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01:00:16 16 |
Produced in New York by WNET.
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01:00:41 42 |
Bill Moyers
This is Dorothy Day. She was born before the turn of the century and has lived her adult life among the wounded and poor of the earth. She has been called the most influential lay person in the history of American Catholicism, as much a symbol of Catholicism in the United States as any single individual. Such tributes annoy her because although she has obeyed a magnificent call to help transfigure this stricken world, Dorothy Day considers herself merely a pilgrim on a lonely spiritual adventure, a pilgrim and a subversive. At 75, Dorothy Day is still a rebel. |
01:01:45 106 |
Bill Moyers
The idea for this show occurred when Dorothy Day recently celebrated her 75th birthday. There have been moments since when I regretted trying to capture the meaning of her life, the power of her personality, the importance of the Catholic Worker Movement, which she's given herself. Well, it's like an amateur photographer trying with a Brownie camera to capture the grandeur of the Rockies. It's a sweeping subject. The influential Catholic magazine of America recently wrote, If one had to choose a single individual to symbolize the best and the aspiration and action of the American Catholic community during the last 40 years, that one person would surely be Dorothy Day. And yet she was born into an Episcopal home, a nominal one at that. As a young woman, she ruthlessly cut religion out of her life altogether, flirting for a while with agnosticism, socialism and Marxism. As she set out to be a journalist, then two events occur that were forever to change Dorothy days life. She had a child, which in some way never fully explained, led to her conversion to Catholicism. And she met a remarkable eccentric peripatetic visionary named Peter Morin. Together, they would become the founders of the Catholic Worker Movement, perhaps the most important social movement within the church in America in this century. The strength of the movement grew from the Catholic Worker, a monthly paper from the practice of voluntary poverty, and from service to the poor with no strings attached, and from dedication with great force and clarity, to the essentials of the Christian faith. Since 1933, disciples of the movement have put out their paper, given coffee, bread, soup, and a place to rest to thousands of bereft human beings. They fought for the rights of workers, and an end to racial prejudice, and they've called within the church for more personal liturgy. But its purest strength lies not in what the Movement has done for the poor, or in its challenge to the social order. It lies instead in simple sustained loyalty to the most radical idea of all the freedom of man's life in the Spirit, and the possibilities such freedom holds for a new society. We can't in this half hour do justice to the whole scope of the Catholic Worker Movement. We can simply report something of what we felt and meeting Dorothy Day and her friend for 40 years. Their work is centered here on the Bowery in the midst of human suffering. |
01:05:24 324 |
Dorothy Day
The great city of New York just a short month ago, came into our door on 1st Street with a poor little woman who was covered with lice from head to foot from sleeping out in the filth in broken down buildings with some loathsome sores. And to be very, very delicate a prolapsed rectum covered with filth of excrement, urine and bed head lice and body lice and came and brought it to us, the police, the Brooklyn police. This is how extreme we can get this happens over and over again in the history of the Catholic Worker. And why not take her to the woman's municipal lodging house. They have 45 beds, there was no room. Why not take her to Bellevue Hospital for a physical condition. It's a chronic case, let's register her in a clinic and she can come back but she has no place to live across St Vincent's Hospital, women being released with tumor on the brain and operation unsuccessful where she lived a long time afterwards. And no elsewhere place for her to go. And our small places, I don't know how over the years you, you can accumulate such a tremendous saga of rescue because it live in the city of New York, the greatest richest city in the world goes ahead and has to bring in this woman in the streets. |
01:07:02 422 |
Stanley Vishnevsky
Most of them are Goodman, I would describe them good men men have worked hard all their lives. These are the manual, who did hard construction labor who worked in a time when there was no social security or unions, and they reached the age where they can no longer have to face hard physical labor, and they've been thrown off and discarded by society. So they're dependent upon groups like the Catholic Worker for their meals. |
01:07:33 453 |
Catholic Worker Volunteer 1
All you can do with someone who's down and out or has just really been messed over as be with them. And we provide certain physical things that people may need around here. And more beyond that, and I think much more important, and I think really in a lot of ways more important even to the men who come in on the Super than the soup is just that we're here and we're going to continue to be here. And it's a place where they get called Sir, instead of get caught on hey you bum you know, it's a place where we hope we don't kick people around. It's a place where we hope we're not arbitrary, but we try to treat people with some respect. There's some kind of mutual respect. |
01:08:09 489 |
Catholic Worker Volunteer 2
I start off with beans, then I put 'em in jars, onions, celery. Green, we have our soup line every day. And that fluctuates greatly. Sometimes sometimes go as low as 50 or 60 people and go up to a couple of 100 or sometimes more. So that's a daily thing. And we of course have our family which average is about for supper time. 50, 60 people, people who are here now working in the paper, some of our neighbors, whatever we have leftover after our meal, whatever any people come along, |
