In previous years, our friends at the Catholic Peace Fellowship have organized this event as an opportunity for our bishops to gather for prayer and fellowship and to listen to members of the Church in places around the world which are currently experiencing the devastation of war and armed conflict. This year, we had hoped to invite Palestinian Catholic youth ministers, Mrs. Nadine Bitar and Fr. Louis Salman (pictured below with Cardinal Pizzaballa), to join the bishops for dinner; however, due to the travel restrictions resulting from the war in Gaza, Nadine and Fr. Louis were sadly unable to obtain visas in time to make it to the United States. 

Nadine and Fr. Louis work with Youth of Jesus’ Homeland Palestine, an umbrella ministry of the Assembly of Catholic Ordinaries of the Holy Land, operating under the aegis of the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem. In their ministry, Nadine and Fr. Louis represent all the children, youth groups, and young adults of all rites and Catholic Churches in Palestine. Given Dorothy’s life-long concern for the vulnerability of children and her respect for the ideas and contributions of young people, we are confident that she is interceding for the current work of YJHP. Although they were not able to join us in person, Fr. Louis and Nadine wrote a letter which we were able to share with Bishop John Stowe of Lexington and Bishop John Michael Botean, of the Romanian Catholic Eparchy of St. George and their brother bishops, and which we also invite you to read. Speaking of the children and youth in their care, Nadine and Fr. Louis write,

“Despite all the challenges and the brutality of the war, the youth in Gaza—particularly those connected to our churches—continue to hold onto hope. They embody a living faith, showing that even in the darkest times, the light of Christ remains with them. They inspire us with their courage, their faith, and their commitment to remain in the land of their ancestors. Through their small acts of faith, community, and solidarity, they resist the despair that the

conflict tries to impose. These young people remind us of Jesus’ words: “In this world, you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world” (John 16:33).”

While we were disappointed that Nadine and Fr. Louis could not be with us in person, their words remind us of Christ’s enduring presence among his people and the great hope of the Incarnation. In spite of the wartime travel restrictions, we felt a great sense of spiritual solidarity with Nadine and Fr. Louis, and we remain hopeful that they will be able to join us in the United States this coming spring for a speaking tour in the Midwest and the East Coast. As we enter into the season of Jesus’ birth, please keep them and the children and young people they minister to in your prayers for Christmas.

Upcoming Dorothy Day Guild events:

Many of us who work or study at schools and universities have only just wrapped up classes and final exams this week, but the spring semester is right around the corner!

We’re also very pleased to share that the recording of our November webinar, “Dorothy Day and the Saintly Six: Politically-Engaged Holiness in the Present Moment” is now available for viewing on our YouTube channel. This roundtable, which took place in the days following the presidential election in the United States and the closure of the Office for Black Ministry in the Archdiocese of New York, is a hopeful and practically-grounded conversation that looks to American exemplars of heroic virtue for a vision of “this-worldly” holiness. We are so grateful to our presenters, Dr. Kim Harris, Dr. Andrew Prevot, Deacon Mel Tardy, and Joanne Kennedy for their insight and commitment to the works of mercy in the classroom, the soup kitchen, the newspaper office, and the parish. If you weren’t able to attend the live panel, pull up this wonderful discussion for some inspiration on a cold night!

Article Round-up for the Month of Dorothy:



The month of November, bookended by Dorothy’s birthday and the anniversary of her death, always yields many thoughtful articles on the continuing significance of Dorothy’s life and witness in the contemporary Church. Several blogs and online magazines, including James Ford’s Monkey Mind on Patheos and The Collector included short introductions and reflections on Dorothy last month, as did a number of Catholic organizations and publications. On Dorothy’s anniversary, the National Shrine of Elizabeth Ann Seton published a piece by Kathryn Jean Lopez for their Seton Reflections series, “Dorothy Day and Elizabeth Ann Seton: New York Converts on First with the Love of Jesus,” which considers Dorothy’s daily reception of the sacraments as the fuel which enabled her decades of activism and the practice of the works of mercy. We join Lopez in her hopes that this anniversary will soon be celebrated as Dorothy’s feast day, and we give thanks for the gifts of devotion and fresh perspective that converts like Dorothy, Mother Elizabeth Ann Seton, and their fellow New Yorker, Mother Rose Hawthorne Lathrop have brought to our Church!

