By Mark Pattison
Catholic News Service
Dorothy Day, co-founder of the Catholic Worker Movement, is pictured in an undated photo. (CNS photo/courtesy Milwaukee Journal)
WASHINGTON — The sainthood cause for Dorothy Day, co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement, believes it could have all of the documentation prepared at some point next year to send to the Vatican Congregation for Saints’ Causes.
It would represent the culmination of an effort begun informally in 1997, but in earnest in 2002. After that, the process is largely in the Vatican’s hands — but also in God’s.
Robert Ellsberg, publisher of Orbis Books, a ministry of the Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers, said the Claretian Fathers, through their magazines U.S. Catholic and Salt, began hailing Day as a saint shortly after her death in 1980.
Ellsberg had included Day in his book “All Saints,” and he had given a talk shortly after its 1997 publication, which argued that she should be canonized. Cardinal John O’Connor of New York, who voiced opinions on Day’s canonization in the 1980s, invited Ellsberg and his family to attend a Mass he was celebrating to observe the centenary of Day’s birth.
After the Mass, according to Ellsberg, Cardinal O’Connor approached him and asked whether he really thought Day should be made a saint. When Ellsberg said yes, the cardinal asked him to gather some others who knew Day for a conversation with him.
“He really wanted to hear what people had to say. He didn’t act like, ‘What a big favor I’m doing for Dorothy Day,’ Ellsberg told Catholic News Service. “He said, ‘I do not want it on my conscience that I did not do what God wanted done.’”
Day, even prior to helping start the Catholic Worker, had led a varied life. Carolyn Zablotny, editor of the Dorothy Day Guild’s newsletter, linked Day’s time to the present because Day served as a nurse during the flu pandemic of 1918-19. Day was also a suffragette and a journalist. She had an abortion and was so distraught about the experience that she tried twice to kill herself.
Upon establishing the Catholic Worker in 1934, Day found a place not only for her pacifist views — opposing U.S. entry into World War II and Vietnam — but also for direct action to aid the poor and workers. (Pope Pius XII declared May 1 the feast of St. Joseph the Worker in 1955.)
Zablotny, whose only contact with Day was on the receiving end of a phone call, said the Catholicism of her youth was “an intellectual thing. … We memorized the faith, right?” But in her college days in the 1960s, with “the ferment of social action and cries for justice,” something more seemed needed.
Her school, Manhattanville College, “had every Catholic periodical you could imagine. But they got the Catholic Worker, the newspaper. It wasn’t glossy, and it wasn’t a good size. They put it on top (of the shelves), and you needed a little round stool to get to it,” Zablotny said.
“When I was in high school, I remember my older sister bringing my mother as a gift, (Day’s autobiography) ‘The Long Loneliness.’ And my mother loved it. There must have been a nun who was hip and turned my sister on to that book, I experienced their excitement. I read ‘The Long Loneliness,’ but it was beyond me in high school. … You had to read between the lines. But in college, I realized ‘That’s that!’, and I knew the autobiography grabbed me as a teenager with its provocative title.”
“My life was changed when I met her a few times,” said David O’Brien, a retired church historian at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts. “Many of my students became lifelong Catholic Workers.”
O’Brien wrote Day’s obituary in Commonweal magazine, calling her “the most interesting and influential” American Catholic of her time. “She did not live apart from life, like (Trappist monk, and Day contemporary Thomas) Merton, but she lived right in the heart of the city and right in the heart of the great issues of the day,” he told CNS.
“Nonviolence has moved from the edge to the center of Christian teaching,” O’Brien said. “There’s a reversal of Catholic teaching, and Dorothy Day’s original pacifism was pretty courageous, because there were not Catholics of any significance” advocating that.