01:08:54 534 |
Bill Moyers
How do you get the food? Catholic Worker Volunteer 2 We buy some basic staples all the time. And periodically when we have a truck which we rent a couple of times a month we were working on the paper and needed to take the paper at the post office. We go to the market at Hunts Point some of the people do and pay for food and for totally unsuccessful on any given day when we go to the market then we have to buy things at the market. But generally we always get something sometimes we get a goodly load sometimes known as Thanksgiving and Christmas things are usually pretty good. |
01:09:37 577 |
Bill Moyers
Dorothy Day now spends much of her time at the Catholic Worker farm at Tivoli 100 miles north of New York City on the Hudson River by effectively reflects the variety of the movements 40 year history. It's a place for music for the planting and harvesting of food for meditation, but always by young and old alike for ministering to anyone On who come. There really is the home for some of the remaining veterans of the Catholic Worker Movement. People like Marge Hughes, who with Dorothy Day, somehow keeps it all together. Marge Hughes Is your back better today? Is your back better today? Man Yeah, Last night agenda Marge Hughes Antoine went to sea in a sailing ship when he was 14 years old. Bill Moyers How long have you been here? Marge Hughes Oh, for years? Bill Moyers How did he find his way here? I mean, how did he rise? |
01:10:30 631 |
Marge Hughes
Oh, he had broken his leg at some point in New York City and came up to the Catholic Worker which was in in maths free out of curiosity, and stayed around a while. And he was invited to go out to the farm and recuperate. And the first morning he was out there, he saw some girls stirring up draft biscuits for a crowd of 50 or 60 people, some inexperienced, inexperienced girls and he just couldn't stand it. He took over and he's been doing this ever since. Bill Moyers Some people think that by coming here to this beautiful mountain beside the Hudson, the Catholic workers are retreating from the world, rather than trying to change the world. Is that a valid criticism or fear? |
01:11:13 673 |
Marge Hughes
I think it might be a valid fear because it would be in some senses easy to retreat here. But in another way, it's not valid, because I think we are a sort of microcosm of the world outside there scarcely any major problem you can mention, in society at large that we don't have here or haven't had here, at one time or another. There's a great deal of suffering that goes on here. mental, emotional, physical. Well, some of the problems are that with all this freedom, things get very inefficient. Sometimes we're ankle, ankle deep and dirty. But then someone sweeps it up. And there are differences of opinion about just about everything, it's very much, except that it's on a larger scale very much the way a normal family functions. Some people, although in a group this large, usually everyone can find a friend or can find someone that understands him or her at any given time. There are disputes over what to eat, and whether the light should be on or off and making noise at night, all kinds of things, but it's exactly the kind of hassle that goes out of family. And there's a tremendous amount of unity to as you find out when there's an emergency. Or anyone has a great sorrow of some kind. There's a perceptible feeling of unity and support. And you get really fond of even people you don't like people you might be quarreling with, there's a bond, almost like a flesh and blood. |
01:12:40 761 |
Bill Moyers
And there are people who don't like each other? Marge Hughes Oh of course, without doubt, loud and clear. And many visitors that come to the New York place also come up here. We have class, we have discussion groups and classes, social and economic things and in languages. And we have a continual stream of visitors from all over the world. Bill Moyers So many of the battles that you and Dorothy Day have fought over the years have have not been one. What happens now? Is the Catholic Worker Movement and anachronism? |
01:13:13 793 |
Marge Hughes
Not at all in the first place. That's one of the great buys in this society. We have all this welfare in high wages and affluence. Some people have it. But it's, it's all based on a competitive ability to win it. And I've worked in lots of jobs around the country. And I know that the bulk of working men are not making high wages. A few well paid unions perhaps are but the bulk of working people are not. Most people with children, they have to have two wage holders. And as for Social Security and unemployment, those things are a big hassle. What about a 75 year old man that gets 40 to 50 a month to live on? For the Social Security. I mean, that's all part of the big lie that we're being sold, the country is prosperous, and that our social legislation takes care of everybody. It just isn't true. There's never a day here that we don't have phone calls and letters. And the most heart rending appeals from people, families, single people, people that don't fit into any of the neat little slots. If men treated each other like brother Peter Martin used to say if everyone took less, then everyone would have more. Bill Moyers Stanley Vishnevsky was there in the beginning, are young activist taking time to sell the Catholic Worker on the street for a penny. He remains Dorothy Day's friend and colleague. |
01:14:37 877 |
Marge Hughes
