As we enjoy summer picnics and barbeques this month, let’s imitate Dorothy in both action and prayer on behalf of all agricultural workers, especially migrant laborers. For some great suggestions on how we can continue participating in Dorothy’s legacy of solidarity with the United Farm Workers, check out their website, Facebook, and other socials.

Upcoming Events:

We like to draw your attention to two upcoming events taking place in the next month, one in New York and one in Chicago. First is a historical program, “Powerful Women of Staten Island’s Past,” which will be held on Saturday, August 24th at 2:00 pm at the Alice Austen House Museum on Staten Island. This free event features Dorothy alongside other significant figures who made their homes on her beloved Staten Island, including photographer Alice Austen and writer Audre Lorde. Many thanks to the Friends of Olmsted-Beil House for sponsoring this program and inviting members and friends of the Dorothy Day Guild!

Following this, from September 6-8, we hope to see many of you in Chicago for the Peter Maurin Conference, hosted by St. Gregory’s Hall and Canterbury House. The Conference organizers write, 

“Maurin's pithy ‘Easy Essays’ have been a staple of The Catholic Worker newspaper from its inception. His essays promoted philosophical personalism and economic distributism and a program of renewal based on Catholic Social Tradition. Maurin's program called Catholics to commit to houses of hospitality, voluntary poverty, the works of mercy, agrarianism, and public roundtable discussions. 

The conference will feature keynote addresses and roundtable discussions on key topics of Maurin's thought and ask how Peter's program can inspire us to "blow the dynamite" of the Gospel to create a world in which it is easier to be good.”

This free, multi-day event features time to worship, play, and celebrate together, as well as learn from roundtable discussions and keynote addresses from scholars Jonathan Sozek of Albertus Magnus College and Lincoln Rice of Casa Maria Catholic Worker. Register here and spend a beautiful weekend in Chicago learning about the philosophy that grounded and gave roots to the movement which became Dorothy’s life’s work!

New Articles and Reading Recommendations for August:

We’re excited to share some new art and insight from the forthcoming graphic novel-style biography Dorothy Day: Radical Devotion, which is the fruit of an eight-year collaboration between former Dorothy Day Guild coordinator and author Jeff Korgen, artist and illustrator Christopher Cardinale, and Friar Mike Lasky, OFM, who consulted on the project. Jeff spoke with Jerry Windley-Daoust and Joan Bromberek for their new article, “Dorothy Day…Superhero? New Graphic Novel Tells the Story of Her ‘Hero’s Journey,” and told them “The art brings the drama alive in a way that a standard biography can’t…Dorothy said the world will be saved by beauty, so I think she would appreciate the contribution of art to storytelling.”

Many thanks to Jeff, Christopher, and Friar Mike for sharing their scholarly and artistic talents with the world through their work on Dorothy’s life! This new and unique take on Dorothy’s biography and continuing legacy of activism, hospitality, and nonviolence will be released by Paulist Press on Labor Day next month. We highly encourage you to order your copy today!

The rest of our articles for this month all center on our trip to the National Eucharistic Congress in Indianapolis last month. A number of us from the Dorothy Day Guild had the opportunity to travel to the Congress to hear Martha Hennessy speak about living into her grandmother’s legacy of Gospel pacifism and resistance to war. In preparation for her address, Martha shared some brief reflections with Aleteia on her earliest spiritual formation, given to her by her grandmother. These lessons from and moments of connection with Dorothy have sustained her in her activism and hospitality work as a member of the Maryhouse Catholic Worker community and in the Plowshares movement, where Martha was arrested and served a sentence of incarceration for protesting our continuing investment in nuclear weapons manufacturing.

On Thursday morning, we joined thousands of other Catholics for a mass in the stadium celebrated by Cardinal Timothy Dolan. The next day, Martha spoke to a crowd of about 5000 pilgrims on the morning of Friday, July 19th and delivered a short address that included some of Dorothy’s most challenging teachings on peace, which Jerry Windley-Daoust has made available for us in both video and text format on the Catholic Worker movement website.

Dorothy spoke in 1976 to an audience at the International Eucharistic Congress in Philadelphia on August 6th, the anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima, and so later that evening, a group of about twenty pilgrims, friends, and Catholic Workers from four different communities gathered together in the park for a picnic dinner and to read and discuss Dorothy’s address from that earlier Congress, which was later published in The Catholic Worker as “Bread for the Hungry.”

As we continued to think about the Eucharist and its implications for how we are to live as members of One Body, we gathered again the following evening to again share fellowship and discuss “We Go On Record: the CW Response to Hiroshima.” 

We had a wonderful time preparing for and participating in the Congress, cooking together, making banners, and distributing literature and holy cards and on Friday and Saturday evenings were blessed with visits from Dorothy’s fellow journalists, Nate Tinner-Williams and Brian Fraga. Last month, Nate had written a piece which we shared, “Martha Hennessy, Dorothy Day’s granddaughter, will speak at National Eucharistic Congress” for Black Catholic Messenger and National Catholic Reporter. 

Following our Friday night picnic and clarification of thought, Brian published, “At Eucharistic congress, peace activist Martha Hennessy stresses ‘presence of God’” for National Catholic Reporter. To Brian and Nate: It was great to meet you both in person, and we all thank you so much for continuing Dorothy’s legacy of radical Catholic journalism! For additional reporting on the Catholic Worker and Dorothy Day Guild presence at the Congress, we encourage you to check out Jerry Windley-Daoust’s “Catholic Workers Bring Messages of Peace, Repentance to National Eucharistic Congress.”

