For Dorothy, however, the communion of saints extended beyond those included in the official canon. The communion of saints embraced the poor and forgotten, like those with whom Dorothy spent over fifty years living in community, and those who labored and died in obscurity for the glory of God and the wellbeing of their brothers and sisters-- the practitioners of her beloved Little Way. It embraced likewise those who were not Catholic, like Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, or not Christian, like Mahatma Gandhi, both of whom Dorothy admired deeply for their practice of nonviolence and whom she eulogized in the pages of The Catholic Worker. Of Gandhi, she wrote in 1948, “Truly he is one of those who has added his own sufferings to those of Christ, whose sacrifice and martyrdom will forever be offered to the Eternal Father... In him we have a new intercessor with Christ; a modern Francis, a pacifist martyr.” 

It is fitting then, that in contemporary works of art, Dorothy is often pictured in the company of other saints, such as in The Lives of the Saints exhibit hosted by St. Cecelia Parish in Boston, featuring the paintings of Nancy Marek Cote, or in John Nava’s tapestries at the University of San Diego and St. Francis Xavier Church in New York. The tapestries at St. Francis Xavier, which feature people of heroic virtue from across the Americas, were dedicated last month on September 15th.

As we prepare to celebrate the communion of saints on the feasts of All Saints and All Souls, we hope that you will spend time reflecting on Dorothy’s life and the lives of others in whom you have seen the Gospel re-enacted. We also invite you to ask Dorothy’s intercession on behalf of all who have died in this past year and those who will soon make the transition from this life to the next. Servant of God Dorothy Day, pray for us!

Guild News:

Speaking of the communion of saints, we would like to take a moment to thank the members of the Dorothy Day Guild’s communications committee for their work on the Fall 2024 edition of In Our Time, the official newsletter of the Dorothy Day Guild. 

This edition of In Our Time is entitled “Communities of Care and Concern,” featuring original work including an interview with Charles Moore, a member of the Bruderhof community and a contributing writer and editor for Plough, reflections from Scott and Claire Schaeffer-Duffy of the Sts. Francis and Thérèse Catholic Worker, art by Brother Mickey McGrath, OSFS and Brother Martin Erspramer, OSB, and more. If you missed this issue in your inbox, keep an eye out for it here on our website. 

While writing this letter each month is one of my favorite parts of this job, the monthly missives don’t allow for the depth that our seasonal newsletter contains. We all benefit greatly from the gifts our editorial and website teams have offered to the digital editions of In Our Time– thank you all!

Earlier this month, two members of the Dorothy Day Guild board of directors, our co-chair Dr. Kevin Ahern and Geoff Gneuhs, traveled to Rome to participate in activities surrounding the synod– see if you can spot them both in this photo from the mass celebrating the renewal of the 1965 Pact of the Catacombs for a Church of the poor and a servant Church! While in Rome, Kevin met with several people in the curia, members of the Synod, and other officials from the Vatican who expressed a strong interest in Dorothy’s legacy and cause for canonization. Kevin also named as particularly rewarding his meeting with the archival team of the Religious of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, who offered a wealth of practical wisdom on canonization causes and how to care for artifacts such as those on display at the Dorothy Day Center at Manhattan University. This will be enormously helpful in the ongoing collaborative project undertaken by the NY Catholic Worker community and the Dorothy Day Center to catalogue and preserve the artifacts in Dorothy’s room at Maryhouse, which is today an active guestroom in a busy Catholic Worker house, not a museum! We are so heartened to hear of such enthusiasm for Dorothy’s cause in Rome, and we ask your prayers for the additional fruit we know these meetings will bear in the coming year.

Finally, as I write this letter, I am also packing and preparing to leave for New York, where the Dorothy Day Guild’s board of directors and advisory committee will meet on Saturday, October 26th at Manhattan University. Please keep this meeting in your prayers as well as we gather to discern and continue developing a vision for the work of the Guild in the next phase of Dorothy’s cause for canonization. We look forward to sharing more updates with you soon!

Upcoming Events:

In the lead-up to the anniversaries of Dorothy’s birth (November 8th) and death (November 29th) next month, there are a number of free in-person and online events that we hope to see some of you at in upcoming weeks!

First, we would like to draw your attention to an ongoing series being put on this month by our friends at the new Staten Island Catholic Worker, "The Spirituality of the Catholic Worker: The Primacy of the Spiritual." This speakers’ series features talks on the various charisms lived out by Dorothy and those who offer the spiritual and corporal works of mercy to the poor through their practice of hospitality. Previous speakers have

included long-time friends and advisors to the Dorothy Day Guild, Fr. Ray Roden, Patrick Jordan, and our Guild co-chair Deirdre Cornell. This series takes place on Tuesday evenings at 7:00 PM at Blessed Sacrament Church, (1091 Forest Ave, 10310) on Staten Island and will meet twice more this month! The next two talks, on Tuesday, October 22nd, and Tuesday, October 29th, will feature Bishop Peter Byrne and Catholic Worker Dr. Carmina Chapp, a member of the Dorothy Day Guild’s board of directors. For more information, please contact the Staten Island Catholic Worker at sicatholicworker@gmail.com.

