Website Re-launch
March 5, 2014
The Dorothy Day Guild is happy to announce the re-launch of its website dorothydayguild.org
This year, 2014, marks the 100th anniversary of the start of World War I -- "the war to end all wars." How poignant that designation in light of the last century of relentless violence and mass destruction!
Among her many gifts to us, Dorothy Day helped to recover peacemaking as an essential element of the Christian vocation. We see this 2014 re-launch of the Guild website not only as a way of furthering a call for her sainthood but also as a way of invoking a new time when peace will end all war.
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Dear members and friends of the Dorothy Day Guild, Greetings to each of you in this fourth week of Easter and on the occasion of the Catholic Worker movement’s 93rd anniversary! On May 1st, 1933, Dorothy, her daughter Tamar, and several others sold the first issue of The Catholic Worker newspaper in Union Square for a penny a copy, and as Dorothy later wrote in The Long Loneliness, “It all happened while we sat there talking, and it is still going on”! It is because of that faithful witness to the Gospel through Dorothy’s practices of nonviolence, hospitality, and voluntary poverty that we get to share in this joyful pilgrimage with you all these years later. Thank you, Dorothy, and happy anniversary to all our Catholic Worker friends, past and present!
Dear Dorothy Day Guild members and friends, Happy Easter; Christ is risen! We hope that the past several days have been occasions of joyful celebration with friends and family for each of you. As a Guild, we would like to extend a special greeting to all of those around the world who were received into the Church on Saturday night at the Easter Vigil. Here in South Bend, several of us from the Catholic Worker community attended the Easter Vigil at St. Matthew’s Cathedral, where our pastor surprised us by invoking Dorothy towards the end of his homily. Speaking directly to the newly baptized and confirmed, as well as the entire congregation, Fr. Andrew talked about how Dorothy’s own conversion to Catholicism had been sparked by the unexpected joy of finding herself pregnant with her daughter, Tamar, and how Christ had come to her, offering her peace. We know that Dorothy was on many of our minds as we watched new brothers and sisters in Christ enter the Church. Christopher Hale, of Letters from Leo, wrote an open letter to all the new Catholics who were received at the Vigil last weekend, offering them thanks and welcome, and inviting them to look to a fellow convert to understand the Church. “Dorothy Day — one of the great American Catholics of the twentieth century — converted to Catholicism and spent the rest of her life serving the poorest of the poor on the streets of New York. Her Episcopalian mother once complained that Dorothy had left respectable society to go to Mass with “the help.” Day did not flinch. She knew what the Church was for.” Like Dorothy, each of these new members of Christ’s Mystical Body enrich the Church and are a gift to the world. We hope that like Dorothy, each of them finds a home, a vocation, and a challenge in Her embrace. The following afternoon, our Catholic Worker community hosted a few dozen friends and neighbors, including many of the guests who join us for breakfast on weekends, for Easter dinner. It is truly a gift to be able to celebrate this feast day with so many of the people who have come into our lives because of Dorothy’s witness to the Gospel, and the legacy of hospitality, voluntary poverty, and nonviolence she gave us!
Dear members of the Dorothy Day Guild, Lenten greetings to each of you! Even just one week in, it’s been a great gift to journey with Dorothy, who reminds us that the practices of Lent, prayer, fasting, and almsgiving are powerful tools in the struggle for justice and peace. On the tenth anniversary of the founding of the Catholic Worker movement and newspaper , Dorothy wrote about the seamless garment of love that was the animating force of Christian faith. “We want to show our love for our brother, so that we can show our love for God,” she said in 1943, “and the best way we can do it is to try to give him what we’ve got, in the way of food, clothing and shelter; to give him what talents we possess by writing, drawing pictures, reminding each other of the love of God and the love of man. There is too little love in this world, too little tenderness.”