Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker Movement

Freedom, freedom, freedom, freedom, freedom, freedom over me Before I've been slain, I'll be buried in my grave with the angels, and then go home to my Lord and be free. What we would like to do is change the world by crying out unceasingly for the rights of workers, of the poor, of the destitute. We can throw our pebble in the pond and be confident that its ever-widening circle will reach around the world. world. I think sometimes we really feel very, very small and in feeling our smallness we can start to despair and we choose to do nothing very often when glaring injustice or unkind. blindness or apathy occurs around us. And I think that this reminds us that we are empowered as children of God to do something and that we're obliged as children of God to do something. Considered by many as one of the most influential Christian figures of the 20th century, Dorothy converted to Catholicism at the age of 30. Along with Peter Morin, she founded the Catholic Worker Movement, a prolific work of hospitality and care for the less fortunate. Mother, writer and journalist, Dorothy was a woman who fought bravely and diligently against poverty, exclusion, war and social and racial injustice by using what she called the revolution of the heart. Today, Dorothy invites us to put love at the center of our lives, of our thoughts and of our actions. She deserves to be known much better and for us to be touched, surprised, to dare to dream just like her of a fairer world, more pacifist and more fraternal. Dorothy was born in 1897 in a modest family of the Episcopalian Church in the Brooklyn neighborhood in New York. Her father was a sports reporter and very busy with his work. took good care of her children. Dorothy was the third of five kids with two big brothers, a little sister she was very close to, and a little brother. She lived a pretty tumultuous youth. Her father was a journalist and she ended up becoming a journalist as well, along with her two older brothers. They were all writers and they moved to San Francisco when she was quite young and she experienced the San Francisco earthquake as an eight-year-old. On the 18th of April 1906, an earthquake hits the city of San Francisco along the San Andreas Fort. This earthquake remains among the biggest natural disasters to hit an American city. There were around 250,000 refugees and 3,000 people died. She watched her mother practice the works of mercy, taking care of everyone during this terrible disaster, feeding and clothing people coming across the bay where the worst of the earthquake happened. The Day family is badly affected by this disaster. Their house is damaged. Dorothy's father, John Day, loses his job. So the family decides to move to Chicago to start a new life. Dorothy spends there part of her childhood and adolescence. And she then went to college, and while she was there in college, she had previously been interested in Christianity, but she became much more interested. in socialism and those who were working for a different kind of world, gave up interest in Christianity. It didn't seem relevant to her. She didn't have much money. She went hungry in order to buy books to read, and that's where she met some very prominent authors. She met them through their books, their writings. Jack London, Upton Sinclair. People who were writing about the horrible conditions of capitalism in the United States. So she had a taste of what poverty was in this country. She left college after a couple of years and went back to New York City and began working for radical journals. socialist and left-wing newspapers. That's when she began her work as a journalist. Her friends were all radicals, they were all against war, they were all striking for social justice. She was arrested in Washington DC protesting for the right of women to vote. She was in jail for ten days. The suffragette movement, women who fought for women's right to vote, started in England in 1903 and then spread to the United States. After a long fight, American woman obtained in 1920 the right to vote on a national scale. As a young woman, you know, she tried to find her way. Had an unfortunate love affair and experienced the horrors of abortion. And met my grandfather. I found some healing there and gave birth to my mother, which was something that very much brought her close to God. In 1924, Dorothy met William Foster Batterham. They moved to Staten Island where she bought a cottage. She gave birth to a daughter, Teresa Tamar, and experienced a deep joy. She began to pray again to read the Bible and the book. The imitation of Christ. She began to find herself praying, and she began to think about having her child become a Catholic. She really was impressed by Catholics because they seemed to take their faith all the way very seriously and made demands on them. And she loved the kind of reading about the mystics, and she loved the Eucharist and the sacraments and the kind of liturgy. She would go into churches and listen, read the New Testament, and she found herself wanting... wanted her daughter to be baptized, and then decided that she should become baptized