Catholic activist and Servant of God Dorothy Day (November 8, 1897 – November 29, 1980) was born in the same decade as others who labored to direct the world's gaze on the working poor and homeless. But while George Orwell wrote journals on what he witnessed among the down-and-out, and John Steinbeck created unforgettable characters with his epics, Day pursued human rights in journalism and unrelenting, non-violent activism.

Day’s life (pending posthumous canonization) was one of tolerance, conviction, and tireless work. Her profound and boundless empathy for others was developed at an extremely young age. She held an expansive feeling that all humans were genuinely equal; therefore, human rights and even ways of life should reflect that. She came to desire, as she memorably described, a "union" with her fellow men. 

Dorothy Day, 1916.

Given Day's long history as a Catholic and as the founder of the Catholic Worker's Movement, one might assume that religion was the source of her early humanity, but it was not yet part of her life. Day's parents were Protestant, but she grew up without strong faith. However, their parenting instilled "a sense of right and wrong" and the presence of something omniscient, which she called "God."

We did not search for God when we were children. We took Him for granted. We were at some time taught to say our evening prayers. "Now I lay me," and "Bless my father and mother." This done, we prayed no more unless a thunderstorm made us hide our heads under the covers and propitiate the Deity by promising to be good. Very early, we had a sense of right and wrong, good and evil. My conscience was very active. There were ethical concepts and religious concepts. To steal cucumbers from Miss Lynch's garden on Cropsey Avenue was wrong. It was also wrong to take money from my mother, without her knowledge, for a soda. What a sense of property rights we had as children! Mine and yours! It begins in us as infants. "This is mine." When we are very young, just taking it makes it mine. Possession is nine points of the law. As infants squabbling in the nursery, we were strong in this possessive sense. In the nursery might made right.

A heightened conscience and the freedom to pursue knowledge of whatever she wanted allowed Day's young mind to expand and test itself. She spent hours in the family attic and one day got ahold of the Bible. Reading it was an experience that shaped her respect for the Christian faith.

In Berkeley, we lived in a house with an attic, and I spent hours one rainy Sunday afternoon reading the Bible. I remember nothing that I read, just the sense of holiness in holding the book in my hands. I did not know then that the Word in the Book and the Word in the flesh of Christ's humanity were the same, but I felt I was handling something holy.

Day's father was rarely home, but his presence was felt; his work as the sports editor at a San Francisco newspaper inspired Day, much later, to use journalism as the primary amplifier for her convictions. In 1906, the Day family lived through the San Francisco earthquake and experienced what Rebecca Solnit would later categorize as an "uprising of new and equalized social networks." Day remembered vividly, "All the neighbors joined my mother in serving the homeless."

The post-disaster community response shaped Day's understanding of what a caring society could look like. People opened their homes and gave out their belongings with altruism and grace. Day expected this, in her heart, of all societies.

When her father lost his job after the earthquake (the building he worked in was destroyed and the jobs with it), the Days moved from California to Chicago, where Dorothy began to pursue religion more seriously, spent much time alone, and met life's resistance with fortitude and determination.

The literature of the Bible, Psalms in particular, provided the melody to her heart's longing song.

Whenever I felt the beauty of the world in song or story, in the material universe around me, or glimpsed it in human love, I wanted to cry out with joy. The Psalms were an outlet for this enthusiasm of joy or grief-and I suppose my writing was also an outlet. After all, one must communicate ideas. I always felt the common unity of our humanity; the longing of the human heart is for this communion. If only I could sing, I thought, would shout before the Lord and call upon the world to shout with me, "All ye works of the Lord, bless ye the Lord, praise Him, and glorify Him forever." My idea of heaven became one of fields and meadows, sweet with flowers, songs, and melodies unutterable, in which even the laughing gull and the waves on the shore would play their part.

