"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." (Dorothy Day) 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 unkindness or apathy occurs around us. I think that this reminds us that we are empowered as children of God to do something, and that we are obliged as children of God to do something. Considered by many as one of the most influential Christian figures of the XXth century, Dorothy converted to Catholicism at the age of 30. Along with Peter Maurin, 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 into 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. Her mother 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. 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 Fault. 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 spent 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. She 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, you know, social justice. She was arrested in Washington DC protesting for the right of women to vote. She was in jail for 10 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 women obtained in 1920 the right to vote on a national scale. A as a young woman, you know, she tried to find her way. She had an unfortunate love affair and experienced the horrors of abortion. She met my grandfather and 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 Forster 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, 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 it made demands on them. She loved reading about the mystics, she loved the Eucharist, the sacraments and the liturgy, she loved going into churches, listen, read the New Testament and she found herself wanting her daughter to be baptized and then decided that she should become baptized herself and become a Catholic. Her husband or 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. It was 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, to change his mind. He didn't. So, she spent five years 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 was 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 where she finds this Frenchman, Peter Maurin, waiting for her. Someone had given her name to him and thought they had similar ideas. He begins telling her this whole idea of how they should start a movement and a newspaper, and she realizes that this is exactly what she's been looking for. After her conversion and meeting Peter Maurin, 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 Maurin 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 round table discussions and, finally, a return to the land. It was Peter's program that birthed the Catholic Worker Movement. The Catholic Worker was born in crisis. The Great Depression was a time when capitalism was not working. There was a great collapse which led to internal displacement of so many people in this country. Her life is deeply embedded in the history of the United States. The Great Depression is a historical period going from the market crash of 1929 to the Second World War. It's the most important economic depression of the XXth century characterized by a deflation and a rise of unemployment never seen before. In 1932, there were 13 million unemployed Americans. On May 1st of 1933, the first issue of the Catholic Worker is published and people begin to gather around, join her and try to find out about the ideas in this paper. That led to what she called a "house of hospitality", a shelter, a home in the city where they would give out food to the hungry and some housing to some people. It also became a meeting place to discuss ideas and how faith is connected to social action. The New York Catholic Worker Community has all three parts. We have two houses in the city where we do hospitality. We do a hot meal, but we also have people living with us as well, who would formally 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 all three of the houses collaborate and participate in the process of coming up with the ideas that go into the paper and mailing it out, and all that stuff. Then, not only do we have the two city houses. We also have a farm called Peter Maurin Farm, which is about an hour and a half north of the city and which is part of our community and supported by the same individuals who support the two city houses. What she said was: "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 Maurin who said that, if we wanted to change the world, it had to start by changing oneself and then we would be able to change others. "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 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. 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 know. Dorothy was a twentieth-century Mystic and saint. She withdrew like Jesus did to be alone to pray, she would often sit in front of the Eucharist, and write. She practiced daily mass and all of the basics of being a Catholic, and that was her sustenance. She and Peter envisioned that Catholic Workers would attend Mass daily together as the basis for what would keep them strong and keep them focused. The Body of Christ, the idea that we are all at one of another, the mystical Body of Christ is something that Dorothy very clearly understood. For me, what Dorothy offers all of us is the way that she held things that one might find opposing. She had very radical politics, but she also went to mass every day. She was a very traditional Catholic in many ways and a very radical thinker in other ways. Some people have said that she held the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other. But for me, she also held tradition. She held the lives of the Saints and she also kind of looked forward. She looked back, she looked forward. She held 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 of the possibility of change and everybody's participation in that. So, I find her to be a very hopeful person who also lived through many struggles. Her hopefulness isn't a sort of "pie in the sky" hopefulness. It's a very grounded hopefulness, grounded in the past and 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 XXth century gave her many occasions to express her pacifism. Then, 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 Worker were always interested in the Civil Rights issue and the struggle of African-Americans for justice and civil rights, going back to their 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 at 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. Ammon Hennacy and Dorothy Day said that is psychological warfare against the American people and that if they were to go into the subways and we would be hit with a nuclear blast, people would be in their graves. So, they very quietly went into a public park, and refused to go underground, and just held signs, as 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 once a year this happened. 7 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 Resisters 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." So, the fourth year they had 500 people joining them. The fifth year they had 1000 people joining them, and in the sixth year they had 2500 people joining them, but they not only joined them in the park, they joined them in several different locations throughout the city. And they won ! the government shut down the air raid drills. So, 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 "subversive or unamerican activities" because they saw that all the 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 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's activities "strongly suggest that she is consciously or unconsciously being used by the Communists". She was put on an index, a list of people to be detained, arrested, imprisoned in the event of a National Emergency. Well it 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 on 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 non-violence, and she would often pray and fast for peace. I think, fundamentally, for me, her message is that, 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, saying a prayer, we trust is helpful, so 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. 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. Kind of have to discover what that is in your life, but for me, Dorothy teaches that you can do something, that you matter, you are part of the solution. She is 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 non-violence, 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 the authentic Christian witness is, too, sometimes. Dorothy received, at the end of her life and after her death, many awards and acknowledgements for her works. For example, she received the Pacem in Terris 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 Maryhouse where she lived, her daughter Tamar at her side. The readings for the mass were chosen. I chose them more from St. Mathew 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, I just preached on the idea of truth. And the scene in St John's gospel where Pilate confronts Christ and questions him 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 addresses Congress in 2015 and he mentioned Dorothy among four exemplary American 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 Junior 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 a struggle for workers, of the option for the poor in solidarity with the victims of injustice. She is a saint who transcends any kind of artificial barrier between the religious world, the Church world and 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 35-36.40b "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 injustices and the conflicts in our neighborhoods and our countries. Come bring Your peace, Your joy, Your grace to this world, Lord. May Your loving kindness be known on this earth.