Dorothy Day tells her own conversion story in the first part of her beautiful, soul-searching memoir, The Long Loneliness. She was born in 1897 in Brooklyn, and she grew up in different cities in the United States as the family followed the fortunes of her father who was a newspaper reporter. Though there was no religion at home, Dorothy was exposed to Christianity at a very early age by her neighbors. She was an avid reader who studied the Bible and was baptized Episcopalian, and she believed in Christianity as a youth. She also read the literature of her time, often dealing with the plight of the poor, whom she saw all around her in the urban environment of those days. The twofold attraction to Jesus and to the poor was present in her life almost from the beginning.
In college, however, Dorothy became disillusioned with Christianity because so many Christians seemed to ignore the poor. She joined socialist and anarchist circles, becoming a reporter for their journals in New York. While Dorothy writes with admiration of the sacrifices and generosity of her non-believing friends, she admits that she herself lived a self-centered life and indulged her own desires. She had several love affairs, and in 1918 became pregnant and had an illegal abortion. Dorothy wanted to be a radical, but she wondered whether for her it was anything more than a justification for dissolute living. Meanwhile she was still drawn by God, and sometimes visited Catholic churches in New York where she found a sense of peace and also – at every Mass or devotion or anytime during the day – the poor on their knees before God, the poor she wanted to love (so many of whom, at that time, were immigrants from southern and eastern Europe).
Writing brought Dorothy some modest financial success. She bought a beach house in Staten Island and entered into a stable though irregular union with an anarchist named Forster Batterham. For several years she lived a quiet life surrounded by natural beauty, but she found that the measure of human happiness she experienced did not take away her desire to know God. Instead it heightened her desire to show gratitude to the Creator of all good things. When she became pregnant in 1925, she knew that she had to raise her child as a Christian. She turned to the place where she had always seen Christianity in a concrete form, shaping the lives of poor people every day, the Catholic Church.
Dorothy met a gruff but kind retired Sister of Charity (Sister Aloysia) who taught her the Catechism (and eventually became her godmother). She had her baby daughter baptized, but hesitated herself for another year because of Forster’s objections to organized religion. She realized they would have to be separated if she became Catholic, but she eventually chose to follow God and entered the Church. She was also following God’s poor, even though many Catholics—like other Christians—did not seem to care much about them. Dorothy, however, had seen them in the churches and known them in the slums. She knew that it was the will of Christ to serve Him in the poor and defend their dignity. This became the source of her immensely fruitful vocation to found the Catholic Worker movement.
