Living in community with so many creative people is a gift, one which Dorothy also enjoyed in her many years at the Catholic Worker, where she worked closely with artists like Ade Bethune, Fritz Eichenberg, and Rita Corbin, as well as lesser-known painters and muralists like Mary Lathrop. Those artistic traditions continue into the present, and Dorothy is continuing to inspire new creative work today– we just saw this incredible chalk portrait of Dorothy from a different local arts festival with the following quotation from her June 1946 column:

“What we would like to do is change the world — make it a little simpler for people to feed, clothe, and shelter themselves as God intended for them to do. And, by fighting for better conditions, by crying out unceasingly for the rights of the workers, the poor, of the destitute — the rights of the worthy and the unworthy poor, in other words — we can, to a certain extent, change the world. We can work for the oasis, the little cell of joy and peace in a harried world.”

Dorothy Day Guild News:

Before we share more about what we’ve been up to recently, we wanted to remind you that membership in the Dorothy Day Guild is now dues-free. Last month, our Guild chair Dr. Kevin Ahern shared the following note:

Dear Friends, 

Thank you for supporting our cause for Dorothy Day’s canonization. The Dorothy Day Guild is excited to announce that membership is now dues-free. As subscribers to our missive and supporters of Dorothy’s cause, we are happy to welcome you as members!

Membership in the Guild is a simple, direct way for us to acknowledge the significance of Dorothy Day’s life and to get involved in her cause for sainthood. We invite you to pray for miracles garnered through Dorothy, to financially support our cause to the extent that you are able, to learn more about her life, and to share her Gospel witness in the world through words and social actions. 

To opt out of membership and stop receiving our monthly newsletter, please use the “unsubscribe” link at the bottom of this email or message us at ddg@archny.org. 

To learn more about what it means to be a member of our Guild, check out our membership page on the website.

In gratitude for all the support,

Kevin Ahern, 

Chair of the Guild



Thank you all for being members of the Guild and for being part of this cause! We are so excited to continue sharing news and updates with you and finding more ways in which we can all work together to share Dorothy’s life and legacy with our communities and our world.

Last month, a number of Guild members gathered at St. Patrick’s cathedral in New York to celebrate Mass and witness the dedication of the new mural by Adam Cvijanovic, which covers the narthex and visually connects the nineteenth-century Irish immigrants who were the cathedral’s first parishioners to their spiritual descendants, contemporary migrants and refugees depicted carrying their children on their backs and their possessions in plastic shopping bags. In the company of the newly-arrived migrants, the mural features holy figures such as St. Mother Cabrini, the great champion of the city’s immigrant poor, and Venerable Félix Varela y Morales, a Cuban-born priest and abolitionist who accompanied migrants and who was himself forced to flee to New York as a refugee after receiving a death sentence from the Spanish crown for his radical political activity. In another panel, Dorothy is depicted alongside other Catholic exemplars of New York, including St. Kateri Tekakwitha and Venerable Pierre Toussaint. In an article for the Catholic Worker website, “New Mural in NYC’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral Features Dorothy Day and the Stories of Immigrants,” our Guild chair, Dr. Kevin Ahern wrote that,

“The images in the murals have the potential to offer a prophetic message that contrasts with the golden letters on the nearby Trump tower and the ICE raids happening in other parts of the city. Like an inscription on the inside of the Old St. Patrick’s that denounce nativism, these images are a counterpoint to the soul sickness of America first nationalism…

Art and beauty, as Dorothy herself knew, has the power to transform and communicate the Gospel. The images of these women and men around the doors of St. Patrick’s means that they are not only present to those entering and leaving the church, but that they can be seen by anyone standing at the Altar. I pray then that they will remind all those who celebrate in this place about the social demands of holiness, and in particular, the Gospel call to show hospitality to migrants and to work to end the violence of racism and xenophobic nationalism that so deeply wounds the country and the church today.”

The luminous, Byzantine and Art Deco-influenced visuals and the theological content of the mural have been profiled in a number of news outlets, including Anabaptist World and The Guardian. To Guardian reporter Barry Yourgrau, Cvijanovic explained the purpose of his deliberately representational style for an American context:

“‘Europeans have hundreds of years of incredible ecclesiastical art,’ he said. ‘They don’t need to do it that way any more. But we do.’ The European sort of ‘anchor sanctuary art-faith places’ don’t commonly exist in the US. So when thinking about making imagery for one of the country’s most important churches, Cvijanovic wanted the mural to be ‘foundational’.

