Revolution of the Heart: The Dorothy Day Story

- [Narrator] In many ways, Dorothy Day was a typical grandmother.

- I see my grandmother as someone who was very ordinary but also very extraordinary.

I mean I understood that she was different.

- [Narrator] Different because Dorothy Day was so often on the front lines protesting war and nuclear buildup, creating houses of hospitality for the hungry and homeless, and earning her place on the FBI Watch List as a dangerous American.

- Yeah, Dorothy Day is a big troublemaker.

- [Narrator] As a young journalist, Dorothy Day campaigned for those in need.

- Her work keeps putting her front and center in the social movements of the time.

- [Narrator] She wrote about workers' rights, child labor.

She was attracted to communism, believing it was a way to improve people's lives.

All part of a chapter in her own life that would leave its scars.

But with the birth of her daughter, Dorothy Day turned from communism and converted to the Catholic faith.

There she discovered a path that for nearly a half-century lead her to become one of the greatest champions for the poor America has ever known.

- She thought if communism was radical, why shouldn't Christianity be radical?

This is radical.

- My grandmother always said that she never meant to start houses of hospitality.

She never meant to open up soup lines.

But what happens when you start writing about these things, people show up at the door.

- She wanted people to exercise their own sense of personal responsibility.

If you see something that needs to be done, you do it.

- [Narrator] But accepting the biblical challenge to be peacemakers also compelled her to become a pacifist, without compromise.

To use her Catholic Worker Movement and the newspaper she founded to resist America's intervention in any war.

Many believed her behavior was unAmerican.

- [Kate] She did describe herself as an anarchist.

- There's an anarchist dimension to her Christian witness.

- Some of the most profound and most rewarding demonstrations that culminated in arrests were with the Catholic Worker community.

- I think of Dorothy Day as a firecracker that never goes out.

- [Narrator] Now this grandmother and anarchist may well be declared a saint.

- We'd love to see Dorothy made a saint.

- For both American middle class people and for Catholics, they recognized that something extraordinary was going on.

They weren't quite sure what to do with it.

- She annoyed people because she challenged them.

- She would say, "Don't call me a saint.

"I don't want to be written off that easily."

- Well I think if you take the Lord's words, you will find they are pretty rigorous.

The "Sermon on the Mount" may be read with great enjoyment, but when it comes to practicing it, it really is an examination of conscience to see how far we go.

(peaceful music) - [Announcer] Major funding for this program was made possible by Lilly Endowment.

Additional funding provided by the Catholic Communication Campaign, through the MPT Foundation.

And the following: Mary Catherine Bunting, Santa Maria Foundation, the Franciscan Friars, Province of St. John the Baptist, the Bunting Family Foundation, and Skip and Fran Minakowski.

(gavel pounding) - [Man] Mr. Speaker.

The Pope of the Holy See.

(clapping) - Pope Francis, when he spoke to Congress, mentioned four great Americans that could provide models of virtue for the entire world.

- They shaped fundamental values which endure forever in the spirit of the American people.

- To base his whole speech on four Americans.

To tell us about ourselves, who Americans are based on these four people, Abraham Lincoln, Dr. Martin Luther king, Thomas Merton, and then Dorothy Day.

- In these times, when social concerns are so important, I cannot fail to mention the servant of God, Dorothy Day, who founded the Catholic Worker Movement.

Her social activism, her passion for justice and for the cause of the oppressed, were inspired by the Gospel, her faith, and the example of the saints.

- And I did have a lot of my colleagues around me saying, "Dorothy Day?

"Who's Dorothy Day?"

But also each of the people that he held up had their flaws, but imperfect people can really be saintly.

Imperfect people can be patriots.

- It found a way of relating it not just to the religious culture of America, but to our civil history, principals of freedom and equality, of immigrants and concern for the poor.

- A nation can be considered great when it strives for justice and the cause of the oppressed, as Dorothy Day did.

(audience claps) (air raid sirens wailing) - [Radio Announcer] Attention, attention!

This is an official civil defense warning.

This is not a test.

The United States is under nuclear attack.

Take cover immediately in your area fallout shelter.

- Through the '50s and early '60s, they would have these air raid sirens go off and we would have to clear the streets or hide under our desks or go into the designated civil defense shelters.

And in New York that included the subway.

They were designated shelters.

- [Radio Announcer] It's a bomb.

Duck and cover!

- [Martin] And that is when they would choose to demonstrate.

- [Film Announcer] we all know the atomic bomb is very dangerous.

We must be ready every day, all the time, to do the right thing if the atomic bomb explodes.

(bomb exploding) Duck and cover!

This family knows what to do.

- There is no way on earth, if New York City had ever suffered a direct hit from a nuclear weapon, there was no way anybody would have survived in or out of those air raid shelters.

So what these air raid drills were doing was actually anesthetizing people to the true horror of what's happening here.

She wanted to point out how ludicrous all of this was.

