Bearing Witness: Catherine de Hueck Doherty and the "Gospel of Dorothy Day"

Bearing Witness: Catherine de Hueck Doherty and the “Gospel of Dorothy Day”* Julie Leininger Pycior C atherine de Hueck Doherty, like her far more famous contemporary Dorothy Day, contributed mightily to the development of lay activism in the 1930s and 1940s, with important consequences not only for U.S. Catholicism but also for the nation’s democratic process. Indeed, the lives and works of these two visionary women inspired countless lay Catholics—particularly young women—to live out Gospel values, in the process taking on responsibilities unusual both for lay Catholics and for women at that time. The power of these two spiritual sojourners derived, paradoxically, in large part from a radical witness in solidarity with “the least”: an attempt, as Catherine de Hueck Doherty put it, “to live the Gospel without Compromise.” Not that the two women always agreed. Indeed, their personalities and some of their perspectives contrasted markedly. Such differences, however, serve to throw into stark relief the important synergies between the two movements. Even though Catherine de Hueck Doherty’s Friendship House would largely fade from the scene, it would have important consequences for U.S. Catholicism, if not as obviously as with Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker. Meanwhile, the two movements—somewhat in concert—indirectly influenced the democratic system, in the sense that they helped inspire a kind of neighborhood organizing that empowers ordinary citizens in the face of a political process increasingly beholden to financial interests. Like Dorothy Day, Catherine de Hueck Doherty belonged to the generation forged during World War I, but the two women experienced this cataclysm in contrasting 43 * An earlier version of this article was presented as the inaugural lecture of the Rita Cassella Jones Series on American Catholic Women at the Curran Center for the Study of American Catholicism, Fordham University, 3 November 2005. For their insights and assistance, the author wishes to thank Monica Ribar Cornell, Thomas Cornell, Robert Ellsberg, James T. Fisher, Roger O’Neill, Dorothy Day-Catholic Worker archivist Phillip Runkel, and Madonna House archivist Bonnie Staib. ways. While Day and her anarchist and Communist comrades were hounded out of their editorial offices by U.S. authorities, de Hueck Doherty and her family, for their part, found the United States a refuge from communist attacks. Both women, however , then proceeded to jumped feet first into the “roaring twenties.” Indeed, the radical journalist Day had a script optioned by Hollywood producers, while the Russian émigré Catherine de Hueck starred on the Chautauqua circuit as “the Baroness”—a name that would stick.1 De Hueck Doherty found her life to be increasingly hollow, however, and sensed the pull of the Holy Spirit—the insistent “baying of the hounds of heaven.” For her part, Dorothy Day famously recalled the profound impact of, in her words, “‘The Hound of Heaven’ in an atmosphere of drink and smoke,” where her dear friend, the playwright Eugene O’Neill would “recite all of Francis Thompson’s poem, and would sit there, black and dour, his head sunk as he intoned, ‘And now my heart is as a broken fount, wherein tear drippings stagnate.’ The idea of this pursuit by the Hound of Heaven fascinated me. The recurrence of it, the inevitableness of the outcome made me feel that I would have to pause in the mad rush of living and remember my first beginning and my last end. . . .” Moreover, for both women the Great Depression made this “baying” resound even more insistently. “I decided to sell what I possessed, give it to the poor,” the Baroness later wrote, explaining that in the Bible “whenever I opened it, I always found the words, ‘Arise—go! Sell all you possess . . . give it directly, personally to the poor.’” Such sentiments also could easily have been expressed by Dorothy Day, who by then had converted to Catholicism and sought a way to live out her beliefs in service to the “least.”2 Soon the two women’s concerted efforts to love God and their neighbors, while ever aware of their own faults, began to attract followers. At the same time, while the Catholic Worker began in 1933 in New York City with no formal ecclesiastical input, de Hueck...