Dorothy Day Didn't Care Who Occupied the White House, and Neither Should You
Plus: Brian Terrell counsels that to truly love the Church as Dorothy did requires 'permanent dissatisfaction' with its shortcomings.
Happy Thursday to you, and I hope that your morning began with pleasant thoughts about coffee, good weather, seed catalogs proclaiming the gospel of spring…anything but the Current State of Politics or the Current Occupant of the White House and his allies. I hope your morning began pleasantly, but if you’re like me, the C.S.O.P. and the C.O.W.H. have taken up residence in an obnoxiously large portion of your brain lately.
If that’s the case, then I have good news: theologian and Catholic Worker Michael Baxter is here to liberate you, via Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin, from the fiction that partisan politics will ever bring about the just and good society we long for. His essay appears in the latest issue of The Houston Catholic Worker, out just this week.
Brian Terrell is here, too, with an essay addressed to those of us who despair at the state of affairs in the Catholic Church…and those of us who perhaps don’t despair enough at that state of affairs, but instead suffer from an “unhealthy attachment disorder.” To love the Church as Dorothy did, Brian writes, requires a clear-eyed assessment of its shortcomings.
I hope you find both of these essays enlightening; as for me, I need to go turn off NPR before I hear anything else about the Current Occupant’s latest whatever, and go find my Prairie Moon Nursery seed catalog instead, because friends, it’s my happy place.
—Jerry
Living Beyond Politics: A Post-Election Reflection on Dorothy Day
by Michael Baxter
from the January - March issue of The Houston Catholic Worker
As Dorothy saw it, electoral politics was not the true path to social transformation…and no amount of investing voting with mystical significance—it is “our sacred duty”—can change it. But if this is true, how do we chart a path for whatever lies ahead? Michael Baxter has some thoughts.
Last fall, political pundits of various stripes informed us that the upcoming 2024 election would be the most important one of our lifetimes. Never mind that we have been told this every presidential election year in this century—this time it was really true. Many of us heeded the warning, absorbed ourselves in the promises of the political personalities and pundits, and in the aftermath, we are learning once again, that electoral politics is at the same time invigorating and dissipating. And it distracts from the real point of our lives which lies beyond politics—at least politics as conventionally understood. To focus on that point, and to gain a needed transcendent perspective on U.S. politics, there may be no better figure than Dorothy Day, co-founder and unofficial matriarch of the Catholic Worker and a Vatican-approved Servant of God, who had the habit of looking at our earthly affairs, as she would say, in the light of eternity.
To get a sense of Dorothy Day’s view of electoral politics, we should take note of the entry in her personal diary for Wednesday, November 4, 1964, the day after election day that year, about what had just transpired: “Johnson elected.” That was it. Two matter-of-fact words. Nothing more.
She could have written plenty. It was one of the largest landslide presidential elections in US political history. It supposedly spelled the end of Goldwater’s brand of hard-right, pro-nuke, political conservatism. It promised to extend the pragmatic liberalism of Kennedy’s New Frontier by building what Johnson had called earlier that year a “Great Society . . . where no child will go unfed, and no youngster will go unschooled.” As a journalist deeply concerned about justice, peace, and world affairs, Dorothy could have written effusively about LBJ’s effort to defeat poverty. But she jotted down none of this. Why was she so terse about the 1964 election?
The answer lies in Dorthy Day’s longstanding, deeply held beliefs about elections and politics, beliefs that she acquired as a young journalist in New York working for two publications, The Call, a socialist daily paper, then later for a monthly periodical called The Masses. Both periodicals were borne out of “the Old Left,” a label referring to a movement in the early twentieth century dedicated to Marxist diagnoses of the injustices in capitalist society and how these can be overcome by revolution and a transition into a classless society. Although this vision may seem outmoded and dangerous these days, it was embraced by leading intellectuals and journalists around the time of World War I, such as Floyd Dell, Max Eastman, Jack Reed, Emma Goldman, all of whom Dorothy knew. She even met Leon Trotsky who she interviewed for The Call in January 1917, not long before he left New York for Russia to be a part of the revolutionary upheaval there on the front lines of the war. Capturing the historical drama of that spring, Dorothy recalled Trotsky telling a crowd at Cooper Union, “Revolution is brewing in the trenches.” When the Revolution came to pass in Russia the next autumn, Dorothy and her crowd—her comrades, she may have said—were enthralled. She forever waxed eloquent about those youthful days when, so they thought, great things were coming to pass in the world. The old order of Czar was being overthrown. A new order was being established, one that that would put an end to the drudgery and deaths of millions of workers and the poor. In Dorothy’s heart and mind, the heroes of the Old Left were the saints and martyrs of today, living for one another, laying down their lives for workers and the poor. And not only in Russia, but in the United States. Eugene Debs, Big Bill Haywood, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, many others: they all made a deep impression on Dorothy in these early journalistic years.
