News from the Guild:

We kicked off this special month a little early this year with our October 30th fall webinar on Pope Leo’s first apostolic exhortation. Many thanks to each of our panelists, our student host, Analucia Romero, our moderator, Kevin Ahern, and to all of our participants for their lively contributions to a great discussion. If you weren’t able to attend live, the recording of “Dreaming of a Church for the Poor: Dorothy Day and Dilexi Te” is now available on our YouTube channel. 

During our conversation, Dr. Kelly Johnson referenced Sister Thea Bowman’s prophetic 1989 address to the USCCB on what it means to be a Black Catholic in the American Church. Last year, Dr. Kim Harris opened our 2024 fall webinar with the same haunting spiritual Sister Thea sang for the bishops. November is also Black Catholic History Month, so we encourage you to check out our video, “Dorothy Day and the Saintly Six” as well!

The following week, our Dorothy Day Guild board and advisory committee met at Manhattan University’s Dorothy Day Center. Our annual meeting is primarily an opportunity for us to take stock of the past year and organize ourselves for the events and projects of the months ahead, but this year, we also got to celebrate Dorothy’s 128th birthday with a cake and party! As we continue to plan and to anticipate the publication of Dorothy’s positio and the next stage of her cause for canonization, we look forward to sharing more ways you can work with us to bring her life and unique witness to the Gospel to your own communities.

We have a few major events coming up, but before that, we wanted to put one more small news item on your radar: our Guild chair, Dr. Kevin Ahern, will be speaking with our friends from the Catholic Faith Network for their show CFN Live on Thursday, November 20th at 9:20 AM Eastern. 

Upcoming events from the Guild and our friends:

We are currently in the thick of preparations for our first-ever Dorothy Day Guild event in Rome, “A Pilgrimage of Hope: An Academic Symposium on the Legacy of Dorothy Day,” and we are so excited to invite you to join us! This free symposium takes place on Wednesday, November 26th, from 3:30 to 7:00 PM Roman time (9:30 AM - 1:00 PM Eastern time). Registration is open for both in-person and online participants using this link.

The full program, including the livestreaming links for both English and Italian, is now available on the Pontifical Gregorian University’s event page. We hope you will join us, and invite your friends! The symposium will feature two panels, on Dorothy’s spirituality and her social action, and concludes with remarks from Kate and Martha Hennessy on their grandmother’s enduring legacy and a reception for those joining in person.

We are so grateful to our speakers, our partners at the Gregorian, the Lay Center, Manhattan University’s Dorothy Day Center, and all of those who have worked so hard to put this international collaboration together in time for the forty-fifth anniversary of Dorothy’s death. The Gospel nonviolence, commitment to voluntary poverty, and generous hospitality to the poor that Dorothy taught us is as necessary today as it was in 1980 and 1933. Whether you are in Rome or will be joining us from home, you definitely do not want to miss this symposium!

We would also like to share an upcoming retreat opportunity from our friends Shelley and Jim Douglass of the Mary’s House Catholic Worker community in Birmingham, Alabama. Martha Hennessy will be leading an Advent retreat, entitled “Dorothy Day and the Nonviolent Gospel: A Discipline for Life in Our Time,” from Friday, December 5th to Saturday, December 6th at Holy Family Cristo Rey Catholic High School (1832 Center Way S Birmingham, AL 35205). The Friday session takes place from 7:00-8:30 PM Central and Saturday’s program begins at 9:00 AM and lasts until 8:00 PM. 

Of the retreat program, Shelley writes,

“In these times of upheaval, it's important to meet together to reflect on our lives an hour response to the issues we confront. How shall we live in these times? It's always an appropriate question, perhaps more so now as we expect the situation to become more challenging.

​

We've invited our friend Martha Hennessy to come for our Advent reflection time and share her wisdom and her questions with us. Martha is a member of the New York Catholic Worker Community… [and] is also a wife, mother, grandmother, and great grandmother. She's an activist for peace and disarmament who has served time in prison for resistance to nuclear omnicide and other warmaking. And she's a granddaughter of Dorothy Day. She spent years studying and meditating on the life of her granny.

​​

This Advent, Martha will lead us in reflection on the witness of Dorothy Day and her life lived in radical obedience to the Gospel. We will examine choices she made then and the choices we can make now to move toward lives of justice leading to peace.” 

