In 1972, Rev. Theodore Hesburgh, CSC, sent a telegram to Dorothy Day. His brief message, dated March 10, informed the 74-year-old Catholic pacifist that Notre Dame planned to honor her with that year’s Laetare Medal. Day, the co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement, had long been on the shortlist for the award then and now considered the most prestigious for American Catholics.
But Day declined. “It is with the deepest regret that I must refuse the great honor that Notre Dame wished to bestow on me,” she replied the same day. “I am afraid [it] would only be an embarrassment to you.”
The University, she meant, might be embarrassed to honor an alleged tax evader. After Day launched The Catholic Worker newspaper with the French layman Peter Maurin in 1933, writers and activists had flocked to their offices to live with them and join their work. Soon they had created a community of dedicated young people — they reminded one visitor of the first Christians in the Acts of the Apostles — living together, printing their monthly newspaper and serving soup. In the decades since, Day had never registered the community or its newspaper with the federal government as a tax-exempt nonprofit.
Hesburgh’s telegram had arrived as Day was locked in a battle with the Internal Revenue Service over nearly $300,000 in back taxes the agency said the Worker owed, since it had not established itself as a charitable organization.
As a Christian anarchist, Day did not believe the state had the authority to determine how communities organized themselves or practiced religion. “The Government has no right to legislate as to who can or who are to perform the works of mercy,” she explained to a New York Times reporter that spring. “As personalists, as an unincorporated group, we will not apply for this ‘privilege.’”
Day felt this public battle could embarrass the University, but on a more fundamental level, she had committed to decline awards or speaking invitations from universities like Notre Dame that offered ROTC programs. She opposed war preparations of all kinds, including military training and research grants that promoted the development of weaponry. Thus her reply to Hesburgh: a polite yet unequivocal “no.”
Hesburgh — literally — didn’t get the message. The Notre Dame president was traveling and did not see Day’s response. Meanwhile, the University had already issued a press release announcing Day as the Laetare honoree. Within days, congratulations poured onto Day’s desk from Church leaders such as the Vatican’s apostolic delegate to the United States, business executives including the president of Corning Glass, and even U.S. President Richard Nixon.
Despite what Day’s refusal might suggest, Notre Dame had long held a tender place in her heart as an important hub of Catholic thought where many cherished friends and colleagues lived and worked.
Answered prayers
Back in December 1932, Day had traveled to Washington, D.C., on assignment from the lay-led Catholic magazine Commonweal and its managing editor, George Shuster, Class of 1915, a former Notre Dame professor of English. While in the capital, Day covered a delegation of desperate farmers as well as a hunger march organized by the Communist Party. She reported that the farmers were welcomed with courtesy, but the Communist hunger marchers were dispersed with tear gas and firehoses.
These, too, were Christ’s poor, she thought. While never a member of the party, Day had maintained several close friends who were Communists even after her conversion to Catholicism in 1927, when she distanced herself from the leftist newspapers she’d been writing for. Her former associates still stood with the poor, but, she wondered, where were her fellow Catholics?
After the march, she attended Mass at the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception. “I offered up a special prayer,” she later recalled, “a prayer which came with tears and anguish, that some way would open up for me to use what talents I possessed for my fellow workers, for the poor.”
Returning to New York City, Day found her prayers answered in the form of Peter Maurin. Maurin was a former Christian Brother of peasant stock who had emigrated to the U.S. in 1911. After observing the plight of the American worker firsthand during nearly 15 years as an itinerant laborer, he wanted to start a publication dedicated to the principles of Catholic social thought. He sought out Shuster at Commonweal, who recommended he meet Day.
Maurin began educating Day on the Church’s social teachings, codified by Pope Leo XIII and his successors. In such encyclicals as Rerum Novarum (1891) and Quadragesimo Anno (1931), they had called for Catholics to respond to the crises of the industrial age with the wisdom of the Gospel — by honoring human dignity and the rights of workers and taking personal responsibility for the common good.
Maurin introduced Day to the Catholic alternative to communism and capitalism: the third way of “personalism,” which proposed a society that held the dignity and freedom of every human being, made in the image of the Divine, as the highest goal.
Day credited her “special prayer” at the shrine for preparing her for Maurin’s message. “If I had not said those prayers down in Washington, I probably would have listened, but continued to write rather than act,” she wrote in her 1939 book, House of Hospitality.
