Revisiting Dorothy Day

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- Revisiting Dorothy Day
  Blake Billings, Ph.D.
- Outside of our own familiar circles here at Portsmouth, one may not immediately identify Dorothy Day as a Benedictine. But the influence of Benedict on her thinking and on her vision of the Catholic Worker movement is inescapable. It is perhaps most simply summarized in the patronal name she chose at her oblation: Benedicta. Certainly, Peter Maurin’s attraction to Benedict had something to do with this interest. Day writes in 1957: “Peter Maurin and Fr. Virgil Michel talked to me about Benedictinism during the early years of the depression, and held up the Benedictine motto Pax, and the balanced life of cult, culture and cultivation as a solution for world troubles; the farming commune as a solution to the problems of unemployment and automation.” (April 1957) The motto of “Work and Pray” expresses much of the Benedictine inspiration found in the Catholic Worker movement – work as prayer, prayer as the Work of God: a Christian spirituality and practice thoroughly aligned with labor. If body and soul serve as the two posts of the “Jacob’s Ladder” of humility of Chapter 7 of the Rule, “work and prayer” would seem to be Day’s version of how to structure a path connecting heaven and earth.
  
  Unpacking the role of Portsmouth Priory in her Benedictine journey is a task offering some intrigue, and with the passage of time is increasingly difficult to sort out with precision. I asked Abbot Matthew Stark about this relationship, beginning with an inquiry into any direct personal contact he may have had. By April of 1955, Dorothy had developed her relationship with Saint Procopius Abbey in Lisle, Illinois to the degree that she then formally enrolled as its oblate. While Abbot Matthew did not join the Portsmouth community until 1956, he did encounter her while doing graduate studies at Saint Louis University, living at Saint Louis Priory. She came to speak at the university, and his big moment came with the Q&A after her talk. As he recalls, it did not go well. His question about the church’s position on birth control elicited a response that felt like a sharp rebuke, and an adamant defense of the church’s teaching, leaving him pondering just what he had said to offend. Day was known to have such triggers, a famous temper, and a direct manner, so perhaps the Abbot is being overly scrupulous concerning the manner of his own delivery.
  
  Beyond this singular memory, we discussed some of the better-known connections between Day and the Portsmouth community. Primarily one thinks of Ade Bethune. Ade’s arrival in New York in the late 1930’s, her friendship with Dorothy, and her shaping of the Catholic Worker’s visual aesthetic through her work appearing in the movement’s paper are all well known. Ade’s residence in Newport, and that of her family, facilitated summer and autumn journeys of Dorothy and others associated within the movement to Newport for several years into the 1940’s. Day wrote in her diary (September 27): “Here, surrounding Ade is one of the most interesting cells of the CW. And it is closely attached to Portsmouth Priory (our Fr. Joseph is there who spends his summers at Maryfarm in Easton). So the ideal of the Benedictines of work and prayer prevail.” She notes particularly “the craft school idea” embodied in Ade’s Newport community - “a dozen working together,” where she had “a lesson in lettering and learned how to make a hooked rug.” This “dozen working together” in Newport also constituted part of the core of an active CW connection to the Portsmouth oblate community, with Ade Bethune among those fully enrolled as an oblate. The group maintained close contact with the Priory, even on occasion making the journey up from Newport on foot, Abbot Matthew notes. There were several of the monastic community drawn to her movement and happy to offer the group hospitality. Brigid O’Shea Merriman, who traces in extensive detail the development of Day’s monastic interest, notes a 1937 letter from Prior Hugh Diman, requesting a subscription renewal of the Catholic Worker, as evidence of the Portsmouth community’s early interest in Dorothy Day (Merriman, p. 101).
  
  One of the monastic community most closely connected to the Movement was Father Joseph Woods, whom Day refers to (see above) as “our Father Joseph.” Fr. Joseph was quite a young man when he developed his connection to the movement, turning 30 in 1941. A picture capturing him at work in the garden a Maryfarm, appearing in The Catholic Worker reveals his youth.
  