The Mary’s House community suggests a $60.00 donation for each retreat participant, which includes Saturday lunch and dinner. Shelley told us they still have a few openings for retreatants, and scholarships are available to help with or cover costs, so if you’re in the Birmingham area, we highly encourage you to attend! Learn more and register, visit the Mary’s House community website or reach out to Shelley directly at shelleymdouglass@gmail.com.

Reading and viewing recommendations:

Every year, this season brings a number of new, thoughtful reflections on Dorothy as an activist, an evangelist, and peacemaker, as well as writings from many who are encountering Dorothy for the first time. We’re very pleased to be able to share a few of these with you (doubtless with many more to come at the end of the month!) here in this missive.

First, for the All Saints and All Souls holidays, Robert Ellsberg shared a selection from the introduction to his new book, Blessed Among Us: Volume 2, with America, speaking on Dorothy as an active participant in and interlocutor with the communion of saints during her own lifetime:

“Thus, among the stories of her favorite saints, Dorothy also appealed to a wider “cloud of witnesses,” including martyrs of the labor cause, peacemakers, prisoners of conscience, artists, philosophers and many who did not know Christ, yet would discover in the end that he was the hungry one, the homeless one or the stranger whom they fed, sheltered and welcomed. Of the Hindu Mohandas Gandhi, she went so far as to say: ‘There is no public figure who has more conformed his life to the life of Jesus Christ than Gandhi’ or ‘carried about him more consistently the aura of divinized humanity.’”

In his many years first as editor of The Catholic Worker and then as Dorothy’s editor, shepherding her letters, columns, and diary entries to publication, Robert has developed the same gift for recognizing holiness in the ordinary, the strange, and the marginal that Dorothy herself possessed. Acknowledging the limitations of the institutional Church’s processes for ‘official’ canonization, he writes, 

“Nevertheless, I hope Catholics can recognize in many saintly stories figures whose holiness or witness was expressed not simply according to the all-too-stereotypical features of traditional hagiography, but in their wit, creativity and prophetic courage in circumventing obstacles; in claiming vocations and identities apart from those assigned by society or religious authorities; for doing what all saints do: demonstrating that a way of heroic discipleship is possible in all times, under all circumstances.

They share what Pope Francis called the true sign of the saints: they reject complacency; they go, like Jesus, to the margins and ‘fringes’; they exhibit boldness and passion. Above all, ‘they surprise us, they confound us, because by their lives they urge us to abandon a dull and dreary mediocrity.’”

We also loved this warm, funny interview, published on Dorothy’s birthday, with Jane Sammon, the longest-serving member of the New York Catholic Worker community. Jane met Dorothy in 1972, moved into the community, and never left. She was drawn to visit St. Joseph House after reading The Catholic Worker and witnessing community members’

“genuine love for the Catholic Church, their willingness to live in voluntary poverty and their readiness to risk jail opposing the Vietnam War.

‘This idea that your beliefs might have engendered an idea that would cause you to get arrested — and they were willing to do that," Sammon said. "That was it. And then when I got here, they also had some good fun.’”

While there are several lifelong Catholic Workers who knew Dorothy in parts of the United States as far-flung as Houston, TX, Los Angeles, CA, and Maloy, IA, Jane is the last remaining live-in member of the New York community who had the chance to work alongside Dorothy as a young adult.

Remembering her first meeting with Dorothy, Jane said, “‘Her voice … it was very disarming to me,”... [She] recalls that in her mid-20s, she expected the then-75-year-old Day to sound old or possibly crotchety, but she didn't.” Dorothy wrote about Jane in her final diary entry; the young Catholic Worker had brought Dorothy’s medicine up to her room in the days before Dorothy’s death

"The last thing she said to me was, 'and I really want to thank you,' " Sammon said. "And I said, 'OK, Dorothy.' " At the time, Sammon and Day had lived on the same floor of Maryhouse for several years. "She said it to be comforting, in a way," Sammon said.

Our thanks to Fiona Murphy for this article, and to Jane for fifty-three years of embodying Dorothy’s legacy of nonviolence, voluntary poverty, and hospitality to the poor of New York!

