“I once spent years reading Dorothy’s diaries, articles, letters and books, and poring over videos, recordings and thousands of photographs. I examined every clue I could gather… Through this process I discovered that I am no different to those for whom even one brief meeting with Dorothy Day decades ago changed their lives. Through these stories, I have come to believe there is little point in simply admiring the Dorothy Day. If you’re going to pay attention to her, you must be prepared for your life to be turned on its head.”
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Dorothy Day Guild July 2023 Missive
Casey Mullaney • Jul 28, 2023
Dear friends,
We hope this email finds you cool and comfortable in the hot weather! Thank you all for the kind comments we’ve been receiving on the latest issue of the newsletter– it’s great to hear that the interview and articles have generated fruitful discussion in your families and communities. Our editors are already working up new pieces for the fall, so keep an eye out for another issue at the end of September. We have a few updates and recommendations for you this month:
New Social Media
We’re on YouTube and Instagram! Our Manhattan College and Yale Divinity School interns have been patient, expert guides as we’ve learned to use some new platforms this summer. You can check out our Membership Monday feature on Instagram, which will run through the end of the summer, as well as informational content about Dorothy and the Guild, which you can share with friends and family members who want to learn more. Be sure to take a look at our latest video as well, a creative reflection featuring contemporary artists’ images of Dorothy. We hope it inspires your prayer and contemplation this week!
Visit with Father Joy Tajonera
Kevin Ahern and Deirdre Cornell met with Father Joyalito Tajonera ("Father Joy") at Maryknoll headquarters in Ossining on June 28. Before joining Maryknoll, Joy had worked with people experiencing homelessness in New York City, where he met the Catholic Worker. He became particularly close to Eileen Egan, learning from her about Dorothy, her life and spirituality.
Joy was instrumental in convening the 1997 Dorothy Day Symposium to mark the 100th anniversary of Dorothy's birth. Several current advisory board members were involved as key participants in the event. Along with other noteworthy efforts leading up to the decision, the symposium helped convince Cardinal John O'Connor to open the cause for Dorothy's canonization. Father Joy gave copies of related records and correspondence to the Guild archives.
Assigned to Taiwan, Father Joy has served migrant workers in Taichung, most of whom are also Filipino, for over 20 years. The shelter he founded, named Ugnayan ("connection"), is run like a Catholic Worker House. Migrants of any nationality are welcomed there 24 hours a day. Workers who have been injured or wronged, especially, find a wide range of support there in a homelike setting; help is offered in the spirit of mutual aid. The Supply Chain Due Diligence program he started empowers workers to organize for their rights and achieve better working conditions. The lives of thousands of migrant workers -- and their families back home -- have been transformed.
Father Joy's ministry is an example of how Dorothy continues to inspire people around the world to practice the Works of Mercy together and to work for justice. To learn more, stay tuned for a new story about Father Joy and Ugnayan in the fall edition of Maryknoll Magazine.
Reading and Viewing Recommendations
Dorothy’s youngest granddaughter, Kate Hennessy, has been publishing a series for The Tablet in honor of the Catholic Worker movement’s ninetieth anniversary. Her first column opens:
“The Nine Provocations of Dorothy Day” takes a series of major teachings– the stuff of life’s big questions– and poses the question, what might Dorothy still be teaching us? How can Dorothy’s life nudge us to live more deeply into our own? We highly recommend this series to anyone who is seeking guidance and direction for discovering their own vocation and living into it with integrity and commitment. The first piece of advice? Make yourself uncomfortable. The latest? Laughter is the best balm. You can read the newest installment of “The Nine Provocations of Dorothy Day,” published July 19th, here.
Robert Ellsberg has two recent reflections on sainthood that we’d like to share. The first, “Walking the path of holiness: What I’ve learned from a lifetime of studying saintly lives,” was published in America last month. Robert’s tenure at the New York Catholic Worker coincided with the last years of Dorothy’s life, “yet there was a youthfulness about her, a spirit of adventure and an instinct for the heroic that was tremendously appealing. She made you believe it was possible to start building a better world, right here where you were. She made you believe, as St. Francis did, that the Beatitudes were for living.”