Dorothy wrote about all this at length in The Long Loneliness, where she also took the time to explain her view among the different intellectual viewpoints that were bandied about in her crowd. She didn’t go in much for the dogmatic Marxists, who believed in waiting for the contradictions of capitalism to play out before launching the Revolution. Nor did she find allies with reform-minded socialists who believed in obtaining a partial measure of justice for workers through mainstream unions, political parties, and the ballot box. Instead, she sided with the radicals of the Industrial Workers of the World, the IWW or “Wobblies,” who opted for direct action to establish the revolutionary society here and now. For Dorothy, this direct-action approach was the most concrete, practical way to fight injustice and forge genuine community.
In short, Dorothy was an anarchist. And not only in her youthful pre-conversion days of the Old Left. She remained an anarchist after her conversion and entry into the Church. Not a bomb-throwing anarchist bent on tearing down society through revolutionary violence, of course. She had become enamored with the Christ of the gospels, teaching us to love our enemies, walking the way of the nonviolent cross, and bestowing on the apostles His gift of peace. She was a Christian, indeed a Catholic anarchist. Thanks to Peter Maurin, she came to see how the Church’s social teaching dovetails implicitly with the IWW’s anarchist vision. The Wobbly slogan, “An injury to one is an injury to all,” can be transformed into our duty to fend for the well-being of all people who are potential members of the Mystical Body of Christ. And the Wobbly adage, “A new society within shell of the old,” can serve as the Catholic Worker’s mission to a world disordered by injustice and needing communities formed by what Dorothy often called “a revolution of the heart.”
In Dorothy’s Catholic anarchist vision, a key part of the collapsing shell of the old society was the state. From her youth she had maintained that the state is a political tool serving the interests of the upper classes, whether it be a monarchy, an autocracy, or even a democracy such as the United States. At the height of the Cold War, Dorothy riled up the readers of The Long Loneliness and of her columns in The Catholic Worker by criticizing the United States for neglecting workers’ rights and the poor at home and for waging imperialist wars abroad. And as always, she matched creed with deed. She refused to pay taxes. She never sought or accepted government money to support the Catholic Worker. She protested U.S. warmaking and was jailed for it several times. And she did not vote.
All of this explains why Dorothy was non-plussed by LBJ’s election back in 1964. As she saw it, electoral politics was not the true path to social transformation, for there exists a chronic disconnect between pulling the lever in the voting booth and pulling the levers of the machinery of the state for the sake of justice and peace. And no amount of investing voting with mystical significance—it is “our sacred duty”—can change it. But if this is true, how do we look at elections, including the most recent one? And how do we chart a path for whatever lies ahead?
I want to suggest three things. First, Dorothy’s anarchism alerts us as to how language is used around election time (which has become virtually all the time) to create the illusion that U.S. politics is based on popular consent. Think of such cliches as “the will of the people,” “free and fair elections,” and “our democracy” as in “we need to protect our democracy.” Such phrases are part of what Noam Chomsky called “the manufacture of consent,” a brilliant, matter-of-fact concept for describing how U.S. politics is presented to us as the result of our choice when in reality our perceptions and desires are already manipulated in manifold and subtle ways by party operatives, advertising agents, management consultants, government bureaucrats, big donors, and television newscasters who welcome into their studios “public intellectuals” to explain the “public affairs” shaping the “public life” of “our Republic.” In other words, we are constantly bombarded with “consensus-fabricating syntax,” as Christopher Hitchens once noted in a book review aptly titled “the ‘we’ fallacy.” His point was that we should be on guard against overusing or misusing the first-person plural pronoun. Stanley Hauerwas has often made much the same point, in a theological and ecclesial sense, by asking, who is the “we”? His point is that there is an identity choice to be made: Is it we Americans or we Christians?
