Dorothy Day Guild news:

Our Guild board of directors and advisory committee meet as a whole group annually, and last month, we were able to gather in person and virtually at Manhattan University on October 26th. It was great to have so many enthusiastic voices in the same room all discussing ideas to promote knowledge of Dorothy’s legacy and encourage in the Church a greater love for the people to whom Dorothy dedicated her life. 

Our Guild executive committee will be meeting later this month with our Roman postulator, Dr. Waldery Hilgeman, to discuss the current status of our cause at the Vatican. We recently learned that the documentation on Dorothy’s cause, including transcriptions of all her writing and witness testimonies, that we sent to Rome in 2021 was more than three times the amount of material sent for Pope John Paul II or Mother Teresa of Kolkata’s canonization causes! 

Our enormous thanks go out to Dr. Hilgeman and his colleagues working in the Dicastery for Causes of the Saints. We have really appreciated the support and enthusiasm for Dorothy’s cause that we’ve received from our friends in Rome.

The day before our Guild meeting, a group of us met in Union Square for our second annual Dorothy Day walking pilgrimage. Pilgrimage, the idea of life as a prayerful journey undertaken in communion with others, was an important spiritual for Dorothy, who wrote a column called “On Pilgrimage” in The Catholic Worker for decades. Last month, we visited sites including the park where she held sit-ins to resist the mandatory civil defense drills, the former Women’s House of Detention where she was jailed, the churches she prayed in, and St. Joseph and Maryhouse. 



We are particularly grateful to the members of the New York Catholic Worker community at St. Joseph’s and Maryhouse for graciously welcoming us into their homes. This pilgrimage has become a wonderful autumn tradition, and although New York City has changed a great deal since Dorothy and Tamar and a few others went out to sell the first issue of The Catholic Worker in May of 1933, it is deeply moving to walk the streets of lower Manhattan where Dorothy prayed, protested, and performed the works of mercy for so many years.



If you would like to make the pilgrimage yourself, you can download a digital copy of the brochure, which includes a map, photographs, and contextual information for the sites you will visit, or you can print a copy at home. We hope that making this pilgrimage, either on foot, or in your heart, is spiritually fruitful and fun for you and your loved ones!

Reading recommendations for November:

A number of new creative projects on Dorothy have come out recently, but first of all, we are delighted to announce that Robert Ellsberg published a new edited volume of Dorothy’s writing at the end of October! Dorothy Day: Spiritual Writings is now available from Orbis Books. This new 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.”

This anthology would make a perfect early Christmas gift or Advent devotional for a friend or family member (or perhaps for yourself!) who is seeking the presence of God and a path to holiness in the context of his or her ordinary life, as Dorothy did.

Robert is also the author of a recent article for U.S. Catholic, “The Common Vision of Pope Francis and Dorothy Day.” We know that Pope Francis, who referenced Dorothy in his 2015 address to the U.S. Congress, has a great respect for and devotion to her legacy and witness; however, as Robert encourages us to speculate, Dorothy very likely would feel the same way about the Holy Father.

As he writes,

"How thrilled she would have been to learn of a pope who took his name from St. Francis. So often she criticized the ecclesial trappings of power and privilege. How she would have delighted in Francis’s gestures of humility, his call for shepherds “who have the smell of the sheep,” his washing the feet of prisoners (including women and Muslims!). With her lifetime among the poor and discarded, how she would have resonated with his words: 'I prefer a church which is bruised, hurting, and dirty because it has been out on the streets….' How moved she would be to learn of his deep friendship with a Jewish rabbi, his love for opera and Dostoevsky, and his exhortation to spread the 'joy of the gospel.'"

It is truly in their love for the poor and in their absolute assurance of God’s mercy that Dorothy and Pope Francis are most closely united. Please join us in thanking Robert for his decades of work on Dorothy’s extensive body of public writing and private correspondence, and in praying for Pope Francis’ continued wellbeing and the intentions of the Holy Father.



The visual artist Robert Shetterly has also included Dorothy in his portrait series, Americans Who Tell the Truth. Speaking with Hyperallergic, Shetterly explains that he begins by researching the life of each portrait subject and then over the course of about a week paints a 30”x30” image of each peace activist with acrylic on wood, a process which “involves a combination of brushes, palette knives, fingers, and a dental pick, which Shetterly uses to inscribe subjects’ quotes into the works’ surfaces.”

Since 2003, Shetterly has created 270 paintings in this series. Dorothy’s is one of fifty portraits featured in his new book, Portraits of Peacemakers: Americans Who Tell the Truth, which was published last month.

We’d also like to share two shorter articles of note. As part of the continuing reflection generated by the Peter Maurin conference which took place in Chicago in September, Theresa Barber of Aleteia spoke with Geoff Gneuhs on Peter’s influence on Dorothy’s thinking and the continuing significance of his legacy for the present day. As Geoff said,

“Peter's ideas continue to be important not just as ideals and inspiration but as practical ways, economically and socially, to maintain the dignity, freedom, and creativity of the individual person in our technological, self-centered world. Peter wanted a Christ-centered world.”

