Day 10, The Path Forward

Admin • December 8, 2022

For nine days now we have gathered in prayer and thanks for the life and witness of Dorothy Day, Servant of God. Last year, on the feast of the Immaculate Conception, the anniversary of her famous prayer for a vocation, we sent her cause to Rome. We continue to pray for her canonization and ask for her help in following our shared call as Christians, as she wrote, “to enlarge our hearts to love each other, to love our neighbor, to love our enemy, as well as our friend.”


Dorothy’s own path to holiness was hardly a clear straight line. She struggled to find a way big enough for her desire “to use what talents I possessed for my fellow workers, for the poor.” She told biographer Robert Coles that she wished to be remembered as an “ardent seeker after God who, with some devotion, had followed His example after a few false starts.”

The Catholic Worker movement she co-founded still inspires us to take the Christian vocation to love God and neighbor seriously. In the words of lifelong movement scholar and teacher, David O’Brien, “It makes personal and political demands …. If the Gospel is true, more is required; love and justice and peace must become verbs that describe how people live.”


Servant of God Dorothy Day, intercede for us; pray that we grow in courage and faith to follow our own path to holiness.


“The greatest challenge of the day is: how to bring about a revolution of the heart, a revolution which has to start with each one of us? When we begin to take the lowest place, to wash the feet of others, to love our brothers with that burning love, that passion, which led to the Cross, then we can truly say, ‘Now I have begun.’” -Dorothy Day, Loaves and Fishes

 

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