An extraordinary, difficult childhood: Dorothy's daughter, others recall growing up in the Catholic Worker

National Catholic Reporter, March 7, 2003 by Margot Patterson

Though more Catholic Workers today may be seeking to combine the ideals of the movement with parenting, the effort goes back generations. Dorothy Day's daughter, Tamar, was the first of many children raised in the Catholic Worker movement.

"I loved the Catholic Worker. It was so exciting. I wouldn't have missed a moment of it," Tamar Hennessey told NCR in a phone interview from Vermont. Nonetheless, like her mother, Tamar Hennessey said it's difficult to combine being a Catholic Worker with parenting. Hennessy said there may be some people who can do both, but usually people find they have to choose between them.

"I think you'll hear a lot of contradictory stories. A lot of other children did have a difficult time being in the Worker," Hennessy said. "I think Dorothy was very aware of the fact that you can't do both well, and she was right."

For herself, Henessey remembers growing up in the Catholic Worker as stimulating but physically grueling, especially with her mother often on the road.

"I was only 8 years old when it started. She was traveling a lot, and I was left to be taken care of by various people, and I got very ill. It was hard for born of us. She had her work, and yet at the same time she had me. She was very devoted. She was torn," said Hennessy. "I did end up in boarding school for four years, which worked out well."

Hennessy offered a sympathetic, nuanced account of Dorothy Day the mother.

"She loved her family so much, and in so many, many ways she kept me going. She missed understanding the material side of it. She expected a lot of going without. At the same time, she supported me a lot, and I can't say enough good about that," Tamar Hennessy said.

Hennessy acknowledged that Dorothy Day could be exacting. "She wanted everybody to be like saints. I mean, who can measure up to that?" asked Hennessy.

Married when she was still a teenager, Tamar Teresa Day Hennessy went on to have nine children and for many years led a hardscrabble existence living in the country. She was attracted to the Catholic Worker vision of rural families living on the land and tried to live that out with her own family, she said.

"I tried to hold on to those values. I tried to live simply. I tried to follow the Catholic faith. It did not turn out well. Right now I seem to have lapsed," she said of her own religious faith.

Hennessy said people sometimes try to invent a rift between her and her mother that doesn't exist. "I admired her overwheimingly," Hennessy said of Dorothy Day.

Other grown-up children of Catholic Workers have their own stories. Some have ended up staying in the movement; others have gone on to lead more so-called "normal" lives. Many say that the ideals they grew up with have stayed with them for a lifetime.

"The bad points were I grew up in the McCarthy era in San Francisco. We really had to keep a very low profile," said Regina Burke, 64, a medical technician in California who remembers that when she and her sisters entered high school her parents gave them a copy of the Bible, Berlin Diary by foreign correspondent William Shirer, and the social encyclicals of the Catholic church.

"This is not the normal thing people get when they reach high school," Burke said. "I think being raised in a family that had ideals that were not exactly popular, it brought us together more as a family. We didn't have the problems of rebellion that a lot of families had. Even though you didn't hear a lot about it in the `50s, the big movie of our time was `Rebel Without a Cause.' We didn't have that problem in our family because it was us against the world," said Burke.

Burke's parents did not run a Catholic Worker house of hospitality, but Burke said both her mother and father were much influenced by Dorothy Day and by Edith Stein, a German Jewish philosopher who became a Catholic nun and died at Auschwitz and was declared a saint. Burke's father was active in setting up printing apprenticeship programs for convicts in prisons so they would have a skill they could draw on when they left prison; her mother was a teacher who was active in the Girl Scouts. Both were unafraid to embrace unpopular causes.

"It was an interesting way to grow up. During the `60s we were all out in the streets for equal rights. We had some problems with people we invited to our home and then there would be problems with the neighbors. My parents weren't very polite when the neighbors passed the petitions against the kind of people we had as guests in our home," said Burke, remembering one friend of her parents who was of Japanese descent and others who were interracial couples.

"My mother knew Dorothy Day," Burke said. "She was a great heroine, and that was held up to us. That and the fact that if you don't go out and make the change, don't expect anyone else to. You must be the change you want to see," Burke said, paraphrasing Gandhi. A one-time lawyer who left the practice of law because she said the most honest people she met were criminals, Burke said her parents' ideals have influenced her for a lifetime. Burke has been active in community organizing; one of her sisters is a Catholic nun who represents her religious community in the group of nongovernmental organizations that support United Nations public information efforts.