‘From a European perspective, the painting is completely retrograde,’ he says. ‘But from an American perspective, it’s needed to form a basis for other things to come out of.’

If you’re in New York, be sure to check out the mural, and send us a picture with Dorothy and the rest of this great cloud of witnesses; we love hearing from you!

We were also very happy to partner with the Dorothy Day Canonization Prayer network last month to co-sponsor the webinar “Dorothy Day: Benedictine Oblate and Candidate for Canonization,” the recording of which is now available on our YouTube channel. This panel featured several members of our Guild leadership as speakers and included a special interview with our postulator, Dr. Waldery Hilgeman. If you are interested in learning more about how the canonization process works, especially regarding the role of miracles, or you have been a supporter of Dorothy’s cause for a long time now and are wondering exactly where we are in the process, we encourage you to check out this panel!

In the final section of the webinar, David Mueller, who leads the Canonization Prayer Network, mentioned that the prayer network has a number of open spaces on their calendar. ​The Prayer network is looking for “groups, organizations and religious communities to join our prayer calendar to pray for those who are asking for Dorothy's intercession for a special favor or grace” on a monthly basis. There are still open spots for the month of October, so if your family, class, parish group, or Catholic Worker community wants to sign up, please reach out to the Prayer Network! If you or someone you know is in need of intercessory prayer, you can submit a request to the Dorothy Day Canonization Prayer Network using their website, and members will remember you and your intention daily.

In the next two months, we have a number of Guild projects and activities underway. The annual meeting of our Dorothy Day Guild Board of Directors and Advisory Committee members will take place on Dorothy’s birthday, November 8th, at Manhattan University. The following week, on November 11th, the Feast of St. Martin of Tours, we will be co-sponsoring the Joshua Casteel Memorial Peace Dinner for our bishops at their November USCCB meeting in Baltimore. Please pray for the success of both of these undertakings. We especially ask for your prayers that in the coming year, the Dorothy Day Guild can continue to promote Dorothy’s legacy of hospitality, voluntary poverty, and Gospel nonviolence in our Church and in our world, and help others to incorporate these values into their own lives and work. Keep reading to find out more about how you can be involved!

Upcoming Dorothy Day Guild events:

Our walking pilgrimages are wrapping up for the season as we anticipate colder weather in New York, but we have two upcoming events we hope you can join us for in October and November! Some of you may have seen that Pope Leo released his first apostolic exhortation, Dilexi te, earlier this month on the Feast of St. Francis of Assisi, October 4th. The subject of the Holy Father’s first exhortation is love for the poor– no doubt Dorothy would have been as thrilled to read this as we were! 

In the exhortation, Pope Leo writes,

“We must also recognize that, throughout centuries of Christian history, helping the poor and advocating for their rights has not only involved individuals, families, institutions, or religious communities. There have been, and still are, various popular movements made up of lay people and led by popular leaders, who have often been viewed with suspicion and even persecuted. I am referring to “all those persons who journey, not as individuals, but as a closely-bound community of all and for all, one that refuses to leave the poor and vulnerable behind... Solidarity ‘also means fighting against the structural causes of poverty and inequality; of the lack of work, land and housing; and of the denial of social and labor rights. It means confronting the destructive effects of the empire of money… Solidarity, understood in its deepest sense, is a way of making history, and this is what the popular movements are doing.’”



Last week, in his “Analysis: Pope Leo’s theological vision of a church for the poor in Dilexi Te,” for America, Kevin Ahern writes, 

“Chapter 3 concludes with a section on popular movements, a category that describes groups of indigenous peoples, landless farmers, unskilled workers, those with disabilities and oppressed minorities. Quoting extensively from Pope Francis’ addresses to these groups, “Dilexi Te” praises their organizing work in “fighting against the structural causes of poverty and inequality … [and] confronting the destructive effects of the empire of money” (No. 81). This attention to grassroots organizing represents an important affirmation that the church’s option for the poor extends beyond acts of charity to solidarity with movements working for systemic transformation.”

Elsewhere in the text, Pope Leo states, 

“All this entails one aspect of the option for the poor that we must constantly keep in mind, namely that it demands of us an attitude of attentiveness to others… ‘Only on the basis of this real and sincere closeness can we properly accompany the poor on their path of liberation.’ For this reason, I express my heartfelt gratitude to all those who have chosen to live among the poor, not merely to pay them an occasional visit but to live with them as they do. Such a decision should be deemed one of the highest forms of evangelical life.”

