Past Events

Our Spanish-language summer book club, led by 2025 Dorothy Day Graduate Research Fellow Magdalena Muñoz Pizzulic, read and discussed Dorothy's first autobiography, Mi conversión: De Union Square a Roma (From Union Square to Rome) over the course of four sessions. 

This reading group provided a space for shared reading and reflection and an opportunity for participants to learn more about Dorothy, her motivations, and what inspired her radical option in the Church, particularly in the Latin American context.

Our English-language summer book club, led by 2024 Dorothy Day Graduate Research Fellow Graceann Beckett, read and discussed The Long Loneliness over the course of six Sunday evenings.

Each of these sessions began with prayer and  included context and background material to help participants enter more deeply into the relationships, texts, and historical moments which shaped Dorothy, and also included  plenty of time for questions and open conversation.

Dorothy and Pope Francis both left our Church, and our world, with a shared legacy of peacemaking, voluntary poverty, love for creation, and care for the poor. In short, they left us with the gift of hope. 

This webinar, which featured panelists Robert Ellsberg, Dr. Margaret Pfeil, Deirdre Cornell, and Magdalena Muñoz Pizzulic, and moderator Dr. Kevin Ahern, took place just days after we welcomed Pope Leo XIV as the new shepherd for our Church. Each of our speakers brought a great depth of knowledge of Dorothy and the Catholic Worker movement as well as particular expertise on the theological and pastoral priorities which characterized Francis' pontificate. 

Our panelists’ discussion touched on not just points of convergence between Dorothy and Francis, but on what Pope Leo’s election could mean for our global Church and for the future of Dorothy’s canonization cause. What might the election of the first Pope from the United States mean for this future (we hope!) American saint? 

We were so excited to bring Lisa Wagner-Carollo's acclaimed play to South Bend! 

"Haunted by God" is a dramatic portrait of Dorothy as the co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement. From 1933 until her death in 1980, Dorothy spent 47 years caring for the poor and leading the Catholic Church to a more active concern for the needy in U.S. society. How did Dorothy become such a towering figure of conscience and a saint for our time?

This one-woman play, featuring Still Point Theatre Founder/Artistic Director Lisa Wagner-Carollo, follows Dorothy from her days as a 17 year-old Greenwich Village bohemian through her later years as a tireless champion of social justice. "Haunted by God: The Life of Dorothy Day" has been touring the U.S. since May of 1990, and has also been presented internationally at the Pax Christi International Conference in Assisi, Italy in 1995, and at the 1999 Parliament of World Religions in Cape Town, South Africa.

Many thanks to the College of Arts and Letters at the University of Notre Dame for their co-sponsorship of this event, and to the South Bend Catholic Worker community for welcoming us to Our Lady of the Road! To learn how you can bring Haunted by God: The Life of Dorothy Day to your own community, visit the Still Point Theatre website.

Robert Ellsberg  reflected on Day's long life "on pilgrimage," and the way her faith was tested by daily life and the challenges of history.

About the Presenter:

Robert Ellsberg, the publisher of Orbis Books, worked with Dorothy Day for the last five years of her life, serving for two years as managing editor of The Catholic Worker. He has spent much of his life promoting her life and legacy, including editing six volumes of her writings (most recently, Dorothy Day: Spiritual Writings.) 

He is well-known for his many books on saints and holiness, including All Saints: Daily Reflections on Saints, Prophets, and Witnesses for Our Time, A Living Gospel, and Blessed Among Us, drawn his reflections for "Give Us This Day.

In his announcement of the upcoming 2025 Jubilee Year of Hope, Pope Francis called the faithful to read the signs of the times and to search amongst them for signs of hope. The Holy Father tells us that the first of these must be “the desire for peace in our world, which once more finds itself immersed in the tragedy of war…May the Jubilee remind us that those who are peacemakers will be called ‘children of God’ (Mt 5:9). The need for peace challenges us all, and demands that concrete steps be taken.” Likewise, Pope Francis asks the wider Christian community to offer real signs of hope to the poor at home and across the world whose material needs go unmet. In the life and legacy of Dorothy Day, we read these signs.

This symposium included scholars at every level and peace practitioners whose life and work have been influenced by Dorothy Day’s legacy gathering for a day of shared conversation, clarification of thought, prayer, and fellowship.

This year, Dorothy Day Guild board member and editor in chief of Orbis Books, Robert Ellsberg, hosted our online reading group over the course of five Sundays in Lent. During our time together, we worked through Robert's newest edited volume of Dorothy's work, entitled Dorothy Day: Spiritual Writings. This collection,

"explores the key themes that underlay [Dorothy's} spirituality, beginning with the call to see Christ in the poor. Day’s spirituality was deeply influenced by the “Little Way” of St. Thérèse of Lisieux, which showed the path to holiness in the daily exercise of patience, charity, and forgiveness. Dorothy extended this principle to the social dimension, the significance of the little protests we make or fail to make. She believed that each act of love, each witness for peace, increases the balance of love and peace in the world."

