Posted in Health and Social Policy

The incredible life and times of the Catholic who served the poor and gave hell to everyone else

by Maureen Tkacik August 6, 2026 (Prospect.org)

This article appears in the August 2026 issue of The American Prospect magazine. If you’d like to receive our next issue in your mailbox, please subscribe here.

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The process of evaluating canonization for Dorothy Day had its 25th anniversary last year, which might seem inauspicious if it did not require a thorough evaluation of all the books, journals, newspaper stories, diary entries, personal letters, and FBI intelligence memos composed by and about her and her closest associates for all 83 years of her life. Day’s FBI file alone, admittedly duplicative, is 830 pages long. There’s a whole book dedicated to her letters to and from Thomas Merton, who like just about every one of Day’s good friends spent considerable time under intelligence agency surveillance. Her granddaughter wrote a tell-all family memoir detailing her mother’s decision to divorce her gay husband and leave the Church, and the horrific sex abuse cult that emerged from a breakaway faction at a farm owned by the Catholic Worker. And she spent the most thoroughly documented period of her life, between her 1916 arrival in the Lower East Side of Manhattan and her 1927 conversion to Catholicism, in the company of other alcohol-abusing communist writers, nearly all of whom also wrote dishy memoirs detailing their youthful indiscretions, scandals, and flames. Day wrote a roman à clef detailing posing as a nude model and her destructive romance with a womanizing writer. She was arrested for prostitution and received an abortion from a greasy-haired hobo doctor who was famously one of Emma Goldman’s lovers.

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There is, in short, just too much tea on this woman, the whole glorious Catholic Worker Movement she founded, and the left-wing icons who traveled around them: John Dos Passos, Diego Rivera, Leon Trotsky, and more. Two of Day’s Jewish ex-boyfriends sparred with Ernest Hemingway. Day left the first to become a kind of complicated, mostly platonic muse and drinking companion to Eugene O’Neill; Day could drink him and any other man under the table, at least according to poet Malcolm Cowley, who was at the time married to Day’s best friend, sex-positive late-in-life Catholic convert Peggy Baird Johns. Another poet, W.H. Auden, paid a delinquent fine from the city on Day’s behalf.

You can feel the canonization council wondering, how is there no prestige TV epic on these people? And yet even during those years, Day emerged with her saintliness intact. The night she got arrested for prostitution, for example, she was ministering to a sick woman who happened to be the side chick of her Mr. Big figure, Lionel Moise. She watched a woman experience severe morphine withdrawal and ruminated on the tragedy of sin. She broke it off with Moise soon afterward, though he nearly killed her first. She was 108 pounds when she moved back to New York, where Peggy nursed her back to health and convinced her to buy a small cottage on Staten Island, where her friend Mike Gold bought a place down the road and the journey finally began.

IT WAS MIKE GOLD who first noticed that Dorothy Day had a thing for God, back when he still wrote under his given name, Itzok Granich, and the two started dating after bonding over labor rights and Dostoyevsky and their differing views on the Lower East Side, Day’s adopted neighborhood where Gold had spent his whole impoverished life. Both Gold and Day had downwardly mobile parents: His father had been injured working as a painter, and hers had lost everything in the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, moving the family to a drab gray apartment complex on the South Side of Chicago. Day still owned nice things and presented like “a well-bred young woman,” but there was something she envied in her immigrant neighbors’ fire escapes, vegetable gardens, and glorious kitchen smells, a fortitude drawn from old-world culture and religion that contrasted with someone like her father—a person whom modern right-wingers would deem a “heritage American”—steeped in Calvinism and regularly gambling away the family’s money.

Day’s grandfathers had fought on opposing sides in the Civil War, and her father’s mom still seethed with resentment about it. No one on either end of her family had any memory of a life before America, a Calvinist experiment whose identity was too inextricably intertwined with the vulgar profit maximization logic to have imbued its natives with anything profound. Catholicism seemed to her a part of this, as she’d thought ever since accidentally barging in as a child on her friend Kathryn’s mother kneeling down in prayer in her ghastly tenement apartment.

