This year, our panel features a conversation between Robert Ellsberg, Dr. Margaret Pfeil, Deirdre Cornell, and Magdalena Muñoz Pizzulic, who will each be introduced by Gus Fuller, a young Catholic Worker who was received into the Church at the Easter Vigil after being deeply immersed in and impacted by the writings and public witness of both Dorothy and Pope Francis.

Each of our panelists brings a great depth of knowledge of Dorothy and the Catholic Worker movement as well as particular expertise on the theological and pastoral priorities which characterized Francis' pontificate. This panel will be moderated by Dorothy Day Guild chair Dr. Kevin Ahern. We hope to see you Tuesday night!

Our friends at the St. Martin de Porres Catholic Worker community in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, are hosting a May spirituality series over the course of four weekends. Each of the talks will take place in the basement hall of St. Francis of Assisi Catholic Church, located at 1439 Market St, Harrisburg, PA 17103 and will explore various aspects of Dorothy’s life, legacy, and ongoing relevance. The series kicked off over the weekend with a talk by Jeff Korgen on his Dorothy Day: Radical Devotion and will continue on Sunday, May 11 at 3:30 PM when Dr. Carmina Chapp of St. Charles Borromeo Seminary and the Dorothy Day Catholic Worker Farm will speak on “Prayer and Work: The Benedictine Spirituality of Dorothy Day.” 

The following Sunday, Nate Tinner-Williams, co-founder of Black Catholic Messenger, will present “The Black Catholics Who Built the American Church” on May 18 at 3:30 PM, connecting Church history with present-day prophetic witness– if you enjoyed our November webinar, “Dorothy Day and the Saintly Six,” we highly recommend you attend if you are in the area!

The series concludes on Saturday, May 24 at 9:30 AM with Martha Hennessy offering reflections on “Dorothy Day and the Works of Mercy in the Jubilee Year.” For more information on any of the talks in this series, please contact the Catholic Worker community at harrisburgcw@gmail.com or visit their website.

For our friends in Europe, Martha Hennessy will be speaking at Le Dorothy in Paris on Thursday, June 26th at 8:00 PM. Le Dorothy is a community café, workshop, and folk school in the tradition of the Catholic Worker, located at 85 bis rue de Ménilmontant, 75020 in Paris, France.

The members of this café community practice hospitality and clarification of thought by welcoming their neighbors and friends, many of whom are new immigrants, for a cup of coffee, tea (or wine!) and by offering many free cultural, educational, and artistic programs.

They’ve also recently released a podcast episode featuring their two co-founders, Foucauld Giuliani and Thérèse du Sartel, who have provided an excellent, in-depth introduction to Dorothy’s life in French. For our English-speaking friends, you can learn more about Le Dorothy from community member Henry Simonin, who spoke as part of our Easter-season webinar “Dorothy Day and the Global Church,” four years ago this month.

Martha’s talk, which will be moderated by Carmen Bouley de Santiago and Foucauld Giuliani, is one of the events surrounding the gallery exhibition of artist François Rieux’s “Dorothy Day: Changer l’Ordre Social”. As the Mercurart Gallery website states,

“Using a narrative approach, the painter evokes the [economic] crisis of 1929 and the soup lines, the working conditions of that era, faith and religion, pacifism, and the “back to the land” movement. Inspired by the life of Dorothy Day, François Rieux painted more than one hundred canvases in which he depicts every facet of the human condition.”

Some of the paintings in this series were originally part of a book, also entitled Dorothy Day: Changer l’Ordre Social, a collaboration between the artist and author Jean-Claude Millet, the founder of the Mercurart Gallery, which includes contributions by Martha and by Geoffrey Gneuhs.

Rieux’s paintings will be on display from June 3rd through July 3rd at Cloitre des Billettes, 24 rue des archives, 75004 in Paris. Gallery hours are Tuesday-Sunday, from 9:00 AM until 6:00 PM.