If you do not yet have your own copy of Dorothy Day: Spiritual Writings, you can purchase a copy through Orbis Books.

We are deeply grateful that Archbishop John Wester was again able to join us in New York to celebrate a Mass for the Abolition of Nuclear Weapons on Tuesday, March 4th at 6:00 pm. Archbishop Wester is coming to New York for the third meeting of states parties to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which will took place from March 3rd-7th. 

The Dorothy Day Guild was honored to be a co-sponsor of this event, along with several other Catholic peace groups in the Northeastern United States.Thank you for joining us in prayer and action for a world free from nuclear weapons!

In addition to being a significant month for those who have a devotion to or interest in Dorothy, November also marks Black Catholic History Month in the United States. The Dorothy Day Guild has hoped for some time to more deeply engage with the legacy of holiness present in the Black Catholic Church in this country. To that end, we were delighted to host a webinar entitled “Dorothy Day and the Saintly Six” on Thursday, November 14th at 7:00 PM Eastern.

This event featured an honest, critical, and welcoming conversation on how Dorothy Day and the six Black American Catholics whose causes for canonization are open can offer us a vision of politically-engaged holiness in our present time. Our panelists, Dr. Kim Harris, Deacon Mel Tardy, Joanne Kennedy, and Dr. Andrew Prevot, are each living out this vision in their scholarship, journalism, teaching, and ministry, and we were very grateful for their insightful comments.

This panel was introduced by Graceann Beckett, former research fellow at the Dorothy Day Guild, and moderated by Dorothy Day Guild co-chair Dr. Kevin Ahern. If you were unable to take part in the live discussion, please check out the recording on our YouTube channel.

The Dorothy Day Guild co-sponsored the Joshua Casteel Memorial Peace Dinner on Tuesday evening, November 12th as the US Catholic Bishops gathered for their annual plenary session. 

We are so honored to have been invited by our friends at the Catholic Peace Fellowship to collaborate on this event, which has taken place annually since 2013. Fr. Seóirse Murray, one of the founding organizers of the Peace Dinner, said that the original impetus for this event was the USCCB’s unanimous endorsement of Dorothy’s cause for canonization in 2012 coupled with a desire to create a space where the bishops could gather to reflect together on the commitments which arose in Dorothy’s life from her reception of the Gospel. We are very grateful to Bishop John Michael Botean and Bishop John Stowe for spending the evening with us during a busy week of meeting!

Dorothy’s commitment to pacifism preceded her conversion to the Catholic faith, yet it was within the Church that this deeply-held conviction found fertile soil in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus and flourished. 

The Peace Dinner is named in honor of Joshua Casteel, a former US Army interrogator who became a conscientious objector and a pacifist during the Iraq War. During the period where he was wrestling with the conflicting demands of conscience and military service, he wrote a series of emails to his friends and family which were later published as a book, Letters from Abu Ghraib. After leaving the army, he became active in the peace movement and traveled to the Vatican in 2007 as part of a delegation invited to discuss the theory of just war and the place of conscientious objection with Pope Benedict XVI and other Vatican officials. Like Dorothy, he was a writer and a convert to Catholicism.

In the spirit of Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin's program of roundtable discussions, the Dorothy Day Guild hosted an Easter webinar on the role of art and artists in the Catholic Worker movement. Featuring a conversation with visual artists Sarah Fuller, Becky McIntyre, and Rachel Mills, this event explored creativity in the works of mercy, the Catholic Worker printmaking tradition, and the intersection of art, hospitality, and activism. 

The eighth annual Dorothy Day lecture at Manhattan College, co-sponsored by the Dorothy Day Guild, took place on March 29th, 2022. Dorothy's vocation as a journalist predates her conversion to Catholicism and her founding of the Catholic Worker movement. After her conversion, Dorothy came to understand journalism as holy work, a spiritual work of mercy that required courage, boots on the ground, and a commitment to encounters with those most affected by injustice.

This webinar features Melissa Cedillo, of the National Catholic Reporter, Colleen Dulle, of American Media, and Eileen Markey reporter and assistant professor of Journalism at Lehman College of the City University of New York. Their conversation is moderated by Dr. Kevin Ahern, co-chair of the Dorothy Day Guild, with an introduction from Anna Woods, Manhattan College class of 2023 and additional comments by George Horton, vice-postulator for the Dorothy Day Guild.