Although she is not mentioned directly, many of us thought instantly of Dorothy and the Catholic Worker upon reading these selections! We know that many of you have been looking forward to reading this exhortation, so we decided to organize a webinar for the end of this month. Please join us on Thursday, October 30th at 7:00 PM Eastern for “Dreaming of a Church for the Poor: Dorothy Day and Dilexi Te.” 

Our conversation will be moderated by Kevin Ahern and will feature panelists Dr. Kelly Johnson, a former Catholic Worker and professor of religious studies at the University of Dayton, Dawn McCarty, of the Houston Catholic Worker, and Fr. Michael Thomas, a Holy Cross priest and doctoral candidate at Stanford University who has worked extensively with the Catholic Peace Fellowship. 

We are really excited to host this webinar on Pope Leo’s first official papal document and look forward to hearing from our panelists, and from you! To join us on October 30th, please register here.

In addition, we hope that some of you will join us in Rome for “A Pilgrim of Hope: An Academic Symposium on the Legacy of Dorothy Day” on Wednesday, November 26th, 2025 from 15:30-19:00 local time (9:30 AM-1:00 PM Eastern) at Gregorian University, Palazzo Frascara, Piazza della Pilotta 4, 00187 Roma. Click here to view the preliminary schedule for the day. We are so excited to partner with Pontifical Gregorian University, University of Notre Dame Rome, the Dorothy Day Center at Manhattan University, and the Lay Center to present this free symposium– our first official Guild event in Rome! All of the presentations and discussions are open to the public and will be offered in English with translation provided in Italian, so if you or someone you know is studying in Rome or planning to visit next month, please share this invitation! We also plan to welcome participants from around the world to join the symposium by livestream– we’ll share more information and a registration link from the Gregorian very soon, so stay tuned!

Events from our friends:

As a reminder, the St. Bakhita Catholic Worker community in Milwaukee, WI is starting their seven-session Wednesday night study, “Dorothy Day: Patron Saint of Both/And” on Wednesday, October 15th, at 6:00 PM. Over the course of the seven sessions, participants will watch Claudia Larson’s documentary Dorothy Day: Don’t Call Me a Saint, read and discuss William Miller’s two books on Dorothy, attend a retreat at the Catholic Worker house, and visit the Dorothy Day/Catholic Worker archives at Marquette University. If you’re in the Milwaukee area and are interested in participating, contact Anne Haines at anne@bakhitahouse.org with your full name, email address, and phone number to register for the study group.

For those in the greater Chicago area, St. Joan of Arc parish in Lisle, IL is hosting a free production of Lisa Wagner-Carollo’s Haunted by God: The Life of Dorothy Day on Wednesday, October 29th at 7:00 PM. The Guild co-sponsored a production of this one-woman play back in April– Lisa puts on a fantastic show, and we highly encourage you to attend! St. Joan of Arc is located at 820 Division Street, Lisle, Illinois 60532.

In Vermont, we recently learned of a new discernment group that has just formed at Immaculate Heart of Mary parish in Williston. Deacon Josh McDonald and his wife were participants at the Dorothy Day Retreat at Pyramid Life Center this summer, where they met Fred Boehrer and Martha Hennessy. The McDonalds were inspired to think about what it might look like to open a Catholic Worker house in northern Vermont and have invited others to discern with them. If you are interested in learning more about Dorothy and the Worker, praying about, and discussing the possibility of starting a Catholic Worker community, the group is meeting every Tuesday evening at six pm in the parish hall at Immaculate Heart of Mary Roman Catholic Church, 7415 Williston Road, Williston VT. To learn more, reach out to Deacon Josh at jmcdonald@vermontcatholic.org. 

Articles, Reading, and Listening Recommendations:

At the beginning of October, Catholic Workers from across the United States came together in San Antonio, TX for the first National Gathering hosted by the San Antonio Catholic Worker community. Martha Hennessy gave the morning keynote address on Friday, October 3rd, and the following day, speaking on “three principles that have inspired the [Catholic Worker] movement and her own work in it: works of mercy, a critique of the ‘putrid industrial capitalist system,’ as Dorothy called it, and her Catholic faith.” Later that evening, participants in the gathering held a peace vigil at Fort Sam Houston. Read the initial report on the gathering in Roundtable, and stay tuned for more reports and talks from the weekend in upcoming issues!