Gold assured Day that Catholicism wasn’t everything she fantasized about; after all, Orthodox Judaism was even older than the Church, and the pointless version of it his robotic Hebrew school teacher feebly attempted to indoctrinate him into was wholly devoid of meaning or beauty, in his estimation. But he understood what Day was searching for because he loved Tolstoy too, just as she gravitated toward the “Marxists, the IWWs who looked upon religion as the opiate of the people, who thought they had only this one life to live and then oblivion,” precisely because they were so “eager to sacrifice themselves here and now, thus doing without now and for all eternity the good things of the world they were fighting to obtain for their brothers.” Gold was, she would always say, the only one of Day’s “bohemian friends” who instantly understood and accepted her need to devote more time to God.

Seven years after their brief engagement, Day and Gold became neighbors, using the proceeds of their respective “novels” to buy cottages on the same Staten Island block, where Gold’s mother visited Day with occasional home-cooked kosher meals. Gold’s book had been such a success that he’d adapted his John Brown biography as a play, and Day’s relative lack of success was eclipsed by the fact that she was now Catholic, pregnant, and blissfully happy. And yet Gold hadn’t been entirely wrong about the Church. The congregations were full of second- and third-generation parishioners trained to “cling to a bourgeois mediocrity which would make it appear we are all Americans, made in the image and likeness of George Washington, all part of a pattern, all prospering if we are good, and going down in the world if we are bad. These are attitudes the Irish, the Italian, the Lithuanian, the Slovak and all races begin to acquire in school. So they change their names, forget their birthplace, their language, and no longer listen to their mothers when they say, ‘when I was a little girl in Russia, or Hungary, or Sicily’” and “try to be something which they call ‘an American.’”

Gold was after something different. As the dedication of his 1930 novel Jews Without Money rhapsodized:

O workers’ Revolution, you brought hope to me, a lonely, suicidal boy. You are the true Messiah. You will destroy the East Side when you come, and build there a garden for the human spirit.
O Revolution, that forced me to think, to struggle and to live.
O great Beginning!

At the time, the highest-profile American Catholic was Detroit-based priest Father Coughlin, a conspiracy-minded, increasingly fascist-leaning populist whose syndicated radio show drew 30 million weekly listeners throughout the Depression. Fatefully, Gold’s brother, who was living in the Staten Island place, invited Day to the event that would change her life: the first “hunger march” the Communist Party and unions were holding in Washington on behalf of unemployed workers, who at that point comprised nearly 20 percent of the workforce. The protest attracted 3,000 marchers, most in rusted jalopies out of The Grapes of Wrath, she later recalled. As they began to approach the border of the city, cops barricaded the highway, trapping the marchers in their freezing cold cars for three nights. Day watched with “joy and pride in the courage of this band of men and women” as they were finally given permission to march and they streamed out into the streets.

“How our dear Lord must love them, I kept thinking to myself,” she would write later, musing: “Where are all the Catholics?” She stopped at the newly built shrine at Catholic University for Mass and contemplated the fact that years after her baptism, she still didn’t really know any fellow Catholics.

THEN PETER MAURIN—a well-dressed and highly educated crank from a big French farming family in Languedoc who had spent some time in the Christian Brothers—began showing up at Day’s door on the recommendation of a mutual acquaintance, and often talked at her for hours until he returned to a flophouse, or later, whatever bed was free in one of the holdings in the Catholic Worker’s small portfolio of barely habitable real estate. He proposed she launch a newspaper and call it the Catholic Radical. She found a press that agreed to print 2,500 copies for $57, but she preferred The Catholic Worker, which hurt Maurin’s feelings just enough that he stopped coming to her apartment every day, but not enough to stay away very long or stop submitting the short poems he called “Easy Essays” for publication.

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The newspaper debuted on May Day 1933, the same spring that unemployment hit its all-time high of 25.6 percent, with a front-page story on the suppression and censorship of two investigations into a Mississippi flood control project overseen by the Department of War where the working conditions had been deemed sub-slavery: 120-degree heat, beatings from foremen, ten-cent-an-hour wages docked for egregiously marked-up gruel, men sleeping in airless tents on the mud. Another story detailed the complaints of a garment worker who went from making $35 a week to being unable to find the same work for $8. A column inside excerpted a Paulist priest’s recent speech opining that the Church was “pregnant with promise, but Catholics still-born with prejudice … not so much because we are Catholics as because we are Americans.”