In saying, "First of all, as an American citizen, "I have a duty and right to be civilly disobedient."

And she always did it respectfully.

She would call the police and say, "We're going to be in Union Square Park," or, "We're going to be in this park "so you can come and arrest us."

- [Narrator] At a time of the great communist scare, when Catholics in particular wanted to be seen as patriotic anti-communists, Dorothy Day's Catholic Worker Movement created acts of public disobedience.

Over decades, the Catholic Worker Movement had evolved from direct care for the poor to public protest on a host of issues.

- Certainly in the 1950's, when she was going to jail protesting the civil defense drills, the number of Catholics in America who really believed that civil defense and preparing for nuclear war was a crime against God and humanity, they could pretty much fit in this one police wagon.

No bishops supported her at the time, it was just kind of shocking and embarrassing.

But there was always allowance for the idea, well, Dorothy is this outlier, she's kind of a holy fool.

- [Narrator] Each year, the Catholic Workers protested the drills.

Each year their numbers grew, and each year they were arrested.

Until finally in 1961, the drills ended.

But her Catholic Worker newspaper soon turned its attention to the war in Vietnam.

It became a leading voice of opposition, attracting such Catholic progressives as Daniel and Phil Berrigan, and Trappist monk, Thomas Merton.

Each viewed Dorothy Day not only as a companion but a mentor.

- She was very influential, very powerful.

And as a woman in all that patriarchy, that said even more.

She was really respected because she was so smart and so committed and such a good strategist.

And she developed an authority that was unique.

And she kept doing this and speaking and the Catholic Worker was this really powerful voice all around the Catholic church and outside of it.

She had real authority.

Daniel Berrigan, Philip Berrigan, who were celebrities during some of that time, Time magazine cover.

They had real authority.

Dorothy had more authority than anybody else.

- [Robert] The very first demonstration against the Vietnam War was organized out of the Catholic Worker in 1963.

The very first draft card burner, who was arrested after it became illegal, was from the Catholic Worker.

- [Narrator] Robert Ellsberg, son of Daniel Ellsberg of Pentagon Papers fame, left Harvard University to join the Catholic Worker.

- Being fresh out of school, the only question that occurred to me was, "How do you reconcile Catholicism and anarchism?"

And she just looked at me and said, "It's never been a problem for me."

- She was an anarchist, she said so.

She wrote extensively about anarchism.

Her form of anarchism took the form of a radical suspicion of institutions and the laws and arrangements around them.

But it wasn't a formula for chaos.

- She was an anarchist in a sense that she believed that too much of our obligations toward other people, toward one another, was being taken over by the state.

And she was deeply distrustful and suspicious of what kind of world that was going to create.

- [Narrator] J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI become highly suspicious of Day's activities.

They are convinced she is being used by communist groups.

- There was one point where J. Edgar Hoover described her as a very erratic and irresponsible person who has a very belligerent attitude toward the FBI and uses every opportunity to castigate the Bureau.

He began saying she's a very dangerous radical and put her on this list of subversives who should be detained in the event of a national emergency.

And I read that to her and she's laughing and she said, "He makes me sound like a mean old woman."

- [Narrator] It's a time when Dorothy Day is becoming one of the most important Catholic figures in America.

The homes she co-founded, Catholic Worker Houses of Hospitality for the poor and destitute had grown from a single house in New York City to dozens around the country.

And they're growing for a reason.

- A poor little woman who was covered with lice from head to foot, sleeping out in filth and broken down buildings.

They came and brought her to us, the police, the Brooklyn police.

This is how extreme it would get.

This happens over and over again in the history of the Catholic Worker.

I don't know how over the years you can accumulate such a tremendous saga of rescue, but in the city of New York, the greatest, richest city in the world, goes ahead and has to bring in this woman from the streets.

- The day would begin with the soup line, early in the morning, with somebody who was in charge of putting beans in the water and boiling them for soup.

And then at a certain point, people would begin lining up outside the door.

And we would say you can't come in if you were stumbling drunk or something.

- I didn't have a clue of who they were or what they did besides serve the poor a hot meal.

So I got on this line and I worked my way upstairs and got this wonderful hot meal and I became enamored of the place and I came back for months and months.

She had a profound effect on my faith, particularly in that time period when I was going to the Worker for food.

She didn't want people serving the poor as if they were doing them a favor.

On the contrary.

Everybody was treated with the utmost respect.

- The goal of the Worker was not to fix all these people.

It was not a social agency and some people could say, well, you're not really helping them.

This person really needs to be on medication, or something like that.

Well, after a while there, you didn't even raise those kinds of questions.

You just accepted people as they were and made room for them as long as there was a modicum of peace.

- There are stories of Catholic Worker volunteers being hurt in food lines with people who are mentally ill. That's true.

So you've got to be careful.

It was tough and it was sometimes dangerous.

It was certainly unpredictable.

You never knew what would happen if you went to the Catholic Worker.

