Loaves and Fishes by Dorothy Day

First published: New York: Harper & Row, 1963

Genre(s): Nonfiction

Subgenre(s): Autobiography

Core issue(s): The Beatitudes; capitalism; Catholics and Catholicism; discipleship; nonviolent resistance; poverty

Overview

Dorothy Day’s Loaves and Fishes tells the story of the movement that she cofounded in 1933, the Catholic Worker. She intended the book to be a sequel to The Long Loneliness: The Autobiography of Dorothy Day (1952), which focused on her conversion from secular radicalism to Catholicism grounded in Jesus’ radical message of love. It also updates Day’s House of Hospitality (1939), an account of the movement’s first five years.

The book is divided into nineteen chapters and five thematic parts, each relating the values of her radical gospel Catholicism through her experiences and observations. A journalist rather than a philosopher, Day presents her radical gospel Catholic beliefs as an integral part of the movement’s history, not as abstractions.

In part 1, Day recounts Catholic Worker history, emphasizing the role of Peter Maurin, originally a French peasant, whose ideas helped her live her Catholic faith while finding a vocation that allowed her to blend her radical activist past with a gospel faith nourished by Catholic worship, sacraments, and teaching. What begins as a journalist’s attempt during the Depression to promote the radical implications of Catholic social teaching through the Catholic Worker (the paper where she was founder, publisher, editor, and often contributor), evolves into an urban movement that houses, feeds, and clothes the poor; an agrarian communal alternative to industrial capitalism; and a movement uncompromising in its pacifism and nonviolent resistance, an approach previously unfamiliar to Catholicism in the United States. Day believed that by living Christianity, she and others could start building a new society.

In part 2, chapters such as “Poverty and Precarity” offer reflections on such topics as the working poor, the racial and ethnic discrimination underlying poverty, the conditions of poverty, and Christian voluntary poverty. Many Americans were enjoying postwar economic prosperity, but Day exposes the poverty so easily hidden from the experience of large numbers of suburbanized Americans. Part 3 features the ideas of especially influential Catholic Workers. Maurin’s personalism advocates individual responsibility for social ills. Ammon Hennacy, a lifelong opponent of war, uses voluntary poverty, manual labor, nonpayment of taxes, picketing, leafleting, and fasting as spiritual tools to resist nuclear weapons and war. The unadulterated gospel lived and preached by courageous priest advisors involves their personal challenges to luxury and social conservatism in the Church hierarchy. Although Day did not deliberately intend to bend gender roles, the work of the Catholic Worker required male and female volunteers to meet the responsibilities of Christian love. Women might write, edit, publish, and mail the paper. Men might tend to household tasks and meet the basic needs of guests in the hospices or on the food line.

In part 4 Day writes of some defining events among those whose paths cross hers at the Catholic Worker. She explains how it was possible to find dignity in guests even as they battled poverty, addiction, homelessness, and mental disorders. Day, who had committed civil disobedience against mandatory air raid drills and therefore had experienced incarceration, criticizes its degrading conditions.

Day’s honest yet affectionate portrayal of guests and volunteers provides convincing examples of her spiritual practices in living the gospel of love. Without resorting to didacticism, Day promotes her message of radical transformation of self by example. She models continuing personal conversion and shows how society could be transformed through nonviolent direct action rooted in love and nourished by prayer and reception of the Eucharist.

In a powerful concluding section, “Love in Practice,” Day explains the radical Christian spirituality underpinning the movement’s sometimes controversial positions. She once rejected interest paid on money owed the movement as unearned by work and therefore unjust, and she returned an interest payment to puzzled city authorities. To public health officials who regarded the farming commune as a slum awaiting improvement or eradication, Day spoke of the freedom to invite a guest in need into one’s home. Dedicated to living a communal life of voluntary poverty with the poor and working for a nonviolent revolution of the heart to challenge the social, economic, and political status quo, Day agrees with Teresa of Ávila’s wry observation that life is like a night spent at an uncomfortable inn. Reliance on direct action, prayer, and the sacraments help meet every need.

