In those years, much like our own time, the entire planet was consumed with the horrific violence of the Second World War, especially in Europe and the Pacific theater. Traveling with her friend Sister Peter Claver, Dorothy also witnessed the violence of racial terrorism and extreme poverty at home. Dorothy reminded her readers that,

“We cannot talk of the love of God, the love of our neighbor without recognizing the dire need for penance. In a world in which such cruelty exists, in which men are so possessed, such a spirit cannot be cast out but by prayer and fasting. Our Lord Himself said so.”

As we begin this holy season of preparation for the Paschal Triduum, please know that all of us at the Guild are praying in a special way for you and your intentions through Dorothy’s intercession. We hope that over the next few weeks, you’ll be able to join us for one of our spring events, or that you’ll enjoy learning more about Dorothy’s ongoing legacy of Gospel nonviolence, hospitality, and voluntary poverty through the new resources we’ll share below. We’re excited to be on this journey with you!

Upcoming Spring Events from the Guild

First, we are really excited to present a new webinar to celebrate International Women’s Day on Sunday, March 8th at 8:00 PM Eastern/7:00 PM Central. Please join us for our program, “In the Footsteps of Dorothy Day: Catholic Women and Social Justice,” which will feature internationally-acclaimed activist Sister Helen Prejean, Clare Grady, Michelle Sherman, and Brenna Cussen-Anglada.

Thank you so much to everyone who has signed up for this incredible opportunity to learn from Catholic women whose social justice advocacy has been inspired and informed by Dorothy’s witness to the Gospel. Register here to receive the Zoom link and presenter bios, and we’ll see you Sunday night!

We had a great first two meetings of our Lenten book club yesterday evening and last Tuesday, with a historical presentation from Dr. Anne Klejment and a lively discussion of Dorothy’s Loaves and Fishes. These book club meetings are always fascinating, because our members bring in so many unique perspectives and resources– at our first meeting, one club member shared this 1952 New Yorker profile of Dorothy and the Catholic Worker, “The Foolish Things of the World” (Read Part 2 here). 

We still have room for additional participants! If you’d like to take part in the remaining meetings of our online reading group, you are warmly invited to register here. We’ll meet each Tuesday night (March 10th, 17th, 24th, and 31st) from 8:00-9:15 PM Eastern through the end of the month, so if you are still looking for something special to engage your heart and mind in this season, check out our weekly reading schedule and come join us!

The Dorothy Day Guild also hosts an in-person walking pilgrimage through lower Manhattan, with seven upcoming opportunities for you to visit and pray at important sites from Dorothy’s life both prior to her conversion and after the founding of the Catholic Worker in 1933. If you’re in the greater New York area, these walking pilgrimages are a wonderful way to deepen your connection with Dorothy, literally walking in her footsteps to see the sites where she prayed, picketed, and performed the works of mercy for more than fifty years. This month, we are offering pilgrimages on Saturday and Sunday afternoons, March 15th, 21st, and 22nd with additional dates in April and May. Bring a friend, or download our printable guide to make a self-guided pilgrimage any day of the week. We hope to see you in Union Square!

Finally, looking further ahead, we are hosting our annual Easter-season webinar on Sunday, May 17th at 1:30 PM Eastern. This year, our event features four of Dorothy’s recent biographers, Kate Hennessy, author of Dorothy Day: The World Will Be Saved by Beauty: An Intimate Portrait of My Grandmother, D.L. Mayfield, author of Unruly Saint: Dorothy Day's Radical Vision and Its Challenge for Our Times, and Blythe Randolph and John Loughery, co-authors of Dorothy Day: Dissenting Voice of the American Century. Register here to join us for what promises to be an engaging and enlightening conversation (and maybe win a free autographed book!).

For more information on any of the Guild’s upcoming free programs, please visit the events page on our website.

Events from Our Friends

We’re also very pleased to share some upcoming events featuring Dorothy being sponsored and organized by friends of the Guild and other Catholic organizations. First, Jesuit Media Lab’s Lenten “Fridays with Dorothy Day” group was so popular that they decided to add a Lenten Thursdays group as well! Hosted by Renée Roden, this group will meet on Thursdays, March 5th, 12th, 19th, and 26th at 12:00 PM Eastern/9:00 AM Pacific. All of the readings will be provided by PDF, and the weekly discussions will take place over Zoom. Register here to participate or email medialab@jesuits.org to join the waiting list for the Friday cohort if additional spots become available.

