Dorothy Day & Wealth Distribution

Dorothy Day, the Catholic anarchist and co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement, had a deeply rooted critique of wealth inequality. Her ideas were clear, radical, and grounded in the Gospels, especially the Sermon on the Mount.

1. Voluntary Poverty

  • She believed in living simply and rejecting material excess.

  • Advocated voluntary poverty as a spiritual and ethical response to a world of economic inequality.

  • Quotation: “We must live simply so that others may simply live.”

2. Personal Responsibility

  • She emphasized personal responsibility to the poor, not institutional charity.

  • Wealthy individuals have a moral duty to share their possessions with those in need.

  • Opposed bureaucratic charity and welfare that removed the human encounter.

3. Houses of Hospitality

  • Promoted voluntary sharing of homes, food, and resources through Houses of Hospitality.

  • These were based on the idea that the rich must give directly and personally to the poor — not through the state, but through communal acts of mercy.

4. Distributism over Capitalism or Socialism

  • Day supported Distributism, an economic philosophy associated with G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc.

  • Key idea: widespread ownership of productive property (land, tools, small businesses), rather than centralized control by the state or monopolistic corporations.

  • Believed in a decentralized economy, with cooperatives, family farms, small workshops — aligning somewhat with Kropotkin.

5. Critique of Capitalism

  • Condemned capitalism as exploitative, dehumanizing, and rooted in greed.

  • Saw the hoarding of wealth as incompatible with Christianity.

  • Opposed war profiteering, real estate speculation, and profit-based motives in health care or education.

6. Works of Mercy as Redistribution

  • Advocated for feeding the hungry, sheltering the homeless, and caring for the sick not as charity, but as justice.

  • The corporal works of mercy were for her a means of redistributing wealth and love in concrete, daily life.

7. Against Usury and Hoarding

  • She spoke out against interest-based banking, investment for profit, and accumulated wealth.

  • Believed money should be used, not accumulated — a means to serve others, not to be stored or leveraged.

8. Land Reform and Back-to-the-Land Movement

  • Supported agrarian reform and helped establish farming communes.

  • Believed people should be able to live off the land in self-sufficient, non-exploitative ways.

  • Wealth was not to be centralized in cities or in corporate hands, but distributed through rural livelihoods.

9. Hospitality Over Ownership

  • Wealth should not define your security — community and mutual care should.

  • Day practiced and preached radical hospitality: giving away not just surplus, but sometimes what you needed yourself.

Sample Quotations on Wealth

  • “The coat that hangs in your closet belongs to the poor.”
    (a paraphrase of St. Basil that Day often used)

  • “The Gospel takes away our right forever, to discriminate between the deserving and the undeserving poor.”

  • “The mystery of the poor is this: That they are Jesus, and what you do for them, you do for Him.”

  • “We are not just asking for crumbs from the table, but we are demanding the right to sit at the table.”