- Someone had said to her, "Why shouldn't people get what they deserve?"

A way of saying that alcoholics and bums shouldn't get handouts from people.

And she said, "God save us if we got what we deserved."

- Many come to us at their hungriest, which bread alone or even the best meal does not satisfy.

What they come to us for is human warmth.

We are living in these times, a time of tremendous failure of man's sense of responsibility for what he is doing.

He relinquishes it to state.

He is not obedient to his own promptings of conscience.

- [Narrator] Those promptings of conscience, she believes, should compel people to help each other, one-to-one, an extension of a concept known as Personalism.

- This idea that every Christian has a personal responsibility to get involved in taking care of our brothers and sisters.

When someone comes to us and asks for help, we can't say, "Well, the state office is down the street."

Or, "Here, I can give you these coupons "but I can send you to the right office."

So that's the wrong response.

The response we're called on, is that we ourselves have to do something for that person.

The profound theological truth she saw was that we should do something for the other because that changes us.

It doesn't just change the other person, we are changed.

- [Narrator] For Dorothy Day, the notion of personal responsibility is directly tied to her understanding of the Catholic faith, a faith she converted to in her 20's.

- She was a conservative Catholic, meaning the liturgy was important to her.

She wasn't, as people might think, a religious leftist.

So Dorothy, on theological matters, ecclesial matters, biblical matters, was actually quite conservative.

And she was radical in her social, economic, political views because of her conservative faith.

- [Narrator] Part of Dorothy Day's attraction to the Catholic faith emerges out of her study of the saints.

One in particular is Benedict, the fifth century monastic who fostered the idea of hospitality to the stranger.

- Treating the other as Christ.

Everybody who comes in the door is a Christ figure.

And that whole notion of hospitality, that you are at the ready to take people into your own life, whatever that might mean.

It says, we have $10, and it costs us each 50 cents to eat today, so bring in 20 people and we'll all eat today.

- [Narrator] But Dorothy Day takes it one step further.

Not only would she and her Catholic Workers receive the poor, they would accept voluntary poverty for themselves.

Become poor like those they serve and live with those they serve.

- She came to visit our community, the Sisters of Social Service.

We were unusual in the '50s and '60s because we lived in a house together and we all went out and worked individually.

We'd get in our cars in the morning and go out to work and then we'd come home in the evening.

Well, she was visiting with us.

We thought we were cool because we were avant-garde and pushing the limits.

One night at dinner she said, "Why don't you stay "with the people you serve?

"Isn't that where you belong?"

And it became like this shock.

Our guest, who we were revering, criticizing us.

So she agitated every place.

Even if she was a guest, she didn't feel like she had to behave.

- [Narrator] On occasion, because of her uncompromising positions, especially around total pacifism and defending worker's rights, she spars with her own Archbishop of New York, Cardinal Francis Spellman.

But never to the point of being disobedient.

- I mean at one point Cardinal Spellman wants her to not use the name Catholic in her newspaper, The Catholic Worker.

And she commented something to the effect of, "Yes, I will shut down and I will give him "the 500 people that I am currently taking care of."

- She was witnessing to the church itself.

You taught us this, we're doing it.

Now don't tell us we're not Catholic.

- [Narrator] So despite threats from the U.S. government, the concerns of her own church, and the daily challenges at The Catholic Worker to survive one meal to the next, The Catholic Worker keeps going.

Dorothy Day is born in New York, 1897.

It is said her parents, Grace and John Day, never went to church.

John considered himself an atheist.

The family is living in northern California in 1906 when the San Francisco earthquake strikes.

- My grandmother was nine years old when the earthquake happened.

She saw how people came together to help each other.

San Francisco was devastated, absolutely devastated.

And everyone just did what they could to help each other.

I think that made a huge impact on her.

She thought, "Why can't we be that way all the time?"

- [Narrator] The earthquake closes the newspaper where John Day is a journalist, mostly covering the world of horseracing.

- [Kate] He lived his life on the racetracks.

And the family's fortunes came and went, based on his gambling.

- [Narrator] The Day family soon moves to Chicago.

There, a young Dorothy is developing a love for reading.

Upton Sinclair's recent sensation, "The Jungle," exposes the life of workers in the Chicago stockyards.

- As a child she was living near the back of the yards of Chicago and reading Upton Sinclair, describing the conditions, the work conditions for the workers.

I think all of these things hit her directly in the heart.

- She was very moved by the way a book could open your eyes to social reality.

You might live in a different way because of being exposed to a world of suffering.

- [Narrator] And on her own, Dorothy is exploring the world of the sacred.

- [Dorothy] I loved the psalms, and learned many of them by heart.

And the anthems filled me with joy.

I had never heard anything so beautiful as the "Benedicte" and the "Te Deum."

- [Narrator] In 1916, the family moves to New York and against her father's wishes, Dorothy begins a career as a journalist.