Also from Roundtable, we are extremely proud to share an article by Graceann Beckett, our 2024 Dorothy Day Guild Graduate Research Fellow, who first presented a version of “Three Ways to Remember Dorothy Day as a Model of Egalitarian Sainthood” at our March Dorothy Day Symposium at Manhattan University. Using a “companionship model” of sainthood, “in which we understand the communion of saints to be instead a ‘company of friends of God and prophets,’ ….[and] as fellow people of God who walk with us in our struggle for peace and justice, whose holiness is realized in their creative fidelity in the midst of day-to-day life,” Graceann offers several practices through which we can recall and remember with Dorothy to deepen our participation in this living community of God’s people. Noting in particular Dorothy’s “commitment to justice and equality, her cultivation of community and mutuality in the name of a relational God, her persistent faithfulness, and the way in which she exemplified creative fidelity in her day-to-day life,” Graceann recognizes her as an especially

“strong and steadfast companion of the laity, surely a friend of God and prophet, a saint for our times. In her, the laity can find a persistent traveling partner, a fine model who encourages contemporary disciples to respond to the Spirit’s call to holiness.”

Thanks, Graceann, for this excellent paper, and to Renée and Jerry over at Roundtable for making it more widely available to our readers!

Over at America, James Keane recently published a profile, “Jesuit James Vizzard, the larger-than-life ‘labor priest,’” detailing Vizzard’s career as an advocate for migrant workers and a fierce critic of the bracero program. Like Dorothy, Fr. Vizzard had a deep respect for and worked closely with Cesar Chavez and the United Farmworkers. Their similarities did not end there; Keane writes,

“Like Dorothy Day, Father Vizzard had the occasional habit of refusing to mince his words. In 1966, while director of the National Catholic Rural Life Conference, he wrote in a Catholic paper: ‘Since these growers seem incapable of self-reform, they need to be told emphatically and with finality by outraged citizens and their legislators that the approximation of slave-labor conditions which they have perpetuated will no longer be tolerated in this nation.’”

We encourage you to read the whole article! Labor Day has passed in the United States, but as Dorothy would remind us, every day is a good day to support organized labor and justice for working people.

Last month also marked the tenth anniversary of Pope Francis’ apostolic visit to the United States, where he addressed Congress and named Dorothy as one of four “great Americans,” who embodied the best values of the United States in their own lifetimes. After his speech for the members of the Senate and House of Representatives, Pope Francis spent the rest of the afternoon with the staff, volunteers, and clients of Catholic Charities in downtown Washington, DC. The Catholic Standard newspaper has published a four-part retrospective on Pope Francis’ September 2015 visit, the final part of which is available here.

National Catholic Register published a short reflection from Larry Chapp on the true meaning of charity as Dorothy understood it– not as a virtue in opposition to justice, but as something “kenotic and cruciform wherein an encounter with a real face and a real name lays a claim upon us.”

The episode opens with a brief anecdote about Sister Pat Murphy, who died over the summer at the age of ninety six. Sister Pat joined the Sisters of Mercy directly out of high school in 1947 and co-founded Su Casa Catholic Worker House in Chicago. She was a tireless advocate for immigrant survivors of torture and was arrested six times (the last at the age of ninety) at protests for the just treatment of migrants and refugees. During this conversation, Downey, Bratten Weiss, and Sanna ask what civil disobedience really means and where it fits into the lay and magisterial traditions of the Catholic faith. Speaking on the civil defense drills, which took place in New York City during the Cold War, and which Dorothy and other Catholic Workers staged sit-ins in the park to protest, Downey remarks,

“The thing that was interesting to me about that choice was that essentially, these were, in their minds, kind of scare tactics that were being used by the government to give the illusion of safety by conscripting civilians into accepting war as a norm. So in some way, shape, or form, it seemed to be counter-intuitive… but the logic of the Catholic Worker and Dorothy Day as the spokesperson for that noncompliance was that even attending to the practice for bombing was in some way shape or form an accommodation to the reality of war that they found to be morally unjust.”

Later in the episode, they go on to discuss “more active” forms of civil disobedience, such as the draft board raids during the Vietnam War, actions undertaken by members of the Plowshares movement, and the deliberately liturgical orientation of these protests. Downey understands civil disobedience in the Catholic tradition to be “a capacious term,” which encompasses a far greater range of practices and goals than can be easily mapped onto the liberal/conservative axis of secular American political discourse. We highly encourage you to listen to the whole discussion!