But act she did. On May 1, 1933 — the Communist Labor Day — she and her brother John distributed 2,500 copies of The Catholic Worker in New York’s Union Square. In her first editorial, Day introduced the newspaper as “an attempt to popularize and make known . . . the program put forth by the Church for the ‘reconstruction of the social order.’”
She struck a chord. Bishops sent donations, monks sent letters and article submissions, and curious young writers from across the country flocked to the paper’s East Village office.
Later that year, the Worker opened its first “house of hospitality” for out-of-work women. On the paper’s first anniversary, its staff distributed 25,000 copies. By year three, its circulation had passed 100,000. Soon Day and Maurin were in demand to speak at churches, colleges and houses of hospitality, which were cropping up around the U.S. and abroad.
A Pleasants birthday
Julian Pleasants, then a student at the College of William and Mary in Virginia, began reading Day’s newspaper in 1936 after seeing an ad in Our Sunday Visitor. “For 25 cents a year, I subscribed,” Pleasants ’40 said in a 1986 interview, “and I have never been the same.”
He decided to transfer to Notre Dame because so many of the intellectuals quoted in The Catholic Worker taught there: priests, theologians and luminaries like Jacques Maritain, the French philosopher who was a close friend of both the Worker and Notre Dame.
In the summer of 1940, Pleasants, about to begin a graduate program in apologetics, and Norbert Merdzinski ’41, visited the Worker house in New York to volunteer on its breadline.
Back on campus in the fall, Pleasants invited Day to speak. The administration did not want to publicize the talk, Pleasants said. The students were not allowed to put up posters advertising Day’s visit. In those days, activism on behalf of the poor and of working people could indicate Communist sympathies, and Pleasants guessed administrators wanted to keep the news from potentially squeamish donors.
Despite the event’s low profile, several hundred students turned out to listen to Day in Washington Hall. University President Rev. Hugh O’Donnell, CSC, Class of 1916, even offered his car for Day’s use while she was in South Bend. Day’s visit coincided with her 43rd birthday, which was celebrated with a dinner at the Rose Marie Tea Room in Robertson’s department store downtown. She also paid a visit to Sister Madeleva Wolff, CSC, Class of 1918 M.A., the president of Saint Mary’s College. Day called her birthday in South Bend “a pleasant one.”
For some, Day’s visit meant far more. “It is a terrible thing to experience a spiritual eye-opening,” Pleasants wrote in The Notre Dame Scholastic. “Once you have seen Christ suffering in the bodies and souls of the poor, you can never be the same again.”
Pleasants and Merdzinski were inspired to open Saints John and Paul House of Hospitality, the first of its kind in South Bend. Saint Mary’s students donated furniture; Rev. John J. Cavanaugh, CSC, ’23, ’27M.A., Notre Dame’s vice president, arranged food donations from the dining hall; and Rev. Michael Mathis, CSC, Class of 1910, who pioneered Notre Dame’s liturgical studies, served as chaplain.
The house opened in April 1941, at 401 South Chapin Street in South Bend, above a drugstore owned by Ladislaus Kolupa, Class of 1904. The Scholastic called it a “flophouse with a difference.” Within weeks, it was serving 250 meals a night and housing as many as 70 men in its dozen rooms. Day visited the house later that year, witnessed the young men’s hard work and advised them to make a retreat before they collapsed, Pleasants said.
Personal responsibility for their suffering neighbors, the two students agreed, was one of Day’s lasting lessons. “Most people today are happy to let the other person do the charity work,” Merdzinski told the Scholastic. “Charity as it was done by the early Christians isn’t popular.”
Merdzinski’s words echoed “Feeding the Poor at a Sacrifice,” one of the oft-quoted, blank-verse “Easy Essays” Maurin penned for The Catholic Worker :
In the first centuries
of Christianity
the hungry were fed
at a personal sacrifice,
the naked were clothed
at a personal sacrifice,
the homeless were sheltered
at personal sacrifice.
And because the poor
were fed, clothed and sheltered
at a personal sacrifice,
the pagans used to say
about the Christians
‘See how they love each other.’
In our own day
the poor are no longer
fed, clothed and sheltered
at a personal sacrifice,
but at the expense
of the taxpayers.
