Dorothy Day

127th Anniversary of her birth

Dorothy Day, co-founder of the Catholic Worker, was born on this date November 8, in 1897. She died on November 30, 1980. Her life an inspiration to countless, including my own.

In 2015, I had the privilege of writing and presenting a paper, “Detachment as a Hallmark of Dorothy Day’s Spiritualty” at the University of St. Francis in Fort Wayne, Indiana. It can be found in Dorothy Day and the Church: Past, Present, and Future (Solidarity Press, 2016).

But another hallmark of her spirituality was hospitality.

In 2022, on Christmas Day, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette published my essay that follows. I post it here in recognition of the anniversary of her birth—and something to consider as the holiday season fast approaches. Her legacy lives on.

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No Room at the Inn

James K. Hanna

This time of year, they pop up nearly everywhere – under the tree, on the desk at work, front yards, church yards, religious school yards, even corporate plazas. I speak of Nativity scenes, so familiar to us that we often pass them by with barely a glance. We even see them year-round in the form of rear window stickers on vans underscored with the admonition “Keep Christ in Christmas.”

We know the history behind the popularization of Nativity scenes: the Holy Family was turned away.

But it’s 2022; times have changed since the evangelist Luke wrote that “She wrapped him in swaddling clothes and laid him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn.”

Times have changed. Or have they? Is there room in the inn today? Despite our display of Nativity scenes, do we care? Should we care? How can we care? Isn’t it too late?

I never met Dorothy Day, cofounder, along with Peter Maurin, of the Catholic Worker newspaper and movement of the same name, but you and I have been or have met many of those she had in mind when, in 1945, she wrote, “It is no use to say that we are born two thousand years too late to give room to Christ. Nor will those who live at the end of the world have been born too late. Christ is always with us, always asking for room in our hearts. But now it is with the voice of our contemporaries that he speaks, with the eyes of store clerks, factory workers and children that he gazes; with the hands of office workers, slum dwellers and suburban housewives that he gives. It is with the feet of soldiers and tramps that he walks, and with the heart of anyone in need that he longs for shelter. And giving shelter or food to anyone who asks for it, or needs it, is giving it to Christ.”

In that short paragraph Day provides us with a challenging fusion of horizons, and one cannot read that last sentence without summoning to mind the image of Luke’s Nativity in considering our own contemporary idea of hospitality.

Hospitality was a hallmark of Dorothy’s spirituality. She died in 1980 but her legacy includes houses of hospitality, a heritage that continues to this day and extends to this city.

She first founded a house of hospitality in New York in 1936. Within five years there were thirty-two such houses in twenty-seven cities, including Pittsburgh. It was in 1937, inspired by Day, that Pittsburgh priest Father Charles Rice and others affiliated with a local group known as the Catholic Radical Alliance opened St. Joseph House of Hospitality on Wylie Avenue.

There is a document in the archives of St. Joseph House of Hospitality titled “Brief History of St. Joseph’s House of Hospitality, Pittsburgh” that addresses the opening of the house: “The policy of the House was established on the basis of the prototype in New York, that is to say, to furnish food, shelter and clothing free of charge without questioning, keeping of statistics or case-records, in short, without red-tape of any sort.”

The house survives today, on Bedford Avenue, now a program of Catholic Charities of the Diocese of Pittsburgh and offers practical assistance to those who are without shelter or at-risk of losing their homes.

It was there, on Bedford Avenue some fifteen years ago, that I came face-to-face, literally, with Dorothy Day’s legacy of hospitality. Enrolled in a university course on social issues, I was assigned the task of creating a project demonstrating the difference between charity and justice. In short, I became the project. Someone referred me to then-Director Paul Dvorchak, who graciously accepted my approach and assigned me to the clothing room where for several years it was my privilege to be the Friday afternoon haberdasher. I very soon learned I was not so much helping the men with clothing, but rather they were opening my eyes to Day’s vision of hospitality, a personalist view, a focus on the value and dignity of the human person emphasizing that we are morally responsible for one another.

About this personalism, much of which she attributed to Maurin, she once wrote, “In following such wisdom, we move away from a self-centered individualism toward the good of the other. This is to be done by taking personal responsibility for changing conditions, rather than looking to the state or other institutions to provide an impersonal ‘charity.’”

The challenge therein is for each of us to find a way to make room in the inn. Look around. There is no shortage of opportunities. The questions of two thousand years ago remain the same. Did you give me food when I was hungry? Did you give me a drink when I was thirsty? Did you take me in when I was homeless and a stranger? Did you clothe me when I was naked? Did you come to see me when I was sick, in prison or in trouble?

Dorothy answered those questions: “And to those who say, aghast, that they never had a chance to do such a thing, that they lived two thousand years too late, he will say again what they had the chance of knowing all their lives, that if these things were done for the very least of his brethren, they were done for Him.”

Hospitality in this way asks us to experience our own nativity, a new dawn of thought, a vision that challenges us to look on the other without stopping to ask whether they are worthy, but instead have the sightedness to see and say, “When I look at you, I see Christ.”  What a world that would be. What an inn that would be. May it happen.