Prayer requests:

In the Church, October is the month dedicated to the rosary, and the Feast of Our Lady of the Rosary took place last week on October 7th. Pope Leo has asked all the faithful to pray the rosary for peace each day in October, “personally, with your families, and in your communities.” Many of you have enthusiastically taken up this charge– thank you for undertaking this important spiritual work of mercy on behalf of all those who are living in conflict zones, especially for the people of Gaza.

Pope Leo has continued Pope Francis’ practice of speaking regularly with Fr Gabriel Romanelli, the pastor of Holy Family Church, which is the only Roman Catholic parish in Gaza. The Holy Father has continued to assure the parish community of Holy Family of his prayers and closeness to them. Over 450 residents of Gaza, Catholic and non-Catholic alike, have taken shelter in the Holy Family parish compound, where they remain hopeful that the current cease-fire will hold in spite of their present difficult conditions.

Last month, we received a note from friends at Holy Cross Family Ministries, an organization founded by Venerable Patrick Peyton with a goal of building family unity through prayer. To support Pope Leo’s call for a daily rosary for peace and the unity of our global family, HCFM has invited members of the Dorothy Day Guild to participate in a Global Rosary for Peace on Wednesday, October 22nd, at 10:00 AM Eastern/4:00 PM Rome. We hope that you will be able to join our friends at Holy Cross Family Ministries and the Patrick Peyton Guild for this moment of intercessory prayer later this month!

We wrote to you last week about Pat Jordan, a dear friend of the Guild and of Dorothy’s, who died on October 2nd. Pat’s funeral Mass will be celebrated at Maryhouse at 11:00 AM on Saturday, October 18th. Last week, his former colleagues at Commonweal published an obituary which remembers his time at the Catholic Worker and his incisive journalism, a talent he shared with Dorothy. As his loved ones prepare to commend him to Christ, please continue to pray for the repose of Pat’s soul and the comfort of his wife, Kathleen, their children and grandchildren, and his many friends and former community members.

We also recently learned of the death of Sister Ann McManamon, founder of Dorothy Day House, the Catholic Worker community in Youngstown, OH, on Monday, September 29th. Sister Ann, a member of the Sisters of the Humility of Mary for over fifty years, opened the Dorothy Day House of Hospitality in 2009 at the age of 76. Please join Sister Ann’s community and all those she served in thanking God for the gift of her life, and in asking that He grant her eternal rest.

Last month, we wrote to you on behalf of a woman in Illinois who is stuck in a difficult, underpaid employment situation. She has asked for our continued prayers through Dorothy’s intercession on her behalf, asking that God grant her “a swift, miraculous breakthrough to a stable, fair-paying vocation. All I need is a chance at a dignified job that restores my worth and grants me the financial independence and the spiritual freedom that this toxic environment has stolen.” Please continue to hold this young worker, A., who has asked to remain anonymous, in your prayers and ask that God help her meet her most pressing needs.

Thank you all for your continued prayers for Kenzie, the young mother in Indiana who has been struggling with cancer while awaiting the birth of her second child. To give both mother and infant the best possible chance of safety, Kenzie’s medical team recommended that her baby be delivered on Monday at 31 weeks. We are so grateful and relieved to report that both Kenzie and her new daughter made it through the birth and are so far doing well. In her lifetime, Dorothy prayed for many expectant mothers with complex pregnancies and difficult births; please continue asking Dorothy to add Kenzie to her prayers as well as your own while we await further news from this dear family.

We also received some happy news of graces and favors that a couple from Louisiana and a woman from Massachusetts all believe they received through Dorothy. From Massachusetts, R. wrote to us to say that in the days leading up to a surgery to repair a hernia in her abdomen, she learned that the way her stomach was twisted could lead to a medical emergency. Between May 21st and her July 1st surgery, she prayed novenas, asking Dorothy to intercede for her so that she would not face surgical complications– thanks be to God, this favor was granted, and her surgery was uncomplicated and successful! From Baton Rouge, E. wrote to us, saying,

“My wife and I have not been active parishioners until recently. After learning about Dorothy Day, her ministry really spoke to us and we became motivated to begin looking for a church home. During that time we moved into a new Parish, Sacred Heart of Jesus. To our amazement, Sacred Heart had just finished building a new community cafe called The Dorothy Day cafe. The cafe offers free coffee to the neighboring community and is the home of Vagabond Missions, a teen focused urban ministry. Since the cafe opened I have been volunteering regularly and the Holy Spirit has moved us to get involved in multiple ministries. I truly believe the spirit of Dorothy Day led us to our church.”

