Dorothy Day

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothy_Day

Dorothy Day (November 8, 1897 – November 29, 1980) was an American journalist, social activist and devout Catholic convert; she advocated the Catholic economic theory of Distributism. She was also considered to be an anarchist, and did not hesitate to use the term. In the 1930s, Day worked closely with fellow activist Peter Maurin to establish the Catholic Worker movement, a nonviolent, pacifist movement that continues to combine direct aid for the poor and homeless with nonviolent direct action on their behalf.

Day's cause for canonization is open in the Catholic Church.

Early life

Dorothy Day was born in the Brooklyn Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York, and raised in San Francisco and Chicago. She was born into a family described by one biographer as "solid, patriotic, and middle class". Her father, John Day, was a Southerner of Scotch-Irish background, while her mother, Grace Day, a native of upstate New York, was of English ancestry. Her parents were married in an Episcopal church located in Greenwich Village, a neighborhood where Day would spend much of her young adulthood.

By 1913 Dorothy Day had read Peter Kropotkin, an advocate of anarchist communism, which influenced her ideas in how society could be organized. In 1914, Day attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign on a scholarship, but dropped out after two years and moved to New York City. Day was a reluctant scholar. Her reading was chiefly in a radical social direction. She avoided campus social life and insisted on supporting herself rather than live on money from her father, a characteristic she was to maintain for the rest of her life, to the point of buying all her clothing and shoes from discount stores to save money.

Work and activism

Settling on the Lower East Side, she worked on the staffs of Socialist publications (The Liberator, The Masses, The Call), though she "smilingly explained to impatient socialists that she was ‘a pacifist even in the class war." She also engaged in anti-war and women's suffrage protests, and spent several months in Greenwich Village, where she became close to Eugene O'Neill.

Awakening

Initially Day lived a bohemian life, with two common-law marriages and an abortion, which she later described in her semi-autobiographical novel, The Eleventh Virgin (1924)—a book she later regretted writing. She had been an agnostic, but with the birth of her daughter, Tamar (1926–2008), she began a period of spiritual awakening which led her to embrace Catholicism, joining the Church in December 1927, with baptism at Our Lady Help of Christians parish on Staten Island. In her 1952 autobiography, The Long Loneliness, Day recalled that immediately after her baptism, she made her first confession, and the following day, she received communion.] Subsequently, Day began writing for Catholic publications, such as Commonwealth and America.

Publishing

The Catholic Worker movement started with the Catholic Worker newspaper, created to promote Catholic social teaching and stake out a neutral, pacifist position in the war-torn 1930s. (See The Catholic Worker: The Aims and Means of the Catholic Worker.) This grew into a "house of hospitality" in the slums of New York City and then a series of farms for people to live together communally. She lived for a time at the now demolished Spanish Camp community in the Annadale section of Staten Island. The movement quickly spread to other cities in the United States, and to Canada and the United Kingdom; more than 30 independent but affiliated CW communities had been founded by 1941. Well over 100 communities exist today, including several in Australia, the United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, the Republic of Ireland, Mexico, New Zealand, and Sweden. She was also a member of the Industrial Workers of the World ('Wobblies').

http://www.catholicworker.org/dorothyday/index.cfm#

By the 1960s, Day was embraced by a significant number of Catholics, while at the same time, she earned the praise of counterculture leaders such as Abbie Hoffman, who characterized her as the first hippie, a description of which Day approved, though there is some evidence which indicates Day might not always have taken a positive view of the hippie movement. Yet, although Day had written passionately about women’s rights, free love and birth control in the 1910s, she opposed the sexual revolution of the 1960s, saying she had seen the ill-effects of a similar sexual revolution in the 1920s. Day had a progressive attitude toward social and economic rights, alloyed with a very orthodox and traditional sense of Catholic morality and piety.

