Archbishop Wester came to New York for the third meeting of states parties to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which took place from March 3rd-7th. Neither the United States nor Russia– the two countries with the largest nuclear arsenals in the world– are signatories to the treaty. As Archbishop Wester said to The Tablet, and Crux, “The countries without nuclear weapons can sign it, and that’s good because they’re committing not to ever develop nuclear weapons, but we have to get the countries that have them to get rid of them... You have to get the nuclear states to sign this treaty for it to have any real impact.”

In his homily, Archbishop Wester quoted Dorothy’s prophetic 1945 editorial, “We Go On Record: The Catholic Worker Response to Hiroshima,” written just days after the United States dropped atomic bombs on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing thousands of men, women, and children. Reflecting on Dorothy’s words, Archbishop Wester told the gathered congregation,

“For her to write that brutally honest and countercultural article that cut to the heart of the matter took great courage. It also meant that she possessed the truth.

I believe we see the same reality in the Beatitudes that Matthew’s Gospel just proclaimed. Poverty, meekness, mourning, mercy, purity of heart, persecution were not seen really as desirable in the days of Jesus, and certainly not peacekeeping. No: power, vanquishing the enemy, military might, political influence, riches, superiority over others — these were the goals of a happy life, of a blessed life.

And yet Jesus was speaking of a higher truth. He had the courage to speak the truth…

For God is love, St. John says quite clearly, quite simply. God is love. Love disarms us. It calls us to surrender our egos, to lay aside our need to control and to be powerful and to be a military might.That was the vision of Dorothy Day, that love is the only solution to our problems today. The love of God, the love of neighbor, and the love of creation. Those who know this are fortunate. And those whose mourning reminds them of it are blessed.

Love is the fundamental, absolute, solitary motivation that animates our vision of a world without nuclear weapons.”

The following morning, on Ash Wednesday, hundreds of advocates gathered for the culmination of a week of prayer, protest, and acts of civil disobedience. Activists gathered for a prayer vigil at the Isaiah Wall outside the United Nations, where Archbishop Wester distributed ashes and blessed the participants, seventeen of whom would be arrested shortly afterwards.

Before tracing the sign of the cross on each person’s forehead, Bishop Wester said to the gathered assembly,

“You’re doing something about it by lending your voices, your bodies, your presence to this very important cause of peace. So I just want you to know that we’ve been praying for all of us that are involved, whatever your organization is, and we thank you. Thank you for your witness.”

Many thanks to Hideko Otake for filming the distribution of ashes and the action, including the arrests, and for her wonderful photographs, which you can view in this article for the Catholic Worker movement website, “Catholic Workers Join Global Witness for Nuclear Abolition at U.N Conference.”

You can view an album of photos from the liturgy on our Guild Facebook page, and you can watch a full recording of the mass and read the text of Archbishop Wester’s homily and his prayer before the distribution of ashes the following morning on the Catholic Worker movement website.

Last week, Magdalena Muñoz Pizzulic and Colleen McLinden visited five classes at Catholic Central high school in Detroit to speak about the Catholic Worker, their work on the housing team for the New Day Intake Center, and Dorothy’s canonization cause.

Colin Whitehead, the Catholic Central theology teacher who organized their visit, structures his courses around the Catholic social tradition as a guiding framework. The students had studied Dorothy at the beginning of the semester and learned about the Catholic Worker movement as a lived expression of Catholic social teaching. 

Magdalena remarked that the students were very eager to learn and asked great practical questions. They had a strong sense of the dignity of the poor, but were also very self-aware about the degree to which their own upbringings had insulated them from exposure to homelessness and poverty– many of them asked for advice on how to approach unhoused neighbors in their city and speak with them as friends. Magdalena noted the importance of teaching the Catholic social tradition as the Church’s program for how to live in solidarity with the poor and expressed how good it was to see young educators like Colin including Dorothy in their courses as an exemplar of how Catholic social teaching might be lived out in practice.

The Dorothy Day Guild regularly provides speakers to high school or college classes and parish groups who are interested in engaging with Dorothy’s life and her legacy of hospitality, nonviolence, and voluntary poverty. If you are interested in bringing someone to talk with you group, please reach out to our speakers’ bureau.

We have now hosted the first of our spring walking pilgrimages! Enormous thanks to our friends at Maryhouse and St. Joseph House for hosting our pilgrims from St. Ignatius Parish last weekend.