We wrote to you over the summer when the Dorothy Day Cafe opened at Sacred Heart– it is so wonderful to learn that this outreach ministry is already bearing such good fruit!

A few words from Dorothy:

In addition to the month’s dedication to the rosary, October also marks the feast days of two of Dorothy’s favorite saints: St. Thérèse of Lisieux on October 1st, and St. Teresa of Avila tomorrow, on October 15th. Dorothy knew of and admired Teresa of Avila prior to her conversion, and even named her daughter Tamar Teresa in her honor, but it took her longer to appreciate the significance of Thérèse of Lisieux and her Little Way.

Eventually, however, after many years of tending to her family and the constant needs of the growing Catholic Worker movement, Dorothy realized that the Little Way of love taught by St. Thérèse had a revolutionary force she had not initially realized, and which is accessible to all of us, especially the most ordinary and disenfranchised. In 1960, Dorothy published a biography of Thérèse and explained in the introduction why she felt it might be helpful to offer another account of a saint who was already so well known and beloved by her co-religionists:

“I still knew nothing of modern saints. Perhaps, I thought, the days of saints had passed. At that time I did not understand that we are all ‘called to be saints,’ as St. Paul puts it. Most people nowadays, if they were asked, would say diffidently that they do not profess to be saints, indeed they do not want to be saints. And yet the saint is the holy man, the ‘whole man’ the integrated man. We all wish to be that, but in these days of stress and strain we are not developing our spiritual capacities as we should and most of us will admit that. We want to grow in love but we do not know how. Love is a science, a knowledge, and we lack it…

My purpose in writing the book in the first place was to reach some of the 65,000 subscribers to The Catholic Worker, many of whom are not Catholic and not even ‘believers,’ to introduce them to a saint of our day. Many of them are familiar only with a St. Francis of Assisi or a St. Joan of Arc. Also I wrote to overcome the sense of futility in Catholics, men, women, and youths, married and single, who feel hopeless and useless, less than the dust, ineffectual, wasted, powerless. On the one hand Therese was ‘the little grain of sand,’ and on the other, ‘her name was written in heaven”; she was beloved by her heavenly Father, she was the bride of Christ, she was little less than the angels. And so are we all.”

Dorothy wrote these lines at the height of the Cold War, during the years when she and other Catholic Workers were in and out of jail protesting the normalization of nuclear attack during the 1955-1962 civil defense drills. The United States was enjoying a time of great prosperity for some, but this wealth did not reach the hundreds of men and women who waited in the early mornings for the soup line at the Chrystie Street and Spring Street houses of hospitality. It was a time much like our own, when it was easy to give in to the sense of futility and hopelessness and believe that nothing could be done to remedy such great injustices. By then, Dorothy had seen the transformative power of the Little Way. In the final pages of Thérèse, Dorothy wrote that the seeds of the Little Flower’s path of spiritual childhood were then 

“being spread, being broadcast, to be watered by our blood perhaps, but with a promise of harvest. God will give the increase. At a time when there are such grave fears because of the radioactive particles that are sprinkled over the world by the hydrogen bomb tests, and the question is asked, what effect they are going to have on the physical life of the universe, one can state that this saint, of this day, is releasing a force, a spiritual force upon the world to counteract that fear and that disaster. We know that one impulse of grace is of infinitely more power than a cobalt bomb. Thérèse has said, ‘All is grace.’”

Many of you are practicing the Little Way in your own families and communities every day, and you have seen the wisdom of its powerful simplicity. Dorothy’s interpretation of Thérèse’s Little Way is revolutionary because she recognized its social implications, and she wrote this small and ordinary biography of a small and ordinary saint to give us courage. What links these two holy women, Thérèse and Dorothy, is the idea that every task done with love increases the amount of love in the world, that tiny acts of love are transformative, and that in God’s economy, nothing goes to waste.

In Thérèse, Dorothy offers us an example of perseverance and a faith which embraces suffering and failure, knowing that the God of Love sees the pain of the world and will not abandon us to destruction. She also offers us the bracing truth that our lives, however small and ordinary, are filled with eternal purpose. Every act of solidarity, every protest or witness for peace, however foolish or futile it might seem, sends an echo of love out into the universe, an echo that God amplifies on its return. God, for both St. Thérèse and Dorothy, is deeply relational, working both within and through us. Nothing in creation fails to hold His interest, and nothing is left behind or forgotten. This month, we encourage you to pick up a copy of this little book on the Little Way, and in all our prayers and all our work, to keep planting those seeds of love which God has promised to increase in our world.

In peace,

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