“Do Something:” A Reflection on the Activism of Dorothy Day

Post Author: Jane Moran

I am a longtime reader of Commonweal, the Catholic magazine on religion and politics founded in 1924. This past June, as conflict between Iran and Israel escalated and rumors swirled about potential US involvement, I opened my email inbox and clicked on the latest edition of Commonweal’s newsletter. It was about Dorothy Day, the 20th-century social activist who is now a candidate for sainthood in the Catholic Church.

When I was a local church pastor, members of my congregation volunteered every month at the Dorothy Day Hospitality House. The Dorothy Day Hospitality House of Danbury, CT, like many other Dorothy Day Houses around the country, has been supporting the unhoused community for decades.

For some, that legacy of service is the first thing they think of when they hear Dorothy Day’s name. Others associate her name with the often-radical politics of the Catholic Worker movement she helped found. We admire everything Day did for the poor and needy, but we get uncomfortable when we see phrases like “voluntary poverty” or “Christian anarchism.”

This uncertainty about what to make of Dorothy Day is not unique to our current decade. In July 1957, Dorothy Day and a few other Catholic Workers were arrested for protesting against civil defense drills (that is to say, they refused to take shelter during a simulated air raid). John Cogley, one of Commonweal’s past editors, reflected on their actions in an article titled “Lonely Protest.”

Cogley admitted that he did not share the radical pacifism of the Catholic Workers. “I have never been persuaded by the pacifists’ arguments,” he wrote. Cogley felt that nuclear disarmament was not a practical solution to the problems facing his world. However, he also acknowledged that nuclear war would “wreak unimaginable horror and destruction.” This left him in a “moral dilemma”–a dilemma he knew was shared by many, if not most, of his fellow Americans.

According to Cogley, what made Dorothy Day and her friends admirable was not that they had all the answers, but that they wanted to “do something…they [were] not willing to live without a murmur in a morally ambiguous situation.”

“I think they have more faith in God than I do,” Cogley went on to say. “I know they have more faith in men.”

Faith in God. Faith in people.

As Cogley implied and as Dorothy Day knew, these two kinds of faith are not easily separated from one another. Our faith in God should inspire greater faith in other people.

As a Christian, I believe that there are times when God calls us to act boldly, perhaps even radically. God asks us to trust in promises that seem impossible. God challenges us to forgive those who wrong us not seven times but seventy times seven.

Faith in God should inspire us to work for a better future even when we can’t yet see all the details of what that future might look like. It should give us something to hold onto when we’re reading the newspaper and thinking that this is the way it’s always been, so surely this is the way it will always be.

Our faith provides us with hope beyond what the world can provide. We should live our lives in a way that reflects this truth.

Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker movement moved the conversation about nuclear arms forward because they refused to accept the unacceptable. Many other people in the 1950s privately agreed with them but didn’t speak out. They felt that they weren’t entitled to voice an opinion because they didn’t have all the answers themselves.

Dorothy Day had enough faith to leave the answers up to God. She avoided the trap of inaction that ensnares so many of us. As John Cogley said, she wanted to “do something.”

I do not write in order to convince you that you should share Dorothy Day’s opinions on nuclear arms, or on anything else for that matter. I write because passive and complacent people have never contributed much to solving any of the world’s problems. 

We all know what it is to be disturbed by some injustice or discomforted by some societal evil. I believe that our Creator gave us this capacity for a reason. That feeling is a sign that we are being called to do something.

It is through our actions that we testify to our faith in God, our faith in one another, and our belief in the possibility of a better tomorrow. Dorothy Day’s life is a powerful reminder of that truth.