She officially joined the church on December 28, 1927. The moment brought her no consolation. “I had no sense of peace, no joy, no conviction that what I was doing was right. It was just something that I had to do, a task to be gotten through.”28 As she performed the sacraments, the Baptism, Penance, Holy Eucharist, she felt herself a hypocrite. She went through the motions, getting down on her knees, coldly. She was afraid somebody might see her. She was afraid she was betraying the poor and going over to the losing side of history, to an institution lined up on the side of property, of the powerful and the elites. “Are you sure of yourself?” she asked herself. “What kind of affectation is this? What act is this you are going through?”
Self-critical as always, Day questioned herself over the following months and years, wondering whether her faith was deep or practical enough: “How little, how puny my work had been since becoming a Catholic, I thought. How self-centered, how ingrown, how lacking in a sense of community! My summer of quiet reading and prayer, my self-absorption seemed sinful as I watched my brothers in their struggle, not for themselves but for others.”29
In choosing religion, she chose an arduous path. It is often said that religion makes life easier for people, provides them with the comforting presence of a loving and all-knowing father. That is certainly not how Day experienced it. She experienced it as difficult self-conflict, the sort of self-conflict that Joseph Soloveitchik described in a famous footnote in his book Halakhic Man. Here is an abridged version of that footnote:
This popular ideology contends that the religious experience is tranquil and neatly ordered, tender and delicate; it is an enchanted stream for embittered souls and still waters for troubled spirits. The person “who comes in from the field, weary” (Gen. 25:29), from the battlefield and campaigns of life, from the secular domain which is filled with doubts and fears, contradictions and refutations, clings to religion as does a baby to its mother and finds in her lap “a shelter for his head, the nest of his forsaken prayers” and there is comforted for his disappointments and tribulations. This Rousseauian ideology left its stamp on the entire Romantic movement from the beginning of its growth until its final (tragic!) manifestations in the consciousness of contemporary man. Therefore, the representatives of religious communities are inclined to portray religion, in a wealth of colors that dazzle the eye, as a poetic Arcadia, a realm of simplicity, wholeness, and tranquillity. This ideology is intrinsically false and deceptive. That religious consciousness in man’s experience, which is most profound and most elevated, which penetrates to the very depths and ascends to the very heights, is not that simple and comfortable.
On the contrary, it is exceptionally complex, rigorous, and tortuous. Where you find its complexity, there you find its greatness. The consciousness of homo religiosis flings bitter accusations against itself and immediately is filled with regret, judges its desires and yearnings with excessive severity, and at the same time steeps itself in them, casts derogatory aspersions on its own attributes, flails away at them, but also subjugates itself to them. It is in a condition of spiritual crisis, of psychic ascent and descent, of contradiction arising from affirmation and negation, self-abnegation and self-appreciation. Religion is not, at the outset, a refuge of grace and mercy for the despondent and desperate, an enchanted stream for crushed spirits, but a raging clamorous torrent of man’s consciousness with all its crises, pangs, and torments.
Early in her religious journey, Day met three women who were in love but weren’t sleeping with the men they intended to marry, even though it was obvious how much they wanted to. Day looked at their self-denial and began to feel “that Catholicism was something rich and real and fascinating…. I saw them wrestling with moral problems, with the principles by which they lived, and this made them noble in my eyes.”30
Day attended mass daily, which meant rising at dawn. She prayed according to the monastic rhythms through the day. She dedicated time each day to the religious disciplines, reading the scripture, saying the rosary. She fasted and went to confession.
These rituals could become routine, like playing the scales for a musician, but Day found the routine, even when it was dull, necessary: “Without the sacraments of the church, primarily the Eucharist, the Lord’s Supper, as it is called, I certainly do not think that I could go on…. I do not always approach it from need, or with joy and thanksgiving. After 38 years of almost daily communion, one can confess to a routine, but it is like the routine of taking daily food.”31
These routines created a spiritual center for her life. From the fragmentation of her early life she moved toward integration.
Living Out the Gospel
Day was now in her early thirties. The Great Depression was biting with full force. In 1933 she started a newspaper called The Catholic Worker to mobilize the proletariat and apply Catholic social teaching toward the goal of creating a society in which it is easier for people to be good. It wasn’t only a newspaper; it was a movement, located in ramshackle offices in Lower Manhattan, with everybody working for free. Within three years it had a circulation of 150,000, with distribution in five hundred parishes across the country.32
The newspaper hosted a soup kitchen, feeding as many as fifteen hundred each morning. It sponsored a series of hospitality houses for the indigent, providing nearly fifty thousand nights of lodging between 1935 and 1938. Day and her colleagues also organized and inspired more than thirty other hospitality houses across the United States and in England. They eventually opened and inspired agrarian communes from California to Michigan to New Jersey. They organized marches and events. These were, in part, efforts to build community, to heal the loneliness that marks human existence.
To Day, separation was sin: separation from God, separation from one another. Unity was holiness: the fusion between people and spirits. The Catholic Worker fused a lot of things together. It was a newspaper but also an activist aid organization. It was a religious publication, but it also advocated for economic change. It was about inner life, but also political radicalism. It brought the rich and poor into contact. It joined theology and economics, material concerns and spiritual ones, body and soul.
Day insisted on being radical, to get down to the roots of social problems. The paper was Catholic, but she embraced a philosophy of personalism, which is an affirmation of the dignity of each person, created in the image of God. Being a personalist, Day had a suspicion of bigness, whether it was big government or big corporations. Day even had a suspicion of big philanthropy. She was constantly urging her co-workers to “stay small”: Start your work from where you live, with the small concrete needs right around you. Help ease tension in your workplace. Help feed the person right in front of you. Personalism holds that we each have a deep personal obligation to live simply, to look after the needs of our brothers and sisters, and to share in the happiness and misery they are suffering. The personalist brings his whole person to serve another whole person. This can only be done by means of intimate contact within small communities.
Day spent the rest of her life, until her death on November 29, 1980, as a Catholic worker, working on the newspaper and serving bread and soup to the poor and mentally disabled. She wrote eleven books and more than a thousand articles. The service work was prosaic. This was before computers and copiers. Each month the staff had to type out tens of thousands of address labels in order to send the paper out to subscribers. The reporters sold the paper themselves on the street. Day felt that it was not enough to just care for the poor, “one must live with them, share with them their suffering too. Give up one’s privacy, and mental and spiritual comforts as well as physical.”33 She didn’t just visit the shelters and hospitality houses from the comfort of her own home. She lived in the hospitality houses herself, with those she was serving.