herself, become a Catholic. And her husband, or the father of her child, was an anarchist and atheist and didn't want to have anything to do with marriage. So she felt that to become a Catholic, she had to separate from him. So she did. Very, very painful. Now, she still hoped that he would change his mind. And she kept writing him these passionate love letters trying to persuade him to marry her, change his mind. She didn't. So she spent five years, you know, just trying to figure out what to do with her life, writing articles, traveling around the country. Dorothy Day covered a communist demonstration in Washington, and during this demonstration she asked herself, where is the church, this church that is supposed to be with the poor, where is it? Not here. There were no Catholics. While in Washington, she went to pray in the Immaculate Conception Cathedral, and she said, God, I need a sign. I need you to show me how to combine my desire for social justice and my faith. And then she goes back to New York and she finds this Frenchman, Peter Morin, waiting for her. Someone had given her name to him, thought they had similar ideas. He begins telling her this whole idea of how they should start a movement or a newspaper or everything. And she realizes that this is exactly what she's been looking for. After her conversion and meeting Peter Morin, Dorothy Day founded the Catholic Worker Movement. and chose to give her life at the service of the less fortunate. Her movement increased significantly and helped many people during the Great Depression. This was after the market crash that plunged the country into misery in 1929. As the base of her work, she decided to put Christ at the center of her daily life, along with the Eucharist, the reading of the Holy Scriptures, and the lives of the saints. Peter Morin would give her what was about to become the fundamentals of the Catholic Worker. What he meant is that they were going to need hospitality houses to house the poor, a newspaper and roundtable discussions, and finally, a return to the land. And it was Peter's program that birthed the Catholic Worker movement. And it was, you know, the Catholic Worker was born in crisis, the Great Depression, where capitalism... Was not working. There was a great collapse, an internal displacement of so many people in this country. So her life is deeply embedded in the history of the United States. The Great Depression is a historical period going from the market crash in 1929 to the Second World War. It's the most important economic depression in the 20th century. characterized by deflation and a rise of unemployment never seen before. In 1932, there were 13 million unemployed Americans. So 1933, May 1st, the first issue of The Catholic Worker is published. And people begin to gather around and join her and try to find out about the ideas in this paper. And that led to a house of hospitality, she called it. A shelter, a home in the city where they would give out food to the hungry and they could give some housing to some people. And it became also a meeting place to discuss ideas and how faith was connected to social action. So the New York Catholic Worker community has all three parts. We have the houses in the city, two houses, right, where we do hospitality. You know, we do a hot meal, but we also do people living with us as well. who would formerly be homeless. And then we also are responsible for putting out the newspaper, which is called The Catholic Worker, which is the original newspaper that Dorothy started. And we collaborate, all three of the houses participate in the process of coming up with the ideas that go into the paper and mailing it out and all that stuff. And then not only do we have the two city houses, we also have a farm, Peter Morin Farm, which is about an hour and a half north. of the city, which is part of our community, which is supported by the same individuals who support the two city houses. She said, what we need is a revolution of the heart. I think that what we need nowadays is to change our heart, to change the way we receive and perceive others. This is something that she took from Peter Morin, who said that if we want to change the world, it had to start by changing oneself, and then we would be able to change others. So Revolution of the Heart means a complete change of heart, a change of life, and sort of surrendering yourself to Christ in service and love and hope and charity overall. And so this means, you know, putting others before yourself and seeing where exactly you can serve. And again, that looks different for every person. And it's probably going to surprise every person too, you know, it might not be the service that you always thought that you can give. But if you're open to God in your life and allowing him to change you from within this time, then I don't think that we can be disappointed. And I think that's going to have a bigger impact on people than we knew. But Dorothy was a 20th century mystic and saint, and she withdrew, like Jesus did, to be alone, to pray. She would often sit in front of the Eucharist and write. And she practiced daily mass, she practiced all of the basics of being a Catholic, and