Also on Dorothy’s birthday, Fr. John Dear published an interview with singer and activist Joan Baez, who met Dorothy during the United Farm Workers protests in 1973. Dorothy knew of and admired Joan as a musician as well as an activist, writing in her January column that year, 

“Joan Baez, who sang at two of my meetings on the West Coast last winter, went to Hanoi and miraculously lived thru those bombings last month. She and a few others, acting as postmen for the prisoners of war, brought and returned with letters. Yes, the world will be saved by such beauty, such courage! She stood on a balcony in Hanoi and sang to the people in the midst of this inhuman war. How could she keep that heavenly voice of hers from trembling with the fear she confessed to enduring all thru her visit? She has suffered imprisonment (and her mother, too) in protesting this longest war in U.S. history. I hope you have all seen those pictures of her accompanying the children in Birmingham, Alabama, as they faced up to, marched against, police dogs and men lined up some years ago against demonstrating women and children of the South in a racial and class war which goes on still, and is even more prevalent in the North.”

In the interview with Fr. John, Joan said,

 “I have brief memories of Dorothy. In the early 1970s, we were with the farmworkers in Southern California, and she was about to get arrested. And I remember her just sitting there with a very peaceful look on her face in a chair while everyone else was bustling around. I didn’t get arrested with her and it would have been nice to have been. But I just remember that elderly calm that some of us have. I almost have it sometimes.” 

You can read this interview at Waging Nonviolence, or listen to it as a podcast from The Beatitudes Center for the Nonviolent Jesus.

Earlier this month, Word on Fire Institute conducted an online seminar on evangelization, the second day of which featured Dorothy and Peter Maurin as exemplars of living out the Catholic social tradition. You can read an introductory interview with the presenter, Dr. Joshua Bitting, here. In this interview, Bitting notes that 

“Both Day and Maurin shared a deep love for Jesus Christ in the Holy Eucharist and in the poor. For them, as for many saints up and down the centuries, it was unthinkable to separate the Christ whom they receive bodily in the Eucharist from the Christ whom they encountered in the poor. It is precisely because of their great devotion to the Mass––both were daily communicants––that they were compelled to see Christ in each and every person they encountered.”

We’re excited to see so much interest in both the founders of the Catholic Worker movement from a well-known Catholic media company like Word on Fire; as the Guild for the cause of her canonization, we also feel strongly that Dorothy’s entire witness to the Gospel must be presented in its fullness if we are to share her legacy with integrity. This legacy includes not only her charity to the poor, but also her structural critique of the systems of militarization and imperialism which create so much suffering, her pacifism, and her challenging practices of protest and voluntary poverty, all of which were fueled by her love for Christ in the Eucharist. While the seminar is only accessible to Word on Fire members, the Institute is offering a free trial period– if you sign up, let us know what you think!

Also interesting this month is a brief introduction to Dorothy’s life and her significance for the Church today by the Spanish-language Chilean publication Reflexión y Liberación, originally founded by Jesuit priest and human rights activist Father José Aldunate and lawyer Rafael Agustín Gumucio Vives, both strong voices of opposition to the violent Pinochet dictatorship. Reflexión y Liberación has continued to publish global news and analysis focused on social justice through the lens of liberation theology and the social teachings of the Catholic Church for over thirty five years, so it’s truly an honor to see a piece on Dorothy on the front page of their journal! You can read “Dorothy Day, vive en los pobres de USA” here.

We also have several recordings and videos to share with you this month, including a fun surprise shoutout from New York City’s new mayor!

On November 3rd, the night before New York’s mayoral election, Zohran Mamdani released the fifth video of his “Until It’s Done” series, speaking on the legacy of Vito Marcantonio, a member of Congress who represented East Harlem during some of the hardest years of the Great Depression. Mamdani references Dorothy’s September 1954 obituary for Marcantonio, saying “In the words of the great Dorothy Day, ‘the poor of East Harlem felt that Vito loved them and was interested in them.’”

Mayor-elect Mamdani will be sworn into office January 1st, 2026, on the Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God. We pray that as mayor, he lives up to his campaign promises to care for the needs of the city’s poorest and most vulnerable residents!

We’re also very pleased to share a recording from Martha Hennessy’s recent visit to Villanova University, where she participated in a fireside chat with Janine Dunlap Kiah, the director for public service and pro bono initiatives at Villanova’s law school. This event, “Her Legacy Continues: Dorothy Day, Martha Hennessy, and the Impact of Radical Hospitality,” celebrated Dorothy’s legacy and explored how Dorothy’s life among the poor and her total commitment to pacifist action continue to bear fruit in today’s world. 



