Polar opposites? Remembering the kindred
spirits of Dorothy Day and Mother Teresa

By Eileen Egan

Reprinted from the Fall 1997 issue of Catholic Peace Voice, newspaper of Pax Christi USA.

The names of two women in our time have been mentioned in connection with sainthood. They are presumed to be polar opposites. Dorothy Day, an American woman who lived the life of a bohemian in her youth in New York's Greenwich Village, had an abortion, became an unwed mother, cofounded the Catholic Worker movement and repeatedly went to jail for her pacifist beliefs. The other, Mother Teresa, was a woman from a little known country in Europe who in her late teens entered a missionary order to become a teaching Sister of Loreto in India for twenty years before she discovered a second call within her original vocation, a call to go out into the streets.

Dorothy Day, the hundredth anniversary of whose birth is marked this November 8, 1997, came from a non-practicing Christian family. As a child she sought out and joined the Episcopalian Church. On entering college, her zeal was expressed in social causes and religion faded from her consciousness. Moving to New York, Dorothy entered the ferment of politics and wrote for the Socialist Call. After a failed love affair, she found a stable relationship with a man of science; a man with an intense and absorbing love of the natural world.

When Dorothy found that she was expecting a child, she was overjoyed. Even at the height of her involvement with people of the left and intellectuals of the literary world, Dorothy still hungered for religion. After the all night dances and discussions she would steal away to an early mass at the Village Catholic Church, "not knowing what was going on at the altar, but warmed and comforted by the lights and silence, the kneeling people and the atmosphere of worship."

After her daughter, Tamar Teresa, was baptized, Dorothy also entered the Catholic church. An agonizing renunciation followed. The father of her child did not believe in a formal wedding ceremony. He made it clear to Dorothy that "he would have nothing to do with religion or with me, if I embraced it." Becoming Catholic, she related, would mean going through life alone. "I did not want to be alone. I did not want to give up human love when it was dearest and tenderest."

Alone with a child to support, Dorothy earned her living as a freelance writer. The separation from her common-law husband was accompanied by separation from her friends of the left whose struggle to bring a new society to birth was their daily bread. Dorothy had lost faith in the solutions they preached. After participating in a 1932 communist-inspired "Hunger-March" to Washington, she went to the crypt of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception and prayed with anguished tears, "that I might find something to do in the social order besides reporting conditions. I wanted to change them, but I had lost faith in revolution. I wanted to love my enemy whether capitalist or communist."

It was in the same crypt some 65 years later on August 10, 1997, that over 700 members of Pax Christi celebrating the 25th anniversary of their founding, attended a mass of peace and remembered their debt to Dorothy Day one of their earliest supporters.

Returning to New York City, Dorothy Day, found Peter Maurin, a personalist and communitarian, at her doorstep waiting for her. Dorothy accepted Peter as her mentor and soon there were roundtable discussions at the East Side tenement apartment. One of Peter's basic beliefs was the necessity of "the daily practice of the works of mercy." At that time, the United States was in the grip of a savage depression. Millions were workless and homeless. Peter was convinced and convinced Dorothy, that the teachings of Jesus and his church had something to say about economic conditions.

A newspaper was the way to spread these ideas, said Peter, and so by May 1, 1933, an eight-page tabloid entitled The Catholic Worker, was ready. Dorothy distributed it in Union Square among the throng of 50,000 people at the annual Communist rally. The Catholic Worker movement was born on that day, brought into being by a bizarre combination, a French peasant and an idealistic American woman.

The works of mercy, a soup line and a house of hospitality for the homeless grew in New York City. They grew in other cities across the nation also. The paper rose to a circulation of 100,000 and then to 150,000. But the vision of the movement was not just to alleviate poverty; it was to challenge and resist the social forces that gave rise to it, among them war. When World War 11 was declared, Dorothy Day announced that the Catholic Worker's manifesto was the Sermon on the Mount. The Catholic Worker movement would not support the killing and would support those young men resisting the draft on the grounds of conscience. Many members fell away from the movement when it opted for gospel nonviolence. The circulation of the paper plummeted to less than half of its previous strength.

