PAUL ELIE: She would come out of the tavern and walk past the church and see healthy and well-adjusted Catholics, the very workers to whom she yearned to be joined, climbing up the steps to pray and worship. she felt the attraction to that very powerfully.

ROBERT ELLSBERG: 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 and then duck into early morning mass at St. Joseph's Church in the Village, where working people would go to mass on their way to work. She said there was the atmosphere of prayer, a kind of silence and quiet, but there was something there, that these people who had difficult and struggling lives 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…. I think that for her Catholicism was not just a polite way of being Christian it was like the total package. it made demands on you… It involved a whole world of the Saints and the mystical body of Christ. . . .

JIM WALLIS: She always said the question is, What does it mean to follow Jesus today? So I was drawn to her as a young kid trying to figure out, What does it mean to follow Jesus? And like her, I had this past of getting kicked out of the church or leaving the church and going to the movements of my time. Finding those secular movements as inspiring as they are, to not have an adequate foundation for how we change the world. And that drew me to Christ, and it drew me to people like Dorothy Day, who were always asking, “I don't have all the answers, I'm not perfect for sure, but the question is, What does it mean to follow Jesus right now?”

MARK MASSA: she represented the kind of Catholic that in some respects is kind of traditional, that fits fairly neatly into a peg of traditional piety, and in another sense a quite radical Christian Socialist 16 understanding of her duty as a lay Catholic. Just a regular believer. And I think putting those two halves together must have given some headaches to the Cardinal Archbishops of New York.

JIM WALLIS: The thing that people don't know about her so much is she was a conservative Catholic, meaning the liturgy and theology was important to her. She wasn’t as people might think, a religious leftist. Where I still think religious right and religious left are both mistaken, we can't let our politics shape our religion. It’s supposed to be the other way around. 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.

MARK MASSA: Dorothy Day managed to combine in her persona, and more importantly, in the Catholic Worker Movement that she and Peter Maurin founded, they managed to combine two seemingly opposite traditions. That is, the Catholic tradition of social justice and the American tradition of outsider-hood.

SIMONE CAMPBELL: Catholic Social Teaching comes out of the sense that the gospel is not a personal journey, the gospel is a communal journey, it’s a worldwide journey . . . [T]he rights of workers to organize, to have a just wage, to push back against management and the domination of capital. That’s kind of a radical thought even in today’s world and certainly in North America that workers have a right to claim what they need in order to live. That is the basis of our Catholic teachings and now it has evolved over the decades since 1891… the responsibility to care for the Earth, the responsibility to care for those who are most left out in poverty and struggle, and the responsibility of to build up a society where all can flourish and realize their own dignity.

MARK MASSA: When she founded The Worker in the 1930s, a large proportion of the Catholic population in the United States were outsiders. They were immigrants, or the children of immigrants, or the grandchildren of immigrants. Dorothy Day was to the culture bred and born. She was born as a Protestant, was a journalist, lived a very fast life in the West Village, would hang out with some of the movers and shakers of the Village intellectual set. Eugene O’Neill and 17 people like that. She brought to the Catholic side of the conversation the whole American tradition of outsider-hood. . . . So Dorothy Day got this insight, it was a brilliant insight, that precisely by taking care of the poor, by taking care of the outsiders, she managed to place herself at the very center of American Catholicism. And maybe of American culture. She represented the kind of Catholic that in some respects is kind of traditional, that fits fairly neatly into a peg of traditional piety, and in another sense a quite radical Christian Socialist understanding of her duty as a lay Catholic. Just a regular believer. And I think putting those two halves together must have given some headaches to the Cardinal Archbishops of New York. Because while they felt disquiet about that, they knew there’s not a lot they could do because she had the kind of authority that you took on at your own risk. And they didn’t try to take her on. . . . [B]y and large, Dorothy Day lived and died as what she always called herself, which was a dutiful daughter of the church. That’s what she wanted to be, she was a daughter of the church.

MARTHA HENNESSEY . . . 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 can. I will shut down, and I will give him the five hundred people that I am currently taking care of.” Something along those lines. And so to think that the message of the Gospel, of “feed the hungry, clothe the naked,” could be such a threat to the state.

CORNEL WEST: She’s not putting up with a hierarchy that can authorize things that she’s against. But she does surrender to Catholic authority. She does surrender to the Pope’s authority. But her surrender always has a Socratic element, she’s thinking for herself.

JOAN CHITTISTER: What she's doing here is raising full force for the rest of us the model of what it is to be a Catholic, to claim Catholicism, and to be witness to the Church itself, of its own teachings.

