Dorothy Day’s Permanent Dissatisfaction with the Church: A Model for the Jubilee Year

“How could one remain is such a Church?” asked the Italian author and playwright Ignazio Silone, referencing the silence and complicity of the Catholic Church during the Fascist years of his youth. “That evasion, on the part of the shepherds who had always claimed the moral leadership of their flock, was an intolerable scandal.”

Silone’s American contemporary and cofounder of the Catholic Worker Dorothy Day often expressed her admiration of and affinity with him, even as she joined the same Church that he rejected. Still, Silone’s question was not lost on Dorothy—and in 2025, it should not be lost on us, either.

How could Dorothy remain in the Catholic Church? Theologian and “owner of a Catholic Worker farm” Larry Chapp, in an April 5, 2023, commentary in The National Catholic Register, “Whither the Catholic Worker” equates Dorothy’s “politics” with that of Joseph Ratzinger, a politics, he says, “that was only possible in the light of a robust faith in Christ.” A faith, Chapp says, “without compartmentalized bifurcation between the ‘institutional hierarchical Church’ and the ‘Church of the people.’

“If you do not understand this point about her Catholic faith,” Chapp asserts (“I will be blunt here,” he says) “and how central the totality of this faith was to the entirety of her vision, then you quite simply have no idea who Dorothy Day was.”

From the beginning, though, a “compartmentalized bifurcation” between the “institutional hierarchical Church” and the “Church of the people” was the indispensable anchor that made it possible for Dorothy to enter the Church to begin with and to remain a faithful Catholic for the rest of her life. “I loved the Church for Christ made visible,” she said, “not for itself, because it was so often a scandal to me.”

In her 1938 memoir From Union Square to Rome, Dorothy justified her decision to have her newborn daughter baptized even before her own conversion: “That bitterness felt by so many in the radical labor movement toward what they call ‘organized religion’ was mixed with the knowledge of the divinity of the Catholic Church.” She “could only always console” herself, she wrote, “with Christ’s words that the greatest enemies would be those of the ‘household.’”

The paradoxical comfort that Dorothy got from Jesus’ warning that our worst enemies are of our own household, often paired with the prophet Isaiah’s “in peace is my bitterness most bitter,” was expressed in her writing through the rest of her life. Sometimes applied to bourgeois Catholics in general, occasionally even to her fellow members of the Catholic Worker movement, but most often to the clergy and hierarchs of the Church. As she wrote in 1949:

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.

It was these enemies, not the Communists, not the abortion advocates, not even fascists nor the industrialists who profit from war and oppression, that Dorothy prayed most fervently for the grace to forgive. “Of all hostilities,” she said, “one of the saddest is the war between clergy and laity.”

On at least one occasion, in her January, 1967 column in The Catholic Worker, Dorothy specifically named one of these enemies of our household, Francis Cardinal Spellman, archbishop of New York, for his support of the United States’ homicidal war on the people of Vietnam:

I can sit in the presence of the Blessed Sacrament and wrestle for that peace in the bitterness of my soul, a bitterness which many Catholics throughout the world feel, and I can find many things in Scripture to console me, to change my heart from hatred to love of enemy. ‘Our worst enemies are those of our own household,’ Jesus said… As to the Church, where else shall we go, except to the Bride of Christ, one flesh with Christ? Though she is a harlot at times, she is our Mother.

Kate Hennessy, in her 2017 biography, Dorothy Day: The World Will Be Saved by Beauty: An Intimate Portrait of My Grandmother confessed, “I turned away from the Worker, and I turned away from the Church, for without the Catholic Worker, the Catholic Church made no sense to me.”

Reading Dorothy’s accounts in her memoirs and letters of events surrounding her conversion in 1927 up until she met Peter Maurin, with whom she would cofound the Catholic Worker five years later, it appears that without the Catholic Worker, the Catholic Church might have made little sense to Dorothy in the long run, either.

The lives of the saints as they are passed on to us are often marked by a distinct pre-and post- conversion division, from being lost to being found, from despair to joy. Dorothy’s conversion did not follow this pattern. In her 1952 memoir The Long Loneliness, Dorothy wrote about her conversion:

I was just as much against capitalism and imperialism as ever, and here I was going over to the opposition, because of course the Church was lined up with property, with the wealthy, with the state, with capitalism, with all the forces of reaction. This I had been taught to think and this I still think to a great extent.

And in From Union Square to Rome, she wrote: “I had become convinced that I would become a Catholic, and yet I felt I was betraying the class to which I belonged, the workers, the poor of the world, the class which Christ most loved and spent His life with.”

Dorothy’s conversion brought her little immediate consolation. In From Union Square to Rome, she described the day of her conditional baptism in December 1927 in this way:

all the way on the ferry through the foggy bay I felt grimly that I was being too precipitate. I had no sense of peace, no joy, no conviction even that what I was doing was right. It was just something that I had to do, a task to be gotten through. I doubted myself when I allowed myself to think. I hated myself for being weak and vacillating. A most consuming restlessness was upon me so that I walked around and around the deck of the ferry, almost groaning in anguish of spirit.