A few more notes from the National Eucharistic Congress:

I’m looking forward to sharing some further reflections on the Congress (more than can fit in this missive!) with our wider network in the upcoming issue of the Dorothy Day Guild newsletter, In Our Time, but for now, I’ll say that I admit to some initial skepticism about the entire enterprise of a National Eucharistic Congress. Could a fifty-thousand person conference, with slickly-produced brochures, stadium lights, and a $300-per-person registration fee truly confront the reality that sacramental participation in the Mystical Body of Christ is completely incompatible with the murder of other members of that Body during wartime? That the works of mercy and the works of war are eternally opposed to one another? We are called to feed the hungry, and every dollar siphoned off to defense contractors and weapons manufacturing companies is bread stolen from the mouths of the poor. Would that teaching be allowed into the convention center, given a microphone at the fifty-yard line of Lucas Oil Stadium?

For those willing to read between the lines a little, yes. In his keynote address on Saturday night, just after we finished our second session of clarification of thought and passed out our Guild prayer cards and the current issue of The Catholic Worker to pilgrims waiting outside the stadium, Bishop Robert Barron mentioned Dorothy as one of his heroes, and as an example of a layperson who rejected a two-tiered morality that reserved the highest exercise of virtue to ordained and religious members of the Church. Dorothy lived the counsels of perfection– poverty, chastity, and obedience– as a working mother in the world. “The secular order– that’s your space,” Bishop Barron told the audience. “Move into it with panache and energy and intelligence and enthusiasm, and become body given and blood poured out.” Dorothy did this in her lifetime. She gave her life over to the corporal and spiritual works of mercy, caring for and living with Christ in the poor until the day she died. Citing Rerum novarum, the 1891 encyclical which opened the canon of Catholic social doctrine, Bishop Barron said that once the demands of necessity and propriety are met, everything else we own belongs to the poor.
“That will change your life if you let that sink in,” Bishop Barron said, and herein lies the challenge that Dorothy poses to the American Catholic Church. We strive to be a generous people. We try to feed the hungry and shelter the homeless. But do we really see ourselves as members of One Body? Bishop Barron reminded us that we become what we consume. When we receive the Eucharist, we become Christ’s Body. When we truly let this sink in, we will understand that the heroic charity that Dorothy so embodied must be imitated not only in individual and interpersonal offerings of mercy, but collectively. A Church which understands itself this way and which allows the grace of the Eucharist to penetrate every aspect of society will refuse to accept the great theft from the poor that war entails, will refuse to accept that our brothers and sisters– fellow members of that Body– die of hunger and exposure in our own cities. The world is aching for this understanding. 

Dorothy accepted the whole of the Gospel. She took responsibility for the world, and offered her fiat to a lay vocation to re-make that secular order into a community where the dignity of the poorest and most forgotten members is upheld to reflect the glory of God. All of us at the Guild are so grateful for the experience of prayer, reflection, and celebration in community that we shared at the National Eucharistic Congress. For all who traveled to Indy last month and those who joined us from afar in prayer, we hope that the deep love of Christ in the Eucharist ignites within you a fire for justice and for peace just as it did for Dorothy.

Prayer Requests:

Several people have recently reached out to us with prayer requests. One of the duties of Dorothy Day Guild members is to pray through Dorothy’s intercession for the needs of our world, and so each month, we bring these requests for healing, vocational discernment, and peace to the wider Guild network so that we can lift them up together. This month, a friend from Malta wrote to us asking for Dorothy’s intercession for their vocation, and a teacher from Ohio wrote to us on behalf of his student, who has cancer and is in need of healing, and in addition, a long-time friend of the South Bend Catholic Worker community suffered a stroke yesterday and is currently waiting for further testing and physical therapy. Please take a moment today to pray for these individuals and intentions and ask Dorothy to bring their needs before God. 

We also received some wonderful news from a family in Minnesota who sought Dorothy’s intercession on behalf of one of their relatives following a major surgery. After entrusting their relative’s health to Dorothy’s prayer, they received word that their family member had seen significant improvement the following day. Please join us in thanking God for this great gift and continuing to pray with this family for complete healing!

A few words from Dorothy:

In the lead-up to last month’s National Eucharistic Congress, I’ve spent some time looking through university and diocesan archives for footage of Dorothy’s 1976 speech in Philadelphia as part of the “Women and the Eucharist” panel at the International Eucharistic Congress. In that search, I came across an incredible short documentary on Servant of God Dom Hélder Câmara, entitled Excuse Me, America which features not only a short clip of Dorothy speaking at the Congress, but a conversation between Dorothy and Dom Câmara at Maryhouse, which begins at timestamp 33:31. 

In that conversation, Dorothy speaks about her admiration for Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers movement. She tells Dom Câmara,

“As the Pope said, you have to have a leader of workers who is himself a worker…and so when you consider that Cesar had this problem on his hands, what did he do? He got forty acres for the Filipinos [farm workers] and they started gardens and they helped feed the strikers. Now if anything like that happens you begin to feel happy about your country. You begin to feel that if by nonviolent action, a thing like this can take place– it must be nonviolent in every way.” 

We highly recommend watching the whole film, which, following Dorothy and Dom Câmara’s conversation, moves to Câmara’s visit to the United Farm Workers and includes footage of the mass he celebrated for the strikers. It is so moving to see the power of Gospel nonviolence at work! Dorothy’s life’s work was in service to this testimony, and we know that she is today among the great cloud of witnesses in heaven, interceding for all of you who work for justice and peace.

Take care,

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