Born on January 16th, 1942 to a Catholic Worker family in Ohio, she joined the New York Catholic Worker community at twenty-one and met and married her husband, Thomas Charles Cornell, shortly after. 

In her memoir, A Priceless View: My Spiritual Homecoming, Monica and Tom’s daughter, Deirdre, shared some memories of her parents’ early formation at the Worker and how the context of the community that Dorothy founded shaped her family’s life and practice of faith over many decades:

"Throughout those years, my parents used to take us on visits to see Dorothy Day. They had met, literally, over a soup pot at the Catholic Worker; their love came into being in the shelters, clothing rooms, and soup kitchens of New York's Lower East side. Once in a while, on days they knew she would be home at the hospitality house, we would drive down to see the woman who had founded the Catholic Worker.

My mother arrived at the community in New York City after a childhood of reading the movement's newspaper, The Catholic Worker. My parents courted under Dorothy's watchful eye. She probably felt particularly responsible since she knew my mother's parents, who had helped her start a hospitality house in Cleveland before my mother was born… My parents laugh about how one night she accosted my father, coming out of the women's apartment where my mother stayed. Confronting him with a glare as she blocked his path in the hallway, she demanded, ‘Young man, are your intentions honorable?’" (46-47)

Dorothy needn’t have worried: Tom Cornell and Monica Ribar were married on July 16th, 1964. In a 1988 interview with Rosalie Riegle, Monica said that they spent $96 on their wedding, including $17 on a dress. A wedding dress had been donated to the Catholic Worker, and Monica tried it on, but it did not fit, she recalled.

The Cornells often referred to Dorothy as their matchmaker, and she reported on their wedding for her July/August 1964 “On Pilgrimage” column, noting with pride that this was “the second second-generation wedding to take place this summer,” as “Monica Ribar’s mother was one of two sisters, Monica Durkin and Carlotta Ribar, who helped Jack English start and keep going one of the two Cleveland Houses of Hospitality.”

Monica and Tom moved into an apartment on Prince Street, just a short walk from the current home of the New York Catholic Worker community, and continued to assist with the work of hospitality, peace activism, and publishing the newspaper. Together, they opened a house of hospitality in Waterbury, Connecticut and then raised their children in Newburgh, NY. During this time, while Tom worked for the Fellowship of Reconciliation, an international peace organization, Monica maintained their home as a little beachhead of hospitality on the Hudson River. Tom and Monica’s Christ-room became the place where dozens of guests, including a foster child, exchange students, a political refugee from Pinochet’s Chile, peace movement friends, and Catholic Workers found safety, welcome, and belonging during those years. 

Later, the Cornells took on the responsibility of running the Peter Maurin Catholic Worker farm in Marlboro, NY, where they lived together for thirty years. After Tom’s death in 2022, Monica stayed on at the farm, caring for formerly homeless guests and continuing to open her home to additional visitors even in her final years. Her warmth and hospitality were legendary. Deirdre writes, 

"Growing up, my parents' belonging in the Catholic Worker movement provided a backdrop as constant as the mountains and river beyond the limits of the Bluff. In the same way my brother and I took in the panorama that gave place to our days, our parents' commitment formed the context of our lives... My father's gregarious personality and my mother's gourmet cooking attracted visitors to our house overlooking the Bluff. On weekends my father was home, he often brought guests from his international peace organization with him. People from various parts of the country, or from different countries, found respite at this corner of the Hudson. Sometimes Catholic Workers exchanged a few days of their hectic work at soup kitchens or shelters for my parents' genteel hospitality. Housed in the extra attic bedroom, they would spend a day or two enjoying the panorama, eating homemade bread and salad nicoise prepared by my mother and talking endlessly about matters related to the peace movement. To this day I run across people who remember meals and conversations on our front porch." (48-49)

Dorothy took great pride in the fact that Monica was a second-generation Catholic Worker, who had been shaped by her parents’ experiences in Cleveland, and her connection to the larger movement through the newspaper and had then gone on to take up the work of hospitality and peacemaking as an adult.

Throughout the many decades of raising her family, running Catholic Worker houses and farms, tending her garden, and offering the works of mercy, Monica was a true disciple of the lay apostolate. She embodied the spirit of Catholic Action, enacting her Christian vocation “in the world,” teaching those around her to become peacemakers and to “live lightly on the land,” as she said to her friend Jane Sammon in a 2001 interview for The Catholic Worker.

Monica and Tom lived out the values of Gospel nonviolence and voluntary poverty every day of their lives. “I continue to think that Peter and Dorothy’s vision could save the world,” she told Rosalie Riegle in the 1988 interview. “It still makes sense. It’s over 50 years old and we still ask people to be ‘go-givers instead of go-getters,’ we can still say, as Peter says, we’re sitting on the dynamite; cooperation instead of competition: all that makes sense.”

Through God’s grace and the power of this witness, they passed their vocation on to a third generation: their son, Tommy, now manages the Peter Maurin Farm, and their daughter, Deirdre, serves as vice-chair of the Dorothy Day Guild and with her husband Kenney works in solidarity with migrant families in the Hudson Valley.

Monica Cornell was a woman of valor, whose life was shaped by and oriented towards the promise of the resurrection and our common membership in Christ’s body. We are deeply grateful for her decades of service to the peace movement and the poor, and for the wisdom and energy she lent to Dorothy’s cause for canonization. All of us miss her terribly, but as her friend Joanne Kennedy of the New York Catholic Worker community noted last week, we now have a powerful intercessor in heaven. Monica Cornell, pray for us!

Visitation for Monica took place on Friday, August 15, from 2:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m. and from 6:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. at DiDonato Funeral Home, 1290 Route 9W in Marlboro. A funeral Mass was offered on Saturday, August 16, at 11:00 a.m. at St. Mary’s Catholic Church, 1209 Route 9W, also in Marlboro, followed by interment at St. Mary’s Cemetery.

Please keep Monica and the Cornell family in your prayers as we commend her to Christ and thank God for the witness of her life. Condolences may be sent to the Peter Maurin Farm 41 Cemetery Road, Marlboro, NY.

-The Dorothy Day Guild