Pat was a draft resister during the Vietnam War, and was eventually sentenced to serve community service hours at the Catholic Worker houses of hospitality– a piece of situational irony which no doubt delighted Dorothy and his fellow Workers. Here, in this 1973 photograph by Bob Fitch, Dorothy and Pat are seated in conversation at St. Joseph House, the current Catholic Worker house of hospitality on First Street. 

Reflecting on his life at the Worker and friendship with Dorothy, Pat shared dozens of small, grace-inflected moments in the interviews, talks, and articles he offered over the years. “I remember once I was down at the front door of the Worker, working off my anxieties or something by cleaning. Sometimes we'd get loads of white shirts that nobody on the clothing line wanted because they'd get dirty so quickly,” he said in an oral history interview which was later published in Dorothy Day: Portraits by Those Who Knew Her. 

“So we had stores of white shirts, and I was just about to rip up this perfectly fine white shirt as a rag for cleaning Dorothy stopped me. She said, ‘You can't do that with that perfectly good shirt. Everything is sacramental.’ It stopped me short. That you really have to pay attention to everything.” (78)

Pat and Kathleen remained close to Dorothy after their marriage, particularly during the years when they lived next door to the Catholic Worker retreat cottage in the Spanish Camp beach community on Staten Island. Dorothy wrote frequently of their growing family, including their two children, Hannah and Justin, in her columns throughout the 1970s. In this photograph, taken by their friend Stanley Vishnewski, Dorothy is pictured with the Jordans’ daughter, Hannah, on Staten Island.

As Dorothy grew older and more physically frail, the Jordans helped care for her. In a 1988 interview with Rosalie Riegle, Kathleen remembered the time Dorothy shared with their family as a particular gift. “We were blessed to have the time with her out here on Staten Island,” Kathleen said. “With one baby and another on the way and spending day after day with this elderly woman on the beach. We miss her very much” (from Voices from the Catholic Worker, page 127).

Pat went on to become the managing editor of Commonweal, a role for which he was amply prepared by his years writing for and editing The Catholic Worker throughout the 1970s. Last year, in honor of Commonweal’s centennial, Pat wrote about the enduring connection between these two lay journals and the unique contributions both papers have made to Catholic political, social, and theological discourse across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Pat later published two edited volumes of Dorothy’s writing, including Hold Nothing Back, and Dorothy Day: Writings from Commonweal, and is also the author of Dorothy Day: Love in Action.

In addition to his work writing for and editing for the popular press, Pat also contributed to academic journals, where his personal relationship with Dorothy and his extensive knowledge of her writing helped a new generation of scholars understand this unique figure in the history of the American Church. Writing on liturgical aesthetics for the Yale ISM Review in 2018, Pat noted that Dorothy:

“had a highly attuned aesthetic sense, one that included an appreciation of both physical and natural beauty. This sense extended to the arts and music, particularly to orchestral works and opera. In the liturgy, she appreciated the sung psalms of Joseph Gelineau and invited the composer Mary Lou Williams to present her jazz Mass at a Catholic Worker peace conference. She loved the 10:30 Puerto Rican Mass at her local parish, she wrote in 1979, the year before she died, because ‘the entire congregation sings so heartily.’ She was particularly appreciative that the Vatican Council had ‘broken down barriers between the clergy and the laity.’”

In the decades after Dorothy’s death, Pat continued to offer his gifts as a writer and editor to her cause for canonization. Together with Robert Ellsberg, Pat wrote the official biography of Dorothy which was included in the materials sent to Rome in 2021 at the close of the diocesan phase of her cause– “the jewel of [the cause’s] historical commission,” according to our vice-postulator, George Horton, a close friend of Pat’s. Remarking on the importance of Dorothy’s canonization cause for the global Church in 2016, Pat said,

“The serious issues of the times themselves — refugees, poverty and inequality, racism, massive spending on wars and developing military technologies for future wars, capital punishment, torture, and prolonged incarcerations, etc. — are all issues on which Dorothy Day wrote forcefully and sought to ameliorate. That her canonization process has now reached this significant stage indicates Dorothy’s life will increasingly be given the recognition it deserves, first in the United States, then in Rome, and finally throughout the world.”

Pat served as a member of the Guild’s advisory board for many years, and gave frequent talks on Dorothy’s life and legacy of nonviolence, hospitality, and voluntary poverty.

At the Maryknoll Lay Missioners’ 2019 Dorothy Day Symposium, he shared a stage with his wife Kathleen, Robert Ellsberg, Kate Hennessy, and several others, and offered the following remarks:

“We have all met holiness in our lives. Over the years I've known and worked with a number of, if not saints, certainly saintly people, yet for me Dorothy stands in a league of her own. Not only was hers a singular holiness, but it was a radical holiness not only in terms of its mission and outreach, but in terms of its challenge to her times and place, and to ours.”

In recent years, Pat also assisted Dorothy’s canonization cause in other ways, attending events such as the commissioning of the Dorothy Day Staten Island ferry in 2022, where he greeted the ferry at St. George Terminal with Kathleen and other supporters. 

George Horton remembers Pat not only as a gifted writer, activist, and visionary–one of the original driving forces who first recognized Dorothy as a saint among us–but also as a friend. George noted that in conversation, Pat “always affirmed. Time with him was always fruitful. He was incredibly smart. But you always felt that something was coming to fruition.” Even in moments of disagreement over the years, George said, “I never felt the loss of his love…. He could keep his integrity while loving you. When I think of Pat, I think of living personalism. He embodied it, both he and Kathleen. He embodied personalism.”

George also spoke of Pat as a man of deep faith. “I remember standing next to him at Mass at the cathedral; I felt the depth of his prayer, the prayer of the mass. It affected me,” said George. “I loved standing next to him.” He continued,

“On a visit up to our house, he read “Ode to the Watermelon” [by Pablo Neruda] with such joy and embodiment. When I think of Pat, I think of that divine moment in the cathedral, and his humanity as he read that Neruda poem.”

That sense of the sacramental nature of our lives, the points at which the material world becomes a site of divine activity, is what Pat himself noticed in Dorothy as a young volunteer at St. Joseph’s House. Looking back on the Staten Island beach years later, Pat reflected,

“I got my life through Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker. Got my life. We so very often think about her. Our son Justin just loves to go down and fish and catch eels. I think of Dorothy telling us about being right out in back of our cottage with her brother John in a boat full of eels and it tipping over. And she writes in The Long Loneliness about the fellow who did the beach combing right below where we live…. She taught me how to see the beauty in this beach, and in everything. All these gifts . . . well, obviously the gift of our own family. We came from different parts of the country and happened to meet at the Catholic Worker. And now we happen to know these children [Hannah and Justin]. It's thanks to Dorothy and the Catholic Worker that any of these good things happened in our lives” (from Dorothy Day: Portraits by Those Who Knew Her, page 127-128).

Deo gratias, for the good gift of Pat’s life! We pray that God grant him eternal rest, and ask through Dorothy’s intercession that God would bring comfort to Kathleen, Hannah, Justin, and the many friends Pat leaves behind. A funeral mass for Pat will be celebrated at 11:00 AM on Saturday, October 18th, at Maryhouse (55 East 3rd Street, New York, New York 10003). 

Yours sincerely,

The Dorothy Day Guild