Life didn’t feel like what Dorothy felt it should. It felt like there was something missing–something askew–and that she was constantly and consistently on the verge of true happiness but never breaking through. It felt like happiness should be such a natural thing but that it still eluded her. As a child, she had been baptized Episcopalian but had never really been a part of the Church. As she aged, she became concerned with the plight of the poverty stricken and disenfranchised. Seeing the oppression of the people that surrounded her struck her with a vague desperation but watching churches ignore this same issue only further convinced her of the irrelevance of most Christians. So, she sought change and had left the Church behind because the Church was leaving her and her concerns behind.
Yet, something felt different as she sat alone in her apartment. Her boyfriend wasn’t around and she was pondering something she hadn’t yet told him: she was pregnant. Dorothy was pregnant and her boyfriend was the father. She enjoyed her bohemian life but was aware that a child might change things. Yet, in spite of all of the looming change she was quietly and powerfully happy. She later described the feeling as being “natural happiness.” This happiness combined with an increasing realization that her life wasn’t a solution to poverty so much as a desperate reaction to the Church’s inattention effected a conversion within her. Soon, she realized that though she had been running away from God she had been running toward God because God had promised the Kingdom to the poor and the outcast. She decided to have her baby baptized into the Roman Catholic church and followed along with her child in 1927.
Yet, she was still uncomfortable with the Church’s inattention to the plight of the poor and the causes of social justice. A self-proclaimed anarchist and pacifist, Dorothy was unafraid to break down existing structures that no longer served any beneficial purpose and it became clear that Dorothy would not sit by and watch the Church protect itself at the cost of the lives of the needy and its own damnation. She prayed that she might do something about it instead of simply talking about it and in 1932, she met Peter Maurin. Peter gave her the idea she needed to get started about the business of changing the Church and the world. Soon, Dorothy was publishing a newspaper entitled The Catholic Worker that connected the people of the Church to the people of the Kingdom. She opened up the Catholic Worker offices as a house of hospitality to provide shelter and food for the poor. She committed herself to vows of poverty, obedience, and chastity but never became a nun or took a position in the Church.
She remained active in protesting wars and acts of vast inattention and ignoranceconcerning the needy and outcast.She was investigated by the FBI and CIA as a spy and a revolutionary. Though her citizenship was truly in another Kingdom, she was not promoting insurrection anywhere except in the souls of the people whose hearts had been hardened to the cries of the needy. She was shot at, threatened, and assaulted because of her radical stance of peace and love as superior to vengeance and control. She actively resisted people who tried to insist that it was possible for her to do great things but impossible for them.In a very real way, Dorothy called everybody she met to live a life worthy of the Gospel and the cross of her Lord.Though she had rejected the Church as a youth because of its inattention to the poor, she spent the majority of her life (all the way until November 29, 1980) reforming the Church she loved to care for the people she loved.
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