With a bottomless supply of down-and-out volunteers looking to help write or distribute the newspaper, the Catholic Worker office quickly turned into a de facto soup kitchen and boardinghouse, and soon enough they found a larger space in Little Italy that enabled them to feed a thousand souls each day. Almost instantly, it became easy for the newspaper to detail a squadron of supporters to any picket line or protest, and Day was especially emphatic about showing up for causes often derided in the newspapers as “communist.”

In 1935, the Worker began hosting anti-Nazi protests outside the German consulate and the church of a priest known to support Hitler’s agenda, with Maurin carrying a sign that read, “Spiritually we are all Semites.” Catholic antisemitism was overheating at the time, thanks in part to the monstrous radio-fueled popularity of Father Coughlin, whose own newspaper Social Justice employed subway-platform hawkers who’d occasionally get in street fights with the volunteers who sold The Catholic Worker. When Coughlin published The Protocols of the Elders of Zion just months before Kristallnacht, Day teamed up with the Jesuits to publish 100,000 copies of a detailed rebuttal of the legendary antisemitic hoax and demand the Roosevelt administration begin accepting Jewish refugees.

As with so many bastions of the American left, The Catholic Worker’s power and reach peaked in the 1930s, when its circulation approached 200,000 and most of the souls it fed and housed were merely unemployed workers. As World War II approached, the men and women who frequented the breadlines and boardinghouses became less palatable, as did Day’s principled opposition to all war, and the alleged hotbed of “subversion” that was her network of soup kitchens. All this occasioned J. Edgar Hoover’s 1943 FBI inquiry, which wasn’t quite razor-sharp: The Bureau’s trusted informants seem to have believed Day was a recent Russian émigré. But hundreds of churches and Catholic organizations canceled their subscriptions to the Worker over its anti-war absolutism.

Still, the Church itself—and specifically, New York’s often villainous warmongering Cardinal Francis Spellman—protected Dorothy Day, even through her scathing condemnations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japanese American internment camps, the gravediggers’ strike of 1949, and the McCarthy-era show trials that nuked the careers of so many of her old colleagues and friends. She was constantly on the road preaching the Catholic Worker gospel against napalm, CIA assassination campaigns, segregation, voter suppression, the blockade of Cuba; and for radical love, liberation theology, the dignity of all humans, and Vatican II.

Though it was not so easy to find a physical copy of The Catholic Worker in the 1950s, its sentences could be rare gems. (The designated obituary writer’s account of an alcoholic named Jim Connors who had been sleeping in a coffin-sized chicken coop before he found a bed at the Catholic Worker, from whose roof he subsequently fell to a ghastly death, was one of the more affecting works of literature I’ve consumed in a long time.)

Day lived until Thanksgiving weekend, 1980. On the day she was buried, three American nuns and a Catholic lay worker in El Salvador were abducted, raped, and murdered at the hands of a fascist death squad backed by the United States, their mutilated bodies left to rot on a roadside as a warning to the thoroughly terrorized peasantry. The following year, longtime Catholic Worker staffer Jane Sammon, who had met another murdered El Salvadoran activist just a few months earlier, described the shock and nausea of learning all over again “what the Church in Latin America had known for more than a decade: The Gospel brings death to those who preach it.”

They were not the first martyrs for Day’s radical Catholicism. A 22-year-old Catholic Worker staffer set himself on fire outside the United Nations building in 1965 in solidarity with the Buddhist monk Thích Quảng Đức, who had done the same to protest the Cardinal Spellman–promoted South Vietnamese government’s persecution and periodic massacring of Buddhists a few years prior. And some followers of Day’s disciple Thomas Merton are convinced that the CIA was behind his bizarre “electrocution” in 1968. But the price of practicing Dorothy Day–style Catholicism would rise considerably in the era of Reagan and John Paul II. President Reagan staunchly backed the openly Hitlerian El Salvadoran junta who ordered the nuns’ assassinations, along with those of Archbishop (now Saint) Oscar Romero, six Jesuit priests, and at least a dozen other members of the Catholic clergy for the sin of “spreading communism.” Pope John Paul II chose to respond to the bloodbath by forcing one of American foreign policy’s fiercest critics in the American government, the Jesuit priest and Democratic congressman from Massachusetts Fr. Robert Drinan, to resign from public office.