Over the course of the next month and a half, we have pilgrimages scheduled for members of Holy Family Parish, St. Francis Xavier Parish, and Pax Christi. 

To respect the ongoing hospitality work that goes on at Maryhouse and St. Joseph house, we have been trying to keep the pilgrimage groups on the smaller side; however, we have a few open spots on our upcoming Monday, March 31st pilgrimage! If you are interested in joining the group from Holy Family Parish on March 31st, from 2:00-4:30 PM, please register using the form on our website (just choose “March 31st” on the drop-down menu). If you are interested in arranging a pilgrimage for your school, parish, or community group, please contact us. We would love to accompany you as you and your community walk in Dorothy’s footsteps.

Upcoming Guild events:

Our online Lenten book club is underway! This year, Robert Ellsberg is leading us through a five-week guided reading of Dorothy Day: Spiritual Writings, his latest anthology of Dorothy’s writing. For the past two Sunday evenings, our group has met for a brief presentation from Robert and time for discussion and reflection. Our book club has three more meetings this season, and we’d love to have you join us! Our subsequent meetings will cover the following chapters:

March 23rd: Chapter 5: “The Little Way” and Chapter 6: “The Practice of the Presence of God”

March 30th: Chapter 7: “Love is the Measure”, Chapter 8: “Spiritual Counsel,” and Chapter 9: “The Duty of Delight”

April 6th: Chapter 10: “Making Peace,” Chapter 11: “Revolution of the Heart,” and the postscript

Each meeting takes place from 7:30-8:30 PM Eastern (6:30-7:30 PM Central) over Zoom. Please register here to receive the Zoom link for our next meeting.

We are also eagerly anticipating our first-ever Dorothy Day Symposium on March 29th! We’re very excited to share the finalized schedule with you in advance– we have some wonderful roundtables planned that you definitely will not want to miss!

This event, “Dorothy Day: Practices of Peace in the Year of Jubilee” technically begins the night before, on March 28th at the Maryhouse Friday Night Meeting (8:00 PM). Kevin Ahern and I are both looking forward to presenting on Dorothy and the Jubilee Year that Pope Francis announced last spring. Maryhouse is located at 55 East Third Street in New York; you can view the complete schedule of Friday Night Meetings on the New York Catholic Worker community’s Instagram page.

Registration for the entire Dorothy Day Symposium is still open, for both online and in-person participation, but we hope to get the catering order in by the end of the week, so please don’t delay! We would love to have you join us for this special day of conversation, clarification of thought, worship, and time together in community.

Finally, we are so excited about the upcoming performance of Haunted by God: The Life of Dorothy Day, which we are co-sponsoring on Friday, April 4th at 7:00 PM Eastern at Our Lady of the Road in South Bend, IN. Our Lady of the Road is the drop-in and community center run by our St. Peter Claver Catholic Worker community and is located at 744 South Main Street in South Bend. Enormous thanks from all of us at the Dorothy Day Guild to the St. Peter Claver Catholic Worker community and the College of Arts and Letters at the University of Notre Dame for helping bring this play to South Bend for the first time! This free event will feature a performance by artist and playwright Lisa Wagner-Carollo and a dessert reception!

For more information on any of our upcoming events, please visit our website. We’re looking forward to continuing to develop educational programming, opportunities for prayer and service, and other events which introduce newcomers to Dorothy’s life and legacy of voluntary poverty, nonviolence, and hospitality, and which help all of us continue to put those values into practice in our own lives. If you have any suggestions for events you’d like to see, please let us know! We hope to see you at one of our upcoming programs!



Other upcoming opportunities:

On March 23rd at 3:00 PM Eastern, Morehead State Public Radio is hosting a radio special on Dorothy as part of their series for Women’s History Month. For those outside of Kentucky, you can tune in to stream David Freudberg’s “Humankind: The Life of Dorothy Day” online on the station website.

We are very pleased to share that on Laetare Sunday (March 30th), Robert Ellsberg will be awarded The Loyola Medal at the 11:00 AM Mass at St. Ignatius Loyola parish. The parish community at St. Ignatius annually awards the Loyola Medal "to a distinguished Catholic who has exemplified the characteristics of St. Ignatius Loyola in his or her profession." St. Ignatius Loyola parish is located at 980 Park Avenue in New York City. For more information on how to live stream (and to also subsequently view a recording of) that Mass, please visit the parish's website.