Finally, registration for the July 21st-23rd Dorothy Day Retreat at Pyramid Life Center in the Adirondacks is still open! Martha Hennessy will be facilitating this retreat along with co-leader Fred Boehrer, one of the founding members of the Emmaus House Catholic Worker community in Albany, NY. This retreat will use Robert Ellsberg’s Dorothy Day: Spiritual Writings as a guide to frame the question of how we are to live as Catholics in the United States today, so we especially recommend this retreat to anyone who signed up for or was interested in our Lenten book club! Fred and Martha are both wonderful retreat leaders who bring the wisdom of many years of experience as peacemakers in the Catholic Worker movement to this dedicated time of prayer, rest, and reflection. We’re so excited to share this amazing opportunity with you and hope that many of you will be able to participate!

Honors and Awards:

We recently learned of two awards named in honor of Dorothy which are being presented this spring. Last month, the New Haven-based group “Promoting Enduring Peace,” gave its inaugural Dorothy Day Award to Mahmoud Khalil, a graduate student from Columbia University who has been detained without criminal charges since his arrest two months ago for participating in demonstrations for peace in Palestine last spring. Promoting Enduring Peace honored Dorothy herself with its Gandhi Peace Award in 1975 for her lifetime of advocacy and activism and had been contemplating naming a second award after her for some time. The group wanted the second award to go to a young person who was in grave danger or incarcerated due to their activism, as Dorothy herself was many times.

You can read additional coverage of this year’s Dorothy Day Award at The Roundtable. The Dorothy Day Guild would like to extend our congratulations to Mahmoud Khalil and Promoting Enduring Peace and ask that you join us in praying for Mahmoud’s release from detention and for the wellbeing of his wife and their new baby.

In Syracuse, NY, St. Lucy’s Parish will posthumously honor Sister Patricia Bergan at the Dorothy Day Award dinner tonight (May 8th) at 5:00 PM. Sister Pat, who died this past December, “lived a life of service, activism, and a little fun thrown in,” according to Eileen Clinton, who serves as the public relations director for the Dorothy Day Award committee. Sister Pat served as an elementary school teacher during her sixty-three years of religious life. During that time, she was also active in parish ministry and war resistance and was repeatedly arrested for protesting the cruise missiles stored at Griffiss Air Force Base in Rome, NY and later the First Gulf War.

The Dorothy Day Award Dinner will be held at the gymnasium at St. Lucy’s Church, 432 Gifford St. in Syracuse, from 5:00-7:00 PM on Thursday, May 8th. Everyone is welcome to attend, and attendees are invited to bring a suggested donation of $10-15 for individuals or $25-30 for a family, which will support the parish’s neighborhood ministries to the poor. The Dorothy Day Guild congratulates St. Lucy’s Parish and Sister Patricia’s Franciscan community on her lifetime of hospitality and activism!

Reading and listening recommendations:

Earlier this spring, many of our friends participated in the events surrounding the Third Meeting of States Parties to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) at the United Nations, culminating in a mass celebrated by Archbishop John Wester and the distribution of ashes prior to a demonstration to urge the United States towards disarmament on the morning of Ash Wednesday. Claire Schaeffer-Duffy, of the Saints Francis & Thérèse Catholic Worker Community in Worcester, Massachusetts, stayed in Dorothy’s room at Maryhouse during her visit to New York to participate in the mass, vigils, and protest. In the most recent edition of the Saints Francis and Thérèse Catholic Worker’s community newsletter, The Catholic Radical, she wrote,

"I had three confirmed commitments in New York: attending the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons Forum at Riverside Church, which was the opening event for Nuclear Ban Week; participating in Archbishop John Wester’s Shrove Tuesday Mass for the Abolition of Nuclear Weapons, and joining my fellow Catholic Workers for an Ash Wednesday protest at the US Mission to urge our callous government to support the TPNW.

During the unclaimed hours, I imagined making a mini-retreat in Dorothy’s room. I would read her books, write in my journal, pray to her for inspiration, and from the window watch New Yorkers carry on with daily life while the country fell apart…

For two months now, I have stayed enraged over the grotesque cruelty of our current administration. Rage of this nature affects one’s vision. When the priest speaks of the “resurrection hidden within the crucifixion,” I look at him blankly. New York brought relief. My days there took on a holy rhythm in spite of my frenzied self. Morning prayer in Dorothy’s room, a bit of news from the old radio, coffee."