Not at all in the first place. That's one of the great buys in this society. We have all this welfare in high wages and affluence. Some people have it. But it's, it's all based on a competitive ability to win it. And I've worked in lots of jobs around the country. And I know that the bulk of working men are not making high wages. A few well paid unions perhaps are but the bulk of working people are not. Most people with children, they have to have two wage holders. And as for Social Security and unemployment, those things are a big hassle. What about a 75 year old man that gets 40 to 50 a month to live on? For the Social Security. I mean, that's all part of the big lie that we're being sold, the country is prosperous, and that our social legislation takes care of everybody. It just isn't true. There's never a day here that we don't have phone calls and letters. And the most heart rending appeals from people, families, single people, people that don't fit into any of the neat little slots. If men treated each other like brother Peter Martin used to say if everyone took less, then everyone would have more. Bill Moyers Stanley Vishnevsky was there in the beginning, are young activist taking time to sell the Catholic Worker on the street for a penny. He remains Dorothy Day's friend and colleague. |
01:14:58 899 |
Stanley Vishnevsky
He was very young. In fact, he was in going to college then. And he came down with his brother, Joe Kennedy. And they spent a day with us there. And of course, they were just the Kennedys to watch just young people that we thought were coming slumming. And they, they spent an afternoon with us looking around the place. And I remember distinctly how bewildered he was by the sight of the poverty and the misery, the place. And then the Dorothy came in and obviously talked to him. And then Dorothy says, Come and have supper with us and can be looked at our little and startled and says, No, oh, come out, have dinner with us instead. So Dorothy, and Joe, and John Kennedy, we went out to the little restaurant around the corner, we had a wonderful conversation. Bill Moyers Did you think that the paper and the people who've been involved in the movement, Dorothy have have touched people like that, |
01:15:47 947 |
Stanley Vishnevsky
I think that the influence of that day at the Catholic Worker when he saw another side of life for him, and then what Michael Harrington spent two years with us and wrote his book and The Other America. And this book came to the attention of our Kennedy, I believe, Kennedy realized that the poverty because he knew from the Catholic record, while poverty really was, and I have a feeling that the Catholic Worker in the way was the seed that planted the the idea of the poverty program that brought the idea of the poor to the attention of people. Because Dorothy tells me that she goes around lecturing to people and people say, Well, why do you need to Catholic work? There are no longer any poor. It's just Michael Harrington's book was the answer to that, that there are the poor, but the poor are our isolated pockets here. They're all around us. And we don't see them. Bill Moyers So many people have written so many generous comments about you in the last few years that I would think, adulation would become a problem for you? |
01:16:57 1018 |
Dorothy Day
Well, in a way, it makes you feel like an awful failure. You feel it to that somehow you've made some terrible mistakes along the way, you know that. But I think it's the failure of the American people who insist upon having a figurehead. And I suppose it's because I'm a woman journalist who writes personally because I was taught to write personally. We started writing newspapers when we were 10 years old. The family, I was taught that a woman had to write some stuff. And whenever I tried to write serious things like the revolution in Mexico when I was living down there in 1929, and the closing of the churches and the martyrdom of Catholics and so on. They would, these stories would be rejected. And the stories that would be accepted would be the stories of the wanderings of myself and my four year old daughter around Mexico, a travelogue. And as a matter of fact, the readers of the Commonwealth got to like these stories so much, which that when I didn't write a story for six months they write, one woman said if she did, meaning the child and would demand more stories of the sort during the crisis of the 30s, when anti semitism was beginning to bloom, you might say in Brooklyn, where somewhere over on Borough Hall, they had meetings where the swastika was much in evidence, and there was a great deal of anti semitism meetings were held in the halls with bands and people speaking about Hitler's great work of overcoming communism, Jews being synonymous with communism, we would go over there with the paper and distribute it and have it torn up and thrown in our faces. And when I wrote stories about that, they were rejected. And I would get sweet, polite letters from the editor, saying, Dear Dorothy, why don't you keep to your delightful informal essay style? And leave these issues to, greater minds, I suppose, but think things have changed to a certain extent, so that you can write about profound issues like the injustice, the suffering of the needy and the groaning of the poor? |
01:19:25 1165 |
Bill Moyers
Are you sympathetic to any extent with what women are trying to do today and in reaching for their rights and for their individuality? Dorothy Day Yes, I think it's been great many great many areas. It's very necessary, but not in the question, I would say, local politics. If I stayed long enough in one place, instead of traveling around between New York and Tivoli and visiting various groups of the Catholic workers throughout the country, I would be more interested in local politics. And I think that's very necessary. I think that When it comes down to it, I think Martin Buber had the right idea when he said the state should be a community of communities, I don't think you can legislate the rights of individuals, I think that it has to spring out of man's realization that we're what St. Paul called the Mystical Body of Christ that we're all members, one of another. |
01:19:26 1166.53 |
Bill Moyers
Let me ask you about what appears to some to be something of an irony in the relationship between the Catholic Worker Movement, yourself and the church, you fought racism, all of your life, you fought the war, you fought poverty. And yet there are within the church as well as in other parts of society, resistance now to integration in middle class neighborhoods. hawkish support for the war, from Dorothy Day Oh, I know Bill Moyers these people, and some resistance to doing something about the poor. What about these contradictions, |