For The Catholic Sun, in Phoenix, AZ, Abigail Standish wrote a reflection on the importance of Dorothy and Mother Teresa of Kolkata for her own practice of the Catholic faith. “What do these two women have in common?” she asks. “A willingness to live in solidarity. Dorothy Day and Mother Teresa met the most vulnerable in their communities exactly where they were at.” 

Finally, Anna Blackman recently published an academic article in Studies in Christian Ethics exploring the Catholic Worker movement’s theological understanding of pacifism based on principles held by Dorothy and Peter and how this is lived out in active, grassroots practices of nonviolence in Catholic Worker communities today. For Dorothy's birthday, we are very pleased to share a copy of "Inhabiting the Kingdom: Theologies of Nonviolence in the Catholic Worker Movement."  Speaking on Dorothy’s understanding of the Mystical Body of Christ, a doctrine which grounded the uniquely Catholic and contemporary articulation of her pacifism, Anna writes, 

“A commitment to the Mystical Body necessitated social responsibility for the other insisting on the inherent dignity of the human person and their communion with God, and a resistance to anything that harms them. Eileen Egan, the cofounder of Pax Christi USA, reminisced how even during World War II, Day had ‘said we should see Jesus in the enemy’. For Day, this doctrine meant that ‘When the health of one member suffers, the health of the whole body is lowered’ and that any form of violence constituted a literal ‘rending of the Mystical Body of Christ’.”

Many thanks to Anna for her insightful scholarship, and especially for designating this article as open-access so that we can freely share it with all of you today. Our movement is blessed with many writers and academics; we are particularly grateful for the ways in which so many of them work to remove economic barriers to sharing knowledge and exchanging ideas for the common good, as Dorothy and Peter would have wanted.

Events and Opportunities:

Paulist Press has also released free study guides for the book geared towards educators at various levels as well as small faith sharing groups. For those who haven't been able to attend these events in person and want to learn more about this new work, the Boston College School of Theology and Ministry recently released a video of a talk Jeff offered last month, which includes many images from the book as well as an overview of where Dorothy’s canonization cause currently stands. 



The following week, on Tuesday, November 12th, at 5:30 pm Central, Colin Miller, author of We Are Only Saved Together: Living the Revolutionary Vision of Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker, will give the final talk, “Being With the Poor,” in his series “Dorothy Day and the Christian Revolution.” This talk will take place in the old schoolhouse at the Church of the Assumption at 51 7th Street W in St. Paul, Minnesota. Register for free on the Center for Catholic Social Thought website.

In addition to being an important month for friends and members of the Dorothy Day Guild, November is also Black Catholic History month. On Thursday, November 14th at 7:00 pm Eastern, we are so excited to be hosting a free online event, “Dorothy Day and the Saintly Six: Politically-Engaged Holiness in the Present Moment.” Interest in this event has been high, and we’ve received many reservations already, but we still have a few more open spots. You can register here to receive the zoom link.



We’re looking forward to a lively conversation that will seek points of convergence and variation between Dorothy’s mode of living the Gospel in the world and the legacies of the six Black American Catholics who also have open causes for canonization. We know that many of you have a strong devotion to these holy men and women whose lives witnessed to the Holy Spirit’s persistent presence in the Black Catholic community in the United States, and we hope you will join us next Thursday.

On Saturday, November 16th, from 1:00-4:00 pm, Robert Ellsberg will host the Annual Thomas Merton Retreat at Corpus Christi Church at 529 West 121st Street in New York. This retreat, entitled “A Journey Faith: Walking with Thomas Merton, Dorothy Day, & other Companions Along the Way,” marks the eighty-sixth anniversary of Thomas Merton’s baptism at Corpus Christi on November 16th, 1938. 



Merton exemplifies what Pope Francis calls a “journey faith, where we find God in the process of “going, walking, doing, searching, seeing. . . . We must enter into the adventure of the quest for meeting God; we must let God search and encounter us. . . . God is encountered walking along the path.” The constant desire to go deeper in faith and in the discovery of one’s own vocation also characterizes Dorothy’s particular spirituality.

This shared understanding of life as a perpetual pilgrimage informed Dorothy’s epistolary friendship with Merton. The retreat is offered free of charge; participants are asked to register by phone at (212) 666-9350 or email at cchristinyc@gmail.com.

For those in the Chicago area, St. Joan of Arc parish in Lisle, IL is hosting a presentation and discussion on Dorothy’s life and legacy on Thursday, November 21st from 7:00-9:00 pm in the St Joan of Arc parish center at 820 Division Street . Lisle is an important place for those interested in Dorothy, particularly her connection to the Benedictine family: Dorothy became an oblate of Lisle’s St. Procopius Abbey in 1955. She was attracted to the particular charism of this community, which at the time celebrated both the Latin-rite Mass and the Eastern-rite Divine Liturgy and worked for the unification of the Catholic and Orthodox Churches. I’m delighted to be presenting at this event alongside my friend Mary Beth Sobolewski, a Benedictine oblate and graduate student in theology. Those interested in attending can RSVP at sjadorothy@gmail.com or by calling 630-963-4500. 