As a reminder, former Dorothy Day Guild coordinator Jeff Korgen will be speaking on Wednesday, October 23rd at 7:30 PM as part of the Beacon Hill Friends Meeting’s MIDWEEK: Experiments in Faithfulness series. Jeff’s ​presentation and discussion, entitled “Dorothy Day: Radical Devotion,” after his new book, will share the story of Dorothy’s life as a journalist and peace activist and will include the important influence of two Quakers on her articulation of Gospel pacifism.

The following evening, Thursday November 7th, at 5:30 PM, Jeff Korgen will give the ninth annual Dorothy Day Lecture at Manhattan University. Jeff’s talk will introduce audience members to Dorothy’s life and her impact on the Church and Catholic and secular peace movements, as well as the contemporary process of canonization. This annual lecture series is the result of the sustaining gifts of time, talent, and treasure offered by several members of the Guild’s board of directors and has been such an important forum for bringing Dorothy’s life and legacy to a wider audience over the years. If you know someone in the New York metro area who is unfamiliar with Dorothy’s unique witness to the Gospel, we hope you will invite them to this talk! 

The next night, on Friday, November 8th at 8:00 PM (Dorothy's 127th birthday!), Jeff will be joined by Christopher Cardinale, the illustrator of Dorothy Day: Radical Devotion to present the Friday night talk at Maryhouse on 3rd Street in Manhattan. For more information on the New York Catholic Worker’s Friday evening roundtable series, check out their Instagram. Lots going on this week; happy birthday, Dorothy!

In addition to being a significant month for those who have a devotion to or interest in Dorothy, November also marks Black Catholic History Month in the United States. The Dorothy Day Guild has hoped for some time to more deeply engage with the legacy of holiness present in the Black Catholic Church in this country. To that end, we are delighted to announce that we are hosting a webinar entitled “Dorothy Day and the Saintly Six” on Thursday, November 14th at 7:00 PM Eastern.

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; please register here to receive the zoom link.

Finally, it has been a dream of ours for some time now to host an academic symposium on Dorothy’s life and witness at the Dorothy Day Center at Manhattan University, and we are so excited to announce that this gathering, “Dorothy Day: Practices of Peace in the Year of Jubilee,” will take place next spring on Saturday, March 29th, 2025! We are currently accepting proposals of 300-500 words to explore the significance of Dorothy’s legacy in the 21st century. This conference is open to scholars at every level and peace practitioners whose life and work have been influenced by Dorothy Day’s legacy of hospitality, Gospel nonviolence, and voluntary poverty.

This conference is open to scholars at every level and peace practitioners whose life and work have been influenced by Dorothy Day’s legacy of hospitality, Gospel nonviolence, and voluntary poverty. We particularly invite students and members of the Catholic Worker movement to submit proposals for papers, panels, and presentations of creative work by January 1st, 2025. Read the call for papers here, and stay tuned for more information on how to register for this conference and join us either in person or virtually! To learn more about this symposium and any of the Dorothy Day Guild’s upcoming events, please visit our website.

Article Round-up:

Dorothy is a central figure in the text; her formative influence on the nonviolent direct action undertaken by the Camden 28 is outlined in Tim Lacy’s review of Spiritual Criminals for the Society for U.S. Intellectual History, “Dorothy Day’s Spiritual Leadership: Against Capitalism, Imperialism, and War.” Lacy notes that Dorothy’s “intense practice of pacifism provided a binding thread for mid-century Catholics.”

In the pages of The Catholic Worker, Dorothy began speaking out against the French occupation of Vietnam in the 1950’s, and pacifism had been a central component of her political praxis even prior to her conversion to Catholicism. Lacy identifies Dorothy’s consistency as a journalist and editor as well as in her lived practice of the faith as a major source of spiritual influence on the members of the Camden 28. We highly encourage you to read Lacy’s review and hope you will order a copy of Spiritual Criminals for yourself or request one for your local public library.

We’re also excited to share a recent interview from the Fall 2024 issue of Radix with Robert Ellsberg, former managing editor of The Catholic Worker and member of the board of directors for the Dorothy Day Guild. This interview, which is available in both text and audio format, discusses our ongoing reliance on and participation in the communion of saints and what Dorothy offers to a Church looking for fresh expressions of sanctity in the modern world.

In preparation for All Saints' Day, and in a month that includes the feast days of two of Dorothy’s favorite saints, Carmelites Thérèse of Lisieux (October 1st) and Teresa of Avila (October 15th), we hope you’ll give this refreshing conversation a listen!