The second is “Dorothy Day: Holy Activist,” presented by the Henri Nouwen society as part of their series, “A Living Gospel: Reading God’s Story in Holy Lives.” Speaking on Dorothy’s potential canonization, Robert says, “If I’ve supported this cause, it’s because I believe that her inclusion in the list of official saints will have more effect in enlarging the Church, of moving her radical message closer to the heart of the Church, rather than diminishing her. Rather than making her smaller, it will make the Church larger.”
Living encounters with holiness and heroic virtue have the power to refract all of our past and future experiences through their prism, casting brilliant light on everything they touch. Many thanks to Robert and Kate for sharing how their lives have been shaped by knowing Dorothy. If you have additional scholarship, art, or other work featuring Dorothy’s contemporary legacy, please let us know! We’re excited to share the work of our members and supporters with you all.
Anniversaries of Nuclear War
Finally, next month marks the anniversaries of the US bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6th and August 9th, 1945. Following the horrific accounts of destruction and death from Japan and the gleeful, celebratory tone of American media, Dorothy devoted her September column to a prophetic denunciation of the slaughter of innocents that had taken place with the enthusiastic support of the American government:
“Mr. Truman was jubilant. President Truman. True man; what a strange name, come to think of it. We refer to Jesus Christ as true God and true Man. Truman is a true man of his time in that he was jubilant. He was not a son of God, brother of Christ, brother of the Japanese, jubilating as he did. He went from table to table on the cruiser which was bringing him home from the Big Three conference, telling the great news; “jubilant” the newspapers said. Jubilate Deo. We have killed 318,000 Japanese…
“You know not of what spirit you are. The Son of Man came not to destroy souls but to save.” He said also, “What you do unto the least of these my brethren, you do unto me.”
To commemorate this anniversary, members of the dioceses of Santa Fe and Seattle will embark on a Pilgrimage of Peace to Japan from July 31st-August 12th. Archbishop John C. Wester of Santa Fe and Archbishop Paul D. Etienne of Seattle will travel with other nuclear disarmament advocates and representatives from diocesan peace and social justice organizations to meet with the bishops of Japan and together work towards an end to the development and production of nuclear weapons.
In preparation for the pilgrimage, Archbishop Wester stated, “I hope to encourage conversation about universal, verifiable nuclear disarmament and to walk together toward a new future of peace… I hope one day, we will stop building these weapons, disarm our state and our world, and embark on a new future without the fear and terror of the nuclear threat.” The delegation will be praying a novena for peace beginning on August 1st and ending on August 9th. We encourage all members and friends of the Dorothy Day Guild to pray in solidarity with the delegation and to offer their prayers for all victims of nuclear weapons testing and nuclear war.
Many Catholic Worker communities have also planned vigils and protests for the days surrounding August 6th and August 9th. The Dayton, Ohio community will host a prayer vigil at the Wright-Patterson Air Force base, where replicas of the “Fat Man” and “Little Boy” atomic bombs are on display. The Amsterdam Catholic Worker community will host antiwar and disarmament activists from around the world for a week-long peace camp focused on the removal of the United States’ nuclear weapons stored at the Volkel Air Base.
On August 10th, peace camp participants will travel to Kail, Germany and take part in actions at Büchel Air Force Base. Both European bases store fifteen to twenty US-made hydrogen bombs, each capable of even greater destruction than the bombs used on the people of Japan. Ellen Grady, a member of the Ithaca Catholic Worker community and peace camp participant says:
“We have to take some responsibility for these U.S. nuclear weapons stationed in Europe, because they threaten genocidal violence and they destabilize the reckless and expanding war in Ukraine.” Please support these peacemakers with your prayers next week.
In the years that followed, even up to the summer before her death in 1980, Dorothy continued to mark the date of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings in her monthly column and spent her life calling for an end to war and an end to preparation for war. Popular media suggests to us that nuclear war is inevitable; the heroic virtue of witnesses like Dorothy Day instead point us towards an eschatological hope: that God is for life and flourishing, not destruction and death. As Dorothy wrote in September 1945, “We are held in God’s hands, all of us, … He, God, holds our life and our happiness, our sanity and our health; our lives are in His hands. He is our Creator. Creator.” Here at the Dorothy Day Guild, we would like to extend our sincere gratitude to all those who follow in her work of disarmament and peacemaking.