that was her sustenance. Peter envisioned that Catholic workers would attend Mass daily together as the basis for what would keep them strong and keep them focused, you know, the body of Christ. We are all one of another. The mystical body of Christ is something that Dorothy very clearly understood. For me, what Dorothy offers all of us all the time really is the way that she held things that one might find opposing, right? So she had very radical politics, but she also went to Mass every day. So she was a very traditional Catholic in many ways and a very radical thinker in other ways. You know, she, some people have said, you know, she held the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other hand. So, but for me, she also held tradition. She held the lives of the saints. And she also kind of looked forward. So she looked back, she looked forward. She held things, intellectual ideas together. She held situations that might seem hopeless in a space of hope. You can read in her writings that things were often difficult. The world was often at war. And yet she would come back to this narrative. of the body of Christ or, you know, of the possibility of change and our participation, everybody's participation in that. So I find her to be a very hopeful person who also lived through many struggles and so her hopefulness isn't a sort of pie-in-the-sky hopefulness, it's a very grounded hopefulness, grounded in the past, grounded in ideas. Beyond the Catholic worker movement, Dorothy tried through her writings and actions to raise consciences in a world dominated by war. The numerous conflicts that marked the 20th century gave her many occasions to express her pacifism. You know, later in the 1930s, her pacifism is expressed most explicitly during the Spanish Civil War and then World War II. Then in the 1950s, she becomes known for her protests against nuclear war. The Civil Rights Movement is going on. And suddenly Dorothy becomes a kind of conscience of a new generation. Dorothy and the Catholic work were always interested in... The civil rights issue and the struggle of African Americans for justice and civil rights, going back to the very early issues of the Catholic Worker, in the 60s in particular, she gave great support and attention to the civil rights movement and made many tours of the South writing about the civil rights struggle. From 1955 to 1961, there were air raid drills in New York City. Once a year, everyone in the city had to go into a subway or into the basement of the building that they were in and clear the streets because the state was saying that if there is a nuclear holocaust, a nuclear blast on the city, attack on the city, everyone's got to be safe so they go underground. And in fact, Ammon Hennessy and Dorothy Day said this is psychological warfare against the American people and that if they were to go into the subways and we would be hitting a nuclear blast, that people would be in their graves. So they very quietly went into a public park and refused to go underground and just held signs. It was a very peaceful protest. And they were put away. Dorothy Day did, if I'm correct, 30 days or 60 days in prison. for that. And they did it, like I said, it was once a year this happened. Seven years in a row they went to a park and sat down. However, in the fourth year there was a new member of the War Resistance League that came to town and he said, listen, this is wonderful to do, it's perfect pacifism, but we need to go to the colleges, we need to get the young people interested. And so the fourth year they had 500 people join them and the fifth year they had a... thousand people joining them. The sixth year they had 2,500 people join them, but they not only joined them in their park they joined them at several different locations throughout the city and they won. The government shut down the air raid drills. It was a remarkably successful, peaceful campaign. The FBI is the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and it had a reputation, especially in the 50s and 60s, for also monitoring what they called sort of subversive or un-American... activities, because they saw that all radicals must be working for Russia, be anti-American dangerous radicals. And during the Cold War, there were many, many laws that were passed to... to try to suppress radical activity and beliefs. The FBI was following Dorothy Day all the way back to the 1940s. I found a document from J. Edgar Hoover, who was the famous, very anti-communist director of the FBI over many decades. He spied on Martin Luther King and many other radicals. And saying that Dorothy was, you know, her activities strongly suggest that she is... consciously or unconsciously being used by the communists. And she was put on an index, a list of people to be detained, arrested, imprisoned in the event of a national emergency. Well, never came to that. But it was interesting to see that she rated that degree of attention and concern about her radicalism. They didn't really know how to understand. how someone could be that radical in her concern for peace and justice and also be a sincere, devout Catholic. Dorothy was obviously very active in the peace