Unruly Saint: Dorothy Day’s Radical Vision and Its Challenge for Our Times

by D.L. Mayfield, 2022

I learned about this book from the library’s monthly biographies email. It’s a short, very well-written, and easy to read biography of Dorothy Day, the woman who started the Catholic Worker newspaper and Hospitality Houses for the poor. I had never heard of her, but Pope Francis in 2015 said to Congress that she was one of the 4 most influential Americans, along with Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr., and Thomas Merton.

She was born in 1897. She loved God from an early age, walking around thanking Him for things. Her parents were not church-goers. At the age of 30, she converted to Catholicism because she wanted to help the poor. She wanted to help the poor because she believed, as the Scriptures say, that when you help the poor, you are helping Jesus.

Before her conversion, she was a young radical in the 1920’s. She drank a lot, smoked a lot, ran around with young intellectuals, leftists, anarchists. She marched for women’s suffragists, got arrested and put in jail. She loved reading novels. Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle influenced her because, as a young girl, she walked her baby brother around Chicago and saw the meat packing plants and workers firsthand. She felt for them. By the way, the book mentions that Upton Sinclair had hoped his novel would change the meat-packers’ working conditions but instead it just made meat-packing more sanitary for the rest of us, and did little to help the workers. She also loved novels by Russians: Dostoevsky, Tolstoy.

She chose Catholicism because it was the church of the poor and the historic true church. Becoming religious caused her to lose the love of her life, Forster Batterham, as he was anti-religion to the max, and anti-fatherhood. She was happily pregnant with him and chose to baptize her baby girl, Tamar Teresa, born in 1926, in the Catholic Church. He refused to marry her and so she raised her little girl on her own. At one point, she was so sick with the flu that she thought she was going to die and leave Tamar on her own. She remembered living among the immigrants in New York City and how she was never alone with them. They helped each other even though they were all poor. She moved back to live among them as soon as she was well.

In 1932, she attended a hunger march in Washington, D.C. She was disheartened to see that her adopted Catholic Church was nowhere to be seen to help the marchers. Nor were any Christians. They were so afraid of Communism. But she saw Jesus in all of the marchers, with their desire for basic human rights. She went to the National Shrine in Washington, D.C., and prayed to Mother Mary asking for a sign of how she could work for the poor. As soon as she got home to New York, she met the strange but wonderful man, Peter Maurin, and the rest is history. He was a French, Catholic immigrant and an eccentric, homeless intellectual. He had essays stuffed in every pocket. But he convinced her God was with the poor and the oppressed and that God wanted His people to do His work to make the world a better place. He was well-versed in papal encyclicals and Catholic church history. His knowledge and enthusiasm and dreams were what she needed. He was the answer to her prayer. She and Peter started the newspaper, Catholic Worker, in 1933. Dorothy did almost all of the work. It grew in popularity quickly. Shortly thereafter, she started the first Hospitality House, to help feed, clothe, and shelter the poor. It was during the Depression and there was no end to those in need. Her House was open to anyone, and they often had addicted, mentally-ill people. She refused to attach strings, though. Her dream was that every Catholic church would open a hospitality house and feed, clothe and shelter the poor. Unfortunately, that didn’t happen.

One of Peter’s dreams was to have communal farms. They tried several different locales but they didn’t work out. You needed to have knowledgeable farmers to work them and good land with water, and they struck out on one or all of those conditions, so the initial communal farms were not a success.

She worked tirelessly to spread the word through the newspaper, and continued to house and shelter the poor. The readership of the paper grew to 150,000 but when she started to write about pacifism and seemed to be too Communist, the readership went way down. The first time that happened was in 1935 when the Spanish War happened and she was against both sides of that war: the Catholic Church and the fascist Franco on one side, and the atheist communists on the other. Then again in 1941 when WWII started, she was again anti-war, and she lost many readers.

I’m glad I read this book. I knew nothing about Dorothy Day. She was in love with God from an early age and wanted to serve Him. She was tireless in her devotion and love for the poor. That is how she served God.