America featured three articles on Dorothy in the past several weeks. The first, “In Entertaining Angels, Dorothy Day reminds us that after an election, the real work begins,” published on her birthday, is a review of the 1996 biopic. Writing in the days following the US presidential election, John Dougherty writes, 

“Day is an interesting figure to consider during election season. Despite marching for women’s suffrage (as depicted in the film) she never voted, skeptical of how much change could be achieved through political means. Early in the film, she tells a friend, ‘The masses need food, not manifestos.’ While I disagree with her on the value of voting, I agree with her larger point: If we took more responsibility for taking care of one another, maybe we wouldn’t need to rely so much on politicians.”

While this film is now almost thirty years old, Dorothy’s particular mode of political engagement remains as fresh and challenging as ever, and we appreciated the timeliness of this review. Dorothy’s firm moral convictions, grounded in the commitments of the Gospel, resist the reductive tendencies of partisan politics. Our political and ecclesial cultures can sometimes tempt us to divorce the works of mercy from the political sphere, as if the work of feeding the hungry was separate from the work of resisting war; Dorothy’s witness reminds us of their indivisibility.

We also appreciated Conor Hartigan’s scripture reflection, “A Lesson in Radical Love from Dorothy Day,” published the following week, and a new piece from Robert Ellsberg. Robert’s essay, “Dorothy Day didn’t want to be called a saint. She wanted to be one,” is adapted from his new anthology from Orbis Books, Dorothy Day: Spiritual Writings. Commenting on Dorothy’s refusal to participate in the civil defense drills during the Cold War, Robert writes, 

“There were many who had initially admired her work among the poor. Among the original subscribers to her newspaper, founded in the heart of the Depression, there were also plenty who sympathized with her critique of an economic system that produced such poverty and desperation. Yet few in those early years joined Day in her conviction that the way of Jesus was incompatible with any kind of killing. On the day of that first civil defense drill, the number of Catholics in New York City who agreed that preparation for nuclear war was a crime against God and humanity could evidently fit inside a single police wagon.

And yet for Dorothy, it all went together. The Catholic Worker was an effort to live out the radical implications of the teaching of Christ: that what we do for the least of our brothers and sisters—whether feed them, shelter them or bomb them—we do directly for him.”

Additional Reading and Listening Recommendations for Christmas:

Many of you may be traveling in the coming days, by car, by plane, or perhaps as Dorothy frequently did, by Greyhound bus! For those who will be in transit this week and have some time for podcasts, we would like to share a fantastic new interview with Fr. John Dear from the Metta Center for Nonviolence, “The Gandhian roots of the Sermon on the Mount.” Fr. John has written and edited forty books on nonviolence and has often named Dorothy as an exemplar of discipleship in her practice of Jesus’ active pacifism. This conversation, which is available as both a transcript and an audio version, walks through the core of Jesus’ teachings on pacifism and nonviolent resistance in Matthew 5-7. Fr. John frames Jesus’ words to the gathered crowd not as a long homily or didactic lecture, but as a retreat centered around a classic training in active nonviolence. For Fr. John, the nonviolence preached by Jesus,

“Means a couple of basics. We’re not allowed to kill, Christians. You’re not allowed to kill anybody. And we don’t kill people who kill people to show that killing is wrong. The days of killing there are over.

And only from within the boundaries of nonviolence. Refusing to take up the gun, the sword, or build bombs or drop nuclear weapons or cultivate violence in any form, then can we practice the universal love and universal compassion and universal peace that Jesus taught.”

In the beatitudes, Jesus calls those who hunger and thirst for justice blessed, and promises that they will be fulfilled. Life-long engagement with that struggle for justice and engagement with the practices of nonviolence changes us; indeed, it is the only thing which will satisfy that hunger and slake that thirst. As Fr. John says,

“No, those who work for justice, the thousands that I have met, and if they go deep into nonviolence, you end up like Gandhi and Thich Nhat Hanh, and Dorothy Day. A real possessing a certain dignity, a certain deep peace and contentment, even an inner joy. And this fundamental meaning that no one can take.”

We highly encourage you to read or listen to this interview, and we join Fr. John Dear in his hope that Pope Francis will offer the Church an encyclical on nonviolence as the normative Christian ethic for addressing conflict.