In New York, you still have time to register for the third annual Catholic Women Speak conference, hosted by Fordham University’s Campus Ministry, which will take place on Saturday, March 21st, from 12:00-5:15 PM, with Eucharist to follow at 5:30.

This year’s theme is "Cultivating the Fruits of Justice from the Seeds of Hope.” The one-day symposium will include lunch and a communion service, and will feature Martha Hennessy speaking on Dorothy as one of the two keynote addresses. Please register for this free event by March 15th.

In Rome, the local chapter of the Carmelite Ecclesial Movement (MEC), has already started hosting a series of Friday evening gatherings focused on the lives of saints and holy men and women. The “Portraits of Saints” series will feature Dorothy, presented by actress Carolina Zaccarini, on Friday, March 20th at 8:30 PM local time. The entire series will take place at the Basilica of Saint Teresa of Avila, Corso d'Italia 37, Rome.

For more information, please contact Teresa Gentiloni by email at teresagentiloni@gmail.com or roma@mec-carmel.org. The MEC is hosting talks on Dorothy in other locations throughout Italy as well! Please visit the MEC’s event page to find other locations in Lombardy, Veneto, Trento, and Sicily where the series, including Carolina’s presentation on Dorothy, will be traveling. 

Looking further ahead to the Easter season, the Franco Family Institute at the University of Notre Dame is hosting the first Dorothy Day and Thomas Merton Culture and the Public Good Symposium on Friday, April 10, 2026 at 2:30 PM Eastern.



The series is named for Dorothy and Thomas Merton as “two of the foremost socially engaged Catholic thinkers of the 20th century,” This year’s panel includes speakers Vauhini Vara, Shankar Vedantam, Jenny Odell, and Rainn Wilson, who will respond to the question, “How should we hold attention?” Register here for free tickets.

Dorothy in the News

We’re excited to share two new articles featuring Dorothy from L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper. Both are in Italian, so we recommend using Google translate to read them in English or another language. First, on February 7th, Federica Re David published “Quelle che hanno fatto la differenza” (“Those who made a difference”), highlighting seven Catholic laywomen who devoted themselves to the needs of the world, sometimes literally stepping into the breach and defending the lives and dignity of the poor and the oppressed with their own bodies. This article places Dorothy in the company of Simone Weil, Madeleine Delbrêl, Blessed Armida Barelli, Chiara Lubich, Adelaide Coari, and Tina Anselmi, seeing the significance of human labor as a common thread in the lives and careers of each of these twentieth century Catholic radicals and activists.

On February 23rd, Lorenzo Fazzini published “Pepite di un fiume carsico: La prefazione a «La pratica della presenza di Dio» di fratel Lorenzo scritta da Dorothy Day nel 1974” (“Nuggets from a karst river: The preface of ‘The Practice of the Presence of God,’ by Brother Lawrence, written by Dorothy Day in 1974”). The Practice of the Presence of God is a spiritual classic, recently republished in Italian with a foreword by Dorothy, which she wrote while living at Maryhouse in the last years of her life, helping to care for the homeless women of the Lower East Side.

Dorothy’s preface cites her many intellectual and spiritual influences, and notes the continuing relevance of the seventeenth-century Carmelite, Brother Lawrence, for contemporary Christians seeking to follow Christ in the course of their ordinary lives and labors. "The times of Friar Lawrence were no different from ours," she notes. 

"Saint Teresa of Avila, who lived through the time of the Inquisition, wrote that all times are dangerous. And just as St. Paul asked us to become another Christ, so Lawrence was another Christ, who lived in the presence of the Father at all times." 

You can read the whole article on page 10 of the February 23rd Issue of L’Osservatore Romano.

Reading and Viewing: New Documentary, A Long-Form Interview, and a Detective Novel!

