The Parallel Lives of Dorothy Day and St. Maria Skobstova
Although they were born more than 4,200 miles apart, Dorothy Day and Mother Maria Skobstova shared much in common: both were writers and intellectuals, both became involved in the radical and revolutionary movements of the day, both lost children and husbands…and both would ultimately be honored by their respective religious communities.
Just before the turn of the 20th century, two women were born 4,200 miles apart who would become two of the most prominent figures of the century in their respective religions: one in the metropolitan hub of New York City and the other in the small city of Riga, Russian Empire (now Latvia).
The American Catholic Dorothy Day—now Servant of God Dorothy Day—and the Russian Orthodox Elizaveta Pilenko—now St. Maria of Paris, formerly Mother Maria Skobstova—never crossed paths, yet their stories seem to be not only crossed but braided, knotted, and tied together.
These two women were writers, anarchists, and activists for the poor. They were both fans of Russian literature, especially Dostoevsky. Day was baptized Episcopal but not raised religiously; she converted to Catholicism after her child was born in 1926. Skobstova was baptized Orthodox but became an atheist after her father died; she re-converted to Orthodoxy after her child died in 1926.
Both women were married and divorced, leaving them both single mothers. Both lost children, Day to abortion and Skobstova to infant illness. Both had conversions that led them to radical service to their faiths. Ultimately, their shared life experiences led to a theology of emptying oneself for the sake of others, which led them to be candidates for sainthood.
“Dangerous” Saints
These two women are not what you think about when you hear the word “saint.” In 1917, Day was arrested with the suffragettes, beaten, and sent to prison. She was arrested five more times after this, landing her on the FBI watchlist as a “dangerous American.” The New Yorker later wrote of her “onetime communism, sometime socialism, and all-the-time anarchism.”
Skobstova was not the average nun, let alone saint. Biographer Jim Forest wrote of her as “the cigarette-smoking beggar nun.” In her early adulthood, she was a member of the Social Revolutionary Party and became the deputy mayor of her town, Anapa, in 1918. She was likewise arrested several times for her politics and later developed a great devotion to “Holy Fools: people who behaved outrageously and yet revealed Christ in a remarkable way.”
Although their radical conversions led them from extreme secularism to extreme religiosity, Dorothy Day and Mother Maria did not abandon their socialist and anarchist beliefs — they adjusted them to advance the Gospel.
Anarchism & Faith In Action
“Why was so much done in remedying the evil instead of avoiding it in the first place?” Day wondered in her youth, as she later recalled in her autobiography, The Long Loneliness. “Where were the saints to try to change the social order, not just to minister to the slaves, but to do away with slavery?”
It was a question that would eventually lead her to embrace the radical and revolutionary movements of the day. In 1916, she left college to write for The Call, a New York Socialist daily. There, she engaged in left-wing ideological debates, sympathizing with the Industrial Workers of the World’s syndicalism and Leo Tolstoy’s nonviolent anarchism.
Skobstova felt a similar feeling of reproach toward the revolutionaries she worked alongside. They would discuss this suffering but never participate in it. She writes, “They will value it, approve or not approve, show understanding on a very high level, and discuss the night away till the sun rises and it’s time for fried eggs. But they will not understand at all that to die for the Revolution means to feel a rope around one’s neck.”
Both Day and Skobstova set out to put their revolutionary thinking into action. Their conversions coincided with this, leading to a new brand of religious activism: anarcho-pacifism.
Ministries of Radical Love
This ideology is the basis of the ministries of both Day and Skobtsova, which manifested in the form of radical service toward the poor and marginalized. For Day, this led her and Peter Maurin to begin the Catholic Worker Movement, whose aim is “to live in accordance with the justice and charity of Jesus Christ.”
For Skobtsova, this ministry began when she took her monastic vows. Her intention in these vows was to live “monasticism in the world,” a vocation that is “not a form of escape from the world but a deep form of service and solidarity within it.” She enacted this by opening a house of hospitality in Paris to serve those in need, similar to the Catholic Worker houses that were opening all over the United States in the 1930s.
Today, there are almost 200 Catholic Worker communities “committed to nonviolence, voluntary poverty, prayer, and hospitality for the homeless, exiled, hungry, and forsaken. Catholic Workers continue to protest injustice, war, racism, and violence of all forms.” In an interview with The New York Times, Catholic Worker Bob Roberts said, “The Catholic Worker movement is all about asking yourself, if Jesus were alive today, who would his disciples be?”
Skobstova asked herself this same question through her new monasticism. She actively sought out the homeless to sleep in her hospitality house and served up to 120 dinners a day for them. In addition to providing the necessities such as food and shelter, Skobstova recognized her guests’ human dignity; she made sure they had the opportunity to engage in intellectual conversations, take classes, and create art within the house.
As Nazis began advancing toward France, Skobstova refused to flee, saying, “If the Germans take Paris, I shall stay here with my old women. Where else could I send them?”
Together with Fr. Dmitri Klepinin, she began providing refuge to dozens of Jews in her house of hospitality. When Nazis stopped her to ask whether she had seen any Jews, she would point to a crucifix or an icon of the Theotokos (Mary, Mother of God), her way of saying, “I have seen these Jews.”
While Fr. Klepinin provided Jews with false baptismal certificates, Skobstova at one point ministered to thousands of Jews being held at a nearby stadium as they awaited transfer to Nazi concentration camps. She conspired with the sanitation workers to save dozens of children by smuggling them out of the stadium in the trash bins.