The author, D.L. Mayfield, is a lot like Dorothy Day. She lives in Portland and she is Christian and watched as her Evangelical church backed Trump and became the antithesis of Christianity.

We can stay true to God and our faith and work tirelessly to keep it from being polluted by the world. Dorothy Day loved the Lord her God and hated the injustice she saw in the world. The battle raged within her, and she never gave up the fight, trying to communicate to others the importance of showing our love of God by showing love to the poor and the oppressed. She was, truly, an “Unruly Saint.” She died in 1980.

I love the chapter, The Duty of Delight. She opens the chapter with a quote from Dorothy Day in her diary, June 18, 1970: “My mother used to say, “When you are in the dumps, clean house, take a bath, dress up, go downtown and window-shop.” Everything passes, St. Teresa of Avila says.”

She writes that Dostoevsky says, “The world will be saved by beauty.” This quote angers Mayfield, the author, but Dorothy Day understood it, and it meant that, “beauty was a sign of the resilience of humanity in the face of cruelty. A sign of resurrection. A small redemption of all the misery the earth endured. And it pointed to a God who was present and good, despite all evidence to the contrary. It reminded Dorothy that God was a creator, delighting in creation of all types. A sweet strawberry, a good cup of coffee, a freshly rolled cigarette, a beautiful piano piece, a play put on by one of her friends, a Russian novel. Each one a precious gift to be savored, to give strength to the one who needs to get up and face the realities of the world again and again.

“In her diaries, Dorothy also wrote about what she called “the duty of delight.” Making the conscious decision to meditate on the good things the world has to offer as a spiritual practice, a discipline of sorts.”

Then, the author writes: “Sometimes I joke that I am very good at practicing the duty of despair. The opposite of the duty of delight, it often feels like my eyes are trained to see all the bad in the world. I see suffering, I see inequality, I see how connected I am to systems that oppress and marginalize–and I don’t see how I can rest, or be happy, or experience joy when not everyone in the world is flourishing.

“…So I paid close attention to all the times Dorothy wrote about her simple life pleasures and the duty of delight. I paid close attention, because I know how much help I need to be able to move forward in a world that is both filled with joy and filled with injustice.”

Dorothy Day spoke out about racism. She spoke out about the bombing of Hiroshima. She spoke out about war and it cost her. This is what D.L. Mayfield writes about Dorothy Day’s writing: “Jesus was the ultimate example of someone who did not return violence with violence but loved his enemies to the end. This guiding principle infused her journalistic work. Pointing out the inconsistencies of both the church and the state during wartime was putting her at odds with Catholic leadership, with the US military and government, and with many of her friends, neighbors and co-conspirators.

“Dorothy, who maintained a lifelong interest in the issues and opinions of Jewish people in New York and beyond, found her pacifist stance in the late 1930s already causing her great grief–especially when she was accused of not caring about what happened to Jewish people under Hitler’s regime. She did care, very much, and both she and Peter Maurin worked for ways to be in solidarity with Jewish people while also arguing that violence does not eradicate violence. In the Catholic Worker, Peter Maurin begged the US government to open its doors to Jewish refugees…”

…”The war years were, by all accounts, a miserable time to be a sincere pacifist. But Dorothy found solace in her religious practices and in what it means to follow Jesus, a God who let himself be killed, only to be declared the ultimate victor over death. She hoped and prayed and lived as if victory over death and sin and war was a possibility in her lifetime.”

In the Afterword, D.L. Mayfield writes: “I hope I will not view myself as the only person who knows what is right in the world, and I hope I learn to seek answers for the world’s problems outside of myself. I hope I learn to prioritize the people in my neighborhood who are struggling mightily to survive in America–their voices, their stories–and, most of all, look to them to tell me how to move forward, both as a follower of Christ and as an American.”

Last paragraph: “May we continue to hunger for God but ensure our neighbors never hunger for bread. May we believe in love. May we believe in a God of life. And may we find each other on this journey, committed to it being long but not quite so lonely as we thought it would be.”