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Living the Gospel on the streets of Dorothy Day’s New York

Dorothy Day, co-founder of the Catholic Worker Movement, is pictured in an undated photo. (CNS photo/courtesy Milwaukee Journal)

This article first appeared in Our Sunday Visitor magazine. Subscribe to receive the monthly magazine here.

A character in the novel “Harrow” by the end-times-minded author Joy Williams says that “we all lead three lives, the true one and the false one and what is the third?” I thought of the line recently leaving the Catholic Worker Maryhouse in New York’s East Village, while feeling uplifted and suffused with faith. The three-story, red-painted brick Maryhouse, along with St. Joseph’s House and the Catholic Worker newspaper, represents the surviving physical legacy in New York City of activist Dorothy Day, currently a candidate for sainthood and beacon of grace in the city. Maryhouse offers a place for homeless women to shower and serves free, home-cooked lunches four days a week. It’s also a relic of an older, poorer East Village. The streets outside its doors are abuzz with City Bikes (from the city’s bicycle share system) and lined with cafés serving things like vegan chia seed croissants and aperol spritzes. My usual life is this one — the false one, I suspect — and Day’s, serving the poor, is the true one. The third thing, she thought, is grace.

Day was a communist, anarchist and social justice advocate, born in 1897 (she moved to New York City in 1916), who believed that “people should be fed, housed and clothed out of personal sacrifice,” according to Catholic Worker Jim Reagan, whom I spoke with during my visit to the house. Her concern was with the world of the poor that lies beneath — or perhaps floats above — the fast, expensive world with the vegan croissants. Yet in 1927, faith drove her into the arms of the Catholic Church, which she considered to be — at least partially — an institution for the wealthy and powerful.

“I felt that the Church was the church of the poor, that St. Patrick’s had been built from the pennies of servant girls,” she wrote in her autobiography, “The Long Loneliness.” “But at the same time I felt that it did not set its face against a social order which made so much charity in the present sense of the word necessary.” Day longed “to make a synthesis” between radicalism and Catholicism, and eventually, in 1933, she and co-founder Peter Maurin created the Catholic Worker newspaper, organized and run along anarchist principles and still published today — an issue still costs 1¢ and no one is in charge. Shortly afterwards, they founded the first of many Catholic Worker houses to care directly for people in need. Almost miraculously, given the tumult of progress in New York City, the mission has physically and spiritually endured for 45 years after her death and continues to draw new adherents. Wider interest in Day at this time — through subscribing to the Catholic Worker newspaper, joining the Dorothy Day Guild, seeking Day’s intercession and reporting any miracles that occur, or merely making the pilgrimage to sites associated with her life — provides valuable support to her candidacy for sainthood.

The best way to encounter Day in today’s New York is “volunteering at the house and attending Mass,” her granddaughter Martha Hennessy told me. “Maryhouse is where she died, and I feel her presence there,” Hennessy added. Maryhouse and St. Joseph’s House are a few blocks apart and, though both are active residences, anyone can knock on the door to see the public areas. (For volunteering opportunities, call ahead.) Maryhouse currently has 25 adult residents, eight of whom are volunteers, while the rest are formerly homeless adults, many with mental health or medical issues. St. Joseph’s House is men-only and currently houses a slightly smaller population in dormitory-style accommodations.

“When we take someone in, we know that it could be for life,” says Jim Reagan, who has lived as a volunteer at St. Joseph’s House for 21 years. Some might call this impractical or inefficient, but, Jim explains, “it’s not just charity; we’re trying to change society.” The Catholic Worker also holds the following events, which are open to all: regular Friday night “clarification of thought” meetings at Maryhouse, regular weekend pacifist vigils and occasional Masses.

Love and sacrifice

Outside the Maryhouse doors, a pilgrimage to other sites in Dorothy Day’s life gave me further insight into her legacy. In 1917, Day was a thin, sharp-jawed teenager, poor but beautifully dressed, who had been kicked out of her family home for going to work at The New York Call, a Socialist newspaper. She lived in a room rented from an Orthodox Jewish family in a tenement on Cherry Street, read Upton Sinclair and Dostoyevsky, and drank all night at the Golden Swan pub on Sixth Avenue, which everyone called the Hell Hole. Day’s circle was always literary and intellectual. In later years she was friends with poets Alan Tate and Hart Crane. During her Hell-Hole phase, Eugene O’Neill was in love with her. Sometimes she brought O’Neill home with her after a night of drinking. Other times, standing on the misty avenue outside the bar, she saw St. Joseph’s Church in Greenwich Village a few blocks away and followed the Irish and Italian laborers in for early-morning Mass, acting on complex feelings she didn’t yet understand.

Maryhouse currently has 25 adult residents, eight of whom are volunteers, while the rest are formerly homeless adults, many with mental health or medical issues. (Courtesy photo)

Day, who was not raised with any particular religion, converted to Catholicism only a decade later, when she’d moved to rural and idyllic Huguenot Beach on Staten Island and was living in what she called a common-law marriage with Forster Batterham, an anarchist biologist and early green revolutionary, and had borne him a child. In her autobiography, Day writes that, despite her and Batterham’s profound love for each other, they split up over her conversion: She, as a Catholic, was required to marry him; he, as an anarchist, wouldn’t do it. The realities might have been more complicated, but the results were that the couple separated, Day took their daughter, and a short time later met mentor Peter Maurin, with whom she founded the Catholic Worker.

