Her January 1942 column was headlined "We Continue Our Christian Pacifist Stand". She wrote:
We are still pacifists. Our manifesto is the Sermon on the Mount, which means that we will try to be peacemakers. Speaking for many of our conscientious objectors, we will not participate in armed warfare or in making munitions, or by buying government bonds to prosecute the war, or in urging others to these efforts. But neither will we be carping in our criticism. We love our country and we love our President.
The circulation of the Catholic Worker, following its losses during the Spanish Civil War, had risen to 75,000, but now plummeted again. Day's pacifism had limited appeal even within the Catholic Worker community.
On January 13, 1949, unions representing workers at cemeteries managed by the Archdiocese of New York went on strike. After several weeks, Cardinal Francis Spellman used lay brothers from the local Maryknoll seminary and then diocesan seminarians under his own supervision to break the strike by digging graves. He called the union action "Communist-inspired". Spellman stood fast until the strike ended on March 11 when the union members accepted the Archdiocese's original offer of a 48-hour 6-day work week. Day wrote in the Catholic Worker in April:
A Cardinal, ill-advised, exercised so overwhelming a show of force against the union of poor working men. There is a temptation of the devil to that most awful of all wars, the war between the clergy and the laity.
Years later she said of Spellman:
[H]e is our chief priest and confessor; he is our spiritual leader–of all of us who live here in New York. But he is not our ruler.
Correspondence with Hilda van Stockum
Probably as a Christmas gift, Hilda van Stockum offered to send some of her books to Dorothy Day. Here is Day's response:
[Peter Maurin Farm]
[469 Bloomingdale Rd.]
[Pleasant Plains, Staten Island, N.Y.]
Feb 3, 1949 [Feast of] St. Blaise
Dear Hilda [in Montreal] –
After your so good and friendly letter I must call you by your Christian name. It was good to get your generous letter and we would be delighted to get the books and I know my daughter would too. Her address is Ridge Road, Westminster, Md. Our farm address–where I am most often–is Peter Maurin Farm, 469 Bloomingdale Rd., Pleasant Plains, Staten Island, N.Y.
Do you know our friends–Dr. Karl Stern, 4137 Marlowe Ave., Montreal? They too have children. You would love them. [We visited with them in Westmount. I remember them well. Several Marlin children became friends with the Stern children in Montreal in 1949-1951.- JTM] [Comment from Olga Marlin: I remember mother talking about Dorothy Day, as she did about many other people. She became friends with Karl Stern and often talked about him.]
My daughter is going to have her fifth child in June. Her husband is now working at the Newman Book Shop until 9 at night which leaves her much alone, out in the country and still with no conveniences.
When your books come I will read them too. I love children's books and would love to write one some day. Right now I am engaged on a story of my life which Harpers asked for after reading On Pilgrimage. [Her autobiography was published and is still in print - JTM] I'm having an awful struggle getting it done. How do you write with 6 children?
Have you heard of the Grail? Started by two Dutch women in this country? A marvelous school for girls.
My son-in-law, having no formal education, read all of the Chesterton & Belloc to get their education. A good idea.
Got to rush now. Too many people. Write again.
Sincerely in Christ,
Dorothy Day
The next correspondence we have is from Day in about March 1951:
[Peter Maurin Farm, 469 Bloomingdale Rd.]
[Pleasant Plains, Staten Island, N.Y.]
1951 [March?]
Dear Hilda [in Ireland] –
Thank you for your most interesting letters from Ireland. Just back myself from a 4 mos. trip to the coast and south, and return to 10 degrees above zero and rheumatism in my hands.
How do you ever get so much writing done, and such good writing. I'm trying mainly to finish a St. Therese book. I am too attached to people.
My daughter's children have been sick with mumps, & the oldest with pneumonia. She is 8 this April. Tamar will have her 6th in Aug.–6 under 9. Quite a handful. And noisy. All in a 4 room house! Poverty indeed.
However if we can raise the money to put on one big room and porch it will do, as they have 4 acres around them and the house only cost $6,000. Housing is still a problem here. One of the worst parts of poverty is the necessity to be always scheming, planning, figuring, how to get bills paid.