As global communism fizzled and the fascist Catholicism of the Francoist project Opus Dei flourished, the radical Catholicism of Day entered a period of near hibernation almost akin to that imposed upon such subversives as Mike Gold, who worked as a janitor in the 1950s as the circulation of his columns dropped to 5,000.

NEARLY A CENTURY after his heyday, even Mike Gold is in the throes of a resurrection. It turns out the villain of Jews Without Money, who sets in action the protagonist’s slide into destitution when he scams his father out of his ownership stake in a small zipper factory, is a hard-line Zionist, whose ideology is cast as an extension of the same virulent racism that leads him to return to the tenements to sell fractional investments in a segregated housing development in the New Jersey suburbs. Gold later edited New Masses when it published a 1935 prophetic takedown of “Jewish Hitler” Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the intellectual godfather of the bloodthirsty Zionist fascism that currently terrorizes the Middle East; and he was an early advocate of a “binational Arab-Jewish” one-state solution in Palestine championed by the beloved new mayor of New York, who appears to have cribbed his political identity from Fiorello La Guardia, the “one-man melting pot” who led the city when Gold and Day were at the pinnacle of their political powers.

Day’s own return to relevance was championed by no less than the deeply reactionary Pope Benedict, in one of his last speeches before the mysterious resignation that unleashed the Vatican’s first Jesuit pontiff, the irrepressible Pope Francis, who inspired this deeply lapsed Catholic to belatedly have her own sons baptized in a small, historically Black Catholic church about a mile down the road from the basilica where Day tearfully prayed for the answer that became the Catholic Worker Movement. I only began attending weekly Mass there, however, during the early weeks of Pope Leo XIV, which coincided with the breathtaking evil unleashed by the second term of Donald Trump, whose institutional death squads staffed by Palantir hackers and anarcho-capitalist legal theorists waged dirty war on every remaining American organization designed to promote the public interest: hospitals and schools, infectious disease trackers and air traffic controllers, weather balloons and disaster responders, IRS auditors and taxation watchdogs.

Day came of age in an America that lacked most of those things, that used the awesome powers of its federal government to break strikes and massacre Bonus Marchers and execute Sacco and Vanzetti and colonize Cuba for the slaveholder class and employ the goons who’d beaten and tortured her during her first stint in prison for protesting World War I. She achieved national fame during the governance of progressive men like FDR and La Guardia, but she harbored no illusions that a state founded to promote capitalist greed or an ideology developed in service of said greed’s eradication could nurture the radical, indefatigable love she sought to spread through humankind.

She famously inspired the conversion of one Catholic Worker subway hawker when she returned to the office after Mass in a huff that the organist had started pounding out “The Star-Spangled Banner” immediately following Communion; as the whole congregation obediently stood, Day herself, much to the awe of her disciple, had knelt back down and prayed for a laity that would rebel against that warmongering song. In 1975, The Catholic Worker published a column suggesting that on the occasion of the American bicentennial, readers should “repent” for their nation’s murderous subjugations and genocides of Native and Black Americans, for Hiroshima and Nagasaki, for the “plundering of our resources to build up the monstrous stockpiles of diabolic weapons,” “lies and plots and murders of the FBI and CIA,” and finally of “our own indifference to the starving millions of the world.” Day was the last Catholic who would have been surprised by that same state’s facilitation of the liquidation of Gaza and the quarter-century campaign to lay waste to the Middle East, its harrowing crackdowns on anti-genocide protesters and its systematic imprisonment and torture of vast swaths of brown-skinned Americans for the crime of standing in the Home Depot parking lot.

In a decade of unprecedented populist state reform, Dorothy Day cast her lot with the Catholic Church—of all things!—purely on the basis of a kind of spiritual hunch that for all the Vatican’s hypocrisy and duplicity, the revolutionary philosophy it was designed to sustain still meant something in the hearts of its believers, and that those believers would change the world if they heeded the call.

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This article appears in Aug 2026 issue.

Maureen Tkacik

moetkacik@gmail.com

Maureen Tkacik is investigations editor at the Prospect and a senior fellow at the American Economic Liberties Project. More by Maureen Tkacik