Dorothy Day’s 1973 Interview with Nodlaig McCarthy
In this archival clip from 1973, Dorothy Day sits down with interviewer Nodlaig McCarthy to talk about the origins of the Catholic Workers’ Houses of Hospitality.
In December 1973, the 76-year-old co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement traveled to Ireland to visit the family of Mike Cullen—an Irish activist and Catholic Worker who had been deported from the United States for his anti-war activities. During this visit, Day sat down with broadcaster Nodlaig McCarthy for RTÉ’s religious and social affairs programming. The conversation offers a rare, televised glimpse into Day’s radical synthesis of traditional Catholic piety and revolutionary social thought, recorded just seven years before her death in 1980. In the following transcript, Day reflects on the providential beginnings of the first House of Hospitality in New York City during the Great Depression, sparked by the tragic death of a young woman sleeping in the subways.
A transcript follows the video embed.
Dorothy Day: One day, writing about hospitality in the paper and the necessity laid down by Canon Law in the Middle Ages—that every Bishop should have a hospice in his diocese—pointing out that there were none such in New York, we wrote about the need for houses of hospitality.
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’ve been writing about it.”
And she said, “Well, why do you write about it if you don’t have one?”
And we saw the reason in that, especially when she told us this terribly tragic story of herself and another girl sleeping in subways, and the other girl becoming so embittered and so into despair that she threw herself in front of a subway train. And in the view of this tragedy that suddenly was thrust under our gaze in this way, we went right out. We went down the street. We rented a seven-room apartment which was large and was heated and it had a gas stove in for cooking.
And then we called up the parish priest and we said, “Can you get in touch with some of the women in your parish and get a few beds?” And before nightfall, we’d paid our first month’s rent and had the gas and electric turned on through the influence of the Church, who could call up the gas and electric company and get some immediate action—which we couldn’t get. And the women of the parish—not the diocese, the parish, it was a poor parish—they had brought blankets and sheets and pillowcases. And we had our first House of Hospitality.
Interviewer: Your hospitality houses, are they all over America?
Dorothy Day: I wouldn’t say all over. You know how it is. You have maybe about 30 altogether. And as a matter of fact, they keep popping up here and there. And you just know about them when somebody says, “Oh, there’s a new house in Niagara,” or a new house out in Sioux City, or something of that sort.
Interviewer: You have said that we have to “put flesh on our spirituality.” Would you like to say exactly what you meant by that?
Dorothy Day: Well, it’s all in the New Testament. People who say, “Lord, Lord,” are not necessarily going to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. Those that do the will of God—the will of God is that we love our neighbor as ourselves in the Second Great Commandment. And then the very simple commandments laid down by Christ as an indication of the Last Judgment, and that is whether we have taken care of the bodily and physical needs of those around us.
That’s emphasized over and over again in the New Testament. And the works of war in the present day are the very opposite of these works of mercy. Works of war destroy the food, destroy the homes, and do everything opposite to what our Lord asked. So that makes us, of course, very ardent pacifists, and as such we could not possibly be communists or fascists or think in terms of the use of force at all.
Interviewer: You were at one stage in your life belonging to a movement, weren’t you, which possibly was aligned to communism?
Dorothy Day: I was influenced strongly towards the communist movement because of my love for Russian literature, which I’d grown up with. And I would say, too, though, that all dictatorships remain dictatorships. I don’t think any movement such as communism, or fascism, the Nazi movement, or all the tendency to enslave… and of course, one of the attractions of the Church to me was a sense of great freedom in it.
Interviewer: Now, in 1927 [corrected from 1926], you decided to become a convert to the Catholic faith. Is that so?
Dorothy Day: It’s through my reading mostly. Yes. I think the reading of St. Augustine—his Confessions and The City of God—describing a time when the world was falling apart around him. And then the reading of James Joyce’s book Dubliners, but also A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. I say that had quite a profound effect on me because I saw sin all around me in the capitalist movement, and amongst young people too, who naturally are prone to think in terms of the immediate present without regarding the consequences.
Interviewer: James Joyce showed the rigors of the Church rather than its beauty. Did this particularly attract you?
Dorothy Day: Well, I think if you take the Lord’s words, you’ll find they’re 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.
Interviewer: Was there any particular moment when you decided, “Now this is the moment when I would like to change, when I’d like to become a Catholic,” or was it a gradual thing?
Dorothy Day: Well, I think it was a gradual thing. One of the things that made me think of Catholicism always was that they were the poor of our country. They were all the latest people who were exploited. They were the Irish of New England who were called “Micks” and who were despised. And I felt, “This is the church of the poor.”
Regardless of the colossal wealth of the Church as everyone speaks of it, it’s a matter of… the Church has grown and been too much tied to the capitalist system and to the state, and I think constantly there has to be renewal—a return again to the sources. I think that Garibaldi and Mazzini were heroes in that they deprived the Church of her holdings in land. I hope somebody comes along to show the way to deprive them of their holdings in stocks and bonds. Because I think the poorer we get, the closer we are to Christ.