Christian Themes

Central to the development of Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker movement was her reading of the Bible, youthful radical activism, conversion to Catholicism in 1927, and the gradual realization of her vocation in living and publicizing Catholic gospel radicalism after meeting Maurin in 1932. Her synthesis of renewed Catholicism involved a life that was nourished by Catholic sacraments and worship and the social encyclicals of modern popes, orthodox in the essentials of the faith, and allowed her to practice corporal and spiritual works of mercy, which originated in Christ’s teaching to love one another. Day created a movement of lay initiative long before the reforms of Vatican II (1962-1965) legitimated lay leadership. She explained that no permission was needed to practice the corporal and spiritual works of mercy, such as feeding the hungry and visiting prisoners. Taught to every Catholic in the catechism, these works of mercy embodied specific ways to live the Beatitudes and Christ’s teaching of love.

Day’s earlier radicalism, aimed at a social, political, and economic revolution by whatever means necessary, contributed to her conversion to Catholicism and the establishment of the Catholic Worker. The young radical had experienced community and sacrifice on behalf of workers and the poor, something lacking in the mainstream Christianity she once discarded as hypocritical. Experience as a radical taught her to prefer uncompromising individual direct action to either indifference or overdependence on bureaucracies of church or state to address social problems. With Maurin’s guidance and her own common sense, she synthesized ideas from a variety of sources into the beliefs of the Catholic Worker movement: Christ’s gospel of love, Catholic social teachings, and countercultural views of American society influenced by mainstream Catholicism (critique of materialism) and secular radicalism (critique of capitalism and imperialism). Day grafted Gandhian nonviolent direct action to Christ’s commandment to love one’s neighbor not only as a path to revolutionary change but also as a means of resistance to all wars. In so doing, she created the Catholic Worker during the Depression, a movement unlike any other American Catholic movement of the time.

Thirty years after the founding of the movement, when Day published Loaves and Fishes, she and her movement continued to define what it meant to be a disciple of Christ in a modern urban industrial era. Her espousal of a life of voluntary poverty shared with the poor provided her most convincing critique of industrial capitalism. Although Day’s uncompromising pacifism divided the movement during World War II, during the Cold War it attracted followers morally troubled by the development and use of weapons of mass destruction. Not only had she pointed out the incompatibility of war with Christian love and Catholic teachings on respect for God’s creation, but also she underscored the futility of surviving nuclear war with her open defiance of a civil defense law, which resulted in a jail sentence. As a tribute to her profound and consistent example of living Christianity, in 2000 Cardinal John J. O’Connor of New York initiated the cause of Dorothy Day for sainthood.

Sources for Further Study

Coy, Patrick G., ed. Revolution of the Heart: Essays on the Catholic Worker. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988. Some of the most accessible and incisive writings on such aspects of the movement as personalism, peace, advocacy journalism, free obedience, hospitality, and resistance.

Ellsberg, Robert, ed. Dorothy Day: Selected Writings. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1992. The introduction provides an excellent brief study of Day, her spirituality, and the movement, with judiciously chosen selections from a wide range of her writings.

Klejment, Anne, and Nancy L. Roberts, eds. American Catholic Pacifism: The Influence of Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker Movement. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1996. Highlights include Day’s letters to Thomas Merton and essays on Day’s preconversion pacifism, conscience and conscription, Cold War era peacemaking, and the movement’s international influence.

Riegle, Rosemary, ed. Dorothy Day: Portraits by Those Who Knew Her. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 2003. A collective biography of Day, thematically organized, based on interviews with family and friends. With contextual comments and photographs.

Thorn, William, et al., eds. Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker Movement: Centenary Essays. Milwaukee, Wis.: Marquette University Press, 2001. Contributions by activists and scholars. The most valuable essays discuss the movement’s significance, spiritual and philosophical roots, radical orthodoxy, and mystical body theology.

Zwick, Mark, and Louise Zwick. The Catholic Worker Movement: Intellectual and Spiritual Origins. New York: Paulist Press, 2005. A well-researched popular volume that analyzes such influences on the movement as the works of mercy, monasticism, voluntary poverty, pacifism, and the “little way.”