natural pull, she felt towards sort of worship of God. And she. People who know more about her story, she was affiliated with the communist movement prior to her conversion, and she really felt drawn to the people and helping the people. And so when she had her own child, she all of a sudden had this shift in saying you, yes, I still want to help the people, I still want to help the poor, which she's known for. But really what we need is God and we're made for worship. We're made. And she loved to go to Mass even before she converted because she felt that that's where people were at home and that's when they were fulfilling their purpose. So that really the fact that she kind of comes out of what we think is a very anti Catholic thing, Communism to Catholicism was actually to her a much more natural shift because she said that Catholicism was the religion of the people and she felt she was in solidarity with the poor by becoming Catholic.
- [04:45]
A
So it was. She has this sense of wonder at worship that she's wondering, as an atheist and thinking about, is there a God worship? And then it's the contemplation of this child. I mean, looking at this beautiful child and thinking, as a mother, I've got to give this child. And she didn't have faith to give that child. That seems like that was probably part of the.
- [05:08]
B
Yeah. And her story is, like, she's thinking, she is feeling this pull that she wants to get her child baptized, but she doesn't know where to start, you know, and then she basically, like, runs into this nun who lives.
- [05:21]
A
So she's ready to get the child baptized before she's baptized.
- [05:23]
B
So she gets the child baptized. And so she starts talking to this nun, and this nun helps her. And the nun keeps telling her, well, really, you should become Catholic. Really, you should become Catholic. But, you know, they allow her to baptize her child, and then Dorothy becomes Catholic. I can't remember how long after. Six months, a year after, or something like that.
- [05:37]
A
Yeah, that's really remarkable. But it says something about a mother's heart, that this great sense of selflessness, like, I've got to give my child. My child needs this. And so she. Obviously, Dorothy believes that baptism is really important, and yet she's seeking baptism first for her own child, even before she seeks it for herself.
- [05:56]
B
And she gives her child the name Tamar Teresa, which is Tamar from the Bible, but apparently it wasn't Tamar from the Bible. She just knew she had Jewish friends, and she knew that the name Tamar meant two trees. Well, you know better Hebrew than I do, but Teresa, for Teresa of Avila, who was someone very inspirational for Dorothy.
- [06:12]
A
Ah. So she. The middle name for the child was Teresa.
- [06:16]
B
Mm.
- [06:17]
A
Wow. I didn't know that. That's fascinating. So, you know, just think about that personal experience for people, because it's such a sign of hope for what happens to Dorothy. And I always think of it as a moment of evangelization when people have a child who's. Maybe they're married, maybe they're not married, but they're not practicing the faith, and they have their first child. That's a moment, I think, for great evangelization, because there's just something about nature that awakens in us with that experience.
- [06:45]
B
Absolutely. I mean, Dorothy's, like, apparently, like, walking along the beach. He's a Catholic nun.
- [06:50]
A
Help me out.
- [06:51]
B
I need help. And also the great personal sacrifice for her to become Catholic because she's living common law with this man for years, you know, essentially her husband, and he refuses to be married in the Catholic Church, so she leaves him and to become Catholic. And, you know, and her daughter really ends up being raised in the community of the Catholic Worker, which she founds. And she has a beautiful line in her autobiography about. She says she's the barren woman who becomes the mother of many children because she had this abortion and thought she was barren, ended up being able to have her own. Her own natural child, but then also to be the mother of this movement and the mother of all the people who come into the Worker house and the farm.
- [07:30]
A
Wow. Well, you've had several children now. How do you relate to that experience of having a child?
- [07:39]
B
Almost the exact parallel experience, because I became Catholic right before my first son was born. And it was really the same reason, because I had been going to Mass for years and had been thinking about becoming Catholic. And then when I got pregnant, I thought, well, I want my son to be baptized. And I thought, well, how can I get him? Who's going to baptize him in the Catholic Church if I'm not actually Catholic? So I had to become Catholic. So when I was confirmed and received, I was really pregnant. I had my son a month after that.
- [08:09]
A
Oh, that's beautiful. So that you can. That's such a great relation. I mean, having a child does open you up, I think, to the transcendent and to the. There's a spiritual awakening.