And because the poor
are no longer
fed, clothed and sheltered
the pagans say about the Christians
‘See how they pass the buck.’
World War II spelled the end of Saints John and Paul House. In 1942, Merdzinski enlisted in the military. By December 1943, Pleasants — who had failed a physical to join the Army — was running the house alone while working nights to provide for his widowed mother. After recovering from pneumonia, he closed the house and began working in a Notre Dame biology lab.
Conscientious objections
The fate of South Bend’s first house of hospitality was not unique. The war closed roughly half of the 33 Catholic Worker houses across the country. Although Day disagreed with the young men who went to war, she respected their consciences. Pleasants said that he and Merdzinski were not “total pacifists,” but that Day was “never hard on us.”
Nevertheless, Day called for peace, in season and out of season. For her, the Gospel was a literal manual for Christian living. “The Catholic manifesto is the Sermon on the Mount,” she wrote in 1935. After World War II, her newspaper quoted Marshal Ferdinand Foch, the French general who had served as Supreme Allied Commander at the end of World War I: “Organized Christianity must either stop participating in wars or else take the Sermon on the Mount out of the Bible.”
When the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, Day remained neutral, even as many Catholic periodicals and Church leaders voiced support for General Francisco Franco’s Catholic nationalist troops. The Catholic Worker’s circulation bled because of Day’s staunch pacifism. Colleges and seminaries canceled their subscriptions. Even as it condemned anti-Semitism and Nazism, its pacificist stance deepened its unpopularity during World War II. Even several houses of hospitality refused to distribute it. But Day believed the commandment to love one’s neighbor had no exception.
In September 1945, one month after the Enola Gay dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, Day penned a scathing editorial, one of the first American Catholic condemnations of the bomb. “‘A cavern below Columbia [University] was the bomb’s cradle,’ born not that men might live, but that men might be killed,” she wrote. She excoriated the bomb — created in a cave, tested in the desert, unleashed in a blinding light on August 6, the Feast of the Transfiguration — as a kind of anti-Christ whose garments were not white as snow, but stained scarlet with the blood of innocents. And she emphasized the irony of the participation of Christian scientists — Notre Dame scientists among them, she noted — who prayed and practiced their faith while crafting a weapon of ultimate destruction that mocked Christ’s gift of life. She concluded with the Gospel of Matthew: “What you do unto the least of these my brethren, you do unto me.”
During the early years of the Cold War, Day gained further notoriety for her protests of New York’s mandatory civil defense drills, which were designed to prepare residents for a Soviet nuclear attack. Five times in four years she and other protesters were arrested for sitting on a park bench during the drills, rather than retreating to a fallout shelter. In 1962, New York’s civil defense drills ceased — due in part, some historians say, to Day’s actions.
Meanwhile, Day’s autobiographies The Long Loneliness (1952) and Loaves and Fishes (1963) cemented her reputation for spiritual wisdom. Ben Peters ’01M.Div., a co-founder of the current South Bend house of hospitality, once commented that the world’s highest concentration of people who have read The Long Loneliness is in South Bend, Indiana. Day’s friend Willis Nutting, a historian, philosopher and co-founder of the great books course now known as the Program of Liberal Studies, ensured the book’s inclusion on the core reading list.
Day was delighted when Julian Pleasants, his wife and three other couples pooled their money, bought 80 acres off Cleveland Road and formed a new community, Family Acres, dedicated to “living on the land.” When Day visited in November 1954, she found the community had grown to eight families living in different houses and was growing a lot of its own food. Such creative projects “kept the idea of communal, rural living and intellectual work and manual labor alive,” Day wrote in Commonweal.
Several Family Acres residents working with Rev. Louis J. Putz, CSC, ’32, founded a publishing house, Fides Press, to promote Christian culture. It produced several works by Day’s close friend William Storey ’54MMS, ’59Ph.D., a Notre Dame theologian, whose titles included The Days of the Lord, a compilation of saints’ writings that Day kept on her bedside and quoted frequently.
After Day’s editor at Harper & Row passed on the manuscript, Fides published Thérèse, her biography of St. Thérèse of Lisieux, in 1960. For nearly a decade, Day had wanted to write a book about the saint who had articulated what she felt was the spiritual philosophy of the Catholic Worker movement. For those who felt despondent in the face of evil, Day believed Thérèse’s “Little Way” could offer a spiritual counterpoint. “This saint, of this day, is releasing a force, a spiritual force, to counteract that fear and disaster,” Day wrote. “We know that one impulse of grace is of infinitely more power than a cobalt bomb.”