She begins writing for socialist newspapers, including The Call, and later The Masses.

She interviews prominent figures like communist leader, Leon Trotsky.

- [Dorothy] We walked the picket lines.

We investigated starvation and death in the slums.

Our function as journalists seemed to be to build up a tremendous indictment against the present system, forcing the workers to rise in revolution.

- There was great injustice all around, great suffering.

And a lot of very sensitive people who cared about the suffering were drawn to Marx and communism.

- [Narrator] Worker uprising and the Russian Revolution are shocking the world.

Russian literature is becoming more important in Dorothy's life.

Especially Leo Tolstoy, who thought of himself as a Christian anarchist, and Fyodor Dostoevsky.

- Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, for her, were what you can call two halves of the Slavic soul.

Dostoevsky knew firsthand what it was to be down and out, to be a person who had to live by his wits.

Tolstoy chose poverty and suffering late in life.

He abandoned the life of the wealthy novelist to live among the poor under the state.

So he represented for her, in a sense, a model of voluntary poverty that was combined with the life of a writer.

- [Narrator] One of the movements polarizing America is the Suffragette Movement, the right of women to vote.

Dorothy travels to Washington to join the protest.

Along with many of the leaders, she is arrested.

- She was beaten horribly.

So severely that people thought that her back was broken, and of course they went through that hunger strike and it really was a difficult time for her.

- [Narrator] In jail, Dorothy asks for a bible and reads the Psalms.

After several weeks, President Woodrow Wilson orders the women freed.

Yet after fighting for the right, throughout her own life, Dorothy Day never voted.

Back in New York, Dorothy is more and more accepted into an elite circle of writers who meet in the back room of a bar known as The Hell Hole.

(swing music) - There was a lot of drinking and smoking and dancing and staying up all night at parties.

You get that feeling everybody then was writing a novel, everybody was talking about ideas.

There were all kinds of political factions.

- [Dorothy] There was a real conflict going on in me at the time to overcome my religious sense.

I started to swear, quite consciously, and began to take God's name in vain in order to shock my friends.

It was a strong gesture I was making to push religion away.

- But she was always spiritually hungry.

She was a seeker, a questioner.

She's hanging out with the greatest playwright of all time in America, Eugene O'Neill.

- One of the things about Eugene O'Neill was he was probably the very first Catholic that she came to know quite well.

And he did recite to her Francis Thompson's poem, The Hound of Heaven.

And she never forgot that.

- [Man] I fled Him, down the nights and down the days.

I fled Him, down the arches of the years.

I fled Him, down the labyrinthine-- - The Hound of Heaven is a late Victorian poem, the idea of which became crucial to Dorothy Day's subsequent sense of how God works, was that you could run away from God, but God would be on your heels like a hound coming after you.

- She describes even in her wandering and restless years when she was hanging out with Eugene O'Neill that she would sometimes leave this all-night saloon or something and then duck into early morning mass where working people would go to mass on their way to work.

She said there was the atmosphere of prayer and silence and quiet, but there was something there that these people who had difficult and struggling lives yet had access to some kind of foundation or moral center that gave some kind of deeper, transcendent meaning to their existence.

And I think that she felt a longing for that.

- [Narrator] But this is also a period when Dorothy Day's hunger for love leads to heartbreak.

She meets another journalist.

They begin a relationship and she becomes pregnant.

He convinces her to have a crude abortion and then leaves her.

Dorothy will later attempt suicide, twice.

On the rebound, she marries a wealthy Boston man, but that, too, ends abruptly with her leaving him.

With earnings from her work as a writer, Dorothy is able to purchase a small cottage on the coast of Staten Island, New York.

She reconnects with a man from her theater circle and falls deeply in love.

His name is Forster Batterham.

- He was a trained biologist, so he really saw nature in a very detailed way.

And he could name everything.

Yes, he viewed it from the point of view of a scientist and she would go one step further, about well, isn't this wonderful?

Isn't this a sign of something deeper?

- [Dorothy] I have always felt that it was life with him that brought me natural happiness, that brought me to God.

His ardent love of creation brought me to the creator of all things.

But it was impossible to talk to him about religion or faith.

A wall immediately separated us.

- [Narrator] And then a surprise.

Dorothy is pregnant.

- It's very painful, the abortion early in life.

Wondering whether she can ever have another child.

Then finally here comes precious Tamar.

- [Narrator] Tamar Teresa is born in 1926.

Tamar, Hebrew for palm tree.

- [Dorothy] Forster did not believe in bringing children into such a world as we lived in.

He was still obsessed by the war.

And his fear of responsibility, his extreme individualism, made him feel that he, of all men, should not be a father.

- [Narrator] It's also a time when Dorothy is reading the early 15th century classic, "Imitation of Christ," by Thomas a Kempis.

And praying the rosary.

She now insists Tamar be baptized into the Catholic faith.

- I mean who else but my grandmother would decide to have a child baptized in a religion that neither parent belonged to?

