Dorothy, Dolan, and the distortion of sanctity
HBD, Dorothy Day!
This is a piece I wrote in early 2022, and submitted it for publication in various places without success. Since today is Dorothy Day’s birthday, I thought it would be a good moment to let it finally see the light of day. I’m also counting this as the ‘response’ category in the writing challenge I set for myself here.
Don’t worry - I don’t usually post on two consecutive days! It just worked out that way this time, but fear not, you won’t hear from me for a while now.
I was recently writing something which mentioned Servant of God Dorothy Day, and in particular, her difficulty ending romantic relations with Forster Batterham, the father of her only child, Tamar. She loved him deeply, and having found her way falteringly to Catholicism, she wanted to marry him in the Church and start a big Catholic family with him. But Forster was having none of it. He was ideologically opposed to both marriage and religion, and neither Dorothy nor Forster were willing to budge from their positions. Over the course of a few fractious years, they struggled to let go of their attachment to one another, but equal dedication to their opposing ideologies eventually forced them to accept the impossibility of their union. It was shortly after this that the Catholic Worker, for which Dorothy is best known, was born.
As I sketched out a few of Dorothy’s biographical details in order to illustrate the point I wanted to make, I realised I was in danger of doing what Cardinal Timothy Dolan was recently accused of doing in his homily about her earlier this year. To the great frustration of Dorothy’s granddaughter, Martha Hennessey, and many others, Dolan essentially reduced her complex and often contradictory life story to: “Dorothy Day lived a wayward and sordid life until she encountered the truth of Catholicism, was baptised, and then spent the rest of her life serving the poor.” He was vague and uncomfortable about the details of what her life really involved, either before or after she “came to Jesus”. I realised that, in my writing, I was doing the same thing: simplifying, even sanitising, Dorothy’s story in order to make a point. I was constructing a “before and after conversion” narrative that grossly misrepresented the trajectory of her life, thought, and work.
It is easy and tempting to talk about saints and other heroes this way; to pick aspects of their lives that appeal to us and use them to tell a story that we want to tell. Dorothy provides great fodder for this tendency, as there are elements of her life that are attractive to both progressives and conservatives. She was a suffragist, a pacifist, and said of Communists that they “are apt to stand more chance in the eyes of God than those indifferent Catholics who stand by and do nothing.” On the other hand, she applauded Pope Paul VI’s 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae, which reaffirmed the Church’s rejection of artificial birth control, and although she welcomed gay and lesbian people to Catholic Worker houses, she made it clear, when pressed, that she shared the Church’s view on homosexuality.
Dorothy is frequently quoted as saying that she did not want to be made a saint because she “[did] not want to be dismissed that easily.” Perhaps what she meant was that she knew her life, her mission, her philosophy, would be reduced to something palatable, something easy to summarise and gloss over. Her abortion and subsequent suicide attempts, which she was deeply traumatised by and which she was very private about for her entire life, would be used as a poster story for the kind of “rock bottom” we hear about that starts a journey towards Christ. Her conversion to Catholicism would be marketed as the turning point in her commitment to the poor, even though her rejection of capitalism and dedication to the marginalised began long before she was baptised. Her strained and often painful relationship with Tamar would simply be a footnote in the story of her dogged commitment to the Catholic Worker.
Cardinal Dolan, who has openly aligned himself with the Republican Party, seems like an ill-fitting commentator for the life and work of Dorothy Day. Although Dorothy was very committed to the institutional Church, she was also highly critical of it, for example pushing for an end to the doctrine of just war, and getting herself a bad reputation with many United States bishops for her frequent heckling and petitioning on matters of social justice. Considering Cardinal Dolan’s proximity to the Church’s ongoing sex abuse scandals, and his vagueness on topics such as racism, war, and the death penalty, it’s hard to imagine that Dorothy would have picked him to address the faithful of New York about her life.
But don’t we all do this? We hold on to the parts of someone’s life or work that buttress our own beliefs and perspectives, skipping over the parts that don’t fit the narrative, or that make us uncomfortable. The beauty and tragedy of having so much more information at our disposal about the recent saints (and blesseds and venerables and servants of God) is that we are faced with their full humanity. Whereas many saints over the centuries are now remembered for some particular event or story about their life that illustrates their worthiness of sainthood, we cannot be under any illusions about the many challenging parts of Dororthy’s life and personality, including after she became Catholic. The Church has never held that the saints were perfect - only Jesus and Mary lived without sin - but lives like Dorothy’s can make us painfully aware of just how imperfect even very holy people can be.
This may make Cardinal Dolan uncomfortable, but if we cannot tell Dorothy’s story in a way that reflects reality then we are attacking her dignity. We cannot honour a person’s life if we decide to cut out parts of it that testify to the fullness of their humanity. Furthermore, we insult God by pretending we can write a better life story than He can. If Dorothy is to become a saint, let it be because of the life she really lived, and not some distorted version of it that fails to honour the very troubled and troubling life that birthed her sanctity.