MARK MASSA: She herself opted for a much more radical take on what the Gospel in the United States meant. A take that combined…that combined the radical tradition of monasticism and the papal social encyclicals with the radical American tradition of being on the outside and being on the outside precisely to critique the mainstream to make it better. So she put those two halves together in a very interesting way. . . I think 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, they weren’t quite sure what peg to put this in, because they said she was crafting it as she went along. She had no, she had no illusions about how the church itself had sometimes been complicit in a lot of the stuff that …marginalized people. I think, you know, she once said she loved the church…she loved the church not because it was perfect, but because it was the cross on which Christ was crucified. And I think therefore --- and putting out The Catholic Worker paper--- she presented a Catholic view of the world with both eyes wide open, with no illusions, no saccharine, no sentimental understanding of a Catholic answer that was devoid of the sin and the complicity that everybody took part in after the fall of Adam and Eve.

Dorothy Day’s relationship with the Roman Catholic Church could sometimes be strained, although she was theologically conservative and always respectful of church authority, even when she disagreed with it. Day’s activism on behalf of the poor, and later, against war and nuclear weapons, implicitly challenged many stances of the American church hierarchy. And while she came to embody the ideas of Catholic Social Teaching, Day claimed not to know much about them when she joined the church in 1927. She was moved, rather, by the fact that the masses of the poor with whom she engaged in New York City---many of them immigrants from southern and eastern Europe---were faithful adherents of the Catholic Church. “[T]his fact in itself,” she wrote, “drew me to the Church.”

1. Dorothy Day’s political radicalism and activism did sometimes cause tensions with the Church. Is there a place for radicalism in the Church, where it can be useful in bringing about change? Or is it mostly harmful in challenging or undermining established Church authority?

2. Review the major tenets of Roman Catholic Social Teaching. (You can do so at the website of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops: http://www.usccb.org/beliefs-andteachings/ what-we-believe/catholic-social-teaching/seven-themes-of-catholic-socialteaching. cfm) In what ways did Day’s life and work embody these teachings? Are there aspects of these teachings that she did not embody? How might she be a good model for a person attempting to live out these tenets?

3. It has been suggested that Day saw the entire world as in some sense “sacramental” – reflective of God and God-ordained. How might that view of the world and everyone in it have influenced Day’s larger purposes and actions?

4. Day has been named a “Servant of God,” a step in the process toward sainthood in the Roman Catholic Church. Do you consider Day a saint? Do you agree with commentators in the film that sainthood could be a way of domesticating Day’s radical witness?

5. In her early years in New York City, Dorothy found herself caught between the allure of the Bohemian life and the solace and meaning she felt in the church. Can you identify times when you have felt torn between the pull of the world, whatever it may be, and the call of the spiritual life? How did you resolve this tension---or did you resolve it?

6. Do you think of the church today (whether Roman Catholic or other) as being “the church of the poor,” as Dorothy Day envisioned it? If not, why? Is the church, as Dorothy Day suggested, too closely allied to an economic and political system (i.e. capitalism)? What does Catholic Social Teaching have to say about the role of the economy?

7. Why did Day, who was nominally raised a Protestant, choose Catholicism? Or did it choose her? What accounts for her conversion to Roman Catholicism? 8. What do you see as Day’s primary legacy for the Christian church today? For Roman Catholicism? Alternatively, what does she have to say to those outside the church today? Is she a figure who transcends religious boundaries?

There was a real conflict going on in me at the time [the early 1920s] to overcome my religious sense. I started to swear, quite consciously, and began to take God’s name in vein in order to shock my friends…I felt the strong gesture I was making to push religion away. (The Long Loneliness, 42)

I felt that the Church was the Church of the poor, that St. Patrick’s had been built from the pennies of the servant girls, that it cared for the immigrant, it established hospitals, orphanages, day nurseries, houses of the Good Shepherd, homes for the aged but at the same time I felt that it did not set its face against a social order which made so much charity in the present sense of the word necessary. I felt that charity was a word to choke over. Who wanted charity? And it was not just human pride but a strong sense of man’s dignity and worth, and what was due to him in justice that made me resent rather than feel proud of so mighty a sum total of Catholic institutions. (The Long Loneliness, 150)

One must live in a state of permanent dissatisfaction with the Church. The scandal of businesslike priests, of collective wealth, the lack of a sense of responsibility for the poor, the worker, the Negro, The Mexican, the Filipino and even the oppression of these and the consenting to the oppression of them by our industrialist capitalist order, these made me feel often that priests were more like Cain than Abel.” (The Long Loneliness, 149)