Dorothy Day’s Little Way – Part 2
Sydney (7 June)
In April 1941, J Edgar Hoover – then the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) – recommended that Dorothy Day be considered for immediate arrest during a national emergency.
FBI agents were avid readers of the Catholic Worker, sweetly passing around notes about Day’s work for decades, beginning in the early 1940s. Regardless, it took them years to figure out her nationality, despite the 1938 publication of her memoir, From Union Square to Rome, which detailed her early life in Chicago, New York, and San Francisco.
“[Dorothy Day] is a Russian who came to this country, visited Chicago in [the] spring of 1939 and attempted to interest people in Communistic activities,” agents wrote in 1941.
But the agents’ main objection to Day had nothing to do with her economic philosophy. They largely accepted that she abandoned Communism after converting to Catholicism. Rather, the FBI surveilled her because of her opposition to war.
In June 1940, as France and Norway prepared to surrender to Germany and the Roosevelt Administration armed the United States, the Catholic Worker took a stand for peace on its front page.
“In the present war, [the Catholic Worker stands] unalterably opposed to the use of war as a means of saving ‘Christianity,’ ‘civilization,’ [and] ‘democracy,’ Day wrote. “For eight years, we have been opposing the use of force – in the labor movement, in the class struggle, as well as in the struggles between countries,” Day added.
Weeks later, she travelled to Washington DC, testifying against the Roosevelt Administration’s pre-war conscription legislation, reaffirming the need for Christians to deploy ‘spiritual weapons’ in the fight against fascism.
The Catholic Worker movement – decentralised and filled with anti-fascists – was bitterly divided by Day’s editorial and activism. Groups across the US stopped distributing the paper by August, and subscriptions halved during the war.
But Day did not let opposition or heartache quiet her. The Catholic Worker would continue to stand for peace until silenced, and she would express herself from prison, if needed, Day wrote in a May letter to an English supporter.
“You know with how great suffering and how great prayer we are trying to hold up these ideas,” she explained. “We must hold ourselves in readiness to help… exhausted nations. I think we should pray for peace without victory,” she added.
In August 1940, frustrated by the distribution halts, Day even asked groups that refused to carry the paper to disaffiliate from the Catholic Worker movement and return copies, noting that the paper would not change its position.
When Japan bombed Pearl Harbor in December 1941, she doubled down on the Catholic Worker’s stance again, while explaining that she would not undermine the war effort. A year later, the Catholic Worker published an early rebuke of the US Government’s confinement of ethnically Japanese Americans on the West Coast.
“I saw a bit of Germany on the West Coast. I saw some of the concentration camps where the Japanese men, women, and children are being held before they are resettled in the Owens Valley,” an unnamed contributor wrote.
“If we do not cry out against this injustice done [to] them, if we [do] not try to protest it, we would be failing in two of the works of mercy, which are to visit the prisoner and to ransom the captive,” they added.
During the war, the Catholic Worker may have also housed an ethnically Japanese lady at one of its shelters in New York City, ignoring the virulent propaganda of the era, a confidential informant told the FBI.
But the movement maintained the tacit support of the Archdiocese of New York throughout World War II. Church leaders neither publicly defended nor opposed the paper, while insisting on Day’s earnest sincerity in interviews with the FBI.
Years later, Day claimed that New York’s Catholic Church resisted FBI efforts to censor her during the war, though her FBI file does not indicate that it attempted to pressure the Church into silencing her.
Day’s opposition to World War II, while controversial, came out of her strict, unfailing obedience to the Church and its teachings. She consistently defended the Church’s ‘just war’ doctrine as theologically valid, even as she argued that modern weaponry meant that wars could never be waged through just means.
“[The] conditions [for a just war] are impossible of fulfilment [in] these present times of bombardment of civilians, open cities, the use of poison gas, etc,” she wrote in her 1940 editorial.
And she maintained the same position in private. Reverend Leo O’Hare – a Jesuit priest in Philadelphia – explained that Day believes that “the present war is unjustifiable, because, in her estimation, the means used in its make-up are not moral… a brutal means has been used that includes the starving out of non-combatant nations,” in a 1943 interview with FBI agents.
In the months leading up to her June 1940 editorial, the Catholic Worker published thousands of words from theologians explaining Catholic teachings on war. The paper devoted pages to explaining Francisco de Vitoria’s distinction between ‘Jus ad Bellum’ and ‘Jus in Bello,’ the just causes and conduct of war.
Day critiqued Catholic support for war, but her critiques were characteristically immanent. She objected to the actions of specific Bishops and leaders by appealing to papal encyclicals and the Catechism, rather than rejecting the Church’s teachings.
