St Dorothy of New York
Stuart Reid writes his first Charterhouse column
18 April 2008

Police flank Dorothy Day, seated at a farm workers picket line in Lamont, California, in 1973

I was in New York last week, and have to say that the place was not exactly buzzing with excitement at the prospect of the Pope's visit. If it was buzzing at all, it was with swarms of badly dressed British tourists clutching shopping bags and looking for the next product of Asian sweated labour on which to spend their supersized pounds.

The Holy Father will see none of this, and a good thing too. It is a pity, though, that he will not really see New York at all while he is there. New York is a beautiful city, and a terrible one. It can make you feel that man is invincible, autonomous. It is also, however, a very Catholic city. If I'd had anything to do with the Pope's itinerary, I'd have directed him to Maryhouse, on grim and grimy East 3rd Street, hard by the Bowery.

Maryhouse is the headquarters of the Catholic Worker Movement, which was founded by Dorothy Day (and Peter Maurin) 75 years ago next month, and which has since spread throughout the world. Miss Day was one of the most remarkable women of the last century: feminist, pacifist, single mother, jailbird, writer, political agitator, ex-Communist, Catholic convert, radical conservative.

Before her conversion, she had an abortion. After her conversion, she went to Mass every morning and to Confession once a week, said the rosary and the divine office daily. She was appalled by the liturgical abuses of the 1960s and 70s. She lived in poverty, and ordered her life and her work according to the social teaching of the Church and the belief that Christianity cannot be reconciled with liberal capitalism. She gave all she had - mainly time - to the poor, the mad and the ill-used. She died penniless in 1980 at the age of 83. Some believe she would make a perfect saint for our times. Her Cause was approved by Rome in 2000, and she is therefore a Servant of God.

She had many enemies, however, especially on the Catholic Right, where she was seen as a Left-wing troublemaker (as in some ways she was). At the same time, though, she had many admirers, among them Frank Sheed, Masie Ward and Abbie Hoffman, king of the Yippies: older readers may recall that in 1967 Hoffman and several thousand like-minded souls went to Washington and tried to will the Pentagon to levitate and turn orange, but the Pentagon refused to budge, or even change colour.

Four years ago I attended a talk at Maryhouse. I remember little of what was said, but I do remember that the man sitting in front of me was reading a gay porno mag. He tore a page out, folded it with great care, and put it in his satchel. Then he fell asleep.



You do not have to be sane or straight to walk through the doors of a Catholic Worker house of hospitality. No one checks your bags at the door. You may smoke, you may sway, you may scream within reason. Only drugs and alcohol are banned.

There was no porno malarkey when my wife and I visited the sweet and gentle Catholic Workers at Maryhouse a couple of weeks ago. The only thing that might have raised a pious eyebrow was a photograph on the wall of the Pope holding a big glass of beer and smoking a cigar. The beer was real but someone had drawn in the cigar. Over tea we and the Workers talked about Terry Thomas, the Sacrament of Penance, Benny Hill, Hilaire Belloc, John Thaw and the Fifth Commandment. What can "Thou shalt not kill" mean?

There are those who say that Dorothy Day was too absolutist in her pacifism, but even if pacifism can never be de fide - since self-defence is a natural right - the existence of weapons of mass destruction may have rendered just-war theory obsolete. Pope Benedict himself is certainly a borderline pacifist. Perhaps Dorothy was the herald of a new orthodoxy...

So: a saint for our times? I think so, but some on the Left - and it must be said that there are Catholic Workers who are more Worker the Catholic - fear that, as someone who had famously repented of having had an abortion, St Dorothy of New York would be used as a propaganda tool on behalf of the Church's pro-life teaching and that her work among the poor would be downplayed. But why should that be? Both aspects of her life are vitally important. What could be more apt than to canonise a woman who stood both for the Church's teaching on abortion (absurdly seen as a Right-wing position) and its concern for social justice (absurdly seen as a Left-wing position)?

I was reminded of Dorothy Day's ability to transcend silly political labels the day after I visited Maryhouse and read in the New York Times that I had missed a grand memorial Mass for William F Buckley Jr at St Patrick's Cathedral on Fifth Avenue.

I liked Bill Buckley a lot, even if his magazine, the National Review, has become rather too aggressively Americanist for my tastes (and even though he had been patronisingly dismissive of Dorothy Day). He was quite the most courteous and generous man I have ever met, and a wit. The title of his last collection of pieces is Cancel Your Own Goddamn Subscription.

I was disappointed to have missed that Mass, but perhaps there was something providential in my having been on the Bowery while the rich and famous gathered on Fifth Avenue. At any rate I recalled something the great Catholic historian John Lukacs had written in 1980 after attending a dinner to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the National Review:

"During the introduction of the celebrities a shower of applause greeted Henry Kissinger. I was sufficiently irritated to ejaculate a fairly loud Boo! A day or so before that evening Dorothy Day had died... During that glamorous evening I thought: who was a truer conservative, Dorothy Day or Henry Kissinger? Surely it was Dorothy Day, whose respect for what was old and valid, whose dedication to the plain decencies and duties of human life, rested on the traditions of two millennia of Christianity, and who was a radical only in the truthful sense of attempting to get to the roots of the human predicament."

My award for the most enterprising beggar in New York last week goes to a cheerful fellow in Union Square. The cardboard sign resting against his knees read: "Why lie? I need a beer."