Nevertheless, in time gospel nonviolence became a distinguishing mark of the Catholic Worker movement, along with absolute dependence on the providence of God and voluntary poverty. For Dorothy and the volunteers at the houses of hospitality, the people they served were "other Christs."

During the cold war, the paper conscientiously championed the rights of the workers, the victims of structural injustice and the poor, and resisted civil defense drills against a presumed nuclear attack. For refusing to take shelter, Dorothy went to jail several times, counting it as a work of mercy to visit the prisoners. For her, serving the poor was none other than serving the Savior in disguise.

Serving Jesus in his "distressing disguise" of poverty, homelessness and abandonment was also at the core of the work of Mother Teresa. Her followers took a formal vow of poverty while the Catholic Worker volunteers practiced voluntary poverty. Similarly, depending on the providence of God, teams of Missionaries of Charity were to move into the neediest corners of the world putting into practice their fourth vow of wholehearted free service to the poorest of the poor.

Mother Teresa was born into a staunchly Catholic family of Albanian origin. During her early teen years, the Jesuit priest who led the parish youth group read accounts of activities of Jesuit priests in a mission region known as Bengal in India. The conviction grew in the heart of Agnes Bogaxhiu that she should leave her home and family to take part in the Bengal mission. Just as renunciation was the soil of Dorothy Day's witness, so renunciation was the foundation of the life and witness of Agnes. In those days, the missionaries never returned to their families or home towns. Agnes was never to see her mother or sister again.

After receiving a reply to her petition to enter the Irish Province of Sisters of Loreto, she went to Dublin, Ireland, for the beginning of novitiate training and then with another aspirant, traveled by boat to Calcutta. Her novitiate ending, she began teaching geography and history in the schools of the Loreto order in Calcutta. The medium was English. She was a most popular teacher, and soon became the Headmistress of St. Mary's School. Another branch had been founded by Loreto, the Daughters of St. Anne. This branch conducted school in the Bengali medium and the Daughters observed Indian dress, wearing a white sari in summer and a blue one in winter. Mother Teresa was given charge of the Daughters of St. Anne in addition to her teaching duties. She was referred to as "Bengali Teresa" to distinguish her from Sr. Theresa(Breen) whose patron saint was St. Teresa of Avila. Mother Teresa always explained that she was named for the little Teresa, St. Therese of Lisieux.

While New York was in the throes of the worklessness and social ferment of the great depression, Calcutta was undergoing the agony that accompanied the partition of India. The convulsion reached its peak on Direct Action Day declared by the Muslim League for August 16, 1946. After a mass meeting in the Maidan, Calcutta's great park, Direct Action Day exploded into violence. Calcutta was divided between Hindu and Muslim communities and communal violence raged in a fiery frenzy for four days. The roaring streets were brought to a stand-still except for the works of destruction. People set fire to the shops and homes of members of the other community. Armed with metal-tipped lathi sticks they attacked each other in the streets leaving their victims to bleed to death. Sewers were flooded with the bodies thrown into them. When eventually bodies could be gathered for transport to the burning ghats, the smoke from human flesh filled the air.

No deliveries of supplies were made, and Mother Teresa had the responsibility of three hundred girls to feed. There was a curfew which she disobeyed by going out on the street in search of food. There she saw the effects of the dreadful violence that had overtaken the streets. Stopped by soldiers she explained why she had taken the risk of walking the streets. They had rice and piling bags of it on a truck, they drove her back to the school. Mother Teresa always referred to August 16, 1946 as the "Day of the Great Killing."

In September, Mother Teresa went to Darjeeling in the hills for her annual retreat. During the train ride she had a time of discernment, which is described as follows in the constitution of what became the congregation of the Missionaries of Charity.

"Our religious family started when our foundress, Mother Teresa Bogaxhiu was inspired by the Holy Spirit with a special charism on the 10th of September, 1946. This inspiration...means that the Holy Spirit communicates God's will to Mother."

Mother Teresa had heard a call to give up all and follow Jesus into the slums to serve him in the poorest of the poor. "I knew it was His will and that I had to follow Him... I was to leave the convent and work with the poor while living among them. It was an order. I knew where I belonged but I did not know how to get there."