The Church has also drifted closer to her position and recognised its value in recent decades. “The ‘just war’ theory, which has all too often been used to justify any kind of war, is now outdated … [and the] use of force, violence and weapons reflects a relational poverty that always has disastrous consequences for civilian populations,” Pope Leo XIV wrote in Manifica Humanitas, a broader April 2026 encyclical on artificial intelligence.
But Day’s argument was likely not an attempt at motivated reasoning, despite her pre-conversion pacifism. In multiple other areas of her life – particularly around sexuality – she explicitly subordinated her instincts to the doctrines of the Church.
Day had lived a liberated life in Chicago and New York, prior to her conversion, as she described in her autobiographical novel, The Eleventh Virgin, in 1924. And her sensual instincts did not change when she converted.
“I am as free and unsuppressed as I ever was [about sex]. I see no immediate difference between enjoying sex and enjoying a symphony concert,” she wrote in a December 1932 letter to Forster Batterham, her common-law partner she left after conversion.
“[But] in breaking [the Church’s sexual] laws one is letting the flesh get an upper hand over the spirit, so I do not want to break these laws,” she added.
Day was also a Benedictine Oblate and pledged to live her life in keeping with the Rule of Saint Benedict, based in part on obedience to God and other just authority. Yet she remained a committed philosophical anarchist until the end of her life.
In Day’s mind, there was no contradiction between her commitment to anarchism and obedience to the Church. As far back as the 1800s, anarchists had differentiated between voluntary and coerced obedience, between obedience backed by threats of violence or destitution and obedience freely given, as a reflection of personal conscience.
Day did not see the Church as a coercive authority. Her voluntary obedience and submission to it – despite its flaws – were expressions of her love of Christ, channelled through his chosen voice on earth, rather than any sense of fear.
“My faith may be the size of a mustard seed, but … it brings with it a beginning of [a] love … so intense that human love with all its heights and depths pales in comparison. Even seeing through a glass darkly makes one want to obey, to do all the Beloved wishes,” she wrote in her 1966 essay, Reflections During Advent.
Chosen obedience to the Church complemented anarchism, in her view, because it came out of the depths of her heart, her unending capacity to reason sharply about the world around her.
“The Church is pretty anarchistic, you know… The saying of Vatican II is above all, ‘Conscience is supreme’,” she said in a 1971 interview with the Catholic Agitator.
Day’s distinction between voluntary and coerced obedience also reflected her economic commitment to mutualism, an anarchist philosophy built on an acceptance of private property and a belief in the communal ownership of productive assets.
Pierre Proudhon, who developed mutualism, once paradoxically argued that “property is theft,” “property is despotism,” and “property is freedom,” depending on whether it was used to exert control over others. Property is free when it supports individual flourishing, and despotism when it supports exploitation, in Proudhon’s view.
Day – like most mature anarchists – did not reject authority or control, only coercion. To her, “the new social order is to be built up by groupings of men together in communities … united in some way but without any governing bodies,” she said in her 1971 interview.
But Day’s obedience to doctrine was far from painless. She gave up Forster over the Church’s prohibition on sex, despite her deep love for him. Yet when it came to sex, Day also saw sensual beauty in prayer and the divine, often quoting Saint John of the Cross’ loving, devotional poems.
The Church’s teachings on sexual orientation and birth control were harder to reconcile with her instincts.
In her first known letter, years before her conversion, Day wrote to the pioneering feminist activist Margaret Sanger – the founder of the American Birth Control League, later renamed Planned Parenthood – about a job as a publicity director.
But just over a decade later, she had accepted the Church’s teachings on contraception and decided to ignore the issue in the Catholic Worker, neither explicitly endorsing nor challenging Church teachings.
In the final years of her life, she faced an even more painful dilemma. In September 1975, five years before her death, two Catholic Workers wrote to her, coming out as lesbian, she wrote in a diary entry at the time.
Day did not want to judge the couple, recounting her own attraction to two women earlier in her life. But she felt unable to avoid it within the confines of the Church. “One must judge what one considers right and wrong and one must remember the [sexual] admonitions in [the Bible],” she wrote in her diary.
It was not easy. Around the same time she wrote the entry, Day described the situation as leaving her in “a most grotesque and horrible misery,” in a letter to a nun and friend.
Catholic teachings on sexual orientation also contributed to the first Catholic Worker – Day’s daughter, Tamar, whose adorably precocious childhood partly played out in newspaper editorials – deciding to leave the Church, according to her daughter, Kate Hennessey.
But Day never expected her obedience, or a principled life, to be easy. In her writings and interviews, she often emphasised that the life of a Catholic Worker was not for everyone, focusing on the discomfort and difficulty that accompanied it, but had lessons for all.
By Avinash Govind