As a reminder, Robert will also be giving a talk for the St. Ignatius 2025 lecture series, “Pilgrims of Hope,” on Monday March 31st at 7:00 PM. Robert’s talk, “The Long Pilgrimage of Dorothy Day,” will reflect on Dorothy’s long life "on pilgrimage," and the way her faith was tested and refined by ordinary life in her community and family and the challenges of her own time and context. All lectures in the series are held in Wallace Hall (again, at 980 Park Avenue in New York City).

For those who are unable to attend in-person, we are hoping to record or livestream this lecture! We will keep you posted once we have more details, so stay tuned!

Last year, our Dorothy Day Guild Lenten book club read through The Long Loneliness together. If you missed out last year, or you are looking for a reflection group to revisit this classic text with in a new season of your own life, the “Dorothy Day Catholic Women” group on Instagram is hosting a read-along this Lent. This online community was started by a small group of Notre Dame alumni who were inspired by Dorothy’s witness. They’ve posted a suggested reading schedule on their Instagram page and have a Whatsapp chat that you can join for book discussion.

We love hearing about other groups who are organizing creative projects focused on Dorothy’s life and legacy, so if you or someone you know is hosting something similar, please reach out to us so we can share your event with our network!

Many of us got to experience Kristi Pfister’s incredible art installation, Radical Action: Tracing Dorothy Day when it was on display at the Staten Island Arts gallery or at Manhattan University’s O’Malley Library last year. We are very pleased to announce that Radical Action is currently being exhibited at Iona University’s Chapman Gallery from now until April 13th.

Kristi’s installation combines marble mosaics, suspended fabric columns, and multimedia drawings and paintings presenting different perspectives of Dorothy as activist, contemplative, and pillar of spiritual strength. Many thanks to our friends Jim Robinson and Liam Myers for working with Kristi to bring this exhibition to Iona. If you haven’t yet had a chance to spend time with Dorothy in this installation yet, we highly recommend a visit over the course of the next month.

The Brother Kenneth Chapman Gallery is located on the campus of Iona University at 665 North Avenue, New Rochelle, NY 10801. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday from 12:30 to 5:00 PM each day, and admission to the exhibit is free.

Next month, on Tuesday, April 15th at 7:00 PM, filmmaker Martin Doblmeier will deliver the annual Yoder Public Affairs lecture at Goshen College. Martin is the founder of Journey Films, a documentary film and television production company focused on faith and spirituality, and is the creator of the film Revolution of the Heart: The Dorothy Day Story. His lecture will focus on his “Prophetic Voices” series, which chronicles the lives of five 20th-century Catholic, Jewish, and Protestant faith leaders, including Dorothy.

The Yoder Public Affairs lecture is free to attend and will take place in the Umble Center at Goshen College, which is located at 1700 S Main St, Goshen, IN. 

Finally, this summer, Martha Hennessy will be offering a retreat on Dorothy at Pyramid Life Center in Paradox, NY from July 21st-23rd. Registration is open for this special midweek opportunity for prayer and reflection on the question “How are we called to live life as a Catholic in America?” Pyramid Life Center is a beautiful place, and Martha is a wonderful retreat leader– you absolutely don’t want to miss this!

Reading recommendations:

We have a few new articles and books for you to check out this month! First, we have recently learned of an exciting new project coming out of St. Mary of Bethany Parish, an ecumenical Eucharistic community grounded in the Anglican tradition. Reverend Danny Bryant and members of the St. Mary of Bethany community have announced the founding of “The Order of Berrigan and Day,” a “shared way of life committed to welcoming, listening, and co-laboring as we seek creative non-violence and non-capitalistic communion for the life of the world based in the lives and work of Daniel Berrigan, SJ and Dorothy Day.” The Order will officially begin on May 1st of this year, the 92nd anniversary of the founding of the Catholic Worker movement. Members of the Order, which is open to all, regardless of their faith commitment or membership in a particular church or denomination, commit to spiritual practices including daily prayer and silence and the works of mercy. 

We are absolutely thrilled to see how Dorothy is inspiring creative new expressions of spirituality in the wider Christian family! To learn more about the Order of Berrigan and Day, check out the St. Mary of Bethany Parish Substack, Stubborn Mercy, where you can find the announcement of the Order and information about how you can support their mission.

