Day and the Catholic Workers subscribed to an ideology of “Christian personalism,” or Thomistic personalism that infuses the personalism, the melding of individualism and collectivism, with the theology of St. Thomas Aquinas.  Personalism sees the individual as (1) possessing an inalienable dignity, (2) having their telos, or ultimate aim, in love, and (3) completely unknowable – some aspects of their selves will remain incomprehensible. The infusion of Thomism provided personalism a point, namely attainment of the Christian afterlife, transforming the “lack of ideology” into something slightly more coherent.

In its insistence that all people have an inherent worth, Thomistic personalism  devoted Day to a wide-reaching social platform. Besides pacificism, she advocated for economic and racial justice. As a group particularly affected by racism and economic injustice, Day was committed to bringing attention to the plights of black American lives. She worked to ensure that her paper featured both black and white voices, shedding light on lynchings and the lives of sharecroppers, bringing her readers’ attention to the “hatred, torture and murder” against blacks that went largely unreported in the press. She was deeply committed to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s civil rights campaigns, The Catholic Worker‘s pages brimming with editorials in support of his work. Day herself rode on buses in support of desegregation, her work rousing the ire of the Klu Klux Klan to such a degree that there was an attempt on her life. After Dr. King was shot by James Earl Ray on April 4th, 1968 in Memphis, Tennessee, Day wrote

Martin Luther King died daily, as St. Paul said. He faced death daily and said a number of times that he knew he would be killed for the faith that was in him. The faith that men could live together as brothers. The faith in the Gospel teaching of nonviolence. The faith that man is capable of change, of growth, of growing in love. (Dorothy Day, The Catholic Worker, April 1968)

While this highly spiritual rhetoric might suggest a greater concern with heaven than earth, Day could be very practical in her work. While not as large a force in this area as reformers like Jane Jacobs, Day was also anti-urban renewal. Though she envisioned paradise-on-earth with roots in a life culled from the land, going so far as to try and live out the life of a communal farmer in Staten Island, she devoted herself to working in New York City’s poor, urban neighborhoods. Lower Manhattan provided a home for Day’s two “houses of hospitality,” St. Joseph House (found at 36 East 1st Street)  and Maryhouse (55 East 3rd Street). Beyond providing a soup kitchen for the neighborhood’s homeless, these houses provided and continue to provide an intellectual network for the Catholic Worker Community, one that aims to be accessible to people from all walks of life.

VOLUNTARY POVERTY