Still standing amid change

The Dorothy Day Guild, the organization overseeing the cause for Day’s canonization, lists on its website a walking tour organized in collaboration with Manhattan University of various sites from these years, including the address of the former Golden Swan, now a small city park, and the address of St. Joseph’s Church, which is still in existence in its original building and has the only 24-hour adoration chapel in Manhattan. The tour also offers addresses on Staten Island, such as the Cemetery of the Resurrection, where Day is buried beneath a humble ground marker near the entrance, and whose chapel has a stained glass window in her honor.

Most addresses on the tour, however, lead to locations where the original buildings have been demolished — a situation that ironically reveals Day’s strength and spirit better than a landmark building might. Some of the change is ordinary New York City churn — the first Catholic Worker office location at the intersection of 15th Street and 1st Avenue in Manhattan is an anonymous corner with a Chase Bank on one side — but some is not. On Staten Island, the bungalow Day lived in from 1972 until her death in 1980 was in Spanish Camp, an independent anarchist community that refused city services and had operated communally since 1923. In 2000, the anarchists’ heirs failed to carry on the founders’ vision — unlike Day’s Catholic Workers — and sold out to a developer. The new owner promptly displaced the homeowners and destroyed the bungalow Day had lived in, despite (or perhaps because of) its earmarking for historic landmark status.

Many of the churches from Day’s time have met a similar fate: Of a list of nine churches and chapels culled from “The Long Loneliness,” only one is open in its original building (St. Joseph’s), while six have been shuttered and/or demolished, a result both of financial pressures and the long, slow decline in religious observance. Two avenue-blocks away from Maryhouse, the Church of the Holy Redeemer, a German Baroque masterpiece built in 1852 and one of New York City’s loveliest places of worship, is an example. In August 2024, it lost its dedicated priest and had its administration — it was already a combined parish — consolidated under that of yet another parish; its long-term fate is unknown. Holy Redeemer was never Day’s main church, and its address isn’t listed on the guild website, but a shrine to her near its entrance makes it a highly recommended unofficial stop.

That a handful of anti-authoritarian people living in voluntary poverty and providing direct charity have remained standing when so much else has fallen is a powerful testimony to the holiness of Day’s vision and to the spirit of the fishermen who put down their nets to follow Christ. Father Joseph Ratzinger (who became Pope Benedict XVI), in his 1958 lecture “The New Pagans and the Church,” identified the weakness in a Catholic Church that had become rich, powerful and omnipresent, but whose adherents were lacking in faith. He recommended that the Church “should again be turned into a community of conviction,” which would require that she abandon her wealth — a process he correctly predicted would be happening soon, by choice or not. Ratzinger believed that only “the witness of small, zealous communities,” would bring people back to the Church. Day’s community, especially in its voluntary poverty, seems to fit the demand.

Inspiring fresh voices

Some fresh voices in Catholicism today are inspired by Dorothy Day. Stephen Adubato, 32, epitomizes the trend of resurgent Catholicism among culturally sophisticated young people. Adubato writes an influential Substack on religion and contemporary culture called Cracks in Postmodernity that lists Dorothy Day as one of its ideological influences, along with feminist thinker Camille Paglia and Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor. Stephen told me that he reveres Dorothy Day, “because of her commitment to social progress married to esteem for the wisdom of Catholicism’s political, moral and spiritual precepts.”

The USCCB unanimously voted to endorse Dorothy Day’s cause for canonization in 2012, as her case was sent to the Vatican in 2021. Over 50,000 pages of documents must be scrutinized by the Vatican before making the announcement that would lead to the next step in Servant of God Dorothy Day’s process. (Courtesy photo)

Day’s ministry grows elsewhere as well. On Staten Island, Deborah Susich, 49, a consecrated virgin for the Diocese of Brooklyn, has started a new chapter of the Catholic Worker on Staten Island (anyone can start one, as a matter of anarchist principal), which currently serves a monthly free meal to the homeless and has launched a program to move people off the streets and into housing. “There was no Catholic faith-based organization helping the poor on Staten Island,” Susich told me, adding that she felt the call to honor Day’s legacy by founding one there. “My call to religious life has put it in my heart to want to serve the poor,” Susich explained. She was drawn to Day because “of her deep Catholic faith” and because of “the spirituality behind the movement,” she said. “It’s really about the spiritual and corporal acts of mercy; it attempts to live out the Gospel in a more radical way.”

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops unanimously voted to endorse Day’s cause for canonization in 2012; her case was sent to the Vatican in 2021, which must scrutinize over 50,000 pages of documents before making the announcement that would lead to the next step in the process. In the meantime, her charitable mission is more necessary than ever.

I ended my Day exploration day at the Golden Swan Garden, a small city park on the site of the former bar, from which you can still see the original St. Joseph’s Church building a few blocks north. I’d hoped to photograph the church from the park, but couldn’t do so without disturbing the several people without homes who appeared to be living there, a different population than the one Dorothy Day ministered to, but one whose need she would recognize.