Dorothy Day and the Mott Street Kitchen

In the winter of 1934, Dorothy Day stood in a cramped kitchen at 115 Mott Street in lower Manhattan, ladling bean soup to a line of hungry men that stretched out the door and down the block. A year earlier, she had been a journalist with a modest but comfortable life. Now she slept on a cot in the same cold tenement where she served the destitute.

Friends thought she had lost her mind. Why not just write about poverty from a warm office? Why not donate to a charity and keep your apartment? But Day understood something about Isaiah 58 that most comfortable Christians miss — that God's idea of fasting has nothing to do with skipping meals and everything to do with breaking bread with those who have none.

She didn't just serve food. She lived with the people she fed. She shared their cold radiators, their cockroaches, their uncertainty about tomorrow. For nearly fifty years, through the Catholic Worker houses she founded, Day practiced what the prophet called "spending yourself on behalf of the hungry." She loosened chains not with political speeches but by welcoming the people everyone else had discarded.

And the promise of Isaiah 58 held true. From that single kitchen on Mott Street, more than two hundred Catholic Worker communities eventually sprang up across the country — springs whose waters have never failed.