- [08:20]
B
And I think it also, like, bespeaks the meaning of baptism. I think now there's a tendency to think, oh, I'm not going to baptize my child. I want them to grow up and make their own. Their own mature decision. But that's kind of misunderstanding of what baptism is, right? Because baptism is really. It's a birth, right? You don't ask your child permission to give birth to them. You know, maybe some of them are like, push back against, you know, why am I in this life? But you want to give life to a child because, you know, it's so good. And so similarly, you have that same pull. You want to give them life in Christ. You want to give them this new life and this identity as a child of Christ, just as you want to give them this identity as your child. And so I think it helps you to understand what baptism really is. It's not sort of a mature signing on the dotted line. It's being made part of a family.
- [09:06]
A
Well, it is entering a family. And you mentioned that Dorothy was a mother in a twofold Sense, she has this child, but then she gives birth, in a sense, to the Catholic Worker movement as somebody who had a great empathy for people. And that's why she was, you know, the romanticism of communism, taking care of the poor and giving them dignity and caring for them. That's what attracted her to that. But now, as a Catholic, she's going to see a different way of taking care of the poor. And she starts the Catholic Worker movement. What inspires her to do that?
- [09:40]
B
Well, it's really another figure named Peter Marin apparently kind of hears about her. There is a story that she was a reporter, and so she used to do the reports for Commonweal. And so she was in Washington, D.C. doing reporting, and she saw the Communists protesting. And she said, I still felt that sympathy, but I no longer knew how I could appropriately participate as a Catholic. And so she prays at the shrine of the Immaculate Conception that she would be able to use her gifts as a Catholic to help the poor. And Peter Marin shows up, like, in her living room and says, I heard about you, and you're the one that I want to help. Me found this movement. And so it's really his vision that they take on together over the course of many years. So it's really the answer to prayer that she sees the Catholic social teaching and she sees the mission of the Church, but she doesn't see enough Catholics with their sort of boots on the ground actually helping the poor and making that vision a reality. And that's where it comes out of that.
- [10:38]
A
I like the place where she learns Catholic social teaching. And a lot of people would think that Dorothy becomes Catholic because of Catholic social teaching, but that's not really what drew her. That comes afterwards.
- [10:51]
B
Yeah. What really drew her was this innate sense of the need to worship God. And that is a fundamental of everybody and the fundamental desire of the human heart. And it's only subsequently that she really discovers Catholic social teaching and the writings of the Pope on the poor and really adopts that. And there's this famous story about her and the Worker, and they make picket signs with all quotations from encyclicals. And they're going to a Worker protest. And the police officer says that he doesn't feel he can arrest them because he'd be like, arresting the Holy Father. So they get away with, you know, I love that.
- [11:27]
A
And I like how she saw this gap once she discovered Catholic social teaching. She saw the beauty and the power of it, but the problem was she didn't see people embodying it. Practically. And rather than complain about that, then that put her into action, didn't it?
- [11:43]
B
And it's really related to this idea of motherhood that she becomes. You know, she's so excited, and she becomes a Catholic, but she's a mother. And then really, the Worker movement becomes. How do we enact this? Well, we invite people in. We have a house where the poor come and live with us, and we give them physical nourishment, and we give them spiritual nourishment, and we put up with them as sinners, and we witness holiness to them. And that's. I mean, that's really what the Worker is. It's really friendship with the poor and with each other.
- [12:11]
A
So speaking about these homes that they would do, these Catholic Worker homes, hospitality was really crucial, which. That's such a biblical virtue. This is part of her taking this desire for the poor that she saw in communism and. But with Catholic social teaching and this biblical virtue of hospitality she embodies, she really finds a way to personalize this in a way that communism could never do that.
- [12:37]
B
Absolutely. And one thing I love about Dorothy Day is that she doesn't make it look easy. And she. You know, she's famous for saying, don't call me a saint, because that would dismiss me too easily. And what she meant by that was, you know, sometimes we think, oh, saints, we can't imitate them. We can't do what they did. And she never wanted to be put in that category because she thought people would dismiss her and dismiss the Catholic Worker movement. And so in her writings, you can really see that it is not easy to live in a house and share your daughter with all of these random people. It's not easy to deal with people who fall down over and over again, people who exploit you and take advantage of your hospitality. And she makes that very clear. And I find that very inspiring about her that she's so transparent about the challenges of living out that radical call to holiness.
- [13:27]
A
She was always bluntly honest, wasn't she?
- [13:29]
B
Yeah.
- [13:30]
A
And let's just talk about her temperament for a bit, because I want people to get a sense of who Dorothy was because she was a strong character. I mean, she had to be tough. First off, she's a New Yorker living in New York, but she is. She's really. She's a tough person. She's got a great heart. She's maternal. She cares for the poor, but she's able to navigate, and. And she could be challenging.
