Meeting Dorothy Day

By Colman McCarthy

I met Dorothy Day twice, once a few months after I began writing for The Washington Post in 1969 and went to interview her at the Worker farm in Tivoli, New York, about 90 minutes and a universe away from the Lower East Side. The other time was in the early 1960s when I toiled for a few years as a laybrother at the Holy Spirit Trappist monastery in rural Rockdale County, Georgia. Dorothy, invited by the abbot to address the community of about 80 priests and brothers, spoke in the monastic chapter room. Unlike other speakers, from Ralph McGill of the Atlanta Constitution to Danilo Dolci, the Sicilian writer, Dorothy was not overly awed by the austerities to which the Trappist subjected themselves. It was somewhat the opposite. She reminded the good monks that in many ways they had it easy. The soft living included having plenty to eat, a place to sleep every night, having access to a Catholic hospital in Atlanta when illness struck, plenty of time to read, meaningful work, someone to do your laundry, no bills to pay, no worries about being robbed or mugged, a guaranteed burial plot and a cost-free funeral. All that and heaven, too.

I can’t say for sure how much Dorothy savored this knocking the Trappists off their high horses but the message was a rare blow to the community’s collective ego. Many years later, I became a regular visitor at the Trappist monastery in Berryville, Virginia, 70 miles west of Washington. One of the monks was having doubts about his vocation. The abbot arranged for him to take a break from the ascetic life and go live at one of the Catholic Worker houses of hospitality in Washington, in a neighborhood where homicides, drug dealing, car-jackings and drive-by shootings were common. After being mugged twice, the monk had enough of urban living and announced that God was calling him back to the monastic life.

In early December 1980 I was among the mourners of Dorothy Day. The funeral procession, her body in a pinewood coffin, moved out of Maryhouse on Third Street on the way to a requiem mass at Nativity Catholic Church, a half-block