It took two years before permission was received for Mother Teresa to leave the convent. Stripping herself of her voluminous habit, she stepped out on the streets of the scourged city of Calcutta. Her garb was a rough cotton sari of the poor and on her stockingless feet were sandals.

In the sari of the poor, Mother Teresa started with the works of mercy, teaching school-less and near-naked children in one of the many bustees or slums that sprawled around the city. A few of her students joined her, adopting the white sari with blue border. They found they had to step over the prone bodies of the homeless dying on the streets and in the gutters. Renting dirt-floored rooms in the slums, they gave them what care they could until they recovered or died.

It was in 1950 that the little band of sari-dressed women were allowed to become a diocesan order under the direction of Mother Teresa. In 1952 the City Fathers of' Calcutta gave them the use of a Pilgrim Hostel for the care of the dying destitute. It was near the Temple of Kali, the goddess of destruction and purification and not far from the burning ghat, the cremation place.

It was 1955 when I visited Calcutta and saw an unknown woman, vigorous and purposeful, feeding and caring for skeletonized human beings carried in from the streets by city ambulances. She fed them slowly and carefully and would talk consolingly to them in Bengali, Hindi or English. As I stood behind her some of them held out imploring hands to me, seeking, I supposed, some consolation. I turned away in revulsion.

I could see helping such a person in an emergency situation, but to do it every day? I asked Mother Teresa how she managed to do it? "Our work calls for us to see Jesus in everyone... each one is Jesus in a distressing disguise."

Each time I returned to Calcutta, I saw how the work had grown. There were more slum schools, mother and child care clinics for the poorest of mothers, service to clusters of lepers from ambulances that carried doctors with medication and food on a regular schedule. Always there was the feeding of families from the courtyard of Bhavan the home for abandoned children, and always the care for the dying at Kalighat. In time, a home for lepers was opened in Titgark, in a Calcutta suburb, and dedicated to Gandhi. Another center was opened two hundred miles from Calcutta in a pleasant rural area. A Sister Doctor directed the little town of lepers called Shanti, Nagar, the town of peace.

In my travels with Mother Teresa in Mexico, the Caribbean and Latin America, I have seen how she and her sisters move unerringly into areas not served by others. In Australia, I saw their work with the aborigines, the Sisters living in simple frame housing near the "reserve." In Cairo, I saw them serve with a clinic and help the rag pickers who make what might be called a living on the huge garbage dumps.

When I last saw Mother Teresa in June of 1997, in the home of the Missionaries of Charity in the Bronx, she was in a wheel chair. I knew she was in pain, but she smiled as she said, "Now we have 368 houses."

The work of Mother Teresa and her Sisters was not part of a preconceived plan; it grew as the needs presented themselves. On the way, writers like Malcome Muggeridge and honors like the Nobel Peace Prize, brought the luminous example of Mother Teresa to the world at large. The national funeral decreed by the Indian government when Mother Teresa "went home to God," as she termed dying, showed the regard in which her adopted country held her. Yet the simplicity and meaning of her work was evidenced when at the funeral mass, a leper was one of those who brought a gift to the altar.

In the end, the witness of Dorothy Day and Mother Teresa centered on one conviction, the presence of' God in every human being who comes into the world. It was this conviction that united them in service to each person.

Dorothy Day expressed more explicitly than Mother Teresa, the command to love the enemy as taught in the Sermon on the Mount, but this command is subsumed in Mother Teresa's actions and words, as when, before the Gulf War, she wrote both President Bush and Saddam Hussein begging them to choose the way of peace. "I come to you in the name of God... to beg for the innocent ones, our poor of the world and those who will become poor because of war."

Dorothy Day attacked and resisted with passionate conviction the social forces that make for injustice, poverty and war, while Mother Teresa cited Cardinal Newman, "Let us preach without preaching, not by words but by our example." She considered the changing of structures necessary and important, but saw it as another ministry from her own.

While Mother Teresa saw each person as "Jesus in a distressing disguise," Dorothy used almost the same words to describe her work. "If we didn't have Christ's own words for it, it would seem raving lunacy to believe that if I offer a bed and food and hospitality to some man or woman or child... that my guest is Christ. He made heaven hinge on the way we act toward him in his disguise, of frail, common place, ordinary humanity."