She does do it.

- [Narrator] And not long after, Dorothy herself accepts the Catholic faith.

- And I must say that I first became a Catholic because...

I felt the Catholic church was the church of the poor and I still think it's the church of the poor.

I think it's the church of all the immigrant populations that came over or brought over.

- I don't think decisions have anything to do with it.

I think it is all about coming to know that this out here is not the fullness of yourself and does not satisfy, but somehow or other there's something going on in here and that's what you have to be true to.

- A lot of people ask, why Catholic?

Her father said, "The Catholic church "is the church of Irish cops and washerwomen."

- [Narrator] Dorothy later wrote she felt like she was going over to the opposition because the church was so often aligned with property, the wealthy, and capitalism.

Yet something drew her.

- I think that for her Catholicism was not just a polite way of being Christian.

It was like this total package.

It made demands on you.

It involved a whole world of the saints and of the mystical body of Christ.

- But what really was the breaking point is that, as a Catholic, as my grandmother would convert to Catholicism, she believed in marriage.

At this point she had lived kind of the bohemian life in which marriage wasn't that important.

But now it was absolutely essential for her.

And my grandfather did not believe in marriage.

- [Narrator] Over the next year, Dorothy's work has her traveling well beyond New York.

But Forster is never far from her mind.

- [Dorothy] I feel that Tamar and I belong to you and when I am with you in that way it leaves me with a feeling of our close presence in my heart for weeks afterwards.

Aren't we ever going to be together again?

- [Narrator] December, 1932.

The Depression has created millions of homeless, unemployed and destitute Americans.

The communists organize a massive march on Washington, D.C. Dorothy Day is there.

- Her work keeps putting her front and center in the social movements of the time.

She sees people agitated for better lives firsthand and she feels something other than the detachment that we associate with a journalist.

She feels very passionate about what they're doing and wants to be part of it.

- Dorothy is standing there witnessing the rag tag protesters going by with the support of the communists.

And she's wondering, where is the Catholic church?

She's now five years into her conversion.

She's trying to understand what her role is, the combination of her journalistic talent and her faith.

And it's there that she realizes that the church is missing in action.

- [Narrator] December 8th.

For Catholics, The Feast of Mary's Immaculate Conception.

Dorothy leaves the march and goes to the crypt church of the Basilica of the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception.

- Dorothy Day felt when she became a Catholic, that she was going to have to leave behind the progressive social movements that she'd been involved in.

- She's really praying for her vocation.

What was this all for, this big sacrifice of becoming a Catholic and leaving the man she loves?

What was she being called to do?

What was the purpose of all of this?

- She said a prayer, she lit a candle and said a prayer that God would show her the way.

And two days later she came back to New York and Peter Maurin was literally on her doorstep.

And she always said, "This is God's answer to my prayer."

- [Narrator] Dorothy Day returns to New York only to find her brother and sister-in-law had let into the apartment a peculiar man who would ultimately change Dorothy's life.

Peter Maurin is 55.

He comes from a family of 23 children in southern France where his family farmed the same land for centuries.

Maurin is a student of Catholic teachings.

He owns little more than the clothes on his back because for him, poverty is a gift from God.

He has a deep devotion to the saints, and wants to share with Dorothy his sweeping plan for social change.

- He would literally follow her around the apartment lecturing at her.

Sometimes for hours at a time.

She'd be scrubbing or cooking or washing the dishes and Peter Maurin would be behind her sort of telling her what the Personalist philosophy was and how this was important for them right there.

And I think after a while, she got it.

- And he was in love with justice and the price that one had to pay.

It was he that saw something in her that he knew would have a profound effect on the Catholic church.

- [Dorothy] Peter made you feel a sense of mission as soon as you met him.

He always reminded me that we are our brother's keeper.

That we must have a sense of personal responsibility to take care of our neighbor at a personal sacrifice.

It is not the function of the state to enter into these realms.

He stressed the need for building a new society within the shell of the old.

A society in which it was easier for people to be good.

- He brought into her life exactly what she had been dealing with internally all her life, the questions.

He becomes for her her spiritual GPS.

He was concerned about what she knew life should be concerned about.

- So here she was trying to figure out how to combine this newfound faith with her old thirst for social justice.

When she started to listen, she realized that he was bringing her the church's teachings on social justice.

She had not heard anything about this.

No one had mentioned this to her.

- In some ways, modern Catholic social teaching began in the late 1800's, when Pope Leo wrote a document called "Of New Things."

And the new thing was the Industrial Revolution and the way it was grinding up the lives of workers.

And so he insisted that workers have particular dignity and therefore they have particular rights to decent wages, to decent working conditions, to have a voice in the workplace, to have a union, even to strike.

And so the church therefore comes forward, in part as a response to communism or socialism or the evils of unfettered capitalism and says, "Let's put the person first."

In a certain sense, they were saying the economy exists for the person, not the other way around.