Her devotion to her church was neither conventional nor unquestioning, however. She alienated many U.S. Catholics (including some clerical leaders) with her condemnation of Falangist leader Francisco Franco during the Spanish Civil War; and, possibly in response to her criticism of Cardinal Francis Spellman, she came under pressure by the Archdiocese of New York in 1951 to change the name of her newspaper, "ostensibly because the word Catholic implies an official church connection when such was not the case". The newspaper's name was not changed.

Awards

In 1971, Day was awarded the Pacem in Terris Award. It was named after a 1963 encyclical letter by Pope John XXIII that calls upon all people of good will to secure peace among all nations. Pacem in Terris is Latin for "Peace on Earth." Day was accorded many other honors in her last decade, including the Laetare Medal from the University of Notre Dame, in 1972.

Death

She died on November 29, 1980, in New York City.

Day was buried in the Cemetery of the Resurrection on Staten Island, just a few blocks from the location of the beachside cottage where she first became interested in Catholicism.

Cause for sainthood

She was proposed for sainthood by the Claretian Missionaries in 1983. Pope John Paul II granted the Archdiocese of New York permission to open Day's "cause" for sainthood in March 2000, thereby officially making her a "Servant of God" in the eyes of the Catholic Church.

Stages of canonization in the Catholic Church:

Servant of God → Venerable → Blessed → Saint

Legacy

Her autobiography, The Long Loneliness, was published in 1952. Day's account of the Catholic Worker movement, Loaves and Fishes, was published in 1963. A popular movie called Entertaining Angels: The Dorothy Day Story was produced in 1996. Day was portrayed by Moira Kelly and Peter Maurin was portrayed by Martin Sheen, actors later known for their roles on The West Wing television series in the United States. Fool for Christ: The Story of Dorothy Day, a one woman play performed by Sarah Melici, premiered in 1998. A DVD of the play has been produced and Melici continues to do live performances in the United States and Canada. The first full-length documentary about Day, Dorothy Day: Don't Call Me a Saint, by filmmaker Claudia Larson, premiered on November 29, 2005 at Marquette University, where Day's papers are housed. The documentary was also shown at the 2006 Tribeca Film Festival and is now available on DVD. Day's diaries, The Duty of Delight: The Diaries of Dorothy Day, edited by Robert Ellsberg, were published by the Marquette University Press in 2008. A companion volume, All the Way to Heaven: The Selected Letters of Dorothy Day, also edited by Ellsberg, was published by the Marquette University Press in 2010. Bill Kauffman of The American Conservative has written of Day:

“ The Little Way. That is what we seek. That—contrary to the ethic of personal parking spaces, of the dollar-sign god—is the American way. Dorothy Day kept to that little way, and that is why we honor her. She understood that if small is not always beautiful, at least it is always human. ”

Day has been the recipient of numerous posthumous honors and awards. Among them: in 1992, she received the Courage of Conscience Award from the Peace Abbey, and in 2001, she was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in Seneca Falls, New York.

Memorialization

Day's accomplishments have been memorialized in many ways. Dormitories at Lewis University in Romeoville, Illinois, University of Scranton in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and Loyola College in Maryland are named in her honor. A named professorship at St. John's University School of Law is currently held by labor law scholar David L. Gregory. At Marquette University, a floor bearing Day's name has been reserved for those drawn to social justice issues. The office of service and justice at Fordham University bears her name, at both of the university's two campuses at Lincoln Center and in the Bronx. Broadway Housing Communities, a supportive housing project in New York City, opened the Dorothy Day Apartment Building in 2003. Several Catholic Worker communities are named after Day. Saint Peter's College of Jersey City, New Jersey named their Political Science Office the Dorothy Day House.

Suffragette, Social Reformer. She was arrested and beaten for picketing on behalf of suffrage in 1917 and was imprisoned eight times in her life for championing her causes. A convert to Catholicism, she was also the founder of the Catholic Worker movement, and had hoped to launch a sort of Catholic communal society. There is a collection of Catholic Worker papers housed at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. (bio by: [fg.cgi?page=mr&MRid=46602628" target="_blank mj)]

• Reference: Find A Grave Memorial - SmartCopy: Apr 30 2018, 13:04:39 UTC