For a long time I have admired Dorothy Day as a modern day saint. She was a normal human being who made moral mistakes during her life yet came to a point where she was able to devote her life to her religious principles. For me, love of God has been a lot easier then the second commandment of love of neighbor. Love of God allows me to have a telephone booth relationship with God. I go in the booth, close the door and talk to God long distance by myself. But love of neighbor means I have to actually put into practice a loving relationship with other people, especially those I don’t like or they don’t like me. That’s tough. Dorothy spent her adult life, some fifty years, putting into practice loving compassion for the down and out, drunks, mentally unstable people and people who were hard to love. She lived a life of active non violence, poverty and prayer while housing and feeding the poor and homeless and raising a child as a single mother.

Religion has always had a tendency to favor rules over interior motive and thought. External rules are easy to follow – church on Sunday, donating money etc, but living the spirit of the law is challenging. Love of neighbor is an all encompassing difficult obligation. Jesus condemned the legalistic religion of his time and instead preached the two great commandments of love of God and love of neighbor. The interior intention of good motive was his message as more important then compliance with external religious rules of liturgy. Gary Wills makes this point in his book What Paul Meant. Wills writes:

"The worship of God is a matter of interior love, not based on external observances, on temples or churches, on hierarchies or priesthoods. Both were at odds with those who impose the burdens of ‘religion’ and punish those tho try to escape them…They were on the side of the poor and saw through the rich. They saw only two basic moral duties, love of God and love of the neighbor. ..Paul meant what Jesus meant, that love is the only law."

I do not suggest that membership and participation in an organized religion is wrong or unnecessary. I participate in my Catholic church religion. What I do suggest is that all religions tend to evolve into a set of ritualistic rules to the disadvantage of interior intentions. Compliance with the rules seems sufficient irrespective of the motives and intentions of the person. Justification by works seems as incomplete to me as justification by faith. Faith without works is meaningless in my view as is works without faith. It is the blend of these two which makes a complete and balanced spirit. However, we must not think we have satisfied the teachings of Jesus when we follow external legalistic rules without regard to the requirement of internal intention and application of the spirit of the law of love of God and neighbor.

Dorothy is one person who lived the spirit of the Gospels. Unlike some ancient picture perfect saint who never did anything wrong, her life is one I relate to. She began her adult life as a Communist when, as a young woman, she moved to New York as a writer for left wing publications. She wrote articles supporting the worker, birth control, women and the poor. She did such things as picket the White House on behalf of women’s rights, resulting in her arrest and a month in jail. In her autobiography, The Long Loneliness, Dorothy writes about her feelings which led to her Communist beliefs during her college days:

"There was Eugene Debs. There were the Haymarket martyrs who had been "framed" and put to death in Chicago in 1887. They were martyrs! They had died for a cause. . . . There had been in the past the so-called "Molly Maguires" in the coal fields, a terrorist organization, and the Knights of Labor, made up of union men working for the eight-hour day and the co-operative system. My heart thrilled at those unknown women in New England who led the first strike to liberate women and children from the cotton mills.

Dropping out of college for lack of money, she lived with a series of men, became pregnant and had an abortion. She married once but it only lasted a year and then ended in divorce. Then she began living with someone she loved, Forster Batterham, an English Botanist who was an anarchist and an atheist. He was opposed to marriage and religion. But over time Dorothy had a developing belief in God.("How can there be no God," she asked, "when there are all these beautiful things.") He was not happy about her religious ideas and it caused controversy between them. She became pregnant by Batterham, but he objected to bringing a child into the evil world. She refused his demands to get an abortion which caused them to become more estranged. By then she was leaning strongly to joining the Catholic Church because she said she saw it as the "church of the poor." Her decision to keep the baby resulted in the final breakup of the relationship with Batterham, which caused her a great deal of pain and was a courageous decision for her to make because she loved him. Later, when she was twenty eight years old, Dorothy was baptized in the Catholic Church and moved to New York.

There she was introduced to Peter Maurin who was a former Christian Brother who had immigrated from France. He was twenty years older then Dorothy. He had spent his time supporting himself as a handyman and living a Franciscan life of poverty, celibacy and prayer. His teaching to her about actually living the spirit of the Gospel inspired Dorothy. She became faithful in attending daily Mass and in her daily prayer life. In 1933, the two of them began publication of the Catholic Worker with Peter Maurin and Dorothy writing the articles. The paper advocated the rights of the worker to a living wage, religious views and pacifism. The paper was distributed by volunteers and it led to people in need coming to them for help. Dorothy’s apartment became a place of hospitality for the poor and homeless. But the need was great enough they decided to rent an apartment with room for ten women. After that another location was found for men. Buildings were rented with donated money and proceeds from the paper where people were fed and given a place to stay. Volunteers helped prepare soup from donated food, but without any government assistance.

All were welcome and there was no attempt to preach religion. The staff were unpaid volunteers who received food and board. The idea spread and similar Catholic Worker Houses were opened across the country staffed by volunteers. By 1936 there were over thirty such houses around the country. With the depression there was no limit to the number of people seeking help. When asked how long people were allowed to stay in these shelters Dorothy said: "They live with us. They die with us and we give them a Christian burial…They are our brothers and sisters in Christ."

It was Dorothy’s unwavering belief in pacifism that caused the most controversy. Dorothy saw this as the heart of the Gospel. It was when WW II began her position became the most controversial. She refused to budge from the principle that violence and war was evil and immoral. As a result the movement lost financial support and some of the houses closed for lack of donations. Young men who accepted her view and refused to serve in the military were put in work camps or in prison. Dorothy’s non violent belief remained constant throughout her life as did her support of the worker. In the 1950’s she was active in protesting nuclear weapons. Between 1955 and 1959 she was arrested several times and put in jail four times. She was even jailed in her seventies for her support of the farm workers.

She often was in trouble with Catholic Church authorities, but she found a way of compliance which often resulted in a change of heart on the part of Church leaders. One of the most public was with Cardinal Francis Spellman, of New York when the grave diggers of Catholic Calvary Cemetery unionized and went on strike in 1949. The strike was crushed by Spellman who ordered seminarians to take over the work. During the month long strike Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker supported strikers and she and volunteers joined the strikers. Causing the Cardinal to make threats about sanctions against the paper and the Work Houses, but in the end in spite of the confrontation, the Cardinal developed deep respect for Dorothy.

Throughout her life her Worker Houses continued to be totally supported by donations without financial assistance from government which she believed would compromise the purpose for which they had been created. She totally trusted that God would provide giving the last of the money to some needy person with the belief it would somehow be replaced and it always was. Her personal life was one of prayer and personal participation in cooking, cleaning and feeding the poor alongside volunteers.

During her work with Peter Maurin Dorothy was also caring for her child who lived and worked with her until marrying. Nor was she perfect. She was a normal person with normal problems. Smoking was a habit she struggled with. She prayed for several years "Dear God, help me stop smoking" without success until one day she realized she didn’t want another cigarette. But her life was one of constant caring for the poor, women’s rights, the worker, the homeless along with constant prayer.

Before she died, she was recognized late in her life, for her piety and her work for the poor. Even Mother Theresa of Calcutta made a visit to see her. In 1980 she died at age 83, never marrying again. She didn’t have enough money to pay for her funeral. Money to bury her had to be raised. She died as she had lived, a life of prayer, poverty and devotion to her neighbor. At the request of New York Cardinal O’Connor the Vatican in 2000 agreed to authorize the investigation of canonization of Dorothy.