- [Narrator] One of the first proposals Maurin offers is to start a newspaper.

- I think it's the ambition of everybody who's been in journalism to have their own paper.

To start a paper.

But I was very dubious about the funds.

You say that in the Catholic church funds were never necessary, you just needed to start.

- [Narrator] The paper will be called The Catholic Worker, and it will forever sell for a penny a copy.

It launches in Union Square, New York, May 1st, 1933.

- May Day is the big celebration on May the first, of communism and of the workers of the world uniting and throwing off their chains.

So it was by no means an accident that she and Peter Maurin decided the first appearance of The Catholic Worker occurs on May Day in Union Square.

- [Dorothy] In the first issue of the paper we dealt with negro labor, exploited as cheap labor by the War Department.

We wrote of women and children in the industry and the spread of unemployment.

The next issues carried stories of textile strikes, farmer's strikes in the Midwest, child labor and combating anti-Semitism.

- [Kate] And it was really important for her to say to people, to say to other Catholics, the church does have a program for social justice.

- You had a large number of working class people who were already Catholic.

Secondly, you had Catholic leaders and hierarchs who were determined not to lose those people to socialism or communism.

- I was reading The Catholic Worker myself at the age of 15.

These Benedictine sisters were alive with this in Erie, Pennsylvania in this little semi-cloistered monastery.

I don't think we knew what it was, but I'll tell you, it was some sort of injection of the soul.

And it stuck.

- [Kate] The first print run was 2,500 copies and it really took off almost immediately.

But certainly within three years, the print run was up to 150,000.

- [Narrator] And soon the inevitable happens.

- One day, writing about hospitality in the paper, and this girl came in.

It was during the Depression and she had nothing but a shopping bag with clothes in it.

And she came in and she said, "I understand "you have a house of hospitality."

And I said, "No, we have been writing about it."

And she said, "Well why do you write about it, "if you don't have one?"

We went right out, we went down the street, we rented a seven room apartment.

We had our first house of hospitality.

- [Narrator] So what starts as a newspaper now is expanding into Catholic Worker houses of hospitality.

- We're talking about the high point of the Depression.

So she had no trouble getting clients, she had no trouble getting people in.

They just needed a place to sleep.

They needed a meal, they needed some company, they needed a word of encouragement.

- Now the idea was not that The Catholic Worker was the solution to the Depression.

But the idea that through these symbolic gestures, it was a call and appeal to other people, for everybody, to accept their personal responsibility.

- If your brother is hungry, you feed him.

You don't meet him at the door and say, "Go be thou filled."

Or wait for a few weeks and you will get a welfare check.

You sit him down and feed him.

And so that's how the soup kitchen started.

- [Narrator] Many of those coming to The Catholic Worker for help are recent immigrants.

- I think that there was something about the situation of the immigrant that really spoke to her.

That this sense of being taken from one's home and coming into a new country, for some reason really did speak to her heart.

But she always said that when people came to the door, when people came in such need, to her that was a way that she most easily saw the face of God.

- [Narrator] And in the midst of it all is Dorothy's daughter, Tamar.

- My mother was seven when The Catholic Worker started.

But I always like to refer to my mother as the very first Catholic Worker.

She understood it.

She did not miss a beat.

I mean, of course there were very difficult times.

They both sacrificed a lot.

And one of those sacrifices was that my grandmother started to speak publicly a lot about what was happening with The Catholic Worker Movement.

And that separation was very difficult for both of them.

- [Narrator] As the movement expands, another Peter Maurin idea is launched.

The Worker begins farming projects where food needed for the city homes can be grown, and scholars can get their hands dirty.

Maurin calls the farms agronomic universities.

- Here's Peter, a peasant of the land.

His family has occupied the same farm for a thousand years.

And so he has this combination of deep-rootedness in the land, the dignity of work, the immense dignity of man being close to the soil and providing for his family.

- They really believed in self-sufficiency, which meant that you would grow your own food, and if you couldn't grow your own food in the city, well then you had to have a farm upstate.

- But I think that no one at The Worker really understood what it took to run something as complicated as a farm.

So how are you going to have the time to talk about papal social encyclicals when you're worried about harvesting the corn?

I never understood, I never got a sense from reading anything by either Day or Maurin that they had a clue of how difficult that was going to be.

(military music) - [Narrator] But the greater challenge is ahead as America enters World War II.

The Catholic Worker must decide to either support what many believe is the very definition of a just war, or take literally the biblical call to be peacemakers.

- It took tremendous courage for her to call into question the tradition of just war that had been hammered out going all the way back to Augustan by towering Catholic theologians.

And for her, just war, with all of its concerns about proportionality and pursuing non-violent options as far as one can, and so on.

It's a very powerful and sophisticated position, there's no doubt about it.

But she also knew that it could too easily become a rationalization for killing innocent people.

And it became a rationalization of how violence takes on a logic of its own.

