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I Remember Dorothy Day By ANNE BUCKLEYA tall, slender, elderly woman wearing a paisley bandana over her white hair and carrying a rumpled woven handbag slipped quietly into a folding chair at the rear during the U.S. bishops' bicentennial hearing on Liberty and Justice for All in a New Jersey suburb. Almost immediately Archbishop Peter L. Gerety of Newark left the chairman's seat on the dais to go back and greet the lady. When he announced "a pleasant surprise," and Dorothy Day rose from the folding chair and moved with the aid of a cane to the witness seat, the entire assembly rose and applauded the revered prophetess of the Christian social justice movement. She had gotten up from her sickbed where she had been nursing a cold for three days following a three-day visit to the federal prison in Alderson, W.Va. She had come for what she understood was to be "a quiet, intimate talk with the bishops." She hadn't expected an audience, said the frail woman whose espousal of Gospel poverty was witnessed by the handed-down clothes she wore. Later, she told me she became "very embarrassed" when she received outpourings of respect like her welcome that day. She explained that appreciation of the Catholic Worker movement she founded belonged to the people who volunteer their lives in its 47 centers. It was December 1975. The U.S. bishops were fact-finding around the country in advance of the celebration of the Bicentennial of the United States in 1976. Dorothy Day's message to the bishops--and to the nation--was a call to the practice of voluntary poverty, reform of the prison system, involvement in the peace movement, elimination of waste of natural resources, simplification of the American way of life, all geared to "making the kind of society in which it is easy to be good." She was down-to-earth specific. "Think about your financial entanglements, your portfolios, your living on interest," she said. Think, too, she urged, of the effect on family life produced by slum conditions in which people live "with rats, vermin, every variety of bug" while being pressured to live "the American way of life" in an endeavor to "get every penny out of them." She described the prison she'd just visited as looking like a college campus but remaining a place of "misery, despair, hopelessness and vice." She said she planned to think, talk and write about Sweden's experiment in rehabilitation in which "prisoners are given 10 acres of land and the chance to see if they can make a go of it." She recommended having youngsters bring broken furniture to school, gathering whatever tools could be found, getting a volunteer to teach a carpentry class. Voluntary poverty is "a marvelous adventure for everybody," she said. "If we would practice the Gospels the way they are presented to us by our Lord in his own words, we'd be overwhelmed by the help we would get." She had much more to say to the bishops and apologized for taking more time than she should have. They had shut off the timer that had limited all the other speakers, and everyone in the place hung on every word. Dorothy Day was 78 years old the day I met her and wrote most of this. She died almost exactly five years later. And now Cardinal O'Connor has succeeded in getting into motion the process that could eventually make her a saint. I guess I should be awed at the possibility that I sat and talked with a saint. Actually, I was awed, that day 25 years ago. I knew I was in the presence of a valiant woman, a person with a mission grounded in plain and simple, very real holiness. |
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