Today there is a ferry that crosses that bay between Manhattan and Staten Island named for her, the Dorothy Day, but at the time she suspected “perhaps the devil was on the boat.”

In The Long Loneiless, she wrote, “I had no particular joy in partaking of these three sacraments, Baptism, Penance, and Holy Eucharist. I proceeded about my own active participation in them grimly, coldly, making acts of faith, and certainly with no consolation whatsoever.”

It is in her letters to Forster, the man she loved and father of her child (collected in All the Way to Heaven, 2010) who could not abide her conversion and would not agree to marry her, that the cost that she paid by becoming Catholic can be understood. At times she pleaded with him, giving assurances that if they married “the ceremony is as simple as that of going before a justice of the peace” and that he only had to agree to allow her to raise their daughter in the Church: “Religion would be intruded on you in no way except to see me go to church once a week, and five times a year on various saints’ days. I would have nothing around the house to jar upon you- no pictures or books.”

“I speak of this misery of leaving one love,” she confided in The Long Loneliness, “but there was another love, too, the life that I had led in the radical movement.” Dorothy knew of no Catholics who were involved in the struggle that had consumed her life to that point, and she found no community in parochial Catholicism that could draw her. After five years in the Church, she noted, she “still did not know personally one Catholic layman.”

In late 1932, Dorothy was in Washinton, D.C., to cover a Communist-led hunger march of farmers, veterans and unemployed workers for Commonweal magazine. “Where was the Catholic leadership in the gathering of the bands of men and women together, for the actual works of mercy that the comrades had always made part of the technique in reaching the workers?” she asked.

When the march was over, before returning home to New York, on December 8, the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, Dorothy went to the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception. She knelt there to pray “with tears and with anguish, that some way would open up for me to use what talents I possessed for my fellow workers, for the poor.”

When Dorothy arrived home the next day, December 9, Peter Maurin was waiting to meet her at her door. The day after that, on December 10, Dorothy wrote to Forster, “I have really given up hope now, so I won’t try to persuade you anymore.” Five months later, on May 1, 1933, the first issue of The Catholic Worker was distributed to workers at a demonstration in Union Square.

“I found myself, a barren woman, the joyful mother of children,” Dorothy wrote in her postscript to The Long Loneliness, even as she admitted that “it is not always easy to be joyful, to keep in mind the duty of delight.”

She continued:

The most significant thing about The Catholic Worker is poverty, some say. The most significant thing is community, others say. We are not alone anymore. But the final word is love. At times it has been, in the words of Father Zossima, a harsh and dreadful thing, and our very faith in love has been tried through fire. We cannot love God unless we love each other, and to love we must know each other. We know him in the breaking of bread, and we are not alone any more. Heaven is a banquet and life is a banquet, too, even with a crust, where there is companionship.

Without the sustenance of companionship that the Catholic Worker offered, without that way open for her to use her talents for her fellow workers, for the poor, could the Catholic Church have continued to make sense for Dorothy? We cannot know, but as a Catholic who has been with the Catholic Worker for fifty years now, I know that without the Catholic Worker, the Church would make no sense to me at all.

“Church is the Cross on which Christ was crucified; one could not separate Christ from his Cross, and one must live in a state of permanent dissatisfaction with the Church.” Dorothy rarely cited theologians, taking more inspiration as she did from novelists, poets, saints and mystics, but this often-repeated admonition by Romano Guardini seemed to haunt her. Dorothy’s dissatisfaction with the Church is not in contradiction to her equally emphatic devotion to and love for the Church. It is not a denial or even a qualifier, but an intensifier of that love.

With Guardini, Dorothy offers dissatisfaction not as an acceptable option for some, but as an imperative. One must be dissatisfied with it, or one does not really love the Church at all. As with any other love—filial, romantic or patriotic—love for the Church requires honest appraisal of the loved one’s faults and sins, otherwise it is not love, but simply an unhealthy attachment disorder.

It was in love that Dorothy could call out and name the “worst enemies” without expelling them from her “household” or leaving it herself.

We can choose to leave the Church as Ignazio Silone did or we can stay with it, permanently dissatisfied, as Romano Guardini and Dorothy Day chose, but to remain in it happy and comfortable, complacent and blind to its many scandals, is not a moral choice at all.

The choice today is even clearer. We know more now. We can choose to leave the Church as Ignazio Silone did or we can stay with it, permanently dissatisfied, as Romano Guardini and Dorothy Day chose, but to remain in it happy and comfortable, complacent and blind to its many scandals, is not a moral choice at all.

In announcing 2025 as a year of Jubilee, Pope Francis said:

We must fan the flame of hope that has been given us and help everyone to gain new strength and certainty by looking to the future with an open spirit, a trusting heart and far-sighted vision. The forthcoming Jubilee can contribute greatly to restoring a climate of hope and trust as a prelude to the renewal and rebirth that we so urgently desire….

If this is a reassurance, it is also a challenge to be accepted if the Church is to make any sense in the future.