Meet My Girl: Dorothy Day

I pumped my fist in the air, Jersey style, when he said her name. Pope Francis, that is. This morning, as he addressed Congress, he spoke of a woman who is near and dear to my little social justice heart: Dorothy Day.

She and Peter Maurin founded The Catholic Worker movement and ran a hospitality house in Manhattan for decades. A convert, a single mother, a post-abortive woman. A writer, a journalist, a radical. A daily Mass goer, self-described “faithful daughter of the Church”.

A woman living the words of St. Catherine of Siena:

Be who you are created to be, and you will set the world ablaze.

Dorothy Day blazed brightly and passionately with God’s love and justice. I first became acquainted with her in college, and read more in graduate school. Friends, I am smitten. Which is super awkward because I’m pretty sure she would think that was crazy if she were alive and I had the chance to meet her. If you can fangirl on someone who died before you were born, sign me up.

So imagine my tremendous joy when Pope Francis invoked her example today. It warmed my heart to see my homegirl “trending” on social media.

She would laugh her ass off at that, I’m sure. She will be a canonized saint someday, I believe. She is a saint for modern women, many carrying the scars of post-abortion pain unhealed. She is a saint for the young who wish to do something of value with their lives, who want to be of service. She is a saint who reminds us of just how uncomfortable the Gospel should make us feel.

I’m going to share just a few (OK maybe more than a few) of my favorite writings of hers. And a list of resources to introduce yourself to this amazing servant of God.

“If we become daily communicants – if we are faithful in the observance of our religious duties – then things are going to happen to us. It is as though a dirty scroll were being washed so that we could read the writing thereon. Our very senses are going to be refined….We are going to be able to understand many things and the Lord is going to tell us what to do…We must expect the gifts of the Holy Spirit. And the gift to be most afraid of is knowledge of what to do. Because if we know what to do, and we do not pay attention, we are denying the inspiration of the Holy Spirit and we are failing in faith, hope and charity…Little by little that voice will cease to speak, our hearts will be hardened, our senses deadened, graces will be withdrawn from us. Then, as we continue to receive the Blessed Sacrament daily, religion will indeed become for us the opium of the people.” – July 1937

“We must see Christ everywhere, even in his most degraded guise. We take care of men by the tens of thousands over the course of the year, and there is no time to stop and figure out who are the worthy or who are the unworthy. We are each of us unprofitable servants. We are guilty of each other’s sins.” – April 1943

“Dear God, let us not accept that judgement – that this is what we are.

Enlighten our minds, inflame our hearts with desire to change – with the hope and faith that we all can change.

Take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh.” – July 1972

“It is because we love Christ in His humanity that we can love our brothers. It is because we see Christ in the least of God’s creatures, that we can talk to them of the love of God and know that what we write will reach their hearts.” – June 1935

“And studying the New Testament, I have come, in this my 76th year, to think of a few holy words of Jesus as the greatest comfort of my life: Judge not. Forgive our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. Forgive seventy times seven times. All words of Our Lord and Savior. I have knowledge of salvation through forgiveness of my sins, Zechariah sang in his canticle. And so, when it comes to divorce, birth control, abortion, I must write in this way. The teaching of Christ, the Word, must be upheld. Held up though one would think that it is completely beyond us – out of our reach, impossible to follow.

I believe Christ is our truth and is with us always….He is a kind and forgiving judge. So are 99 percent of priests in the confessional. The verdict there is always not guilty, even though our “firm resolve with the help of His grace to confess our sins, do our penance, and amend our lives” may seem a hopeless proposition. It always contains, that act of contrition, the phrase “to confess our sins”, even though we have just finished confessing them, which indicates that the priest knows, we know, and we want to be honest about it, that we will be back in that confessional again and again.”

– December 1972

“But the final word is love. At times it has been a harsh and dreadful thing, and our very faith in love has been tried through fire. We cannot love God unless we love each other, and to love we must know each other. We know Him in the breaking of bread, and we know each other in the breaking of bread, and we are not alone anymore. Heaven is a banquet, and life is a banquet, too, even with a crust, where there is companionship. We have all known the long loneliness and we have learned that the only solution is love and that love comes with community.” -The Long Loneliness, 286.

The following is a prayer for the canonization of Dorothy Day, from Catholic Peace Fellowship. Each Friday the Catholic Peace Fellowship prays for the canonization of one of its early advisers the Servant of God Dorothy Day.

God our Creator,

Your servant Dorothy Day exemplified the

Catholic faith by her conversion,

life of prayer and voluntary poverty,

works of mercy, and

witness to the justice and peace of the Gospel.

May her life inspire people

to turn to Christ as their savior and guide,

to see his face in the world’s poor and

to raise their voices for the justice

of God’s kingdom.

We pray that you grant the favors we ask