That's voluntary poverty too, altho we would like to think romantically about it as freedom from care.
Pray for us, and God bless you.
In Christ
Dorothy Day
P.S. I speak as to a kindred soul. My royalty check went in 10 minutes.
The third letter to Hilda van Stockum was in December 1951.
[Peter Maurin Farm, 469 Bloomingdale Rd.]
[Pleasant Plains, Staten Island, N.Y.]
PAX
Dec. 20, 1951
Dear Hilda –Thank you for your lovely letter of Sept 30! Please excuse delay. I've been travelling about the country & am not half done yet. What a life you have! I envy you living in Ireland near the sea.Yes, you must come to one our retreats. They are going better than ever this year. Amos [?] became a Catholic as a result of one.Tamar [Day's daughter] is having a hard winter with her little flock. Too shut in. Their house is too small. They are fearfully overcrowded. A big family needs a big house to be happy.I'm writing a new book on The Little Flower and I'm hoping it sells well enough for me to help her build a big extra living room in back & a porch on the front. She lives in real poverty, poor child. Pray for her. I'm enjoying this trip very much. It is both work and vacation. There is so much to write about – I could fill two Catholic Workers!
Thank you very much for writing me. A Happy Christmas and New Year to you all
In Christ,
Dorothy Day
Dorothy Day's Later Life
Day's autobiography, The Long Loneliness, was published in 1952 with illustrations by the Quaker Fritz Eichenberg.
On June 15, 1955, Day joined a group of pacifists in refusing to participate in civil defense drills scheduled that day. Some of them challenged the constitutionality of the law under which they were charged, but Day and six others took the position that their refusal was not a legal dispute but one of philosophy. Day said she was doing "public penance" for the United States' first use of an atom bomb. They pleaded guilty on September 28, 1955, but the judge refused to send them to jail saying "I'm not making any martyrs." She did the same in each of the next five years. In 1958, instead of taking shelter she joined a group picketing the offices of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission. She served 30 days in jail.
In 1956, along with David Dellinger and Rev. A.J. Muste, two veteran allies in the pacifist movement, she helped found Liberation magazine.
In 1960, she praised Fidel Castro's "promise of social justice". She said: "Far better to revolt violently than to do nothing about the poor destitute." Several months later, Day traveled to Cuba and reported her experiences in a four-part series in the Catholic Worker. In the first of these, she wrote:
I am most of all interested in the religious life of the people and so must not be on the side of a regime that favors the extirpation of religion. On the other hand, when that regime is bending all its efforts to make a good life for the people, a naturally good life (on which grace can build) one cannot help but be in favor of the measures taken.
Day hoped that the Second Vatican Council would endorse nonviolence as a fundamental tenet of Catholic life and denounce nuclear arms, both their use in warfare and the "idea of arms being used as deterrents, to establish a balance of terror". She lobbied bishops in Rome and joined with other women in a ten-day fast.
She was pleased when the Council in Gaudium et spes (1965), its statement on "the Church in the Modern World", said that nuclear warfare was incompatible with traditional Catholic just war theory:
Every act of war directed to the indiscriminate destruction of whole cities or vast areas with their inhabitants is a crime against God and man, which merits firm and unequivocal condemnation.
Day's account of the Catholic Worker movement, Loaves and Fishes, was published in 1963. Despite her anti-establishment sympathies, Day's judgment of the 60s counterculture was nuanced. She enjoyed it when Abbie Hoffman told her she was the original hippie. At the same time she disapproved of many who called themselves hippies.
Day struggled as a leader with influence but without direct authority over the Catholic Worker houses, even the Tivoli Catholic Worker Farm that she visited regularly. She recorded her frustration in her diary: "I have no power to control smoking of pot, for instance, or sexual promiscuity, or solitary sins.”
In 1966, Spellman visited U.S. troops in Vietnam at Christmas, where he was reported as saying: "This war in Vietnam is ... a war for civilization." Day authored a response in the January 1967 issue of the Catholic Worker that avoided direct criticism but cataloged all the war zones Spellman had visited over the years. She asked: "Oh, God, what are all these Americans doing all over the world so far from our own shores?”