movement with pacifism, with gospel nonviolence, and she would often pray and fast for peace. So I think fundamentally for me, her message is that, you know, when we can be so overwhelmed by such a global crisis, by something that seems so... massive and beyond our control, there is something that each one of us can do. Even just, you know, saying a prayer we trust is helpful, right? So you don't, um, you don't feel that you have to turn away or go into despair because there's nothing you can do, but each one of us is part of the change. You know, it's going to come about when more of us join the movement. And that looks different also for each person. Maybe some person can donate some supplies. Maybe someone can go and stand outside of a consulate. Maybe someone can write a letter. You kind of have to discover what that is in your life. But for me, Dorothy teaches that you can do something. You matter. You are part of the solution. She was not a stranger to conflict. She openly protested the Vietnam Wars and cried against the continual war crimes committed. in America and abroad. The message of Gospel Nonviolence, I think, doesn't get enough press sometimes. We love and receive into our bodies a God who said that you should turn the other cheek when someone strikes you and that if someone presses you into service for one mile you should go for two and who ultimately gave his body and his life for people who spit on him and beat him and imprisoned him and stripped him naked in public. And I think that's extremely challenging. It's extremely challenging as a believer. It's extremely challenging as a witness. The cross is a stumbling block and folly. And I think that authentic Christian witnesses too sometimes. Dorothy received at the end of her life and after her death many awards and acknowledgments for her works. For example, she received the Pachémine Thérèse Award in 1972 in the middle of the Cold War. This prize is awarded every year to people who work for justice and peace in the world, in memory of Pope John XXIII's encyclical. In the 70s, Dorothy was getting tired, so she decided to leave the responsibility of her works to others. On the 29th of November 1980, she died of a heart attack at the age of 83, in Mary House where she lived, her daughter Tamar at her side. The readings for the Mass were... chosen, I chose them, were from St. Matthew's Gospel, the 25th chapter, in which he talks about when I was hungry, you fed me. When I was thirsty, you gave me drink. And I was praying that what you do for the least of these, you do unto me. And that's one of the foundational scriptural passages for the Catholic worker, as well as the Sermon on the Mount. Those are the two key passages. However, in the homily, even though that was proclaimed, that gospel, I preached on the idea of truth. The scene in St. John's Gospel where Pilate confronts Christ, questions him, take it in almost a cynical, sarcastic way, and he says to Christ, what is truth? And I took that as the theme to preach about Dorothy's life, that she was seeking truth, and truth is incarnate in Christ. When Pope Francis visited the United States, he addressed Congress in 2015, and he mentioned Dorothy among four exemplary Americans, people who lived in America in modern times and who we should emulate. And the four that he mentioned were Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and Abraham Lincoln. So to be considered among such company is really pretty remarkable. I think that Dorothy represents, in an extraordinary way, a model of holiness for the world today. She's really a saint of the spirit of Vatican II and the... Gaudium et spes, the pastoral constitution on the church in the modern world. She represents the church in the modern world, a world of violence, of struggle for workers, of the option for the poor and solidarity with victims of injustice. She is a saint who transcends any kind of artificial barrier between the religious world, the church world. The world of all men and women. She, in a very special way, I think embodies the understanding of mission that Pope Francis has brought to the Church, or has elevated in the Church, of a poor Church for the poor that goes out to the margins to touch the wounds of Christ, those who are on the peripheries, those who are on the margins. A Church that is not afraid of getting dirty because it's out on the streets. Matthew 25 verses 35, 36 and 40 For I was hungry, and you gave me food. I was thirsty, and you gave me something to drink. I was a stranger, and you welcomed me. I was naked, and you clothed me. I was ill, and you cared for me. In prison, and you visited me. Amen, I say to you. Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me. Lord, following the example of Dorothy Day, we pray that we too may be carriers of unity and fraternity in our home. Give us the grace to take care of the less fortunate around us, and to dare to commit ourselves to rightful and peaceful causes. We hand you the places of social and racial injustice, and the conflicts in our neighbourhoods and countries. Come, bring your peace, your joy, your grace to this world, Lord. May your loving kindness be known on this earth.