The Catholic Worker began to grow anew during the Vietnam War. As opposition to the war erupted in the late 1960s, many young people were drawn to its houses of hospitality and Day’s uncompromising pacifism. She became a sort of godmother to the anti-war movement. In 1967, she noted that anti-war demonstrators numbered in the thousands, as compared to “the few score we used to be.” Tim MacCarry ’70 wrote a front-page story for the Worker about the 1968 student protests over the appearance of CIA and Dow Chemical job recruiters at Notre Dame — Dow manufactured napalm for the U.S. military. MacCarry had visited Day in New York and, with Storey’s support, briefly ran St. Francis Catholic Worker house east of campus.
Later that year, during a “Resistance Mass” outside Memorial Library, MacCarry was among six students and faculty who ripped up their draft cards at the offertory. One month later, he was one of 10 Notre Dame students suspended or expelled for their renewed protests of the war.
A day to rejoice
After the news that Day would receive the Laetare Medal was widely shared — and celebrated — Hesburgh finally replied to the honoree. Regarding the “embarrassment” she might cause Notre Dame, he said the only embarrassment would come if she did not accept the medal. Hesburgh noted the enthusiastic reaction to the announcement. “I think it would rob many people of their legitimate joy not to have you receive the medal,” he wrote. “Do say you will receive the medal, as it will make all of us very happy.”
Five days later, Day relented. But she warned Hesburgh that, because of her declining health, she was under doctor’s orders not to travel. She hoped that Storey and her good friend Nina Polcyn Moore, owner of St. Benet’s Bookstore in Chicago, a beloved purveyor of religious art and books, might accept the Laetare in her stead. Hesburgh insisted that he would present the medal to Day in person, either at Notre Dame or in New York when her health allowed.
Thanks to the Notre Dame president’s determination, she traveled to South Bend to receive the award at the May 21, 1972, commencement exercises. An audience of 11,000 responded to her speech with a standing ovation.
Writing in Commonweal a few months later, she acknowledged that she had “compromised” in accepting the Laetare. But she cast her decision as an opportunity to express her gratitude to the many Notre Dame students and professors who had given so much to the movement: to Storey for his spiritual writing; to Pleasants and Merdzinski for opening the first house of hospitality in South Bend; and to George Shuster for the introduction to Maurin, who had inspired her life’s work.
For his part, Hesburgh said her address made a good impression on at least one honorary degree recipient that year: New York Times reporter Tom Wicker. Wicker soon published an article arguing Day’s case against the IRS. Hesburgh would later suggest that Wicker’s words had contributed to the IRS dropping its case against the Catholic Worker. While Day never weighed in on any role that receiving the Laetare may have played in her IRS battle, she nevertheless thanked Hesburgh for the “whale of a present.”
After Day’s first heart attack in 1976, Hesburgh wrote her again, wishing her a speedy recovery. “We need you more than most other people in America today,” he wrote.
Still going on
Day died after her third heart attack, on November 29, 1980, but she remains a beloved witness of faith in action and passion for justice at Notre Dame. The past 80 years have seen a series of houses of hospitality in South Bend. The most recent, St. Peter Claver Catholic Worker, was founded in 2003 to renew Day’s legacy of hospitality and solidarity with the poor.
In 2006, the community opened Our Lady of the Road, a drop-in center where volunteers serve breakfast, run a laundry and just sit and talk with guests. During the pandemic, several members launched Motels4Now, a low-barrier shelter to house chronically homeless people at a former motel near the city’s airport. Students volunteered at the site, de-escalating conflicts and offering a listening ear. The effort has evolved and is preparing to build a proper facility, to be called the New Day Intake Center.
Day’s vision of living the Gospel no matter the cost still inspires many Catholics — and Notre Dame alumni — to counter the atomizing, destructive forces at work in the world; to become holy in whatever little, humble way one can.
Renée Roden is a graduate of Columbia University’s School of Journalism. She lives at St. Martin de Porres Catholic Worker in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and is author of Tantur: Seeking Christian Unity in a Divided City, forthcoming in June 2025 from Liturgical Press.