Upcoming events from the Guild and our friends

We have several upcoming events for October and November that we would like to invite our members to join us for, but first, a reminder that our fall back-to-school online book club begins TONIGHT, Wednesday, September 30th at 8:00 PM Eastern. This evening, and over the next several weeks on Wednesday nights, we will be reading through All The Way to Heaven: The Selected Letters of Dorothy Day. Our book club will be led by Robert Ellsberg, the editor of this collection, and we still have space for a few more participants! 

This year, we were able to offer a special gift to book club members: signed, hardcover editions of All The Way to Heaven. We know that many of you who registered early have already received your copies, and we hope you’ve been enjoying reading so far! If you are interested in being part of this fall’s reading group, it’s not too late to sign up. Register here, and join us for the Zoom meeting even if you haven’t had a chance to read the first section of the book yet. 

We are also hosting two Manhattan-based events in October. First, we have a walking pilgrimage on Sunday, October 4th, which begins at 2:00 PM in Union Square. Our walking pilgrimages are an incredible opportunity to truly walk in Dorothy’s footsteps and inhabit the places which shaped and witnessed Dorothy’s legacy of hospitality, Gospel nonviolence, and voluntary poverty over more than six decades. Jodee is a wonderful tour guide, and there are still a couple of open spots on Sunday, so if you’re in the area, please join us!

In anticipation of Dorothy’s upcoming anniversaries of birth and death in November, we are also hosting the Guild’s first work party at Maryhouse! On Saturday, October 24th from 12:00-4:00 PM, you are invited to join us to help prepare Dorothy’s home for this special season. We’ll be working on cleaning, plaster repair, and painting projects focused on the auditorium. We’ll provide drinks and snacks, so wear clothes you don’t mind getting dirty and come for a fun afternoon of shared work and fellowship! If you’re local to New York and would like to help out, please RSVP here.

Many thanks to our hosts from the New York Catholic Worker community for their longstanding works of mercy and for their hospitality to us as well as to the poor– the efforts of the Guild towards Dorothy’s canonization have truly been enriched by our deepening connection to the Catholic Worker.

Finally, we’d like to remind you that our friends at the Staten Island Catholic Worker is hosting a celebration for Dorothy’s 129th birthday on Sunday, November 8th, beginning at noon with a street-naming ceremony, for the new “Dorothy Day Way” on the corner of Staten Island’s Pollion and Zephyr at noon, followed by a 2:00 PM Mass and reception at Our Lady Help of Christians parish, where Dorothy was baptized at age 30 in December of 1927.

Virtual Pilgrimage

We hope that eventually, each of you will have the chance to visit New York and experience the places where Dorothy spent her life serving the poor and speaking out for justice. That being said, our Guild membership is now truly global, and we wanted to make it possible for our members across the world to ‘visit’ Dorothy’s home at Maryhouse and pray with her in the house of hospitality she dreamed of for the women of the Lower East Side.

We are very proud to announce that a special project that has been in the works for the past several months is now live. The Dorothy Day Center at Manhattan University has launched a virtual Maryhouse pilgrimage, and you’re invited for a visit!

The virtual pilgrimage begins at the front door of Maryhouse and takes visitors to the dining room, auditorium, chapel, and then up the stairs to Dorothy’s bedroom. Along the way, be sure to click on the photo icons in each room for close-ups of particular, significant artefacts, the quotation icons for relevant selections from Dorothy’s writings, and the information icons for additional context in each space. This is a rich and carefully curated online experience, and we know that whether or not you’ve had the chance to spend time at Maryhouse in person, you’ll find something of Dorothy’s vision of the spiritual and corporal works of mercy in action here.

Our enormous thanks go out to Manhattan University professors Kevin Ahern and Daniel Savoy and undergraduate student Sri Vaishnavi Pannala, who carefully photographed the various rooms and artefacts of Maryhouse, chose the accompanying quotations and photographs, and designed the online interface. 

News and reading round-up

This month, we have two short articles that mention or feature Dorothy that we’re excited to share with you. First, for Good Faith Media, Craig Nash offered a Labor Day reflection which considered his own family’s history of participation in the labor movement and how he came to understand the deep Catholic heritage of concern for working people and articulate theory of labor justice through reading Dorothy’s The Long Loneliness. In “Labor Day, Dorothy Day, and the Spiritual Roots of Unions,” he writes, “Although [Dorothy] explored many ‘-isms’ over her life—pacifism, anarchism, communism, socialism, etc.—what remained steady was a fierce belief that the Bible’s teachings on “the body” were relevant to the plight of workers.”

In this piece, Craig links to a fantastic 1971 interview that Dorothy gave for the Los Angeles Catholic Worker’s Catholic Agitator where she makes the connection between St. Paul’s teachings on the Mystical Body of Christ and the slogan and spirit of the Industrial Workers of the World and the larger American labor movement: “An injury to one is an injury to all.” Labor Day has passed, but our need for an economic system which honors the dignity of working people and serves the common good persists; we encourage you to read both the article and the interview!