- The works of war destroy the food, destroy the homes, and do everything opposite of what our Lord asks.

So that makes us, of course, very ardent pacifists.

- We know she lost a lot of Catholic support.

Not only among the hierarchy, but among rank and file Catholics who had lost sons, you know, fighting in Normandy and Europe.

They could just not understand how someone who claimed to be a Catholic could be so critical of the last good war.

- [Narrator] The decision costs the paper half its readership.

Donations declined dramatically.

Yet Dorothy does not waiver.

- Her understanding of what Jesus said when he said, "Put the sword down.

"Those who live by the sword, will die by the sword."

This was something that she was willing and able to practice.

- [Narrator] In 1944, Dorothy's daughter, Tamar, marries David Hennessy.

Together they will have nine children.

Five years later, Peter Maurin, the man who was Dorothy's mentor for 17 years, suffers a stroke in his sleep and dies soon after.

Committed to poverty until the end, Peter Maurin is buried in a donated suit, in a donated grave.

- In the 1950's then, the whole agenda becomes anti-communism, the McCarthy Era.

And really, anti-communism becomes almost the ID card for a Catholic and it was a guarantee of Catholic's Americanism.

And for Dorothy then to defect from that agenda, or that identification of flag and cross, and not to hop aboard this Cold War mentality, that was deeply shocking.

- [Narrator] Later, as the Vietnam War takes center stage, Day and her Catholic Workers are part of the early protests.

Again, they find themselves outside mainstream America.

- The amazing thing about Dorothy Day is that she's consistent.

She said this war was wrong, and she got involved, and was in the streets and civil disobedience around the war.

And the country sort of caught up to her.

It's not that she changed, the nation changed.

- Now Dorothy, though, didn't have the kind of pacifism that was passive.

There's a real difference here.

Pacifism isn't actually a biblical term.

Jesus says, "Blessed are the peacemakers "for they'll be called the children of God."

He didn't say blessed are the peace lovers.

We all love peace.

- There is a tremendous growth in the peace movement certainly in this country.

And the constant emphasis on the need for voluntary poverty and the works of mercy as a basis of the peace movement.

These things are taken hold you might say all through the young.

The desire is there to grow spiritually and to see how much they can do without, to see how much they can go ahead to change the system by each one playing his part in this way.

A great sense of personal responsibility.

- [Narrator] For Dorothy Day, years of caring for the needs of the poor and organizing public resistance to the nation's war efforts are taking a toll.

- Well, I think anybody who embarks on a prophetic witness, comes to terms with the overwhelming darkness and grimness of the world, the overwhelming hurt and suffering in the world, needs some source of spiritual sustenance.

And she was able to find it in daily meditation and the Eucharist.

We cannot downplay the degree to which, for her, when she is partaking of the body and blood of Jesus, she is tied to the memory of the blood of those made in the image of God, especially the weak and the vulnerable.

So there is a political dimension to this profoundly liturgical act.

- She believed that it took a person three hours a day to keep their spiritual life going.

Prayer had a very wide notion.

I mean it was, you know, formal prayer, and reading scripture but it was also reading a wide variety of things.

It was listening to music.

It was writing, she viewed writing as a form of prayer.

- [Narrator] In the 1960's, The Catholic Worker manages to buy an old mansion and land on the Hudson River north of New York City.

It's called Tivoli Farm.

- And to my grandmother this was such a moment of hope.

She said, "We'll have a Catholic Worker school.

"We'll have a place where we can have conferences, "peace conferences."

- There were Friday night meetings when all kinds of writers or intellectuals or activists would come and give a presentation.

- You know, you have to have a sense of humor when you've got nine grandkids running wild.

I mean, her willingness to be in the midst of chaos and very gently enjoying it.

- My grandmother has been accused of being an indifferent and neglectful mother, and that is just not what my mother experienced.

It really is not.

Dorothy was heroic in terms of her family obligations.

It was really quite extraordinary how much she was involved.

- When she had all these idealistic kids in the 1960's to come in and work for her, she was thrilled.

But they were all into the free love movement and everything and that just drove her crazy.

She'd her own wild childhood but man, she did not like kids who were casual about sexual mores at the time.

- The '60s and '70s were very difficult for my grandmother.

She says, "I've done all the things "that young people are doing today "except for drugs."

(United Farm Workers singing) - And one of the best things that has been happening in the United States is the strike of the United Farm Workers headed by Cesar Chavez.

(Chavez speaking in foreign language) - [Translator] We who fight for justice, wherever we are, we always say the same thing.

We are obliged to fight for the poor.

We are obliged to care for our own.

And who are we?

We are everyone, everyone who stoops, everyone who is poor, everyone who is exploited.

- And they have successfully for the first time organized farm workers not only in California and Arizona, but also in Florida.

You might say that there is an upsurge of... inspiration coming from such a group as that.

So they are bringing to it a very, very deep thinking.