world. I think sometimes we really feel very, very small and in feeling our smallness we can start to despair and we choose to do nothing very often when glaring injustice or unkind. blindness or apathy occurs around us. And I think that this reminds us that we are empowered as children of God to do something and that we're obliged as children of God to do something.

Considered by many as one of the most influential Christian figures of the 20th century, Dorothy converted to Catholicism at the age of 30. Along with Peter Morin, she founded the Catholic Worker Movement, a prolific work of hospitality and care for the less fortunate. Mother, writer and journalist, Dorothy was a woman who fought bravely and diligently against poverty, exclusion, war and social and racial injustice by using what she called the revolution of the heart. Today, Dorothy invites us to put love at the center of our lives, of our thoughts and of our actions. She deserves to be known much better and for us to be touched, surprised, to dare to dream just like her of a fairer world, more pacifist and more fraternal. Dorothy was born in 1897 in a modest family of the Episcopalian Church in the Brooklyn neighborhood in New York.

Her father was a sports reporter and very busy with his work. took good care of her children. Dorothy was the third of five kids with two big brothers, a little sister she was very close to, and a little brother.

She lived a pretty tumultuous youth. Her father was a journalist and she ended up becoming a journalist as well, along with her two older brothers. They were all writers and they moved to San Francisco when she was quite young and she experienced the San Francisco earthquake as an eight-year-old. On the 18th of April 1906, an earthquake hits the city of San Francisco along the San Andreas Fort.

This earthquake remains among the biggest natural disasters to hit an American city. There were around 250,000 refugees and 3,000 people died. She watched her mother practice the works of mercy, taking care of everyone during this terrible disaster, feeding and clothing people coming across the bay where the worst of the earthquake happened.

The Day family is badly affected by this disaster. Their house is damaged. Dorothy's father, John Day, loses his job.

So the family decides to move to Chicago to start a new life. Dorothy spends there part of her childhood and adolescence. And she then went to college, and while she was there in college, she had previously been interested in Christianity, but she became much more interested.

in socialism and those who were working for a different kind of world, gave up interest in Christianity. It didn't seem relevant to her. She didn't have much money. She went hungry in order to buy books to read, and that's where she met some very prominent authors.

She met them through their books, their writings. Jack London, Upton Sinclair. People who were writing about the horrible conditions of capitalism in the United States.

So she had a taste of what poverty was in this country. She left college after a couple of years and went back to New York City and began working for radical journals. socialist and left-wing newspapers. That's when she began her work as a journalist. Her friends were all radicals, they were all against war, they were all striking for social justice.

She was arrested in Washington DC protesting for the right of women to vote. She was in jail for ten days. The suffragette movement, women who fought for women's right to vote, started in England in 1903 and then spread to the United States. After a long fight, American woman obtained in 1920 the right to vote on a national scale. As a young woman, you know, she tried to find her way.

Had an unfortunate love affair and experienced the horrors of abortion. And met my grandfather. I found some healing there and gave birth to my mother, which was something that very much brought her close to God.

In 1924, Dorothy met William Foster Batterham. They moved to Staten Island where she bought a cottage. She gave birth to a daughter, Teresa Tamar, and experienced a deep joy. She began to pray again to read the Bible and the book.

The imitation of Christ. She began to find herself praying, and she began to think about having her child become a Catholic. She really was impressed by Catholics because they seemed to take their faith all the way very seriously and made demands on them. And she loved the kind of reading about the mystics, and she loved the Eucharist and the sacraments and the kind of liturgy. She would go into churches and listen, read the New Testament, and she found herself wanting...

wanted her daughter to be baptized, and then decided that she should become baptized herself, become a Catholic. And her husband, or the father of her child, was an anarchist and atheist and didn't want to have anything to do with marriage. So she felt that to become a Catholic, she had to separate from him.

