The inspiring life of an 'everyday' saint

Dorothy Day: Champion of the poor
By Elaine Murray Stone
New York: Paulist Press, 2004

Reviewed by Lorraine Land

There are many long and very serious biographies of Catholic activist and visionary Dorothy Day. This book is not one of them.  In Dorothy Day: Champion of the Poor, Elaine Murray Stone provides a very concise and readable biography of Day’s complex life and ideas.

Dorothy Day has been called the most influential Catholic lay person of the twentieth century.  Day co-founded (with Peter Maurin) the Catholic Worker movement, a network of houses across North America that provide hospitality for the poor and emphasize communal living, pacifism and simplicity. Day and Maurin began the Catholic Worker newspaper in depression-era New York. The newspaper advocated for social change, the rights of workers and the need for a “Christian revolution” of love, justice and peace, and grew quickly to a circulation of 130,000. Within short order, the first Catholic Worker house began, feeding and housing the poor and unemployed showing up on the paper’s doorstep. Eventually, the successful paper and resulting donations led to other Catholic Worker houses, farms and retreat centres, including many started by others following Day’s example. Hundreds of young men and women flocked then (and now) to the Catholic Worker houses of hospitality, living in voluntary poverty and sharing the shelter, food, clothing (and even beds) with the poor and marginalized, thus living out Day’s vision of simplicity, voluntary poverty and radical love for the poor.

Stone’s book provides more than an overview of Day’s fascinating journey from wild and tempetous youth to conversion to Catholicism to radical activism as an advocate for the poor and marginalized. Stone also provides a helpful overview of Day’s impact on religious, peace and activist movements of the past century, including her role in starting the movement for silent spiritual retreats for Catholic laity, her influence on the peace movement, and eventually her influence on 21st century Catholic theology.

My favourite part of this book is a surprising jewel near the end: a chapter in which Stone concisely and lucidly writes about the spiritual influences on Day. Stone notes at the beginning of the chapter that many people support causes and devote their lives to helping the poor. What made Day stand out was her devoted service to the destitute, her courageous living out of her ideals, and her spiritual strength which made her an inspiration and advisor to thousands.  This chapter traces the source of Day’s own spiritual strength and inspiration.

Stone also traces the movement, before and after Day’s death, to canonize Day. When it was suggested to Day that she was a modern saint, she famously retorted, “Don’t call me a saint. I don’t want to be dismissed so easily.”).  As Stone rightly points out, Day was not the picture of a stereotypical meek and unassuming female saint – she was unsentimental and unrelenting in her radical love for the poor.  She may or may not eventually be canonized, but she will always be an ‘everyday’ saint of the bum, the homeless, the prostitute, the dirty, the unwanted, the drunk and the hopeless. She was a successful journalist and published author, eventually regarded in awe by millions, yet she continued to live in voluntary poverty. She refused to treat poverty and misery as an abstract problem, instead attending personally to those in front of her and their real and immediate needs and refusing to dismiss the pooor as undeserving of unconditional love and mercy.

Sometimes I feel overwhelmed by the social change needed in the world, and at my ability to do anything about it.  Dorothy Day has been an inspiration to me at those moments.  Day’s life’s work and writing help the rest of us better understand the importance of living out justice, peace and love in the small everyday things of life, and provide an inspiring and clear call to community, simplicity and pacifism. Stone provides a very readable introduction to Day’s life and those ideas.

Lorraine Land lives in Iqaluit, Nunavut where she works as a legal and constitutional advisor to the Nunavut government. She lived in the Toronto Catholic Worker community from 1995 to 2007.