 The sisters have chosen Dorothy as one of the patrons of their new congregation. Sister Theresa Aletheia and Sister Danielle Victoria are currently studying safeguarding, or abuse prevention in the Church at the Gregorian in Rome. Speaking on their decision to place the work of their community under Dorothy’s care, Sister Theresa Aletheia writes,

“Core to [Dorothy’s] thought and spirituality was the importance of not only addressing symptoms of poverty but in also exploring the systemic reality as to why poverty exists in certain contexts. In other words, Day recognized that not all sin is individual—it also can be systemic or structural. Dorothy herself applied this way of thinking to the Church, observing that systemic changes were needed not only in broader society but within the Church. When asked why there was a vocations crisis, Dorothy responded, ‘I think it’s a result of the corruption in the institutional Church, through money and through their acceptance of this lousy, rotten system.’ Of course, Dorothy was referring to the need for different systemic changes but her general idea of the need for ecclesial structural reform makes sense applied to our work as well.”

The Sisters of the Little Way of Beauty, Truth, and Goodness, are currently a private association of the faithful.

Finally, Dorothy’s deep love for the sacraments is well-documented, and those who knew her during her lifetime remember the peace and strength she drew from her daily reception of the Eucharist. In the years since her death, the memory of this devotion has evolved into hagiography, which at times distorts the details of historical events in order to gesture towards a point of theology or spirituality that the storyteller wishes to communicate through the life of the saint. One of the Dorothy-stories that has been passed around over the years is a story about what happened when a priest celebrated mass at the Catholic Worker in New York using an ordinary ceramic cup in lieu of a chalice. This process of crafting a devotional narrative is a common feature in the stories we pass on about the saints, the members of our family who have gone before us in Christ; however, one of the incredible gifts of our time is our proximity to Dorothy in history. Brian Terrell, who lived at the Catholic Worker in New York in the 1970s, remembers Dorothy’s Eucharistic devotion clearly, even though by Dorothy’s own account, she was out of town when the 1966 “Coffee Cup Mass” was celebrated and could not have therefore have disposed of the make-shift chalice afterwards.

In a recent piece for the Catholic Worker movement website, “What the Myth of the Coffee Cup Mass Gets Wrong– and Why It Matters,” Brian tells us, “When I knew Dorothy in the five years before her death, every celebration of the Mass we attended together in our houses was as informal as it was reverent.” Dorothy loved the aesthetic grandeur of the high mass, with its beautiful chants and vestments, and she also loved the modest celebrations of the Eucharist which took place in the community’s houses of hospitality. In either case, Jesus was fully present.



Dorothy is close to us in time. Some of you knew her well; many of you met her once or twice and remember and cherish those encounters. Others of us missed her by a decade or a generation, but we’ve come to know and love her through her writing, through the ongoing witness of the Catholic Worker movement, and through the living memories of those of you who knew her in life. Dorothy is a holy figure, a member of the Church universal whom we believe is now interceding for us in heaven, but she is also a real person, as are all the saints. She was a woman with her own particularities, preferences, and interests, and as a journalist and a Catholic, we know that she was dedicated to the promotion of truth. Loving Dorothy and cultivating a spiritual friendship with her means respecting her integrity. One way we can do this is by sharing true stories about Dorothy, and developing an account of her biography and spirituality which honors her deepest commitments and the historical events of her life, big and small. We thank Brian for his work to correct the record on this narrative and point us towards the heart of Dorothy’s faith: the person of Jesus, found in the bread and wine of the Eucharist, and in the faces of the poor.

Books and reviews:

All of us at the Guild have enjoyed sharing the number of new books published on Dorothy in recent months, and it’s been great to see other publications taking note of them as well. If you still need one or two very last-minute Christmas gifts, keep reading!

National Catholic Register jointly reviewed Colin Miller’s We Are Only Saved Together and Jeff Korgen’s Dorothy Day: Radical Devotion last month. Rosalie Riegle also reviewed Robert Ellsberg’s anthology, Dorothy Day: Spiritual Writings for CatholicWorker.org, finding it inspiring and fresh in its organization. Rosalie writes this new collection of Dorothy’s writings finally broke open for her the deep connection Dorothy felt with St. Thérèse of Lisieux, whose “Little Way” helped Dorothy understand the significance of the tiny acts of love and fidelity offered in houses of hospitality, picket lines, and jail.

Christianity Today recently released their annual book awards picks, and included Alex Sosler’s A Short Guide to Spiritual Formation: Finding Life in Truth, Goodness, Beauty, and Community as the winner in their Christian Living/Spiritual Formation category. Sosler names Dorothy as an exemplar in the pursuit of holiness alongside St. Augustine, St. Teresa of Avila, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Dorothy points us towards a vision of Gospel-centered life which extends beyond denominational boundaries, and we’re excited to see the ways in which her legacy appeals to our evangelical brothers and sisters.

