Alex Whalen
11/8/08
Junior Theology
Model of Faith
Dorothy Day had many troubles in her life between her father who hated everything Catholic, a mother who had ailments of her own, and the shame of where she lived to the point that she would walk around her school so nobody would know where she lived. Dorothy’s faith in God did not get started by her parents but by a simple act of seeing a family friend praying next to her bed.
Dorothy was born in New York but her family moved to San Francisco later. The Day family lived in San Francisco until 1906 when an earthquake hit. Dorothy grew up in Chicago in a lower class area of the city. Dorothy became ashamed of her home and wanted to leave. Dorothy’s father got a new job and the family moved to the north side of Chicago in a large house. When she was older, she grew an ability to see the beauty of an urban desolation that like she had once tried so hard to escape from. At the age of 16, she was awarded a scholarship to the University of Champaign-Urbana. Dorothy was determined to make her own life, and not depend on her father, so after two years of college she dropped out to move to New York.
In 1916, Day went to work for The Call, New York’s only socialist paper. She covered rallies and interviewed revolutionaries of the city. She next worked for The Masses, a paper that was against the involvement of the United States in World War I. Federal agents stopped the magazine and five main editors were charged with sedition. Day was not deterred though, in November 1917 she along with forty other women were arrested for protesting, outside the White House, about women’s exclusion from electorate. Slowly, she began to gain interest in the catholic faith. To her the Catholic church was a "church of the immigrants, the church of the poor." Both of these ideals appealed to her interests. Day, during her time with as a journalist, got pregnant and had an abortion. Years later, she got pregnant and had a baby, which she felt was a miracle since when she had the abortion she thought she could not have any other children. She immediately wanted the baby to be baptized and she wanted to become Catholic. A little while after both happened Dorothy’s husband left her since he was an atheist.
Day returned to her New York home and met Peter Maurin. Maurin convinced Day that she should write a news magazine that taught the Catholic Church’s social and moral teachings. Day did just that. On march 1, 1933, the first copies of The Catholic Worker were sold for one penny. Her reasoning on this was so everybody who wanted it could afford to buy it. Maurin’s main contribution to the paper was that he said all people and parishes should help the poor not just there friends. So, thus began the “Catholic Worker Movement.” The Catholic Worker houses took in all the homeless and poor that they could and the people were amazed that there was no forced reform of their ways. Day let the people stay with the houses as long as they liked. She let them become part of her family just as she was a part of theirs.
Throughout the years, Dorothy Day’s message has resounded. Taking care of the poor has been brought into the eyes of society and it will not go away. Her legacies are not that of the “Catholic Worker” but of taking care of those in need no matter what their circumstances were. She has brought to life what many have tried and failed to do.