This brings up the second thing Dorothy Day’s anarchism helps us guard against, namely, the partisan captivity of the Church. Catholics regularly decry polarization in the Church, but few see that the problem stems from our near total absorption in U.S. political culture. The absorption process has been underway for a century, but it has accelerated and deepened in the past twenty-five years during which Catholics have roughly split in every national election, though recently they lean more rightward. Until recently, the issues have been sliced and diced along familiar lines: Catholic Democrats are strong on economic justice, racial justice, peace, immigration, and the environment; while conservative Catholics are solid on the life issues, the traditional family, and business. Lately, these alignments have shifted, with Republicans vying for the working class, claiming the mantle of peace, and getting increasingly harsh on immigration. But in any case, extremism has overrun both parties. Thus, Democrats now support abortion with few or no limits and Republicans are planning mass deportations of immigrants. As a result, claims that one party or the other adequately stands for what the Catholic Church teaches have become increasingly implausible. This may seem like an utterly disastrous development for Catholics on both sides of the nation’s widening political divide—that is, for Catholics who fantasized in 2020 that a democratic president would return the Church to its rightful role as the shaper of our “public discourse,” and for those who see the incoming Republican president as the latest opportunity for seizing yet another “Catholic moment.” But the present implausibility of partisan politics actually provides an opening for Catholics who, like Dorothy, do not see consonance but conflict between being American and Catholic, an opening for a more radical approach to what Pope Pius XI called “social reconstruction.”
The third point concerns this more radical, reconstructive approach. As Peter and Dorothy understood it, the word “radical” meant, not just opposing the state, but also going down to the roots of society and taking personal responsibility for social change. This called for translating love into action, which in turn required community. The idea was to forego the politics of the nation-state in order to pursue local forms of community-based work: houses of hospitality and farms, of course, and credit unions, labor unions, neighborhood associations, educational associations, parish pantries, soup kitchens, settlement houses—all kinds of charitable works. With Catholics devoting less time, energy, and money to conventional nation-state politics in the years to come, there will be more time, energy, and money to expand our own charitable works.
Dorothy Day set her sights beyond politics and lived for people beyond politics. She set her sights on God and lived for the people Christ brought to her, the hungry, the thirsty, the sick and imprisoned, the stranger. In the years to come, Christ will continue bringing the poor to us as well—if we receive the grace of setting our sights beyond politics.
Michael J. Baxter, Ph.D., is a Visiting Associate Professor at the McGrath Institute for Church Life. He has taught at Regis University, DePaul University, the University of Dayton, and the University of Notre Dame. He is a co-founder of Andre House and the Peter Claver Catholic Worker, and a board member of Our Lady of the Road.
Dorothy's Permanent Dissatisfaction with the Church: A Model for the Jubilee Year
by Brian Terrell
from the winter 2025 issue of The Sower
“Dorothy’s dissatisfaction with the Church is not in contradiction to her equally emphatic devotion to and love for the Church. It is not a denial or even a qualifier, but an intensifier of that love.”
“How could one remain is such a Church?” asked the Italian author and playwright Ignazio Silone, referencing the silence and complicity of the Catholic Church during the Fascist years of his youth. “That evasion, on the part of the shepherds who had always claimed the moral leadership of their flock, was an intolerable scandal.”
Silone’s American contemporary and cofounder of the Catholic Worker Dorothy Day often expressed her admiration of and affinity with him, even as she joined the same Church that he rejected. Still, Silone’s question was not lost on Dorothy—and in 2025, it should not be lost on us, either.
How could Dorothy remain in the Catholic Church? Theologian and “owner of a Catholic Worker farm” Larry Chapp, in an April 5, 2023, commentary in The National Catholic Register, “Whither the Catholic Worker” equates Dorothy’s “politics” with that of Joseph Ratzinger, a politics, he says, “that was only possible in the light of a robust faith in Christ.” A faith, Chapp says, “without compartmentalized bifurcation between the ‘institutional hierarchical Church’ and the ‘Church of the people.’
“If you do not understand this point about her Catholic faith,” Chapp asserts (“I will be blunt here,” he says) “and how central the totality of this faith was to the entirety of her vision, then you quite simply have no idea who Dorothy Day was.”
From the beginning, though, a “compartmentalized bifurcation” between the “institutional hierarchical Church” and the “Church of the people” was the indispensable anchor that made it possible for Dorothy to enter the Church to begin with and to remain a faithful Catholic for the rest of her life. “I loved the Church for Christ made visible,” she said, “not for itself, because it was so often a scandal to me.”
In her 1938 memoir From Union Square to Rome, Dorothy justified her decision to have her newborn daughter baptized even before her own conversion: “That bitterness felt by so many in the radical labor movement toward what they call ‘organized religion’ was mixed with the knowledge of the divinity of the Catholic Church.” She “could only always console” herself, she wrote, “with Christ’s words that the greatest enemies would be those of the ‘household.’”
