Dorothy Day Guild November 2023 Missive

Casey Mullaney • November 8, 2023

Dear friends,

Happy birthday to Dorothy Day! Today marks the 126th anniversary of Dorothy’s birth in Brooklyn, New York to Grace and John Day. We hope you will join us in celebrating today, and for the rest of the month leading up to Dorothy’s anniversary of death on November 29th!

We have so much to share with you today, but first, we are thrilled to announce that we have revamped our Guild website! We hope that you’ll enjoy the refreshed layout and increased accessibility to our newsletter, blog, and upcoming events that the new version of the site offers. Our site now contains a full archive of the Guild’s publications, so you’ll continue to have full access to back issues of “In Our Time” and other posts. Over the coming months, we look forward to adding additional free educational content about Dorothy’s life and legacy and other resources for you to share with your communities, so stay tuned!

Mass for the Abolition of Nuclear Weapons:

The Guild was so proud to co-sponsor two recent events at Manhattan College. Kristi Pfister’s artist talk on her exhibit, “Radical Action: Tracing Dorothy Day” and Lincoln Rice’s lecture “Peter Maurin: The Forgotten Radical” were the perfect way to bookend the All Hallows Eve, All Saints, and All Souls holiday and kick off Dorothy’s birthday month. If you haven’t seen Kristi’s show yet, it’s on display in the O’Malley Library until December. Thank you so much, Lincoln and Kristi, for sharing your artistic and academic gifts with us!

Looking ahead to the end of the month, we invite you to join us on November 29th, the 43rd anniversary of Dorothy’s death for a celebration of Eucharist for the Abolition of Nuclear Weapons. As we head into the Advent season, please join us in praying for peace and especially for an end to nuclear weapons development and testing. Bishop John Wester of Santa Fe will concelebrate mass with Msgr. Kevin Sullivan at 6:00 pm on Wednesday November 29th at the Church of Our Savior (59 Park Ave in Manhattan, NY). Bishop Wester is the author of a powerful pastoral letter, “Living in the Light of Christ’s Peace: A Conversation Towards Nuclear Disarmament,” which we highly recommend as spiritual reading for this season.

After mass, we hope that you’ll join us for a reception, so please RSVP using this form, and feel free to invite your friends and family. We know that Dorothy is with us when we work to end the scourge of nuclear war– let’s bring her legacy of peacebuilding forward into the new liturgical year together!

Reading Recommendations for November:

Speaking of good things to read, we would like to recommend to you two recent articles written by dear friends of the Dorothy Day Guild. On All Souls Day, Chicago Catholic Worker and journalist Renée Roden published “Servant of God Dorothy Day and Her Revolution of Love, as part of a series on American Eucharistic Witnesses, accompanied by a beautiful original woodcut by artist Connor Miller. This series is offered in concert with the National Eucharistic Revival currently taking place in the United States. Dorothy herself addressed the last Eucharistic Congress in the United States, which took place in Philadelphia in 1976. In her talk, Dorothy spoke “on the Eucharist, the brotherhood of all men, and the perversion of our function as co-creators by making and waging terrible war… ‘Our Creator gave us life, and the Eucharist to sustain our life. But we gave the world instruments of death of inconceivable magnitude,’ she said.” Many thanks to Renée for sharing this reflection on the social implications of Dorothy’s devotion to the Body of Christ.

Also published on All Souls, we have been refreshed and challenged by Iowa Catholic Worker Brian Terrell’s “Dorothy Day Inspires a New Meaning of Saint,” a reflection on Dorothy’s expansive ability to recognize sanctity beyond the boundaries of the Catholic Church. Well before Vatican II, Dorothy understood the universal call to holiness, and she understood that shared vocation of our human family to be truly universal. As Brian writes,

Proclaiming that all are called to be saints, Day was not suggesting that all are called to be good Catholics or good Christians or even to believe in God. The saint-revolutionist synthesis, the personalist action that the world is even more urgently crying aloud for today, and the holiness that its example will impel in others have nothing to do with piety, religious confessions, or the sacraments… As much as Day herself found her home in the church and strength in its sacraments, such considerations are not necessarily relevant to the revolutionary sanctity that Dorothy Day said that each person is called to.

Our world needs as many saints as we can get, both within and outside the Church. We pray that many will follow in the footsteps of figures like Angela Davis, Ignazio Silone, and Mahatma Gandhi, in their own way living out the Gospel in their work for justice. Thank you to Brian for this encouragement to look for such radical holiness in the fierce witness of our brothers and sisters.

Membership in the Dorothy Day Guild:

Here at the Guild, as we approach the 43rd anniversary of Dorothy’s death on November 29th we anticipate with great hope future years in which we might eventually celebrate this day as Dorothy’s feast day, her birthday into heaven. You have helped bring this future closer by your support of and membership in the Dorothy Day Guild.

Our Guild is made up of the faithful who have been touched by some aspect of Dorothy’s life and witness. If you are reading this letter, something about Dorothy’s legacy has spoken to you and perhaps altered the course of your life in a significant way. The work of the Guild relies on the dedication of our members, who in addition to their financial support of Dorothy’s cause in Rome commit to praying for Dorothy’s canonization, sharing her story, and living out her legacy of Gospel nonviolence and voluntary poverty in our world. Thank you so much for participating in this work! Whether you are a brand-new or founding member of the Guild, we are so grateful for all of the support and encouragement you have offered to this cause.

A few words from Dorothy:

I’d like to close with a few lines from Dorothy’s December 1978 “On Pilgrimage” column. Towards the end of her life, Dorothy was the recipient of much tenderness and admiration from her friends and family members, which she notes with gratitude in this passage taken from her diary on the eighty first anniversary of her birth:

November 8th–my birthday–I was born in 1897. Mary Lathrop Pope has just put up two, gigantic sheets of paper on my wall, a painting she did of a pink-robed, guardian angel, with orange hair, carrying an armload of huge lilies–blue sky and green earth. Wildly decorative, (Mary had made her first retreat after her conversion at Mary Reparatrix, on East 29th Street, a church of perpetual adoration, with a retreat house connected. I had made my first retreat at that convent too.)

Tamar embroidered a gorgeous, round pillowcase and stuffed it. Mike DeGregory and Michelle Timmins sent me an unusually beautiful Madonna of Czestochowa. I will pray to her for them, and our Polish Pope. People send us cups and plates of china, Spode, also Limoges–such luxury! There was a party in the dining room after Mass, and many flowers.

How wonderful, in this dark and cold month of the year, to be reminded of Dorothy’s love of beauty in art, nature, and human relationships. May this season also bring each of you many flowers.

In peace,

Dr. Casey Mullaney, on behalf of the Dorothy Day Guild

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Ninety-three years ago today!

By Casey Mullaney • May 1, 2026

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!

Easter with Dorothy Day

By Casey Mullaney • April 9, 2026

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!

Happy 100th Birthday, Tamar Day Batterham Hennessy!

By Casey Mullaney • March 4, 2026

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.”