- [13:52]
B
Yeah. And I think she. One thing that's really admirable about her is that she's able. She has these strong convictions that a lot of people in the church didn't agree with. And she really stayed true to them, and she really was able to live them out even in the face of difficulty. One of the famous ones is that she was a pacifist, which is still a point of contention, has always been a point of contention in Christianity, even from the earliest times, to what extent, you know, Christians should sort of participate in the state and the military and all of that. And she stayed true to that conviction and that witness all the way through the first and Second World War, when many of her supporters did not agree. And there was a lot of conflict in the church over that issue. And, you know, you may or may not agree with that particular position, but I think she's very inspiring in living out something that she feels called to as a witness, even in the face of great opposition.
- [14:42]
A
And she. Let's talk about her call to take care of the poor. You know, at that time, especially with World War I and World War II, we didn't have the wealth that we have now in this country. And so she was. She really thought people should not just go to the government to help the poor, but that each person had a call to take care of the poor.
- [15:01]
B
Yeah, well, interestingly, we think about Dorothy Day as being sort of, I don't know, leftist politics or that's kind of the association. She was very opposed to government assistance of the poor. And that's not because she didn't want to help the poor. And it's because she felt that what gives a person dignity is work and personal property. And so she always wanted to work, to empower people to be able to take care of their own families and to sort of make their own life. And so that was part of the worker movement and also part of these farms they founded to help people learn to get back on the land. She felt that cities dehumanized people. And so she is kind of an interesting figure, if you care to go actually read about her political position. It doesn't map on really neatly onto the kind of ideas we have now.
- [15:42]
A
I think that's really important. There's a complexity and a uniqueness to Dorothy's convictions and how she wanted to live them out. And I think a lot of people sometimes want to pigeonhole her. You know, some people want to claim, well, she was a leftist or she's on the left. She was in certain ways that characterize people who. What they cared about on the left. But Otherwise, she was, you know, she realized abortion was wrong and, you know, was against that. And so she doesn't fit into any clear box.
- [16:08]
B
Yeah, well, I mean, cast Catholics as general. I think as Americans especially now, things get more and more polarized. It's easy to identify with this or that. But Dorothy really tried to take her inspiration and her work from the Gospels and the writings of the popes. And so you do get this sort of life that's dedicated holistically to Catholic social teaching, which doesn't neatly map on to especially sort of modern American politics. So it's interesting.
- [16:33]
A
I think that's important because I don't like the label of Catholics being conservative or liberal, left or right. The label for Catholics is to be a disciple of Jesus Christ, to be Christian, right, to follow Christ. And that's what's crucial for us. I mean, concluding thoughts to get people to think more about Dorothy, to be inspired by her character, because there's so much to be inspired by from Dorothy.
- [16:58]
B
Yeah. So I would recommend to everybody to read the Long Loneliness or one of Dorothy's autobiographies, and I think what you'll find is one, someone who lived through such tumultuous times, I think gives such perspective right now. We always think that our own time is the most stressful time. And to see all these things she lived through and how she witnessed in those times is very inspiring. And I think also the kind of charity that she demonstrated in her life, both towards the poor and to those who disagreed with her, is so wonderful and a very wonderful example, I think, of one story where a bishop banned everybody from all the parishes from subscribing to the Catholic Worker. And this had been a bishop who had previously supported their movement. And she writes about this and says. And she interprets it in such a charitable light, and she says she understands why he feels he can't have his parishes subscribing. And yet he didn't restrict individuals from doing it. And he was very even handed about it. And those kinds of things aren't the kinds of things you hear now when somebody opposes you publicly like that. You know, usually we don't always have such a charitable interpretation. So I think she's very inspiring in that way.
- [18:02]
A
She's a great model for charity for us, and we need that charity because we live in tumultuous times, too, that are becoming more and more tense. And I think she gives us inspiration. So if you know anybody who's a single mother who. Who has had an abortion, you know, there is hope God's grace can reach all of us and transform any one of us, and Dorothy is a great example of that. So let Dorothy's example inspire and encourage you and share her story so that she can be an encouragement to many others. We're thankful for all of you who support us through the mission circle. We're encouraged by your support and we hope that you continue to support us and realize that your giving is very important to us. May the Lord bless and keep all of you. Take care. You can watch these interviews in video format by visiting formed.org formed is an online Catholic streaming service created by the Augustan Institute and Ignatius Press with award winning studies and parish programs, inspiring audio content, movies, ebooks, and family friendly kids programming to support the mission of the Augustan institute. Please visit missioncircle.org.