The paradoxical comfort that Dorothy got from Jesus’ warning that our worst enemies are of our own household, often paired with the prophet Isaiah’s “in peace is my bitterness most bitter,” was expressed in her writing through the rest of her life. Sometimes applied to bourgeois Catholics in general, occasionally even to her fellow members of the Catholic Worker movement, but most often to the clergy and hierarchs of the Church. As she wrote in 1949:
The scandal of businesslike priests, of collective wealth, the lack of a sense of responsibility for the poor, the worker, the Negro, the Mexican, the Filipino, and even the oppression of these, and the consenting to the oppression of them by our industrialist-capitalist order – these made me feel often that priests were more like Cain than Abel.
It was these enemies, not the Communists, not the abortion advocates, not even fascists nor the industrialists who profit from war and oppression, that Dorothy prayed most fervently for the grace to forgive. “Of all hostilities,” she said, “one of the saddest is the war between clergy and laity.”
On at least one occasion, in her January, 1967 column in The Catholic Worker, Dorothy specifically named one of these enemies of our household, Francis Cardinal Spellman, archbishop of New York, for his support of the United States’ homicidal war on the people of Vietnam:
I can sit in the presence of the Blessed Sacrament and wrestle for that peace in the bitterness of my soul, a bitterness which many Catholics throughout the world feel, and I can find many things in Scripture to console me, to change my heart from hatred to love of enemy. ‘Our worst enemies are those of our own household,’ Jesus said… As to the Church, where else shall we go, except to the Bride of Christ, one flesh with Christ? Though she is a harlot at times, she is our Mother.
Kate Hennessy, in her 2017 biography, Dorothy Day: The World Will Be Saved by Beauty: An Intimate Portrait of My Grandmother confessed, “I turned away from the Worker, and I turned away from the Church, for without the Catholic Worker, the Catholic Church made no sense to me.”
Reading Dorothy’s accounts in her memoirs and letters of events surrounding her conversion in 1927 up until she met Peter Maurin, with whom she would cofound the Catholic Worker five years later, it appears that without the Catholic Worker, the Catholic Church might have made little sense to Dorothy in the long run, either.
The lives of the saints as they are passed on to us are often marked by a distinct pre-and post- conversion division, from being lost to being found, from despair to joy. Dorothy’s conversion did not follow this pattern. In her 1952 memoir The Long Loneliness, Dorothy wrote about her conversion:
I was just as much against capitalism and imperialism as ever, and here I was going over to the opposition, because of course the Church was lined up with property, with the wealthy, with the state, with capitalism, with all the forces of reaction. This I had been taught to think and this I still think to a great extent.
And in From Union Square to Rome, she wrote: “I had become convinced that I would become a Catholic, and yet I felt I was betraying the class to which I belonged, the workers, the poor of the world, the class which Christ most loved and spent His life with.”
Dorothy’s conversion brought her little immediate consolation. In From Union Square to Rome, she described the day of her conditional baptism in December 1927 in this way:
all the way on the ferry through the foggy bay I felt grimly that I was being too precipitate. I had no sense of peace, no joy, no conviction even that what I was doing was right. It was just something that I had to do, a task to be gotten through. I doubted myself when I allowed myself to think. I hated myself for being weak and vacillating. A most consuming restlessness was upon me so that I walked around and around the deck of the ferry, almost groaning in anguish of spirit.
Today there is a ferry that crosses that bay between Manhattan and Staten Island named for her, the Dorothy Day, but at the time she suspected “perhaps the devil was on the boat.”
In The Long Loneiless, she wrote, “I had no particular joy in partaking of these three sacraments, Baptism, Penance, and Holy Eucharist. I proceeded about my own active participation in them grimly, coldly, making acts of faith, and certainly with no consolation whatsoever.”
It is in her letters to Forster, the man she loved and father of her child (collected in All the Way to Heaven, 2010) who could not abide her conversion and would not agree to marry her, that the cost that she paid by becoming Catholic can be understood. At times she pleaded with him, giving assurances that if they married “the ceremony is as simple as that of going before a justice of the peace” and that he only had to agree to allow her to raise their daughter in the Church: “Religion would be intruded on you in no way except to see me go to church once a week, and five times a year on various saints’ days. I would have nothing around the house to jar upon you- no pictures or books.”
“I speak of this misery of leaving one love,” she confided in The Long Loneliness, “but there was another love, too, the life that I had led in the radical movement.” Dorothy knew of no Catholics who were involved in the struggle that had consumed her life to that point, and she found no community in parochial Catholicism that could draw her. After five years in the Church, she noted, she “still did not know personally one Catholic layman.”
In late 1932, Dorothy was in Washinton, D.C., to cover a Communist-led hunger march of farmers, veterans and unemployed workers for Commonweal magazine. “Where was the Catholic leadership in the gathering of the bands of men and women together, for the actual works of mercy that the comrades had always made part of the technique in reaching the workers?” she asked.