Read Claire’s whole reflection in The Catholic Radical (find it under “Mason Street Musings,” on page eight), or in The Roundtable.

We also wanted to pass along two additional articles, from OSV News and The Houston Catholic Worker. For OSV, Jason Adkins recently published “Dorothy Day, Local Politics, and Faithful Citizenship,” a reflection which follows his recent interview with Dr. Michael Baxter, “Dorothy Day, Politics, and the Catholic Way Forward,” for the podcast Catholic in America. In this reflection, Jason reminds us that Dorothy’s mode of engagement with public life 

"was deeply personal, but never apolitical. She lived in voluntary poverty in New York City, helping found houses of hospitality where the homeless and hungry could find food, shelter and dignity. She believed politics wasn’t just about votes and policies (she rarely voted) — it was also about how we treated one another and the systems we upheld through our choices.

She didn’t waste time waiting for the system to fix itself. She built a new way of living right in its shadow. She practiced a kind of politics rooted in community, compassion and daily commitment — one that looked askance at events in Washington without pretending politics didn’t matter."

Jason encourages us to think in terms of both subsidiarity and solidarity and to commit to the work of faithful citizenship within our own communities. Local engagement 

“allows us to see the face of our neighbor, especially the suffering neighbor. That proximity teaches us empathy, sharpens our sense of justice and helps us discern the real needs of our community.. away from the abstractions and performative arguments that often dominate national discourse.”

As many of us look forward to the school year ending for ourselves or our children, this is a timely reminder to consider how we might invest more deeply in projects and relationships which bring us into the lives and worlds of our most vulnerable neighbors (perhaps by reaching out to your nearest Catholic Worker community to find out how you might be able to volunteer with them!).

In a similar vein, considering our responsibilities to and the possibilities of action within our world today, Louise Zwick recently published “Sacrifice, Creativity, Availability in Bulgakov, Mounier, Dorothy Day, and Fr. John Hugo” for The Houston Catholic Worker. In this piece, Louise considers how making ourselves radically available to the needs of the poor and joining our suffering and their own with that of Christ can allow us to become “partners with God and put in our grain of sand for good in the cosmic struggle against evil and help with a reconstruction of the social order to save our world.” Dorothy recognized this, and spoke of it often in her discussions of our shared membership in Christ’s Mystical Body. Within the context of the Catholic Worker, to be available to the poor means sacrificing our time, opportunities for “good jobs,” predictability, and privacy. These sacrifices, small as they might be, can be offered up and joined with the suffering of Christ for the redemption of the world.

Our contemporary culture tends to think of sacrifice as exclusively negative, but Louise writes that in her many years of experience at Casa Juan Diego, sacrifice has also been an act of devotion, an opportunity to be intimately engaged with another person. Dorothy understood this, and recognized that inviting others to make themselves available in this way was a way of offering them a path to greater unity with Christ through His Mystical Body. Louise remembers how years ago, Dorothy offered her late husband Mark and his mother the opportunity to share in the work of availability and sacrifice. Ed Willock, a working-class Catholic writer and artist, father of twelve, and friend of the Catholic Worker community, whom Dorothy would later eulogize in Commonweal,

“became very ill after several strokes. Mark Zwick and his mother (before I knew them) were visiting Dorothy Day one day in New York. After visiting for a while, Dorothy asked them if they would be willing to drive four of Ed Willock’s children up to New England to Mary Reed Newland, who would care for the children for a time. Mark and his mother were available, and they drove the children, joyfully.”

That ongoing practice, that habit of availability of course went on to become the foundation of the Casa Juan Diego Catholic Worker community, who have been a sign of hope for thousands of our immigrant neighbors in the decades since Dorothy’s death in 1980. Our thanks to Louise for this article, and for her ongoing work in support of Dorothy’s cause for canonization and in re-presenting the spiritual and intellectual heritage of the Catholic Worker tradition.

We’re also very excited to share two new listening recommendations this month. The first is a new episode of Wisconsin Public Radio’s To the Best of Our Knowledge program, entitled “On Pilgrimage with Dorothy Day.”