French Catholic television channel KTO recently released a new hour-long documentary entitled Anarchistes chrétiens - Dieu comme seul maître (“Christian anarchists: God as sole master”). The film, which is directed by Guillaume Paqueville, traces the roots of Christian anarchism to figures like Dorothy, who refused to accommodate the proclamation of the Gospel to the capitalist, imperialist, and militaristic power structures of the present age. The film goes on to explore contemporary initiatives who claim this Catholic, anarchist heritage, including the Plowshares and Catholic Worker movements. The film is in French, but many of the documentary interviews are conducted in English and subtitled, so we highly recommend checking it out. Those of you who have spent time with the New York Catholic Worker community are guaranteed to recognize many familiar faces!

We’re also excited to share a long-form, archival interview about Dorothy over at CatholicWorker.org. In “A Conversation with Nina Polcyn Moore, 1986,” oral historian Rosalie Riegle explores the connection between Dorothy’s radicalism and the network of Catholic Worker communities serving the poor today. In this interview, Nina and Rosalie consider tensions in the movement related to family life, lay and female leadership, and the future of the Catholic Worker in the years following Dorothy’s death. Speaking here on responsibility and action, Nina reflected,

“There is no policy manual for any of this, you know. You come and you see what needs to be done, and you do it. There is no computer printout, no charts, no recipes. You just do what needs to be done. That, to me, is the joy and the richness of somebody like Dorothy and all the people who have done all these things.

It is the age of the laity, and I feel this has always been primarily emphasized in the Worker. A personal responsibility which gives people an opportunity to be, which they frequently get no place else. And I think Dorothy has always said we really don’t need to ask about any of these things. We just do it.”

Many thanks to Rosalie for this excellent and thought-provoking interview, and for our friends at the Dorothy Day/Catholic Worker Archives at Marquette University and CatholicWorker.org for making this transcript available!

Finally, we recently heard of a new work of fiction featuring Dorothy. Upstate New York author Robert Conner released his new mystery thriller, The Detective and Dorothy Day at the end of February. The jacket summary states that the novel, which is set in New York in the 1970s,

“follows Manhattan private investigator Sy Johnson, hired by a labor union to investigate the murder of upstate chemical tycoon Jack Williams… What begins as a straightforward murder inquiry soon reveals connections between five deaths and a system poisoned by greed and moral compromise.

Sy’s investigation brings him to the Catholic Worker farm in Tivoli, New York, where he encounters seventy-seven-year-old Dorothy Day, the famed writer, pacifist, and co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement. There and elsewhere he forms relationships which complicate the case and his own life, drawing him into deeper questions than just solving a crime.”

Robert lived at the Tivoli farm in 1974 and 1975, where he had the chance to meet and work alongside Dorothy.



While none of us from the Guild have had the chance to read the novel yet, we are always delighted to learn about these creative projects in art, music, and literature which engage Dorothy’s moral and spiritual witness in innovative and imaginative modes. If you get ahold of your own copy of The Detective and Dorothy Day, let us know what you think!

Other Canonization Causes of Note

Sister Thea Bowman’s cause for canonization is officially on its way to Rome! We were thrilled to hear how well-attended the closing mass for the diocesan phase of her cause was last month in Jackson, Mississippi.

We know that many of you who love and are inspired by Dorothy’s life and legacy also have strong devotions to Sister Thea; we are very proud to share the news that two of our cause’s biggest supporters, Brother Mickey McGrath and Dr. Anne Klejment, also contributed art and scholarly work to Sister Thea’s cause. Brother Mickey, who has created 47 separate pieces of art inspired by Sister Thea, also created this sketch of the liturgy which marked the closing of the first phase of her cause for sainthood last month.

In December of 2023, Anne Klejment was invited to join the historical commission for Sister Thea’s cause. Anne’s research and teaching as a professor emerita of history at the University of St. Thomas has focused on the social history of American Catholicism; in this context, she has published extensively on Dorothy’s life, journalistic career, and spirituality. Her own study of the U.S. Catholic Church, particularly the experience of Black Catholics amply prepared her for the archival research involved in preparing the documentation for Sister Thea’s cause. In a recent article for The Catholic Spirit, Anne said,

“As a historian, context is essential for understanding the past. Bishops in the Dicastery of the Causes of the Saints will read the positio, or position paper, prepared by the postulator, who reads all the documents and our reports. Sister Thea’s virtue will be more intelligible with historical context on race relations during her lifetime and spiritual influences, such as her immersion in Black American Christianity and later in Catholic spirituality.”