Yours,
Dr. Casey Mullaney, on behalf of the Dorothy Day Guild
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A desire to know God in the poor rather than any specific quest for community led the two of us to the Mary Harris and St. Benedict Catholic Worker houses in Washington, DC in the summer and autumn of 1982. Michael Kirwan, a graduate student in sociology at George Washington University, founded both a couple years earlier. We arrived shortly after graduating from college, coming by separate paths. Claire had just finished a senior thesis on the enduring, revolutionary value of the Catholic Worker movement. And Scott was reassessing his vocation after spending most of a year as a novice with the Capuchin-Franciscans. In those days, the talk between us was all about radical poverty and solidarity with the poor. The two small row houses Michael purchased were located on Fourth Street NW in a squalid neighborhood under the thumb of several drug-dealing families. Mary Harris house served women while St. Benedict house served men. Both were crammed with people who were mentally ill, addicted, or utterly alone in the world. Inspired by Michael, we saw the Catholic Worker as a place where Christianity could be taken literally. Fourth Street provided ample opportunity. There, the Gospel invocations of “whatever you do for the least of these, you do for me,” “take nothing for the journey,” “take the lowest place,” “forgive not seven times, but seventy-seven times,” and “pray unceasingly” were translated into unlimited hospitality and incredible precarity. We slept on the floor, prayed the Liturgy of the Hours, and went to daily Mass in the midst of the chaos. In early 1983, Carl Siciliano, an eighteen year old contemplative came to volunteer at St. Benedict’s. He too was eager for the radical path, and the three of us immersed ourselves in the tumult of life on Fourth Street with enthusiasm. As Claire would say, “we’re like the three musketeers.” This was the era of Reaganomics, a time when thousands of unhoused Americans lived on the streets of the Capitol. The United States was arming wars in Central America and ramping up its nuclear arsenal to build weapons of incalculable destruction. Washington, DC was abuzz with protests. Despite the enormity of our daily tasks, we joined numerous anti-war demonstrations and went to jail on several occasions for acts of nonviolent civil disobedience. In the autumn of 1983, we went on a peace mission to Nicaragua with Teresa Grady, who is now part of the Ithaca, NY Catholic Worker, and Carl. Following Michael’s advice, we left the care of the houses on Fourth Street in the hands of Peter Maurin and Dorothy Day while we were away. The responsibility of maintaining two small houses of hospitality often conflicted with our desire to participate in a nonviolent action. The one who went off to jail or a peace campaign could only do so if someone stayed back at the house to cook the soup and break up the fights. Deciding who did what was an occasional source of tension. New community members came, but did not remain long.
Bro. Martin Erspamer, OSB and Bro. Michael (Mickey) McGrath, OSFS are both liturgical artists, widely recognized for their creative work. Meeting in the pages of the Guild’s newsletter, they bring an artistry and open-heartedness long associated with Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker. From its very beginning, the Catholic Worker has been blessed by grace-filled encounters, their number suggesting more providence than coincidence. How else can the meeting between Peter Maurin and Dorothy Day be understood? He lit the match that set the new convert on fire to see what the Gospel, if lived, would look like, a match that led to a movement and even to a cause for canonization. Both still kindle our imagination with the possibility of new life, new hope. Beauty is an entryway to our imagination. Even as a young girl, Dorothy found deep inspiration and joy in literature, nature, and music. She must have felt a kindred spirit when she met nineteen-year-old art student, Ade Bethune, in 1933. Ade had come to the Catholic Worker on East Fifteenth Street. While she was moved by the hospitality offered to the poor, she felt the fledgling Catholic Worker newspaper wasn’t sufficiently conveying the spirit behind the work. She offered her artwork. To this day, her bold images continue to animate the paper.
Charles E. Moore is a member, teacher, and pastor of the Bruderhof, an international Christian movement of intentional communities founded by Eberhard Arnold in 1920. A contributing editor and author for Plough , his published works include Called to Community: The Life Jesus Wants for His People, Provocations: Spiritual Writings of Kierkegaard , and Following the Call: Living the Sermon on the Mount Together. Drawing on his expertise and experience, he spoke with one of In Our Time’s editors, Gabriella Wilke, on how to go about life together. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
A Woman of Conscience, a Saint for Our Time
The Dorothy Day Guild supports and advances the cause for canonization of Dorothy Day, initiated by the Archdiocese of New York as a saint by the Roman Catholic Church, and promotes, for the benefit of all people interested in social justice, awareness of Dorothy Day, her writings, the Catholic Worker Movement she co-founded, and her life and witness to the Gospel.
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