Last, but not least, we were so pleased to read in The Evangelist that Dorothy’s life and witness was the focus of Catechetical Sunday in the Roman Catholic Diocese of Albany last month. Dorothy is an incredible guide and companion to walk with us as we contemplate this year’s catechetical theme, “Lord, when did we see you hungry.” Our friends Fr. Bob Longobucco, Sr. Betsy Van Deusen, CSJ, Catholic Workers Fred Boehrer and Diana Conroy, and others in the Office of Discipleship Formation have put together a collection of resources for catechists, liturgical ministers, and anyone who wishes to deepen their own journey of discipleship by responding to the poor as Dorothy did. We hope that this initiative from our friends in the Albany Diocese will encourage others who work in diocesan ministry to consider how Dorothy’s legacy of Gospel nonviolence and voluntary poverty might inform the spiritual and corporal works of mercy they offer in and through their local Churches. We particularly encourage you to read the opening message from Vicar General Fr. Bob Longobucco, which includes the following reflection on Kelly Latimore’s contemporary icon, “Dorothy Day and the Holy Family of the Streets.”

“The powerful image of Dorothy Day, Servant of God, that accompanies the theme makes clear our mission. Her inviting a holy family of shivering migrants into Maryhouse in New York City reminds us that what other people might see as expendable or inconvenient is indeed Christ himself. To the excluded, to the forgotten, to the lonely, Dorothy Day found a place. She knew what to do with hungry people. She fed them. 

And she fed them Christ. Not in sermons or demands for conversion (for she knew how searingly personal that decision was), but in the humility and dignity she shared. The respect she showed. As Jesus went to the anawim of his time, as he touched lepers and restored sight to the blind, he never forgot their humanity. He asked what they needed. He allowed power to flow out of himself. With a whole world to save, he never forgot any person.”

For me, reading through these thoughtful reflections on Dorothy, the works of mercy, discipleship, and formation was especially sweet: When I was a teenager and young adult at St. Kateri’s parish in the diocese of Albany, Fr. Bob, Sr. Betsy, Fred, and Diana were the people most responsible for my own formation as a member of the Church and a Catholic Worker. Each of them has offered a remarkable gift of self to the countless young people they have accompanied on journeys of discipleship. The works of catechesis and formation rely on relationships; we catch the echo of Jesus’ life as it is reflected back to us in the life of another person. For many of us, Dorothy is one of these people. We know how deeply she relied on the communion of saints, living and dead, canonized and not, to sustain her in her work for peace, and we know how generously she gave of herself during her lifetime. Many of you have written about how Dorothy’s example helped you to find a home in the Church or that through her practice of the works of mercy, you found Christ made visible. To all catechists, we thank you for your work of instruction and accompaniment, and we pray that Dorothy’s life and example might be a light to all those in your care!

A few words from Dorothy:

Last week marked the fifty-sixth anniversary of the trial of the Catonsville 9, which took place from October 5th-9th, 1968, following an action undertaken by nine lay and religious Catholic peace activists the preceding May. Fr. Daniel Berrigan, pictured here with Dorothy and other young friends one of the many times he came to celebrate mass at the Catholic Worker, was among the nine, along with his brother Philip.

The members of the Catonsville 9 raided a draft office in Catonsville, MD and burned 378 draft files in the parking lot, effectively preventing the young men listed in those files from being sent to participate in the violence of the Vietnam War. Later that month, Dorothy wrote the following in her October 1968 “On Pilgrimage” column: 

"It is mid-October and the weather is still warm. There has been no wind and the leaves are still on the trees. The maples and the oaks and the sumac are brilliant, but in general the trees are still green. There is scarcely a hint of frost in the air; only at night a chill arises, a foretaste of the cold to come…

How to be happy in this world where even nature itself, in sudden hurricane or typhoon or earthquake, suffers and groans? How to sing of the glory of God in this strange land? “By the waters of Babylon, there we sat and wept,” living as exiles, as we are.

It is only in the light of this anguish that one can understand the attempt made by the Catonsville Nine and the Milwaukee Fourteen, amongst whom are so many of our friends, to suffer with these fellow human beings so devastated by war and famine. These men, priests and laymen, have offered themselves as a living sacrifice, as hostages. Next to life itself, man’s freedom is his most precious possession, and they have offered that, as well as the prayer and fasting they have done behind bars, for these others.

In case there are those among our readers who do not know why these men have suffered trial and imprisonment, if radio or television or press has not reached them – it is because they have destroyed draft records in Maryland and Wisconsin, the 1-A files, which meant the next men to be called in our criminal drafting and enslavement of young men for our immoral wars. Where we have not sent men, we have sent weapons, planes, bombs to do the work in other countries’ wars. There are many other actions – of refusal to work in any industry pertaining to war or to pay taxes for war – being undertaken that we cannot include here, that are too numerous to list.

We can only thank God and try to add our prayers and sacrifices."

In light of the United States’ deepening involvement in multiple devastating wars around the world through financial support, weapons development, and the arms trade, Dorothy’s words remind us of the courage of a previous generation of war resisters and practitioners of the Gospel of peace. Today, we invoke the same Holy Spirit who inspired and strengthened the Milwaukee 14, the Catonsville 9, and the Camden 28 to raise up new voices whose prophetic words and actions will bring an end to the present violence being inflicted upon the people of Gaza, Ukraine, and every place where families live in fear for their lives. Through Dorothy’s intercession, we ask God’s protection for all victims of armed conflict and genocide, and over all those who work for peace.

Yours,

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