In this program, journalist and producer Shannon Henry Kleiber takes us along with her on a pilgrimage to New York, visiting Maryhouse, the Dorothy Day Center at Manhattan University, riding the Dorothy Day Staten Island Ferry, and along the way learning about Dorothy’s life and the process by which the Church officially recognizes saints. If you’ve been part of the Guild or of our extended network of friends for a while now, you’ll recognize a lot of familiar names and voices here

Shannon’s conversations with Guild members like Joe Sclafani and Geoff Gneuhs, Catholic Workers like Jane Sammon, and clergy like Fr. James Martin, SJ are thoughtful, nuanced, and personal. She interviewed Deirdre Cornell to ask about Deirdre’s family connections with Dorothy and their longstanding participation in the Catholic Worker movement. As Deirdre said, 

“My grandparents had known Dorothy because they helped to start a house of hospitality in Cleveland, Ohio. So my mother's family stayed in touch with the Catholic Worker. She [Monica Cornell] received the newspaper, and she came to New York City at the age of twenty-one to join other young people who wanted to be around, or they wanted to be near her because they were looking for ways to build a better world. My father [Tom Cornell] had read "The Long Loneliness" when he was a college student at nineteen.”



“So [Dorothy] kind of was a matchmaker,” Shannon responds. 

“My father says that,” Deirdre replied. “And then when he burned his draft cards, my mother, brother and I lived at the Catholic Worker farm while he was in the Danbury prison. And that's where I took my first steps as I learned to walk.”

To call “On Pilgrimage with Dorothy Day” a radio show or podcast episode really doesn’t do it justice– this is really a rich audio documentary which includes several great conversations with people who knew Dorothy in her lifetime, and which brings together a wide range of perspectives on Dorothy’s life as a journalist, a Catholic convert, a working mother, and a future saint. If you’ve been contemplating a visit to New York for one of our walking pilgrimages or if you’ve volunteered at the Catholic Worker, we highly encourage you to give this program a listen– and if you know someone who is curious about Dorothy, share this recording with them! 

Martha Hennessy also recently appeared on Fr. John Dear’s The Nonviolent Jesus Podcast for its sixteenth episode, "We are experiencing the thrashing of empire and death throes of capitalism," where she spoke on her own experiences as an activist and peacemaker as well as Dorothy’s firm pacifism and committed opposition to every occasion of war. Fr. John Dear asks Martha where she sees Dorothy as a teacher and model of nonviolence, Christian faith, and the embodiment of Jesus’ teachings on the Sermon on the Mount. Martha responded that she saw this first and foremost in Dorothy’s “willingness to give her will over to God.” Martha noted that this particular expression of holiness begins in intimate, interpersonal relationships and radiates outwards. As she said to Fr. John,

"I saw it in what happened to my mother’s parents. At the family level, this practice of nonviolence really does begin with each of us in our own hearts. And she gave up a life [with her daughter’s father, Forster] that she so dearly wanted…So Dorothy had a very personal experience, initially, which I do believe prepared her to give her will over to God. I think that my grandfather recognized something that he had to let go of, and go do the work that she needed to do. And that level of commitment and understanding and willingness to trust in God is what gave her the stamina and the foundation to continue with nearly fifty years of the Catholic Worker movement."

Thank you, Martha and Fr. John, for this thoughtful and wide-ranging conversation! We hope that you enjoy listening to this episode, and we encourage you to check out Fr. John’s interviews with other recent and upcoming guests as well. New episodes of The Nonviolent Jesus Podcast are released every Monday.

Dorothy Day en Español:



Last month, Jane Sammon and Magdalena Muñoz Pizzulic spoke at a bilingual online forum for Líderes Católicos, a Latin American Catholic association which focuses on lay education and formation in the Church. Ursula Lonngi provided live simultaneous interpretation for Jane’s testimony of coming to know the Catholic Worker through the newspaper as a child, of living and working with Dorothy as a young adult, and life in the New York Catholic Worker community from 1972 until the present. In the second half of the livestream, Jane and Magdalena took questions on the cultural and literary references which formed Dorothy, as well as the challenges of sustaining a “revolution of the heart” in a deeply broken society in Spanish from the audience. A recording of the program, “Testimonio de Dorothy Day,” is available on the Líderes Católicos Youtube channel.