Earlier this winter, Stephen Adubato, who authors the Substack Cracks in Postmodernity gave a Friday Night Meeting at Maryhouse. His most recent talk, "The Duty of Seeking Delight in our Postmodern Culture," drew a great crowd, as have other events he has hosted in collaboration with the New York Catholic Worker community (as you can see below in the photograph he shared!).

In his reflections on the talk, Adubato writes about the necessity of joy for sustaining the rigorous life of activism Dorothy both before and after her conversion to Catholicism and the founding of the Catholic Worker. “Dorothy was not the kind of prophet who is overly self-serious,” he writes. “She was well aware of her flaws and was not afraid to acknowledge them…and she also recognized that her prophetic mission had to be fueled by her investment in prayer as well as in the arts and literature.” 

The ability to seek joy in the midst of struggle, to labor for justice without taking oneself too seriously, is an undervalued expression of the virtue of humility. “If we don’t know how to poke fun at ourselves, we won’t know how to be humble. And if we don’t know how to be humble, we won’t be able to allow God to enter into our lives,” writes Adubato. Contemplating Dorothy’s commitment to “the duty of delight” can help us engage in some fresh clarification of thought this year during Lent– may God help all of us work with good humor and playfulness in building the new society in the shell of the old!

If you’re looking for some additional Lenten reading, James Keane’s new book from Orbis Press was recently reviewed in The Tablet.

Published last year, Reading Culture Through Catholic Eyes: 50 Writers, Thinkers, and Firebrands Who Challenge and Change Us includes a section on Dorothy. This anthology compiles fifty columns that Keane has written over the years for various publications. Keane brings a depth of theological knowledge and a longstanding engagement with spirituality to cultural and literary topics, elevating them far above the shallow, polarized discourse that often dominates these conversations, so we know this book will be an excellent edition to your reading list!

In the most recent issue of U.S. Catholic, Rebecca Randall has published a thoughtful article which contextualizes Dorothy and the Catholic Worker movement in light of societal trends impacting Christian intentional communities. In “Intentional communities are changing to meet the times,” Randall interviews members of L’Arche, Reba’s Place, and the Catholic Worker to discuss practical issues that these communities are facing in terms of membership, labor and finances, and the ongoing life of a movement after the death of its founder. Speaking with Randall on precarity at the Catholic Worker, Brian Terrell acknowledges that this reality is in the movement’s DNA, part and parcel to Dorothy’s legacy of voluntary poverty. “The reason why [the Catholic Worker movement] continues to exist is that it doesn’t try to persist,” he says. “It’s OK for us to be scrambling for money or be in debt. That’s our vocation. Dorothy talked about precarity as being a goal, not something to be concerned about or fixed on.”

Ana Gonzalez-Lane, a parishioner at St. Ignatius Church in San Francisco wrote a brief introduction to Dorothy’s life and spirituality for the members of her parish community in honor of Women’s History Month. Gonzalez-Lane notes Dorothy’s connection to Hispanic-American communities through her solidarity with the United Farm Workers and writes that 

“Dorothy Day’s lifelong devotion to the oppressed aligns with the core feminist principles of pushing against the hierarchy and fighting for the rights of the marginalized. Her lifelong work in providing aid to impoverished communities and her devotion to egalitarian Catholic values makes her an ideal role model and inspiration for us in these troubled times.”

Finally, David Carlson recently published a short editorial considering Dorothy’s legacy in the Franklin, Indiana Daily Journal. In “How long does fame last?” Carlson considers narratives and cultural memory, asking what stories we tell now, and what stories from the present will persist into the future. Politicians, celebrities, and athletes might be remembered for a generation or two after their deaths, but Carlson notes, our memory of the lives of holy men and women “survives centuries and millennia, even though many of these saints were ignored by their contemporaries.” Speaking on Dorothy, he writes,

“Like Mother Theresa, Dorothy Day lived with the poor and fought for their dignity, but Day was a rabble-rouser, not a nun…Yes, she subsequently had a conversion to Christianity, but Day never deviated from her conviction that anyone following Christ’s example should work harder than the Communists for the rights of the poor and the dispossessed.”

These last two are short pieces, but we encourage you to check them out– brief reflections like Carlson’s and Gonzalez-Lane’s are important for Dorothy’s canonization cause, as they indicate how members of the Church and members of society far beyond Dorothy’s native New York are thinking and praying with her, and how her ongoing legacy informs their own ways of living in the world.

Prayer Requests:

This month we have a few urgent intercessory requests to share with you; we ask that you include each of these individuals and their intentions in your prayers.

