Events

We are thrilled to announce that Archbishop John Wester will once again be celebrating a Mass for the Abolition of Nuclear Weapons on Tuesday, March 4th at 6:00 pm. Archbishop Wester is coming to New York for the third meeting of states parties to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which will take place from March 3rd-7th. The mass, which will be followed by a light reception, will be held at the Church of Our Saviour, 59 Park Ave in Manhattan. The Dorothy Day Guild is honored to be a co-sponsor of this event, along with several other Catholic peace groups in the Northeastern United States. If you would like to attend, please register on our website. We hope you will join us in prayer and action for a world free from nuclear weapons next month!

This year, Dorothy Day Guild board member and editor in chief of Orbis Books, Robert Ellsberg, will host our online reading group over the course of five Sundays in Lent. During our time together, we will work through Robert's newest edited volume of Dorothy's work, entitled Dorothy Day: Spiritual Writings. This collection,

"explores the key themes that underlay [Dorothy's} spirituality, beginning with the call to see Christ in the poor. Day’s spirituality was deeply influenced by the “Little Way” of St. Thérèse of Lisieux, which showed the path to holiness in the daily exercise of patience, charity, and forgiveness. Dorothy extended this principle to the social dimension, the significance of the little protests we make or fail to make. She believed that each act of love, each witness for peace, increases the balance of love and peace in the world."

If you do not yet have your own copy of Dorothy Day: Spiritual Writings, you can purchase a copy through Orbis Books. We also encourage book club members to request a copy through their local public library. We look forward to a series of wonderful conversations as we journey together with Christ, and with Dorothy, in the Lenten season.

Meeting schedule: Sunday evenings at 7:30 pm Eastern/6:30 pm Central

Each meeting will last one hour.

Celebrate Black Catholic History Month and mark the anniversaries of Dorothy's birth and death this November!

Please join us for a conversation on how Dorothy Day and the six Black American Catholics whose causes for canonization are open can offer us a vision of politically-engaged holiness in our present time. Our panelists, Dr.Kim Harris, Deacon Mel Tardy, Joanne Kennedy, and Dr. Andrew Prevot, are each living out this vision in their scholarship, journalism, teaching, and ministry. This panel will be moderated by Dorothy Day Guild co-chair Dr. Kevin Ahern.

The Dorothy Day Guild co-sponsored the Joshua Casteel Memorial Peace Dinner on Tuesday evening, November 12th as the US Catholic Bishops gathered for their annual plenary session. 

We are so honored to have been invited by our friends at the Catholic Peace Fellowship to collaborate on this event, which has taken place annually since 2013. Fr. Seóirse Murray, one of the founding organizers of the Peace Dinner, said that the original impetus for this event was the USCCB’s unanimous endorsement of Dorothy’s cause for canonization in 2012 coupled with a desire to create a space where the bishops could gather to reflect together on the commitments which arose in Dorothy’s life from her reception of the Gospel. We are very grateful to Bishop John Michael Botean and Bishop John Stowe for spending the evening with us during a busy week of meeting!

Dorothy’s commitment to pacifism preceded her conversion to the Catholic faith, yet it was within the Church that this deeply-held conviction found fertile soil in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus and flourished. 

The Peace Dinner is named in honor of Joshua Casteel, a former US Army interrogator who became a conscientious objector and a pacifist during the Iraq War. During the period where he was wrestling with the conflicting demands of conscience and military service, he wrote a series of emails to his friends and family which were later published as a book, Letters from Abu Ghraib. After leaving the army, he became active in the peace movement and traveled to the Vatican in 2007 as part of a delegation invited to discuss the theory of just war and the place of conscientious objection with Pope Benedict XVI and other Vatican officials. Like Dorothy, he was a writer and a convert to Catholicism.