Feast of Dorothy Day, Nov. 29
The thing I have always liked about Dorothy Day is that she was one of the people she dedicated her
life to serving…. She was the real thing. She was an unwed mother, a disillusioned citizen, a poor
woman, a disaffected churchgoer, an unemployed observer of the human race. She had abandoned the
church. She had lived in a tenement of which, as a child, she had been ashamed. She had aborted one
child and borne another out of wedlock. She had worked hard to earn nothing and lived in a cheap,
vermin-ridden apartment because she couldn’t afford anything else. But for the grace of God, Dorothy
Day herself could easily have been the Bag Lady of the World par excellence.
But if Dorothy Day is model of anything at all, it is certainly the fact that life is not over till it’s over.
What Dorothy Day raised out of the ashes of her life is a monument to living.
She began The Catholic Worker, a penny newspaper, to admonish and instruct and counsel and comfort
people everywhere who, like her, could not make sense out of a world that called itself Christian but
had gone officially mad, grinding people under heel in the name of private enterprise, destroying
nations in the name of liberating them, enslaving people in the name of human rights. At its peak the
circulation of the paper rose to over 150,000.
She opened soup kitchens to feed the hungry and give drink to the thirsty.
She began hospitality houses to clothe the naked and harbor the harborless, to care for the sick and
bury the dead.
To feed the hungry was one thing. To be against World War II and the nuclearization of the world was
entirely another. To pursue violence as an act of justice, she taught, was un-Christian. She said without
apology, “We confess to being fools [for Christ], and wish that we were more so….Dear God, please
enlarge our hearts to love each other, to love our neighbor, to love our enemy as well as our friend.”
At first the Catholic Worker Movement was treated at best like a misguided but basically harmless
embarrassment to the institutional church. Within five years of her death, though, the Roman Catholic
bishops of the United States in concert with three popes… themselves published a pastoral on peace,
condemning the arms race and allowing for conscientious objection. Popular writers had begun to talk
about Roman Catholicism as “a peace church,” and war resistance had become a very Catholic thing.
Dorothy Day had stood firm and eventually the church had come to her. It is hard to deny the Gospel in
your midst.
from A Passion for Life by Joan Chittister (Orbis)
The thing I have always liked about Dorothy Day is that she was one of the people she dedicated her
life to serving…. She was the real thing. She was an unwed mother, a disillusioned citizen, a poor
woman, a disaffected churchgoer, an unemployed observer of the human race. She had abandoned the
church. She had lived in a tenement of which, as a child, she had been ashamed. She had aborted one
child and borne another out of wedlock. She had worked hard to earn nothing and lived in a cheap,
vermin-ridden apartment because she couldn’t afford anything else. But for the grace of God, Dorothy
Day herself could easily have been the Bag Lady of the World par excellence.
But if Dorothy Day is model of anything at all, it is certainly the fact that life is not over till it’s over.
What Dorothy Day raised out of the ashes of her life is a monument to living.
She began The Catholic Worker, a penny newspaper, to admonish and instruct and counsel and comfort
people everywhere who, like her, could not make sense out of a world that called itself Christian but
had gone officially mad, grinding people under heel in the name of private enterprise, destroying
nations in the name of liberating them, enslaving people in the name of human rights. At its peak the
circulation of the paper rose to over 150,000.
She opened soup kitchens to feed the hungry and give drink to the thirsty.
She began hospitality houses to clothe the naked and harbor the harborless, to care for the sick and
bury the dead.
To feed the hungry was one thing. To be against World War II and the nuclearization of the world was
entirely another. To pursue violence as an act of justice, she taught, was un-Christian. She said without
apology, “We confess to being fools [for Christ], and wish that we were more so….Dear God, please
enlarge our hearts to love each other, to love our neighbor, to love our enemy as well as our friend.”
At first the Catholic Worker Movement was treated at best like a misguided but basically harmless
embarrassment to the institutional church. Within five years of her death, though, the Roman Catholic
bishops of the United States in concert with three popes… themselves published a pastoral on peace,
condemning the arms race and allowing for conscientious objection. Popular writers had begun to talk
about Roman Catholicism as “a peace church,” and war resistance had become a very Catholic thing.
Dorothy Day had stood firm and eventually the church had come to her. It is hard to deny the Gospel in
your midst.
from A Passion for Life by Joan Chittister (Orbis)
A WOMAN FOR ALL TIME
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