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Dear friends and members of the Dorothy Day Guild, As Advent draws to a close and we anticipate the Nativity of the Lord, we hope that these are days of joyful waiting for each of you! All of us at the Guild welcome the chance to be in touch with you and to share a few updates, photos, and reflections before the great celebrations of Christmas. Dorothy loved this time of year

Dear friends and members of the Dorothy Day Guild, Greetings to each of you on Dorothy’s 127th birthday! On this day in 1897, Grace Satterlee Day and John Day welcomed their first daughter into the world in Brooklyn, New York. We know that for many of you in the United States the election season has been a time of anxiety and tension, and we hope that remembering Dorothy’s witness to nonviolence and voluntary poverty on the anniversary of her birth reminds you that the Gospel is always ready to be born into our world through our commitments to peace and to the works of mercy.  Here in South Bend this past weekend, our friend Flora Tang invited members of our Catholic Worker community to her home for an All Saints and All Souls prayer service. Flora asked us to bring photographs and mementos of holy men and women, members of our families and our friends, to place on an altar as we gathered to remember our beloved dead who have gone before us in faith. The month of November is dedicated to remembering all the faithful departed, who are members of the great cloud of witnesses that surrounds us and encourages us with their prayers and with their love. Dorothy is among that cloud of witnesses, and she is especially close to us when we live as she did, embracing poverty in solidarity with the poorest members of our communities, working for peace and refusing to participate in war, and inviting the unhoused and hungry into our homes and into our lives.

Dear friends and members of the Dorothy Day Guild, Hello! We hope as always that this missive finds each of you well. Here at the Catholic Worker in South Bend, the leaves have started changing in earnest, and as we look ahead to what I always think of as the ‘Autumn Triduum’ of All Hallow’s Eve, All Saints’ Day, and All Souls, I am reminded of how intimately we are connected to our beloved dead and all those who have gone before us in faith. Dorothy is my favorite exemplar of what the belief in the communion of saints looks like in practice: as a member of Christ’s Mystical Body, Dorothy understood herself to be part of a community which reached back through the generations and extended into the future. She prayed with the saints, asked artists like Ade Bethune to create images of them for the newspaper, and even met with a few in person, receiving communion from St. Pope Paul VI in Rome and receiving a visit from her friend St. Mother Teresa of Kolkata in her home at Maryhouse.

IN OUR TIME  Newsletter of the Dorothy Day Guild

Dear friends and members of the Dorothy Day Guild, Hello, and warm greetings from all of us here at the Guild! We hope that the change of seasons has brought all of your summer projects to a satisfying conclusion, and for those who are now back to school as either students or teachers that the fall semester is off to a great start. I look forward to writing this letter every month, but particularly at the start of the school year when everything feels crisp and renewed. We have so many exciting updates and new resources to share with you this month! First, in honor of National Hispanic Heritage Month, which began last week in the United States, we are very proud to announce that the main pages of our website are now available in Spanish . You can use the language buttons on our home page to toggle back and forth between English and Spanish. Many thanks to Magdalena Muñoz Pizzulic for her work on this translation. Originally from Chile, Magdalena is a recent graduate of the Master of Theological Studies program at the University of Notre Dame and now lives and works as a member of the St. Peter Claver Catholic Worker community in South Bend, Indiana. Magdalena’s linguistic skills, theological knowledge, and lived commitment to Dorothy’s legacy of nonviolence, voluntary poverty, and hospitality have been invaluable to us in increasing the accessibility of our online resources. As we work to promote Dorothy’s cause for canonization in our global Church, we hope to continue making our Guild’s educational and devotional materials available bilingually, and eventually in other languages as well. Please keep us in your prayers as we continue this work, and for those who live, work, and worship in Spanish-speaking communities, please consider sharing Dorothy’s story with someone new this month!

Dispatches is a column dedicated to notable developments from the Dorothy Day Guild. For the community issue of In Our Time, Casey Mullaney reflects on what it was like to share Dorothy Day’s Eucharistic theology with the wider Church.

Sowing Seeds is a column that examines the distinctive ways Catholic Worker communities are living out its charisms. For the community issue of In Our Time , Claire Schaeffer-Duffy and Scott Schaeffer-Duffy reflect on their decades-long journey as Catholic Workers.

Saved by Beauty is a column about the creative entryways into Dorothy Day’s legacy. Bro. Martin Erspamer, OSB and Bro. Michael (Mickey) McGrath, OSFS are both liturgical artists, widely recognized for their creative work. Meeting in the pages of the Guild’s newsletter, Carolyn Zablotny reflects on how they bring an artistry and open-heartedness long associated with Dorothy and the Catholic Worker.

Charles E. Moore is a member, teacher, and pastor of the Bruderhof, an international Christian movement of intentional communities founded by Eberhard Arnold in 1920. A contributing editor and author for Plough , his published works include Called to Community: The Life Jesus Wants for His People , Provocations: Spiritual Writings of Kierkegaard , and Following the Call: Living the Sermon on the Mount Together . For our column, Good Talk , he spoke with Gabriella Wilke on how to go about community life together. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Signs of Holiness is a column that explores some of the spiritual dimensions of the Cause. For the community issue of In Our Time, Colleen Dulle reflects on what it means to live out the pope’s call for political and social love.