We particularly appreciated Martha’s explanation of how we might understand Dorothy as a radical Christian anarchist. “First and foremost, she was a pacifist,” Martha said, “and it’s very important to keep that in mind, because the definition of anarchism can be misconstrued” Martha then turns to the words of St. Augustine, who states as a principle for Christian action “Love God and do what you will,” by which Martha notes that “We do have free will and primacy of conscience to apply ourselves to the works of God.” Dorothy’s radical Christian anarchism meant freedom to act for the common good. To this axiom from St. Augustine, Martha adds a quote from Ammon Hennacy,

“an illustrious figure in the movement; ‘One-man revolution, he was called.’ And Ammon said you don’t need laws to be good, you don’t need cops to tell you to be good; you just have to understand what the human needs are and meet them. And people would be able to function more independently and honestly in a society that values that.”

Janine and Martha’s entire conversation is nuanced and thoughtful, and is framed around a series of photographs of Dorothy as a mother, grandmother, antiwar and labor justice activist, and partner in ecumenical dialogue, as well as photographs from Martha’s own work for peace and nuclear disarmament in the United States and abroad. The whole conversation and slide presentation is well-worth your time as we contemplate Dorothy as a living signpost to the Gospel and the future of her cause for canonization.

Finally, the Catholic Nonviolence Initiative has recently concluded their annual fall webinar series, this year entitled “The World Will Be Saved By Beauty: Nonviolence and the Transformative Power of the Arts.” The series includes conversations with filmmakers, actors, dancers, choreographers, playwrights, musicians, visual artists, and poets whose work is informed by a belief in creative work as an agent of nonviolent social change and who offer their artistic labor in the service of this vision. A recording and study guide for each of the six sessions is available on the Catholic Nonviolence Initiative website, and the “Theater” selection includes panelist Lisa Wagner-Carollo, speaking about her work with Stillpoint Theatre Collective and her play, “Haunted by God: The Life of Dorothy Day.”

A few words from Dorothy: 

As the liturgical year winds to a close, and we begin to look towards Advent and the coming of the Light of Christ, we would like to share a selection from Dorothy’s December 1935 essay, “Liturgy and Sociology.” Here, she writes,

“The age of individualism, laissez-faire industrialism and self-seeking capitalism is dead and gone. Embers of the charred structure built up by the Protestant Revolution remain but it is nevertheless as dead as a doornail. Men are beginning to realize that they are not individuals but persons in society, that man alone is weak and adrift, that he must seek strength in common action.

The Mystical Body of Christ is a union—a unit—and action within the Body is common action. In the Liturgy we have the means to teach Catholics, thrown apart by Individualism into snobbery, apathy, prejudice, blind unreason, that they ARE members of one body and that “an injury to one is an injury to all,”...

The Liturgy, then, is common worship, concorporate worship, worship in one mind and with one heart, and with one mouth. Our common action in the Sacrifice of the Mass, impersonal, anti-individualistic is the best weapon against the world.

‘Pius X tells us that the liturgy is the indispensable source of the true Christian spirit.

Pius XI tells us that the true Christian spirit is indispensable for social regeneration.

Hence the conclusion: The Liturgy is the indispensable basis of Christian social regeneration.’”

Every three years, our Church begins a new liturgical cycle, opening the first Sunday of Advent with Isaiah’s proclamation that the people “shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; one nation shall not raise the sword against another, nor shall they train for war again.” We will hear these words afresh when Advent begins this year on November 30th. We are renewed and strengthened through the words of the biblical prophets who point us towards Christ, year after year.

Dorothy published these words on the liturgy and our participation in the Mystical Body of Christ on the first Sunday of Advent ninety years ago, but we likewise must hear them again with fresh ears. The Eucharist makes us members of one body. When we receive the Body and Blood of Christ, we are made one with the child sheltering in Holy Family Church in Gaza, the elderly homeless woman keeping warm in the public library in South Bend, and the young father locked away in ICE detention.

We are all members and potential members of the Mystical Body of Christ, who is constantly renewing His Body through the holy Sacrifice of the Mass. Our prayer for each of you as we look towards Advent is that you are strengthened by these words from the prophets of scripture and the prophets of our time and are refreshed and renewed to participate in this great work of building a new society in the shell of the old.

In peace,

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