In 1970, at the height of American participation in the Vietnam War, she described Ho Chi Minh as "a man of vision, as a patriot, a rebel against foreign invaders" while telling a story of a holiday gathering with relatives where one needs "to find points of agreement and concordance, if possible, rather than the painful differences, religious and political."
In 1972, the University of Notre Dame awarded her its Laetare Medal.
Despite suffering from poor health, Day visited India, where she met Mother Teresa. In 1971, Day visited Poland, the Soviet Union, Hungary, and Romania as part of a group of peace activists,with the financial support of Corliss Lamont, whom she described as a "'pinko' millionaire who lived modestly and helped the Communist Party USA." She met with three members of the Writers' Union and defended Alexander Solzhenitsyn against charges that he had betrayed his country. Day informed her readers that:
Solzhenitsin lives in poverty and has been expelled from the Writers Union and cannot be published in his own country. He is harassed continually, and recently his small cottage in the country has been vandalized and papers destroyed, and a friend of his who went to bring some of his papers to him was seized and beaten.
Day visited the Kremlin, and she reported:
I was moved to see the names of the Americans, Ruthenberg and Bill Haywood, on the Kremlin Wall in Roman letters, and the name of Jack Reed (with whom I worked on the old Masses), in Cyrillac characters in a flower-covered grave.
The individuals mentioned are:
- Ruthenberg was C. E. Ruthenberg, founder of the Communist Party USA.
- Bill Haywood was a key figure in the IWW.
- Jack Reed was the journalist better known as John Reed, author of Ten Days That Shook the World. [JTM: According to Max Eastman in his book Great Companions, Funding for Jack Reed's trip to Moscow was raised by Inez Milholland's widower, Eugen Boissevain, who approached Alva Vanderbilt Belmont, a close friend both of Eugen's late wife Inez Milholland and former employer of Eugen's sister-in-law Anne Boissevain.]
In 1972, the Jesuit magazine America marked her 75th birthday by devoting an entire issue to Day and the Catholic Worker movement. The editors wrote:
If one had to choose a single individual to symbolize the best in the aspiration and action of the American Catholic community during the last forty years, that one person would certainly be Dorothy Day."
Day had supported the work of Cesar Chavez in organizing California farm laborers from the beginning of his campaign in the mid-1960s. She admired him for being motivated by religious inspiration and committed to nonviolence. In the summer of 1973, she joined Cesar Chavez in his campaign for farm laborers in the fields of California. She was arrested with other protesters for defying an injunction against picketing and spent ten days in jail.
Day made her last public appearance at the Eucharistic Congress held on August 6, 1976, in Philadelphia at a service honoring the U.S. Armed Forces on the Bicentennial of the United States. She spoke about reconciliation and penance, and castigated the organizers for failing to recognize that for peace activists August 6 is the day the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, an inappropriate day to honor the military.
Day suffered a heart attack and died on November 29, 1980, at Maryhouse on East 3rd Street in Manhattan. Cardinal Terence Cooke greeted her funeral procession at the Church of the Nativity, the local parish church.
Day's daughter Tamar, the mother of nine children, was with her mother when she died, and she and her father joined the funeral procession and attended a later memorial Mass the cardinal celebrated at St. Patrick's Cathedral; Day and Batterham had remained lifelong friends. After her death,
- Her body was buried in the Cemetery of the Resurrection on Staten Island, just a few blocks from the beachside cottage where she first became interested in Catholicism. Her gravestone is inscribed with the words "Deo Gratias".
- Her body of writings, including letters, was given to Marquette University along with many records of the Catholic Worker movement. The Catholic Worker, which had a circulation of more than 100,000 for some years, reported a circulation of under 30,000 in 2013.
Sainthood Cause
In May 1983, a pastoral letter issued by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, "The Challenge of Peace", noted Dorothy Day's role in establishing non-violence as a Catholic principle:
The nonviolent witness of such figures as Dorothy Day and Martin Luther King has had profound impact upon the life of the Church in the United States.
The probability of Dorothy Day's canonization was increased by