This column, Breaking Bread , is typically a first-person reflection about the impact Dorothy Day has had in someone’s life. For the community issue of In Our Time, we tried something different. One of the joys in Dorothy’s life was fiction. While we might more immediately think of the books she read, she also toiled at the dream of writing a novel, particularly a social novel. Sometimes dismissed for its activist leanings, the social novel dramatizes a prevailing social problem, such as poverty or prejudice. As you meet Dorothy the fiction writer, perhaps there’s a critique for Catholics too. This is her debut story for Commonweal.

Updates from the National Eucharistic Congress, reading recs, and some amazing documentary footage.

Dear members and friends of the Dorothy Day Guild, We hope this month’s missive finds you well! Here at the Guild, we are enjoying some beautiful summer weather and making prayerful and practical preparations for the National Eucharistic Congress next week. It’s hard to believe how the summer is flying by, so I’m especially grateful for the opportunity to pause and reflect on the events and fellowship of the past month before we dive into another busy time of fellowship, liturgy, and celebration.

Dear friends, Warm June greetings from all of us at the Dorothy Day Guild! As we settle into the liturgical season of Ordinary time, the time of the Church, we hope that this missive finds you enjoying a sense of vitality and growth in community. For Dorothy, the rhythms of Ordinary time reflected the goodness of everyday life and the quiet presence of God in the shared meals, celebrations, and work of life together in her family and at the Catholic Worker. A disciple of Peter Maurin and of “the Little Way,” Dorothy knew that the path to holiness is found through a lifetime of these small moments and practices undertaken with love.

Dear members and friends of the Dorothy Day Guild, Happy May Day! Today marks the 91st anniversary of the publication of the first issue of The Catholic Worker on May 1st, 1933. Dorothy, her brother John, her daughter Tamar, and a few others distributed the first run of 2,500 papers in Union Square for a penny a copy and by the end of the year, circulation had grown to 100,000. From this little paper sprouted the houses of hospitality, soup kitchens, co-ops, and farms which have offered the spiritual and corporal works of mercy and sheltered and sustained so many of us for the past nine decades. As Dorothy wrote years later in The Long Loneliness,

Dear members and friends of the Dorothy Day Guild, Greetings, and happy feast of St. Joseph! We hope that this Lenten season has been a fruitful time of growing closer to Christ for each of you– in prayer as well as through action on behalf of and in solidarity with those around the world who are suffering the effects of war, displacement, and poverty. Dorothy loved the peace and solitude of this time of year; in 1965, she hoped to spend the last ten days of Lent in holy silence , although we have doubts that her bustling community ultimately left her undisturbed that long! While maintaining holy silence in the midst of our busy lives may feel like a stretch for most of us, please know that we at the Guild are praying for you and your intentions as we approach Palm Sunday and the sacred events of the Paschal Triduum. 

Dear friends, Greetings, and happy Feast of the Presentation! Today’s Gospel reading brings the Holy Family into the embrace of Anna and Simeon, faithful prophets who trusted that God would send them a redeemer, and who recognize the child Jesus in His mother’s arms as their long-awaited Savior. As we continue to await news of a miracle which will further Dorothy’s canonization cause, may we remain as prayerful and vigilant as Anna and Simeon, and as ready to welcome Christ in our neighbors, especially the poor.

Dear friends, Merry Christmas from all of us at the Dorothy Day Guild! We hope that all of you were able to enjoy some rest and refreshment as Advent concluded and we began the celebration of the Christmas season. Every year, Kelly Latimore’s beautiful image of Dorothy welcoming the Holy Family to Maryhouse captures for us the spirit of hospitality, vulnerability, and peace that characterizes this time of year. Many thanks to the artists and musicians who have brought such beauty and variety to our homes and our liturgies over the past few weeks!

Dear friends, Hello, and Advent greetings from the Dorothy Day Guild! You might know that we received a really important canonization update last month: the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints in Rome appointed Monsignor Maurizio Tagliaferri as the relator for Dorothy’s cause! Our Guild steering committee, George Horton, Deirdre Cornell, and Dr. Kevin Ahern, met with our postulator, Dr. Waldery Hilgeman, at the beginning of November, when he shared this news. This was a great gift for Dorothy’s birthday on November 8th and her anniversary of death on November 29th! All of us here at the Guild are thrilled with this development, and we wanted to take this opportunity to explain what happens at this stage of the canonization process and outline the next steps towards sainthood for our members.

Dear friends and members of the Dorothy Day Guild,

Dear friends,

Dear members and friends of the Dorothy Day Guild,

IN OUR TIME Newsletter of the Dorothy Day Guild

Hello! The air has shifted and the leaves are starting to change, and it’s definitely autumn in New York. The Guild is in the midst of a season of transitions and reorganization right now, and we’re looking forward to continuing … Continue reading →

Dear members and friends of the Dorothy Day Guild,

Dear friends,

IN OUR TIME Newsletter of the Dorothy Day Guild

The cause for the canonization of Dorothy Day has arrived safely in Rome—all 137 archival boxes of evidence of her holiness, over 50,000 pages!—freeing the Guild now to turn its creative energies to outreach and educational initiatives. A sad farewell … Continue reading →

“The main thing is not to hold on to anything.” -Dorothy Day The Catholic Worker, May 1952

Dear friends,