  (Photo from the Catholic Worker July-August 1939)
- Catholic Worker July-Aug 1939
- Abbot Matthew noted that Fr. Woods had been part of the novice group trained at Fort Augustus in Scotland, the monastery’s first generation of novices from the early 1930’s. He developed a “reputation as an excellent teacher,” and was fully involved in the School, “even coaching football or some such thing.” Matthew recounts that no less a source than Bishop Ansgar Nelson spoke of Woods as “one of the best theological minds I have ever met.” He was reputed to have been “one or two” in his graduating class at Holy Cross College. Day speaks of Woods’ frequent presence at the Worker movement’s Maryfarm, directing summer retreats and, if the photo is indicative, actively involved in the work of the farm. In the summer of 1943, on Long Island, she invited him to offer weekly conferences to the CW group staying there, noting “the talks have been crowded” (Duty, p. 67). A number of the priory’s monks at this time had become interested in farming and self-sufficiency at Portsmouth, in part prompted by wartime needs, though certainly correlated to a kind of Benedictine theology of work. Such ideals shared with the Priory only strengthened its association with the Movement’s Newport community, as did the personal relationships that remained so important to Day. Matthew believes that Fr. Joseph heard the First Confession of Day’s daughter Tamar, whom Dorothy sent to spend time with Ade Bethune to learn at her art school. By the time Abbot Matthew joined the community in 1956, Fr. Joseph was infrequently present, having years earlier been diagnosed with a heart condition for which a leading treatment was being developed at Duke University, prompting his move to North Carolina. Matthew does, however, remember his visits back to Portsmouth, recalling the unsavory smell of the special dietary foods Joseph’s health regimen required him to prepare. He also commented that following Fr. Joseph’s death in 1974, he sent to Day a Mass card and a note acknowledging the significance to Fr. Joseph of their relationship.
  
  (Dorothy Day @ 1940; Photo from the website of the Dorothy Day Guild)
- The 1940’s appear to be the high point of Day’s connection to Portsmouth, and a productive moment in the development of the Worker movement. These Priory connections clearly helped foster a potent inspiration of prayer and work, in its liturgical life as well as through intellectual discussion and theological reflection. Her Newport diary entries of 1940, prompted by her contact with the “most interesting cell” in the movement’s Newport community, elicit the sense of dynamism and enthusiasm she associated with her time here: “Thirty houses and eleven farms! And thru them all, despite differences of opinion, is a sense of fundamental unity, a sense of community, of common striving, of sharing a common crust” (Sep 27, 1940). Throughout the 1950’s, Day’s Benedictine contacts, together with the growth of the Catholic Worker, expanded and developed, and her contact with Portsmouth waned. While her Portsmouth relationships had led to Day’s invitation in the 1940’s to give a lecture to the School, her reception, it seems, was mixed. While Father Damian Kearney, then a student, spoke of being impressed by her personal witness, Abbot Matthew recalls an assessment offered by Dom Wilfred Bayne, that Day’s message had not overall seemed to resonate with the boys: it may well have proven a kind of Rorschach test of one’s own political or theological views.
  
  While contact with Portsmouth diminished, the Benedictine ideal continued to offer much to Day. She wrote a brief remark in The Catholic Worker about her oblation, which she made at Holy Innocents Parish in Manhattan in April of 1955. The comment found its place among a series of notes on Peter Maurin entitled “Peter’s Program,” surely connecting her own interest in Benedict to his:
  
  “How Peter loved St. Benedict whose motto was ‘Work and Pray.’ He is happy, no doubt, that I, his co-worker, was professed last month as a full oblate of St. Benedict, attached to St. Procopius Abbey, the mission of which is to work for unity between east and west, and which aims to set up a shrine to the eastern saints, at the monastery at Lisle, Illinois. He loved St. Benedict because he said that what the workers needed most was a philosophy of work. He loved St. Francis because he said St. Francis, through his voluntary poverty, was free as a bird. St. Francis was the personalist, St. Benedict the communitarian. (May 1955)
  
  In one of his “Easy Essays,” Maurin had written: “The motto of St. Benedict was Laborare et Orare, Labor and Pray. Labor and prayer ought to be combined; labor ought to be a prayer. The liturgy of the Church is the prayer of the Church. People ought to pray with the Church and to work with the Church. The religious life of the people and the economic life of the people ought to be one” (“Building Churches”). Dorothy Day, Benedictine oblate, continued in such an inspiration found underlying “Peter’s Program.” It was a program which brought her into close contact with our own Benedictine community for some years, at an important moment in the growth of the Catholic Worker. Such contact remained important enough to Day that she would later write of her oblation: “I am a part of the Benedictine family all over the world.” And Abbot Matthew notes that the Portsmouth community now has joined others around “all over the world” in offering each First Saturday, for this Servant of God’s cause, the following prayer:
  
  Prayer for the Intercession of Servant of God Dorothy Day
  
  God our Creator, Your servant Dorothy Day exemplified the Catholic faith by her conversion, life of prayer and voluntary poverty, works of mercy, and witness to the justice and peace of the Gospel. May her life inspire people to turn to Christ as their savior and guide, to see his face in the world’s poor and to raise their voices for the justice of God’s kingdom. We pray that you grant the favors we ask through her intercession so that her goodness and holiness may be more widely recognized and one day the Church may proclaim her Saint. We ask this through Christ our Lord. Amen.
  
  Notes:
  
  The Duty of Delight: The Diaries of Dorothy Day, edited by Robert Ellsberg.
  
  Searching for Christ: The Spirituality of Dorothy Day, Brigid O’Shea Merriman, O.S.F.
  
  “Prayer and Work in the Light of Dorothy Day”, Rita McClain Tybor.