First, for the Holy Father, Pope Francis, who has now been in the hospital for a month. We know that Pope Francis has been holding all of us in prayer during this difficult time in his own life: as his spiritual children, it’s now our turn to offer him the support of our intercession. May God grant him a full recovery and sustain and comfort those who are caring for him. Pope Francis has a deep love for Dorothy and her witness to the Gospel. He has been a great support to her cause for canonization, and so we ask Dorothy to uphold the Holy Father’s needs before God this season.

Three additional requests came in from friends and members of the Guild– please remember these individuals and their loved ones in your prayers over the coming weeks:

1. Colene in the Bronx is in need of gifts of wisdom, discernment, and consolation.
2. A woman in Philadelphia, who asked to remain anonymous, has asked for prayers for her husband’s spiritual well-being.
3. Finally, the niece of a long-time Guild member is struggling with brain cancer that is no longer responding to treatment. Through Dorothy’s intercession, please ask God to grant a miracle of healing for her and her family.

Thank you all so much for your commitment to undertaking the spiritual work of mercy of intercessory prayer. If you or a loved one is in need of prayer, please reach out to us to be added to the Dorothy Day Guild’s prayer intentions, and if you feel that you’ve received some response to prayers made through Dorothy’s intercession, no matter how small, let us know. 

A few words from Dorothy:

In the spring of 1967, Dorothy and her community were still living scattered among several apartments close to the old Catholic Worker house on Chrystie Street, running the newspaper and soup line while dreaming of purchasing and repairing a building large enough to both offer daytime hospitality and house the entire community under one roof.

The following year, they purchased St. Joseph House on First Street in New York, one of the two houses where the New York Catholic Worker community still resides. In the 1967 March-April issue of the newspaper, Dorothy published her annual Spring Appeal, asking readers for help to continue their work of hospitality. She writes,

“I think most of us wish to be poor, to simplify our lives, to throw out the trash and make more room for the good – to put off the old man and put on the new – to be new creatures, as St. Paul said. It’s the essence of Spring that it makes all things new, though there is not much suggestion of Spring on this March snowy day that I write. But none of us wish to be destitute. And it is the destitute who come to us day after day for help. “Deal your bread to the hungry and take those without shelter into your house,” we are told at the beginning of Lent. That has meant that we have grown into a community of sorts, and somehow or other the Lord has blessed us and sent us what we needed over the years. But He told us to ask. “Ask and you shall receive, seek and you shall find, knock and it shall be opened to you.” I love those words and recommend them to all… Someone said once, “You are certainly a success in your voluntary poverty. You have managed to maintain it for these many years.” But again I repeat, it is not destitution, but a sharing which the Lord Jesus enables us to do because He continues to multiply the Loaves and Fishes for us, day after day. What need of foundation funds, or government funds, to do the work we do? St. Hilary commented once, “The less we have of Caesar’s the less we will have to render to Caesar.” And Jesus Himself said, “Your Heavenly Father knows you have need of these things,” food and shelter, and the means to keep on doing the work He has given us to do, the corporal and spiritual works of mercy.”

Whether or not we are engaged in the same kind of work that Dorothy was, we can all recognize the desire she expresses to simplify our lives, to clear out the clutter and become a new creation, especially now in the Lenten season. For many of us, Lent is an opportunity for some spiritual “spring cleaning,” a time when we examine what we have been holding onto and what we can let go, a time when we scrub out the dark and forgotten corners of our hearts and open the windows to let in some light and fresh air. The discipline of voluntary poverty enabled Dorothy to dispense with unnecessary distractions in favor of discipleship: It was a way of making room for Christ. 

For Dorothy, voluntary poverty and hospitality were closely linked; through the embrace of economic precarity, she and her community learned to both rely on God’s unfailing provision and to welcome Christ in the poor. Dorothy trusted in Providence because every day at the Catholic Worker, she saw how God “continues to multiply the Loaves and Fishes.” God has called each of us to undertake the spiritual and corporal works of mercy in our own lives and communities, and so we can trust that He will give us the means to carry them out. The traditional Lenten practices of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving nudge us towards the same embrace of voluntary poverty that Dorothy undertook in imitation of Christ. We hope that as we journey together through Lent, you will feel Dorothy’s intercession sustaining you, and that you likewise have the chance to participate in God’s ongoing miracle of provision in the Loaves and Fishes he multiplies for the poor.

In peace,

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