Last week, for US Catholic, Mark Piper published a humorous and insightful listicle, “5 saints for exhausted middle-aged Catholics,” which included Dorothy as a patron and exemplar to working parents of large and unruly families. As the co-founder of the Catholic Worker, Dorothy,

“didn’t get to live within the neat and tidy schedules of religious life. No, like any parent or person with work responsibilities, her grand aspirations of revolution were often interrupted by pressing unexpected needs at 6:40 a.m. and 6:40 p.m. These are needs I understand, such as feeding hungry children, filling out forms or updating too many apps, and putting up with unexpected issues or broken appliances.”

Many of you are no doubt nodding along as you read this! Dorothy lived her vocation in the ordinary messiness of the world, and as Mark notes, she also provided us with a model of how to make time for prayer, for beauty, and for attentive joy in the midst of the chaos.

In addition, like many Catholics around the United States and beyond, we were thrilled to celebrate the beatification of Archbishop Fulton Sheen last week. Like Dorothy, Blessed Fulton Sheen evangelized through contemporary media and articulated a uniquely American expression of the Catholic faith. Archbishop Ronald Hicks of New York spoke with The Good Newsroom last week about his own connection to Fulton Sheen and his enthusiasm for the beatification, as well as the local Church’s need for more American, and more contemporary saints. As he states in this interview,

“I think we benefit not only from having an American saint, but we have a benefit from having current saints also. Our saints are our heroes, and no matter what time they lived in, they give us a heroic holy way of living the faith. Sometimes however, we can look at some of our saints who maybe lived 1700 years ago and it gets a little hard to relate to their lives, to the setting that they were a part of. When we have saints who have grown up in neighborhoods like we've grown up in communities in the United States, they have a shared experience and we can relate to them, I think, in a deeper way. 

And so having current saints, saints from the United States, having saints that are so relatable to us, it's almost like having a current family member saying, ‘I can relate to that person. I know them. They're part of my identity.’ And so therefore, we can turn to them and then turn to their example and hopefully help them lead us on our path to holiness.”

Congratulations to all of those who worked on Blessed Fulton Sheen’s cause, those who prayed through his intercession, and those who organized the beautiful beatification celebration last week! Eventually, we look forward to the universal Church recognizing Dorothy among these Saints and Blessed, who even as they intercede for us in heaven, still feel familiar and close at hand.

Prayer Requests

We received a few recent requests for intercession this month that we ask you to hold in prayer. Several of the people who wrote to us asked us to keep their stories private, but we do have one request that we’d like to share with you: A mother from Ireland wrote to us asking Dorothy’s (and our) prayers for her daughters, each of whom has experienced some of the same suffering and struggle that Dorothy herself knew as a young woman. She asked that the Holy Spirit would guide them towards their unique vocation and that God’s plans and purposes for their lives would be fulfilled. Please join us in praying for this dear family!

A few words from Dorothy

In preparation for our fall book club, I’ve been reading through Dorothy’s letters, and found this one, which Dorothy wrote exactly ninety-one years ago today, September 30th of 1935. It’s a lengthy response to a subscriber, in which Dorothy lays out the program which she and Peter and the rest of their community (which, she reminds the recipient of her letter, is made up of all sorts of people, many of whom are physically and mentally unwell) are trying to establish. Here, Dorothy speaks frankly about the challenges they face, where they have seen a measure of success, and where they still hope that their witness of hospitality, voluntary poverty, and nonviolence might engender a cultural and spiritual “revolution of the heart.” She writes,

“The great work which is to be done is to change public opinion, to indoctrinate, to set small groups to work here and there in different cities who will live a life of sacrifice, typifying the Catholic idea of personal responsibility. Numbers and organizations are not important. We are just beginning after all. But one person can do a tremendous amount of boring from within in his office, factory, neighborhood, parish, and among his daily acquaintances and associates…

I cannot go into much detail as to our Farming Commune idea which is the one we advocate. What we are trying to do is put our ideas immediately into practice, that is to live them. And at that we have not really started to do it yet. We take in the homeless– we try to make this office, this house, a center of Catholic Action, a half-way house where people can exchange ideas, where we can hold forums, where we can perform the works of mercy. But it is only a half-way house, a step towards our ideal. Four-fifths of the Catholic population are in cities. They have to get back to the land. And when we take the Catholic Worker and the whole crowd and get out on a farm and build up a community there, a place big enough where anyone can come and add himself to it,-- then we will be making a real step.

And it isn’t that we wish to isolate ourselves. The monasteries during the Dark Ages were centers where Catholic thought grew and was disseminated. The monasteries do not influence their surroundings now and change them. They adapt themselves to their surroundings.

From such a center we could send out missionaries of labor to wherever there was labor trouble or fascism brewing.” 

Nearly a century later, the vision that Dorothy sets out in this letter remains alive. It is being vibrantly enacted in Catholic Worker houses and other creative, Gospel-centered communities around the United States and around the world. The world still needs those “missionaries of labor,” as well as missionaries of justice, of hospitality, and of peace, as dearly today as it did in 1935. This month, we offer our thanks to all of those who have taken up this vision as their own and given their lives over to “the great work which is to be done.”

In peace,

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