And they are thinking in terms of an entirely new social order.

- [Narrator] Now in her 70's, Dorothy Day travels to California in support of Cesar Chavez and the striking farm workers.

There she is arrested for the eighth and last time.

- You did these things because they were the right thing to do.

You had to draw attention to the injustices of the poor.

- Farm workers were the most marginalized people at that time.

And were given very little in wages.

They were given terrible working conditions.

They were not allowed, in the heat of the summer, to even take breaks.

It was excruciating work.

- One of the most iconic photographs in American religious art is her sitting there, looking something like a bag lady, but a very prophetic bag lady, lecturing these policemen with guns.

- It was almost easier to stand before a judge and go to jail on other occasions.

(audience clapping) I suppose I have been asked to speak because my name is associated so much with these houses of hospitality and bread lines.

- [Narrator] Dorothy Day believes in paying local taxes for all the local services the community enjoys.

But because of her deep suspicions about how federal monies could support war efforts, she refuses to pay federal taxes.

- They figured that she owed $300,000 in back taxes (chuckling) or something like that.

And she said, "Oh, here's a solution.

"Why don't you just figure out "how much you think I owe, and you tell me, "and I just won't pay it."

Here she is at the end of her life, not thinking, oh my gosh, I could be homeless or they could close down The Catholic Worker.

It's like you do whatever you got to do, I'm just not going to go along with it.

- [Narrator] In the end, the government takes no action.

- There's many times of great weariness in work of this kind.

And you think to yourself, how pleasant it would be if I could just drop all responsibilities and all authority.

- [Kate] The last three years, particularly, of my grandmother's life were very difficult for her.

She had to slow down, she'd had a heart attack.

She had a series of several heart attacks.

And she had to retreat to her room at Mary House on the Lower East Side.

- The speaking engagements had to become less and less.

It was a very rigorous schedule that she maintained for so many years.

And so she was coming to a place of letting go.

And for a woman of such power and such strength to have to submit to that aging process, it broke my heart to see that happening.

- [Narrator] Over the years, Dorothy stays in touch with Forster, the father of Tamar.

And the last years are special, too, for Dorothy and a daughter whose life has known poverty all too well.

- So that was a very, very painful thing for me to witness my mother letting go of her mother.

Tamar and Dorothy both sacrificed for this work.

- [Dorothy] I think that we are very happy people.

I mean, you can have a family of poverty-stricken people around you and there still is joy.

There is the joy of companionship, and the joy of children, there's a great deal of natural joy, and then there's the feeling that you are doing what you are called to do.

Your vocation is being fulfilled.

- She was talking about reading books and the life of the mind, the life of the spirit.

She realized that, for someone who is alive to those kind of realities, growing old, approaching death has no fear.

And there is that kind of youthfulness that she carried right up to the very end.

- [Narrator] Dorothy Day dies November 29th, 1980, at the age of 83.

- What I remember most about the funeral is how different the people were in the audience.

I mean you have all kinds of people who were poor, just streamed in and they just thought she belonged to them.

- It was just a typical Catholic Worker thing.

There were people who were drunk and fighting and getting into fist fights and stuff.

There were other people coming and kissing her coffin.

- And yet you looked around, there were bishops there.

There were a lot of people there who had been touched by Dorothy Day.

Many of whom had very influential voices, in church and journalism, in politics.

And she had impacted so many people.

- Talk about hearing your own drummer.

And there is a vision that, as far as I'm concerned, is the ultimate criteria of the prophetic person.

- There's this terrible irony in an atheist coming to love God, and an anarchist coming to embrace a hierarchical institution, and a radical deciding that personal charity and living and working with the poor is an expression of faith.

- She embodies so much of what we need now, which is genuine empathy for others.

- Her life was instinctual.

She saw someone fall, she'd help them up.

She saw someone hungry, she'd feed 'em.

- She leaves us with a model on how to be authentic.

How to have integrity.

How to live as if your life really means something.

- And she would say, "Don't call me a saint.

"I don't want to be written off that easily."

- It was all there from the moment she decided to say yes to God.

It was all on this trajectory.

I'm going to go all the way, I'm going to take this crazy message of Jesus all the way.

- I believe in miracles, of course.

I believe that perhaps someday there may be mutinies large enough to bring an end to war.

Who knows what will happen?

(peaceful music) - [Announcer] Major funding for this program was made possible by Lilly Endowment.

Additional funding providing by the Catholic Communication Campaign, through the MPT Foundation, and the following: Mary Catherine Bunting, Santa Maria Foundation, the Franciscan Friars, Province of St. John the Baptist, the Bunting Family Foundation, and Skip and Fran Minakowski.

A DVD of "Revolution of the Heart, The Dorothy Day Story" including bonus materials, is available online at mpt.org/shop.

Or call the phone number on the screen.

- [Announcer] For more information about this program, or the educational materials available about Dorothy Day, visit journeyfilms.com.

(pleasant music)