This whole article is a fascinating read for those interested in the nitty-gritty of these early stages of a canonization cause and we encourage those of you who have been involved in promoting Dorothy’s cause as well as Sister Thea’s to check it out! “Laity can play an important role in the canonization process, that is, if they choose to do so,” Anne said.

“Those who are officially on the path to sainthood proceed from servant of God to venerable, then with a verified miracle to blessed, and, with a second verified miracle to saint. Prayers of petition contribute greatly to the success of a cause.”

In addition, we were very pleased to hear that the cause for Adele Brice, the Belgian immigrant to whom Mary appeared as Our Lady of Champion in the Wisconsin woods in 1859, is moving forward. Adele was declared “Servant of God” on January 30th, meaning that the diocesan phase of her cause is now officially open. 

The Dorothy Day Guild has been invited to participate in a “Catholic Saints of America” event at the Our Lady of Champion Shrine in the first week of July, so stay tuned for more information!

Prayer Requests

This month, we would like to invite you to pray for a potential community garden project in Texas. The person who wrote to us met and was inspired by the Catholic Worker community in San Antonio and submitted the following prayer request, which has been lightly edited for clarity:

“I am asking for the intercession of Dorothy Day that I will be able to build a community garden here in Corpus Christi in order to demonstrate environmental sustainability and to donate the fruits of the earth to the homeless shelter. I pray that I will be able to inspire a community to collaborate together and help alleviate the needs of the poor by providing them with the crops from the garden. I am yet to work on the garden belonging to a church and see if I am able to maintain it. I pray for the sustainability to spread here in Corpus Christi and beyond.”

We know that this is exactly the kind of responsible, self-directed and community-focused initiative that Dorothy and Peter would have loved! Please join in asking Dorothy’s prayers for this potential work of the Green Revolution and for the many people whom it will serve.

A few words from Dorothy: Happy 100th Birthday, Tamar Day Hennessy

Today, March 4th, marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of Tamar Teresa Day Hennessy, Dorothy’s beloved daughter. Tamar’s birth was a transformative spiritual event for Dorothy, and her experience of motherhood was one of the most significant factors that set her on the path towards Christian faith and the founding of the Catholic Worker movement.



We love this tender image of mother and daughter in the days after Tamar’s birth by artist Sarah Fuller– it’s available as part of Sarah’s Catholic Worker print series on her Etsy store!

In the chapter “Family,” in part three of The Long Loneliness, Dorothy wrote about the lingering sadness of ending her relationship with Forster, Tamar’s father, following her conversion to Catholicism. “The sense of loss was there. It was a price I had paid. I was Abraham who had sacrificed Isaac. And yet I had Isaac. I had Tamar,” Dorothy said.

“She was, of course, everything to me. I have not even to this day ceased to look upon her with wonder. When I looked at her tiny, perfect hands and my own, already worn though I was only twenty-seven, I marveled at her newness. Tamar crowing on the beach, learning to walk on the sands. Tamar at three, meeting her father again, and saying to me resentfully, ‘That is my father, not your father’-- oh, cruel stab! Tamar singing, Tamar praying– ‘Does the Blessed Mother mind if I say my prayers standing on my head? And how can I pray when I have to keep laughing.’

Tamar growing up in community.”

Dorothy’s love for Tamar was boundless, and yet Tamar was perhaps the one person who sacrificed the most so that the Catholic Worker movement could come into its full flourishing. Tamar had to share her mother with the world. This could not have been easy for the girl who would become one of Peter Maurin’s first disciples and grow up to become the mother of nine children, raising them on a series of hardscrabble farms and developing a unique practice of hospitality to the young.

We are grateful for Tamar’s strength and endurance, and for the tireless care and support she offered to so many people, including to Dorothy at the end of her mother’s life. Today, on what would be her hundredth birthday, please join us in honoring Tamar and thanking her for sharing the gift of Dorothy with all of us.

In peace,

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