So she did. Very, very painful. Now, she still hoped that he would change his mind. And she kept writing him these passionate love letters trying to persuade him to marry her, change his mind. She didn't.

So she spent five years, you know, just trying to figure out what to do with her life, writing articles, traveling around the country. Dorothy Day covered a communist demonstration in Washington, and during this demonstration she asked herself, where is the church, this church that is supposed to be with the poor, where is it? Not here. There were no Catholics.

While in Washington, she went to pray in the Immaculate Conception Cathedral, and she said, God, I need a sign. I need you to show me how to combine my desire for social justice and my faith. And then she goes back to New York and she finds this Frenchman, Peter Morin, waiting for her. Someone had given her name to him, thought they had similar ideas. He begins telling her this whole idea of how they should start a movement or a newspaper or everything.

And she realizes that this is exactly what she's been looking for. After her conversion and meeting Peter Morin, Dorothy Day founded the Catholic Worker Movement. and chose to give her life at the service of the less fortunate. Her movement increased significantly and helped many people during the Great Depression.

This was after the market crash that plunged the country into misery in 1929. As the base of her work, she decided to put Christ at the center of her daily life, along with the Eucharist, the reading of the Holy Scriptures, and the lives of the saints. Peter Morin would give her what was about to become the fundamentals of the Catholic Worker. What he meant is that they were going to need hospitality houses to house the poor, a newspaper and roundtable discussions, and finally, a return to the land. And it was Peter's program that birthed the Catholic Worker movement. And it was, you know, the Catholic Worker was born in crisis, the Great Depression, where capitalism...

Was not working. There was a great collapse, an internal displacement of so many people in this country. So her life is deeply embedded in the history of the United States.

The Great Depression is a historical period going from the market crash in 1929 to the Second World War. It's the most important economic depression in the 20th century. characterized by deflation and a rise of unemployment never seen before. In 1932, there were 13 million unemployed Americans.

So 1933, May 1st, the first issue of The Catholic Worker is published. And people begin to gather around and join her and try to find out about the ideas in this paper. And that led to a house of hospitality, she called it.

A shelter, a home in the city where they would give out food to the hungry and they could give some housing to some people. And it became also a meeting place to discuss ideas and how faith was connected to social action. So the New York Catholic Worker community has all three parts.

We have the houses in the city, two houses, right, where we do hospitality. You know, we do a hot meal, but we also do people living with us as well. who would formerly be homeless. And then we also are responsible for putting out the newspaper, which is called The Catholic Worker, which is the original newspaper that Dorothy started. And we collaborate, all three of the houses participate in the process of coming up with the ideas that go into the paper and mailing it out and all that stuff.

And then not only do we have the two city houses, we also have a farm, Peter Morin Farm, which is about an hour and a half north. of the city, which is part of our community, which is supported by the same individuals who support the two city houses. She said, what we need is a revolution of the heart.

I think that what we need nowadays is to change our heart, to change the way we receive and perceive others. This is something that she took from Peter Morin, who said that if we want to change the world, it had to start by changing oneself, and then we would be able to change others. So Revolution of the Heart means a complete change of heart, a change of life, and sort of surrendering yourself to Christ in service and love and hope and charity overall.

And so this means, you know, putting others before yourself and seeing where exactly you can serve. And again, that looks different for every person. And it's probably going to surprise every person too, you know, it might not be the service that you always thought that you can give. But if you're open to God in your life and allowing him to change you from within this time, then I don't think that we can be disappointed.

And I think that's going to have a bigger impact on people than we knew. But Dorothy was a 20th century mystic and saint, and she withdrew, like Jesus did, to be alone, to pray. She would often sit in front of the Eucharist and write. And she practiced daily mass, she practiced all of the basics of being a Catholic, and that was her sustenance.

Peter envisioned that Catholic workers would attend Mass daily together as the basis for what would keep them strong and keep them focused, you know, the body of Christ. We are all one of another. The mystical body of Christ is something that Dorothy very clearly understood. For me, what Dorothy offers all of us all the time really is the way that she held things that one might find opposing, right?