We are so grateful to Catholic Workers like Jane and Magdalena who have worked to make Dorothy’s writing and legacy more widely available to Spanish-language audiences! Magdalena has also continued the ongoing work of translating Dorothy’s newspaper columns into Spanish, two more of which have just been posted on the Catholic Worker movement website. Just in time for Mothers’ Day, which will be celebrated in Mexico on Saturday and the United States on Sunday, check out Dorothy’s narrative of her daughter Tamar’s birth in 1926, “Tener un Bebé: Una Historia de Navidad” (“Having a Baby”). Peter Maurin’s 148th birthday is also this week, on May 9th, and the anniversary of his death in 1949 takes place next week on May 15th. To mark the occasion, Magdalena has translated Dorothy’s May 1955 column, “Programa de Peter,” (“Peter’s Program”), which Dorothy wrote to honor her late friend and mentor and to continue sharing his vision of the Gospel and the world which had so profoundly changed the course of her life. You can read all of the columns currently available in Spanish here. Thank you, Magdalena, for these translations, and thanks as well to Jerry Windley-Daoust for his heroic work in maintaining the CatholicWorker.org website as such an invaluable resource for all of us who are interested in Dorothy’s life and legacy.

Prayer requests:

First, we ask your continuing prayers for the repose of the soul of Pope Francis and for the College of Cardinals, who are now engaged in the process of choosing a new shepherd for our Church. Please join us in asking Dorothy’s intercession for this process, and for Francis’ successor to share his deep love for Christ in the poor and for peace.

We also had two personal requests for prayer from friends of the Guild. Mary, from Syracuse, NY wrote to us asking for prayers for her nephew and his family, and Domitila wrote to us asking for prayers for her son and for another relative. Over the next month, please pray for these individuals, their families, and their intentions, and ask Dorothy to pray along with you, perhaps by using the canonization prayer on our website, or in your own words. Thank you for undertaking this important spiritual work of mercy!

A few words from Dorothy:

Our friend Renée Roden, of the Harrisburg Catholic Worker community, is in Rome now, covering the papal conclave as a freelance journalist– we are eagerly anticipating her report and hoping she is able to visit with our colleagues at the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints! 

Dorothy likewise traveled to Rome several times and was present during the final session of Vatican II, when Gaudium et spes, the pastoral constitution on the Church and the modern world, was being discussed.

Dorothy hoped that in the finalized texts the council would produce, that the Church would finally come out in a definitive way for nonviolence as the normative Christian response to conflict. In the months leading up to her trip, where she and an international group of Catholic women would spend their days praying and fasting for peace, she wrote,

"Our prayer and our hope is that from the chair of Peter, from the College of Cardinals will come during this last session of the Council, a clear statement, “Put up thy sword,” with the healing touch of Jesus in such a statement to the ears of those who, hearing, do not understand.

The apostles didn’t take the sword, they cowered in fear instead and could scarcely believe that they saw Him again. They were still asking Him about when the earthly kingdom would come despite His clear statement that His kingdom was not of this world which is a testing ground, a place of trial, a school of Christ, as St. Benedict had it.But after the Holy Spirit enlightened the apostles they went to martyrdom, embraced the cross, laid down their own lives for their neighbors, in whom they were beginning to see Christ.

“Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren you have done it unto me.”

We long with all our hearts for such a statement from the Bishops, clear, uncompromising, courageous. We know that men in their weakness, like the apostles, will still take the sword… But the teaching of Jesus has indeed been answered again and again over the ages, from the apostles to the present day and again and again these called by the Holy Spirit and touched by grace have laid down their lives for the Faith that God is our Father and all men are our brothers."

Many of us at the Guild have similar hopes for this papal conclave as those Dorothy expressed during Vatican II. We have offered our earnest prayers that the next shepherd of our Church would be a man who, like his predecessor, and like Dorothy, recognizes the unmistakable call to peace at the heart of the Gospel. Please continue to pray with us for our Church and for our world that the Holy Spirit would continue to be present with us and remind us of our essential unity as members of Christ’s Body.

In peace,

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