The Day family had intermittent poverty owing to their increasing brood and the father's unstable employment. When she was fourteen, Dorothy Day read Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. She felt intimately connected to its journalist/novel form of literature, which detailed the inhuman working conditions at Chicago's meat processing plants. Day took long walks around Chicago's neighborhoods, imagining the plight of the workers and seeing the people who lived in her city.

I felt, even at fifteen, that God meant man to be happy, that He meant to provide him with what he needed to maintain life to be happy, and that we did not need to have quite so much destitution and misery as I saw all around and read of in the daily press. From my earliest remembrance, the destitute were always looked upon as the shiftless, the worthless, and those without the talent of any kind, let alone the ability to make a living for themselves. They were that way because of their fault. They chose their lot. They drank. They were the prodigal sons who were eating the swines' husks only because they had squandered their inheritance.

[...]

On the one hand, there were the religious people I had come up against in church, and there were a few who had enough money so that they did not have to bother about the things of this world. There were also worldlings, the tycoons, the people I read about who piled up fortunes and cornered wheat and exploited the workers in the stockyards.

The primary contradiction of Day's early life was her literal interpretation of what she supposed the Christian faith called for people to do, compared with what she saw people of faith actually doing.

Children look at things very directly and simply. I did not see anyone taking off his coat and giving it to the poor. I didn't see anyone having a banquet and calling in the lame, the halt, and the blind. And those who were doing it, like the Salvation Army, did not appeal to me. I wanted, though I did not know it then, a synthesis. I wanted life, and I wanted an abundant life. I wanted it for others, too. I did not want just the few, the missionary-minded people like the Salvation Army, to be kind to the poor, as the poor. I wanted everyone to be kind. I wanted every home to be open to the lame, the halt, and the blind as it had been after the San Francisco earthquake. Only then did people really live, really love their brothers. In such love was the abundant life, and I did not have the slightest idea how to find it.

Day saw Catholicism's idealized meekness and joy in significant conflict with the need to take decisive action in the face of poverty. Day faced this dilemma head-on after her family moved to New York and saw a sort of poverty that she could neither forget nor ignore.

The poverty of New York was appallingly different from that of Chicago. The very odors were different. The sight of homeless and workless men lounging on street corners or sleeping in doorways in broad sunlight appalled me. The sight of cheap lodging houses, dingy restaurants, the noise of subways and elevated railways, and the clanging of streetcars jarred my senses. Above all, the smell from the tenements, coming up from basements and areaways from dank halls, horrified me. It is a smell like no other in the world, and one never can become accustomed to it. I have lived with these smells for many years, but they will always affront me. I shall never cease to be indignant over the conditions that give rise to them. There is a smell in the walls of such tenements, a damp ooze coming from them in the halls. One's very clothes smell of it. It is not the smell of life but the smell of the grave.

Finding herself once again quite alone, Day again walked the streets and wanted to go and live among the poor: "In some mysterious way, I felt that I would never be freed from the burden of loneliness and sorrow unless I did." Shortly after the family moved to New York, Day left her family home to go to work and live in the world. She rejected her faith and subsequently re-founded it, but her path throughout was guided by her supreme desire to harmonize with all living things. To lift and exalt and equalize: "All beauty, all joy, all music thrilled my heart and my flesh, so that they cried out for fulfillment, for union."

Dorothy Day, head of Catholic Worker inside the worker office at 175 Christie St. Photo by Judd Mehlman for the NY Daily News.

Dorothy Day's 1952 autobiography The Long Loneliness is the story of Day's complex faith, romantic and maternal love, and what it was like to live a life of social action and radical resistance without internal contradiction. It gives her a tender comparison between writing and confession and sheds light on what it was like to fight and be imprisoned as a young woman. My article scratches the surface of Dorothy Day's wondrous existence. Still, I hope that by focusing on the root of her vast empathy, we begin to understand how an utter conviction of the Gospel word could reconcile with living a life of action, defense of the poor, and objection to systems that perpetuated inequality and injustice. Such was Day's one and only life.