So she had very radical politics, but she also went to Mass every day. So she was a very traditional Catholic in many ways and a very radical thinker in other ways. You know, she, some people have said, you know, she held the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other hand.

So, but for me, she also held tradition. She held the lives of the saints. And she also kind of looked forward.

So she looked back, she looked forward. She held things, intellectual ideas together. She held situations that might seem hopeless in a space of hope. You can read in her writings that things were often difficult. The world was often at war.

And yet she would come back to this narrative. of the body of Christ or, you know, of the possibility of change and our participation, everybody's participation in that. So I find her to be a very hopeful person who also lived through many struggles and so her hopefulness isn't a sort of pie-in-the-sky hopefulness, it's a very grounded hopefulness, grounded in the past, grounded in ideas.

Beyond the Catholic worker movement, Dorothy tried through her writings and actions to raise consciences in a world dominated by war. The numerous conflicts that marked the 20th century gave her many occasions to express her pacifism. You know, later in the 1930s, her pacifism is expressed most explicitly during the Spanish Civil War and then World War II. Then in the 1950s, she becomes known for her protests against nuclear war.

The Civil Rights Movement is going on. And suddenly Dorothy becomes a kind of conscience of a new generation. Dorothy and the Catholic work were always interested in... The civil rights issue and the struggle of African Americans for justice and civil rights, going back to the very early issues of the Catholic Worker, in the 60s in particular, she gave great support and attention to the civil rights movement and made many tours of the South writing about the civil rights struggle.

From 1955 to 1961, there were air raid drills in New York City. Once a year, everyone in the city had to go into a subway or into the basement of the building that they were in and clear the streets because the state was saying that if there is a nuclear holocaust, a nuclear blast on the city, attack on the city, everyone's got to be safe so they go underground. And in fact, Ammon Hennessy and Dorothy Day said this is psychological warfare against the American people and that if they were to go into the subways and we would be hitting a nuclear blast, that people would be in their graves.

So they very quietly went into a public park and refused to go underground and just held signs. It was a very peaceful protest. And they were put away.

Dorothy Day did, if I'm correct, 30 days or 60 days in prison. for that. And they did it, like I said, it was once a year this happened.

Seven years in a row they went to a park and sat down. However, in the fourth year there was a new member of the War Resistance League that came to town and he said, listen, this is wonderful to do, it's perfect pacifism, but we need to go to the colleges, we need to get the young people interested. And so the fourth year they had 500 people join them and the fifth year they had a... thousand people joining them. The sixth year they had 2,500 people join them, but they not only joined them in their park they joined them at several different locations throughout the city and they won.

The government shut down the air raid drills. It was a remarkably successful, peaceful campaign. The FBI is the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and it had a reputation, especially in the 50s and 60s, for also monitoring what they called sort of subversive or un-American... activities, because they saw that all radicals must be working for Russia, be anti-American dangerous radicals.

And during the Cold War, there were many, many laws that were passed to... to try to suppress radical activity and beliefs. The FBI was following Dorothy Day all the way back to the 1940s.

I found a document from J. Edgar Hoover, who was the famous, very anti-communist director of the FBI over many decades. He spied on Martin Luther King and many other radicals.

And saying that Dorothy was, you know, her activities strongly suggest that she is... consciously or unconsciously being used by the communists. And she was put on an index, a list of people to be detained, arrested, imprisoned in the event of a national emergency.

Well, never came to that. But it was interesting to see that she rated that degree of attention and concern about her radicalism. They didn't really know how to understand. how someone could be that radical in her concern for peace and justice and also be a sincere, devout Catholic. Dorothy was obviously very active in the peace movement with pacifism, with gospel nonviolence, and she would often pray and fast for peace.

So I think fundamentally for me, her message is that, you know, when we can be so overwhelmed by such a global crisis, by something that seems so... massive and beyond our control, there is something that each one of us can do. Even just, you know, saying a prayer we trust is helpful, right?