Last but not least, in 1966, Dorothy wrote a series of luminous Advent reflections for Ave Maria magazine. Dorothy took this opportunity to engage the evangelical counsels in her own context, writing the first week on “Searching for Christ,” and following it with reflections on poverty, chastity, and obedience. In the final reflection for the fourth week of Advent, “Obedience,” Dorothy writes about the challenge this concept holds out to the entire Church, but especially to members of the laity. For Dorothy, obedience was inflected by the resonance of other concepts: love, freedom, and responsibility. Dorothy recalls a meeting that took place in the early days of the Catholic Worker movement, when Bishop O’Hara of Kansas City tasked Peter Maurin with “leading the way” in order that the hierarchy might follow, writing that, 

“Peter knew what he meant. He meant that it was up to the laity to be in the vanguard, to live in the midst of the battle, to live in the world which God so loved that He sent His only begotten Son to us to show us how to live and to die, to meet that last great enemy, Death. We were to explore the paths of what was possible, to find concordances with our opponents, to seek for the common good, to try to work with all men of goodwill, and to trust all men too, and to believe in that goodwill, and to forgive our own failures and those of others seventy times seventy times. We could venture where priest and prelate could not or ought not, in political and economic fields. We could make mistakes without too great harm, we could retrace our steps, start over again in this attempt to build a new society within the shell of the old, as Peter and the old radicals (those who went to the roots of things) used to say.

I speak of these incidents to show the tremendous freedom there is in the Church, a freedom most cradle Catholics do not seem to know they possess.”

Obedience, for Dorothy, was first and foremost obedience to conscience, where the voice of God speaks to our hearts and invites us to follow freely. We love these reflections for the Christmas season as well as these last days of preparation and anticipation. Reflections During Advent can be read in full on the Catholic Worker movement website and has also been compiled by Ave Maria Press as an ebook available for purchase. 

Their new anthology, Vi sår kärlekens frön av Dorothy Day, is published by Silentium.



Magdalena Muñoz Pizzulic, a member of the St. Peter Claver Catholic Worker community in South Bend, has also begun translating a number of Dorothy’s best-known columns into Spanish. Magdalena tells us that Dorothy offers an important corrective to both individualist forms of organization which deny the reality of the common good and collectivist political structures which demote the personal subject below the masses and in doing so, makes a unique contribution to liberation theology. In her conversion, Dorothy moved away from hierarchical political structures and recovered a concept of communitarian social organization where the human person “can be cherished for all of her needs and gifts.”

Keep an eye out for additional articles translated into Spanish in the weeks ahead!



As we look forward to the next stage of Dorothy’s canonization process, we remember that the Church is a global community. When Dorothy is, God willing, eventually canonized, she will not be a saint only for New York, or only for the United States, but for the Church universal. Many thanks to Alva, Joshua, and Magdalena for their generosity and skill, which have made Dorothy’s legacy of nonviolence, voluntary poverty, and hospitality legible to more and more of our brothers and sisters in Christ.

A few words from Dorothy:

In the decade-plus that I have been a member of the Catholic Worker movement, I have had many opportunities to engage with Dorothy’s writing in both devotional and academic contexts. I am also fortunate enough to teach several graduate and undergraduate courses on Dorothy and the Worker, and each semester, I am faced with the question of which of her books and articles to assign to the class. Choosing a favorite text of Dorothy’s would be an almost impossible task, but if it really came down to it and I were forced to pick just one, it would be her 1945 Christmas column, “Room for Christ.” Speaking on the Incarnation and the cosmic significance of the works of mercy, Dorothy writes,

“It is no use to say that we are born two thousand years too late to give room to Christ. Nor will those who live at the end of the world have been born too late. Christ is always with us, always asking for room in our hearts.

But now it is with the voice of our contemporaries that he speaks, with the eyes of store clerks, factory workers and children that he gazes; with the hands of office workers, slum dwellers and suburban housewives that he gives. It is with the feet of soldiers and tramps that he walks, and with the heart of anyone in need that he longs for shelter. And giving shelter or food to anyone who asks for it, or needs it, is giving it to Christ.

We can do now what those who knew Him in the days of His flesh did. I’m sure that the shepherds did not adore and then go away to leave Mary and her Child in the stable, but somehow found them room, even though what they had to offer might have been primitive enough. All that the friends of Christ did in His life-time for Him we can do.”