New York’s archbishop, Cardinal
Timothy M. Dolan, has embraced her cause with striking zeal the New York Times
reports: speaking on the anniversaries of her birth and death, distributing
Dorothy Day prayer cards to parishes and even buying roughly 100 copies of her
biography to give out last year as Christmas gifts to civic officials including
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg.
“I am convinced she is a saint
for our time,” Cardinal Dolan said at the bishops’ meeting. She exemplifies, he
said, “what’s best in Catholic life, that ability we have to be ‘both-and’ not
‘either-or.’ ”
Day was born in 1897 to a
nonobservant Protestant family, dropped out of the University of Illinois and
moved to New York to work as a journalist for leftist publications in the
bohemian literary world of downtown Manhattan. She converted to Catholicism in
1927, citing a spiritual awakening that was accelerated by the joy that she
felt upon the birth of a daughter, Tamar. She said she chose Catholicism for
many reasons — partly because it was the religion of so many of the workers and
poor people whose cause she fought for as a socialist writer, and partly
because she had lived in Chicago with Catholic roommates whose faith had deeply
impressed her.
She spent decades as a passionate
lay Catholic, devoting her life to the principles of social justice, including
pacifism and service to the poor, that
she felt were at the root of her religion’s teachings.
Though she was traditional in her
religious practices and strong in her love for the church, her relationship
with the church hierarchy in her lifetime was not always smooth. Not a single
Catholic bishop came to her funeral in 1980, according to Robert Ellsberg, the
editor of her letters and diaries.
But some bishops now say Day’s
life resonates with the struggles that they are most engaged in today: the
fight against abortion and their concern about government intrusion in their
affairs. In her radical rejection of government — Day believed all states were
inherently totalitarian — the bishops see echoes of their fight with the Obama
administration over health care.
“As we struggle at this opportune
moment to try to show how we are losing our freedoms in the name of individual
rights, Dorothy Day is a very good woman to have on our side,” Cardinal Francis
E. George, archbishop of Chicago, said recently during a discussion of Day’s
sainthood cause at a meeting of bishops.
At St. Joseph House on First
Street in Manhattan’s East Village on a recent Thursday, a kitchen full of
volunteers rinsed down giant stockpots and bowl-size ladles after finishing the
morning’s soup line for the neighborhood poor. Around 25 residents and
volunteers live in the graffiti-tagged building, relying on donations for their
work. More Catholic workers live two blocks away in Mary House, the refuge
where Day lived the final years of her life.
As the volunteers gathered for
lunch at St. Joseph House — in a simple dining hall hung with hand-drawn
pictures of Day, a portrait of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and a
crucifix — Carmen Trotta, who has lived in the house for a quarter-century,
said that while he believed Day’s message of pacifism and works of mercy should
be the focus of discussions about her possible canonization, he was confident
that anyone who read her writings would understand her priorities.
“None of us really have any doubt
that she was a saint,” he said.
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