When the march was over, before returning home to New York, on December 8, the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, Dorothy went to the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception. She knelt there to pray “with tears and with anguish, that some way would open up for me to use what talents I possessed for my fellow workers, for the poor.”
When Dorothy arrived home the next day, December 9, Peter Maurin was waiting to meet her at her door. The day after that, on December 10, Dorothy wrote to Forster, “I have really given up hope now, so I won’t try to persuade you anymore.” Five months later, on May 1, 1933, the first issue of The Catholic Worker was distributed to workers at a demonstration in Union Square.
“I found myself, a barren woman, the joyful mother of children,” Dorothy wrote in her postscript to The Long Loneliness, even as she admitted that “it is not always easy to be joyful, to keep in mind the duty of delight.”
She continued:
The most significant thing about The Catholic Worker is poverty, some say. The most significant thing is community, others say. We are not alone anymore. But the final word is love. At times it has been, in the words of Father Zossima, a harsh and dreadful thing, and our very faith in love has been tried through fire. We cannot love God unless we love each other, and to love we must know each other. We know him in the breaking of bread, and we are not alone any more. Heaven is a banquet and life is a banquet, too, even with a crust, where there is companionship.
Without the sustenance of companionship that the Catholic Worker offered, without that way open for her to use her talents for her fellow workers, for the poor, could the Catholic Church have continued to make sense for Dorothy? We cannot know, but as a Catholic who has been with the Catholic Worker for fifty years now, I know that without the Catholic Worker, the Church would make no sense to me at all.
“Church is the Cross on which Christ was crucified; one could not separate Christ from his Cross, and one must live in a state of permanent dissatisfaction with the Church.” Dorothy rarely cited theologians, taking more inspiration as she did from novelists, poets, saints and mystics, but this often-repeated admonition by Romano Guardini seemed to haunt her. Dorothy’s dissatisfaction with the Church is not in contradiction to her equally emphatic devotion to and love for the Church. It is not a denial or even a qualifier, but an intensifier of that love.
With Guardini, Dorothy offers dissatisfaction not as an acceptable option for some, but as an imperative. One must be dissatisfied with it, or one does not really love the Church at all. As with any other love—filial, romantic or patriotic—love for the Church requires honest appraisal of the loved one’s faults and sins, otherwise it is not love, but simply an unhealthy attachment disorder.
It was in love that Dorothy could call out and name the “worst enemies” without expelling them from her “household” or leaving it herself.
We can choose to leave the Church as Ignazio Silone did or we can stay with it, permanently dissatisfied, as Romano Guardini and Dorothy Day chose, but to remain in it happy and comfortable, complacent and blind to its many scandals, is not a moral choice at all.
The choice today is even clearer. We know more now. We can choose to leave the Church as Ignazio Silone did or we can stay with it, permanently dissatisfied, as Romano Guardini and Dorothy Day chose, but to remain in it happy and comfortable, complacent and blind to its many scandals, is not a moral choice at all.
In announcing 2025 as a year of Jubilee, Pope Francis said:
We must fan the flame of hope that has been given us and help everyone to gain new strength and certainty by looking to the future with an open spirit, a trusting heart and far-sighted vision. The forthcoming Jubilee can contribute greatly to restoring a climate of hope and trust as a prelude to the renewal and rebirth that we so urgently desire....
If this is a reassurance, it is also a challenge to be accepted if the Church is to make any sense in the future.
Brian Terrell is a longtime Catholic Worker, peace activist, and farmer who lives at Strangers and Guests Catholic Worker in Maloy, Iowa, with his wife, Betsy Keenan…and a goat named Krampus.
About us. Roundtable covers the Catholic Worker Movement. This week’s Roundtable was produced by Jerry Windley-Daoust and Renée Roden. Art by Monica Welch at DovetailInk. Roundtable is an independent publication not associated with the New York Catholic Worker or The Catholic Worker newspaper. Send inquiries to roundtable@catholicworker.org.
Subscription management. Add CW Reads, our long-read edition, by managing your subscription here. Need to unsubscribe? Use the link at the bottom of this email. Need to cancel your paid subscription? Find out how here. Gift subscriptions can be purchased here.
Paid subscriptions. Paid subscriptions are entirely optional; free subscribers receive all the benefits that paid subscribers receive. Paid subscriptions fund our work and cover operating expenses. If you find Substack’s prompts to upgrade to a paid subscription annoying, email roundtable@catholicworker.org and we will manually upgrade you to a comp subscription.