So you don't, um, you don't feel that you have to turn away or go into despair because there's nothing you can do, but each one of us is part of the change. You know, it's going to come about when more of us join the movement. And that looks different also for each person. Maybe some person can donate some supplies.

Maybe someone can go and stand outside of a consulate. Maybe someone can write a letter. You kind of have to discover what that is in your life. But for me, Dorothy teaches that you can do something.

You matter. You are part of the solution. She was not a stranger to conflict. She openly protested the Vietnam Wars and cried against the continual war crimes committed.

in America and abroad. The message of Gospel Nonviolence, I think, doesn't get enough press sometimes. We love and receive into our bodies a God who said that you should turn the other cheek when someone strikes you and that if someone presses you into service for one mile you should go for two and who ultimately gave his body and his life for people who spit on him and beat him and imprisoned him and stripped him naked in public.

And I think that's extremely challenging. It's extremely challenging as a believer. It's extremely challenging as a witness.

The cross is a stumbling block and folly. And I think that authentic Christian witnesses too sometimes. Dorothy received at the end of her life and after her death many awards and acknowledgments for her works.

For example, she received the Pachémine Thérèse Award in 1972 in the middle of the Cold War. This prize is awarded every year to people who work for justice and peace in the world, in memory of Pope John XXIII's encyclical. In the 70s, Dorothy was getting tired, so she decided to leave the responsibility of her works to others. On the 29th of November 1980, she died of a heart attack at the age of 83, in Mary House where she lived, her daughter Tamar at her side.

The readings for the Mass were... chosen, I chose them, were from St. Matthew's Gospel, the 25th chapter, in which he talks about when I was hungry, you fed me. When I was thirsty, you gave me drink.

And I was praying that what you do for the least of these, you do unto me. And that's one of the foundational scriptural passages for the Catholic worker, as well as the Sermon on the Mount. Those are the two key passages.

However, in the homily, even though that was proclaimed, that gospel, I preached on the idea of truth. The scene in St. John's Gospel where Pilate confronts Christ, questions him, take it in almost a cynical, sarcastic way, and he says to Christ, what is truth? And I took that as the theme to preach about Dorothy's life, that she was seeking truth, and truth is incarnate in Christ.

When Pope Francis visited the United States, he addressed Congress in 2015, and he mentioned Dorothy among four exemplary Americans, people who lived in America in modern times and who we should emulate. And the four that he mentioned were Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and Abraham Lincoln. So to be considered among such company is really pretty remarkable.

I think that Dorothy represents, in an extraordinary way, a model of holiness for the world today. She's really a saint of the spirit of Vatican II and the... Gaudium et spes, the pastoral constitution on the church in the modern world. She represents the church in the modern world, a world of violence, of struggle for workers, of the option for the poor and solidarity with victims of injustice. She is a saint who transcends any kind of artificial barrier between the religious world, the church world.

The world of all men and women. She, in a very special way, I think embodies the understanding of mission that Pope Francis has brought to the Church, or has elevated in the Church, of a poor Church for the poor that goes out to the margins to touch the wounds of Christ, those who are on the peripheries, those who are on the margins. A Church that is not afraid of getting dirty because it's out on the streets. Matthew 25 verses 35, 36 and 40 For I was hungry, and you gave me food.

I was thirsty, and you gave me something to drink. I was a stranger, and you welcomed me. I was naked, and you clothed me. I was ill, and you cared for me.

In prison, and you visited me. Amen, I say to you. Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.

Lord, following the example of Dorothy Day, we pray that we too may be carriers of unity and fraternity in our home. Give us the grace to take care of the less fortunate around us, and to dare to commit ourselves to rightful and peaceful causes. We hand you the places of social and racial injustice, and the conflicts in our neighbourhoods and countries.

Come, bring your peace, your joy, your grace to this world, Lord. May your loving kindness be known on this earth.

Transcript for:Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker Movement

Transcript for:
Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker Movement