Eventually, this dedication to the marginalized led Mother Maria Skobstova to be arrested and taken to the Ravensbrück concentration camp in 1945. Skobstova ministered to the other prisoners until Good Friday of that year, on the eve of the liberation of Paris. According to some accounts, she took the place of a fellow prisoner who was chosen for the gas chamber that day.
Canonizing the “Unlikely Saints”
Skobstova was canonized as a saint and martyr by the Holy Synod of the Ecumenical Patriarchate on January 16, 2004, alongside Fr. Dmitri Klepinin, George (Yuri) Skobtsov (her son), and Ilya Fondaminsky. The glorification took place at the Cathedral of Saint Alexander Nevsky in Paris on May 1-2, 2004, and their feast day is July 20.
Following her canonization, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Paris Cardinal Jean Marie Lustiger—who was born Jewish and had both parents die in concentration camps—added St. Maria of Paris to the French Catholic calendar of saints. She is one of the few Orthodox saints to be recognized within the Catholic Church, and is frequently described as an “Orthodox Dorothy Day.”
Although Day is now up for canonization, she is famously quoted as saying, “Don’t call me a saint — I don’t want to be dismissed that easily.” Day did not want her total self-giving acts of service to be regarded as only for the saintly, but to be something that any average person can (and should) do for others. These seemingly extraordinary acts of love were not extraordinary for Day, but the bare minimum to loving one another.
The Double Standard For Female Conversions
When discussing Dorothy Day and Mother Maria Skobstova, many people choose to focus on how different they were pre and post-conversion, rather than focusing on their acts of service and charity. Special attention is paid to their past lives, which is often disregarded in male saints.
This is similar to many other female saints who had conversions. Though Mary Magdalene was historically one of Jesus’ closest friends and followers, she is often lowered to the status of a prostitute–an unfortunate application of another Gospel passage that was mistakenly applied to her.
There is a clear double standard for female saints, especially these two modern women. As Colleen Dulle wrote in America Magazine, “How often, after all, are St. Ignatius, St. Francis of Assisi, St. Augustine or Thomas Merton identified by their youthful promiscuity?”
This choice to focus on their pasts neglects the future that they aimed to create for our world. Both women were devoted to creating a world of peace, not division, including a unified Christian faith.
Ecumenicism: Reuniting the Divide
In a memoir, Jacqueline Péry d’Alincourt, a survivor of Ravensbrück, wrote on the impression Mother Maria left on the discussion groups she led at the camp: “She used to organize real discussion circles…and I had the good fortune to participate in them. Here was an oasis at the end of the day. She would tell us about her social work, about how she conceived the reconciliation of the Orthodox and Catholic Churches.”
Day was likewise committed to this reconciliation. In 1955, she became an oblate of St. Procopius Abbey, an Eastern Catholic Benedictine monastery in Lisle, Illinois. In the book Searching For Christ: The Spirituality of Dorothy Day, Brigid O’Shea Merriman O.S.F. wrote that the mission of the Abbey was to serve as “an ecumenical center whose special mission was to labor for the reunion of the Eastern (Orthodox) churches with Rome.”
It would honor their common commitment to ecumenism if they were eventually to be recognized fully in both Churches. While unusual, this is not impossible, especially considering that St. Maria already has a feast day in the Archdiocese of Paris.
In May 2023, Pope Francis recognized 21 Coptic Orthodox martyrs who were killed in 2015 in the universal Catholic Church calendar in an audience with the Coptic Orthodox pope. This was a major step in the reconciliation of the two churches, which could be driven further by the mutual canonization of Dorothy Day and Mother Maria. Especially with all that is going on in the world, we need both of their intercession now more than ever.
Maria Skobstova & the Catholic Worker
Today, the Maria Skobtsova House & Community is the Catholic Worker house in Calais, France, that “offers sanctuary and hospitality to vulnerable refugees, in the spirit of Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker Movement, and Maria Skobtsova, ‘Saint Mary of Paris’.”
There, the missions of both women are braided together to form the beauty of the Catholic Worker Movement. More can be read about Skobtsova on the house’s website, as well as on page eight of the December 2001 issue of The Catholic Worker. This article titled “A Pilgrim of the Absolute” by Jerry Ryan concludes:
Dorothy and Mother Marie were pilgrims of the absolute, who believed that the essence of the consecrated life could be and should be lived, unprotected, in the midst of the infernal misery of this world….Now, united in the joy of their Master, Dorothy Day and Elisabeth Skobstov doubtless continue to desire that this heavenly unity be reflected on earth.
In our currently divided world, we need the guidance of Dorothy Day and Mother Maria now more than ever. Through their examples, both in their writings and in their lived experience, we can learn to better love all of God’s creation, especially those most in need of our love.
Servant of God Dorothy Day and St. Maria of Paris, pray for a united Christian Church.
Servant of God Dorothy Day and St. Maria of Paris, pray for the state of our world.
Servant of God Dorothy Day and St. Maria of Paris, pray for those in need.
Servant of God Dorothy Day and St. Maria of Paris, pray for the conversion of our hearts.
Servant of God Dorothy Day and St. Maria of Paris, pray for us.
The late Jim Forest wrote an extensive biography of Mother Maria Skobtsova, much of it taken from the introduction to Mother Maria Skobtsova: Essential Writings, published by Orbis Books. You can find his essay at the website of In Communion, website of the Orthodox Peace Fellowship.
