For nine days now we have gathered in prayer and thanks for the life and witness of Dorothy Day, Servant of God. Last year, on the feast of the Immaculate Conception, the anniversary of her famous prayer for a vocation, we sent her cause to Rome. We continue to pray for her canonization and ask for her help in following our shared call as Christians, as she wrote, “to enlarge our hearts to love each other, to love our neighbor, to love our enemy, as well as our friend.”
Dorothy’s own path to holiness was hardly a clear straight line. She struggled to find a way big enough for her desire “to use what talents I possessed for my fellow workers, for the poor.” She told biographer Robert Coles that she wished to be remembered as an “ardent seeker after God who, with some devotion, had followed His example after a few false starts.”
