Others Carry On Her Work Worldwide

There are something like 125 Catholic Worker houses and farming communes in the United States and seven other countries. The movement continues to build--in its modest, remarkable ways.

It’s a little like a religious order, except it’s composed primarily of lay people. People come to Worker houses and farms, stay for a while, help ladle the soup, grow the vegetables, assist in the publications, go on to other callings in the world. But Dorothy Day’s spirit travels with them.

There are two Worker houses on T Street Northwest in Washington. One recent morning, as every morning, some of the guests were out on the stoop before sunrise, waiting for the first bowl of soup and chunk of bread. Other guests had awakened inside in warm beds with sheets on them. A few years ago at the house at 1305 T, there was a family of four--mother, father, two kids--living under the dining room table. It was the only wedge of space available to them. They lived under the table for six months.

Michael Kirwan runs the Worker house at 1305 T. He knew Dorothy Day in the closing years of her life. He is always overworked, underslept. He gets up from his narrow bed on the third floor at 5 a.m. to start the soup. He brushes his teeth wondering how to defeat the bills. From first light, Dorothy Day is in his consciousness, goading and pricking and scratching at him to do better, be better, feel more intensely.

One brilliantly sunny morning a few weeks ago, there was a man with a beard and a great stomach stirring a vat. There was another man sorting bags of clothes. There was another man with reddened fingers working on the second floor: Kirwan had his sleeves rolled past his elbows, and he was putting things in an old-fashioned washing machine. The agitator worked, but the wringer was the pits. So he was doing some of the wash by hand. There were so many piles of wash, it all seemed hopeless.

Kirwan, who’s 52, who knew Day, whose parents knew Day, who has given his life to the never-ending heap of neediness before him, stopped the work and said: “I saw Dorothy at times lose her temper. But I also saw her be unbelievably kind to people. Unbelievably solicitous. She was very human. She got tired. She was overwrought. She got worn out. But she kept going.”