Dorothy on "The Undeserving"

The Undeserving

A friend sent us a dollar yesterday, and with it the remark: "Enclosed is for bread, but not to make bums out of those who should be earning their own." ...

I thought of that this morning when I passed a little group of four who always seem to be hanging around the place, out in front, in the coffee room, in the doorways. Always drunk, sometimes prostrate on the sidewalk, sometimes sitting on the curb, they give a picture of despair or hilarity, according to the mood they are in. And, to the minds of many of our friends, they epitomize the six hundred or so who come here to eat every day.

This morning as I came from Mass, I passed the little vegetable woman around the corner, washing her mustard greens in a huge barrel of cold water. Her hands were raw and cold. It was one of those grey mornings, wet and misty, and the pavement was slimy under foot.

I commiserated with her over her hands, and she said: "What are you going to do? If you don’t work, you don’t eat."

What a tradition of industry these Italians have--working steadily from morning to night, earning their income by pennies, and educating their children by those same pennies, even putting them through college.

When I passed this same little knot of men in front of the house, whom I had passed on the way to church, I told them about the little Italian woman, and they hung their heads sheepishly and went away. I don’t know what can be done--except to pray. Here are the most humiliated of men, the most despised, the evidence of their sins is flagrant and ever present. And as to what brought them to this pass--war and poverty, disease and sorrow--who can tell? Why question? We must see Christ everywhere, even in His most degraded guise.

We take care of men by the tens of thousands during the course of the year, and there is no time to stop and figure who are the worthy or who are the unworthy. We are each of us unprofitable servants. We are guilty of each other’s sins.

-The Catholic Worker, April 1943