As a reminder, we are now accepting proposals for our spring 2025 symposium, “Dorothy Day: Practices of Peace in the Year of Jubilee,” which will take place on Saturday, March 29th, 2025 in a hybrid in-person/virtual format at Manhattan University and online.

This conference will be open to all and will feature work from scholars at every level from undergraduate onward as well as peace practitioners whose activism and work has been influenced by or grounded in Dorothy’s Gospel pacifism. We welcome proposals which engage Dorothy’s legacy of voluntary poverty, nonviolence, and hospitality and its significance for the Church, the academy, and our world in the twenty-first century. All proposals are due January 1st, 2025. For more information on the Guild’s upcoming events, please visit our website. 



The Dorothy Day Guild is committed to furthering Dorothy’s witness of Gospel pacifism, voluntary poverty, and hospitality in a variety of different spheres of action, particularly through educational programming and opportunities for prayer and reflection. If you have participated in any of our free events this year or have enjoyed receiving this monthly letter and our other participations, we humbly invite you to consider becoming a member of the Guild or making a donation to support our work. All of the funds we receive support the work of our postulator in Rome, Dr. Waldery Hilgeman and his team, as well as the daily operations of the Guild, and help us keep our events and our newsletter free of charge.

Finally, the Dorothy Day Guild will be co-sponsoring the Joshua Casteel Memorial Peace Dinner on Tuesday evening, November 12th as the US Catholic Bishops gather 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. 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.

A few words from Dorothy:

Last month, we shared with you a section from Dorothy’s October 1968 “On Pilgrimage” column, reflecting on the trial and conviction of the members of the Catonsville 9. The nine Catholic peace activists were sentenced to a total of 18 years in jail and fined $22,000. Four of the nine, Mary Moylan, George Mische, Fr. Philip Berrigan, and Fr. Daniel Berrigan continued their resistance by failing to show up for the start of their sentences and going underground. During this time, Fr. Dan Berrigan caused considerable embarrassment to the government by showing up at various events, including the “America is Hard to Find” festival at Cornell University, to give speeches and celebrate mass.

In August of 1970, the FBI finally caught up to Dan at the home of his friend William Stringfellow and remanded him to Danbury prison in Connecticut, where he served two years before being paroled. 



Dorothy was a close friend and supporter of the Berrigans and exchanged many letters with Dan until her death. While many of their letters have been collected, edited, and published, we know that some of their correspondence is still in circulation. At the end of last month, on October 30th, the feast of St. Marcellus, patron saint of conscientious objectors and patron of the Catholic Peace Fellowship, of which Fr. Dan Berrigan was a founding member, the Dorothy Day Guild received a precious gift. William Fliss, the archivist for the Dorothy Day and Catholic Worker collection at Marquette University, sent us a previously undiscovered letter written by Dorothy to Dan Berrigan while he was imprisoned, on May 31st, probably in the year 1971. If this date is correct, Dorothy wrote this letter to encourage Dan while he was serving time for his participation in the Catonsville action.

This letter, which you can read in full here, was sent to the archives by Frida Berrigan, Dan’s niece, who received it from Willa Bickham and Brendan Walsh of the Viva House Catholic Worker in Baltimore. We are enormously grateful to Willa, Brendan, Frida, and William for their stewardship of this treasure and for making it available to all of us to read and contemplate.

In her closing thoughts, Dorothy writes,

“I am hoping that you will be able to do a little writing in jail, but I know that the impact of your fellow prisoners will be such that it will be hard to think. I know that you will be receiving mail from your brother in Syracuse and that I can send you messages through him. It is the way we reach our friends among the prisoners. Yours is most truly a witness, a revolutionary act, or rather a series of revolutionary acts, and I know you have counted the cost. Certainly if a Ho Chi Minh and other revolutionaries can spend much time in prison, you also can endure the coming years. Years! It seems terrible to be saying it. But others feel your strength and do not doubt it.”

In their own time, God called Dorothy and Dan and their companions to many revolutionary acts, the sum total of which patterned their lives after the model of Jesus.

These witnesses are still with us through their writing, the legacies they have left us in the Church, and through the encouragement of their prayers, but as exemplars of holiness, they do not exist of and for themselves. They point beyond themselves to a more pressing truth: God has not ceased calling members of His family to heroic virtue. Perhaps this month you will hear God calling you. The virtues of courage, wisdom, charity, and hope which sustained Dorothy’s lifelong witness and that of the Catonsville 9 are as necessary now as they were in 1933 and 1968; we should pray and labor to cultivate them in our own lives and communities. God is still calling men and women to dedicate themselves to His Gospel of peace and solidarity. As you and your loved ones continue to discern fresh ways in which you might live out Gospel nonviolence, voluntary poverty, and hospitality in your own contexts and communities, please be assured of our prayers. 

In peace,

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