01:20:58 1259 |
Dorothy Day
some resistance, plenty of resistance. You look at these estates up and down the Hudson, they're owned by the church and various orders. And you think to yourself, it's a crime, trying to heaven for vengeance. And I think this kind of a vengeance is going on now, emptying, they don't have the postulants to come, the buildings stand empty, they're selling them this great big Jesuit seminary down there is now a cooking school. The Christian brothers are leasing their property to the city. I think to myself, there needs to be great liberators come to liberate it from its investments. And I think that's going to be a very difficult thing, very difficult thing for people themselves to liberate themselves from the whole concept of interest on money. And we have to have dealing with insurance companies, we have to go ahead and deal with interest on mortgages, and so on and so forth. Because you can't buy a piece of property without having a mortgage. So we're all involved in this whole money scheme, just as churches, Bill Moyers what do you see these as the main as the chief |
01:22:09 1329 |
Dorothy Day
problem. Chesterton says that interest and war were the two great problems of the day. Two of the greatest problems of the day, when the church puts this money out, money lending it interests and gets self involved with war industries, and what isn't involved. Anybody who owns any kind of investments, you put your money in the bank, the bank puts it out, if you put it in mutual funds, they put it out. So that in a way, we're all guilty, every single one of us. And that's why I say that, when we're dealing with these issues. And writing about this, we're not writing about this from any height of virtue. It's just something that we as an American people, as an American people are involved in. And I think that our when Cardinal Spellman said my country, right or wrong, I thought to myself, Yes, it's true. It is our country, and every single one of us are involved in in the right and the wrong. And we've just he bought mentors in one way, perhaps, but at the same time, who can judge how he mentored. Bill Moyers You once wrote that if the Chantry ordered you to stop publishing the Catholic Worker tomorrow? You would? Isn't that accepting someone else's definition of your freedom? |
01:23:25 1405 |
Dorothy Day
When I said, I would obey Cardinal Spellman, or there's many times of great weariness and work of this kind. And you would think to yourself, well, how pleasant would it be if I could just drop all responsibilities and all authority, the authority which comes you know, from the fact that you've yet to while you're taking it upon yourself to do something, you just have to have to do it. And somebody is saying, Stop. And my conscience, I think, looking around me and seeing the tremendous growth of the Catholic Worker around the country, in all these small ways, these very small ways, made me realize that I could immediately obey the cardinal and nothing could stop the Catholic Worker. And I must say that I first became a Catholic. Because I felt that the Catholic Church was the Church of the poor and I still think it's the Church of the poor. I think it's the Church of the of all the immigrant population is a came over or brought over for the prosperous Puritan money making. Developers of this country rubbishes you might say the very words used in connection with him guineas, dagos, WAPs, mix. Irish weren't allowed to own property in Massachusetts. But the church itself, as I say, is still misunderstood in many, many ways that the freedom in the church is something which nobody understands. I believe in miracles, of course, I believe that perhaps someday there may be mutiny is large enough to bring an end to war. Who knows what will happen? When my mother died, she said to me, she said, Dorothy, don't pray that I live. She said, I've been through two world wars, the San Francisco earthquake and the Florida hurricane. And I really feel that I've had enough. In other words, she lived through them and endured them. And she was a woman of a happy disposition. But she felt that her life was full, and that she was ready to go. And she had this beautiful acceptance. But we're living in these times of a time of tremendous failure, |
01:25:56 1557 |
Bill Moyers
Of what? Dorothy Day Of man's sense of responsibility for what he is doing, you relinquish it to state. He's not obedient to His own. The promptings of conscience. We were talking about obedience before and the various meanings of it. It's a very important word. And it seems to me that if the Catholic Worker arouses the conscience, by a constant portrayal of man's needs, the constant failure of government, the constant failure of any but this, this, taking upon oneself, even though it's, it doesn't bring the satisfaction of any immediate accomplishment. I suppose everybody thinks there, whatever they do is just a drop in the bucket. But there's a quotation from William James, that one of our readers sent to us, we've reprinted cards. And I've sent it out, certainly to everyone who writes to us. I am done with great things and big things, great institutions and big success. And I am for those tiny, invisible molecular moral forces that work from individual to individual, creeping through the crannies of the world. Like so many rootlets are like the capillary oozing of water, yet which if you give them time, will rent the hardest monuments of man's pride. |
01:27:32 1652 |
Bill Moyers
Dorothy de remains an enigma, a radical and yet an adherent. A journalist who is also an activist, a believer and still a rebel. And so this small and ashamed tribute has to end with the one mystery which is long attended people like Dorothy Day that God has always chosen the foolish things of this world to confound the wise. I'm Bill Moyers. |
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