WASHINGTON (CNS) — 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.
Servant of God Dorothy Day
Born: Nov. 8, 1897 Baptized Catholic: Dec. 28, 1928 Founded Catholic Worker Movement: May 1, 1933 Died: Nov. 29, 1980 Declared Servant of God: March 16, 2000
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.
George Horton, vice postulator of the cause,
is doing his work for no pay. Zablotny, his wife, edits the Dorothy Day Guild’s
newsletter, and the cause’s only employee, Jeff Korgen, works part time with
help from the Ignatian Volunteer Corps and some Archdiocese of New York staff.
“Maybe I’m good at delegating,” he chuckled.
Advancing a sainthood cause does not come
cheap; most efforts easily run into six figures and sometimes seven — a bit of
a conundrum when the object of the cause embraced voluntary poverty. “We’re not
like a religious order trying to get their founder canonized. They can draw on
the finances of the order, both provisional and staff. We’re not like that. The
legacy of Dorothy Day is the Catholic Worker movement, and the people in the
Catholic Worker are out feeding the poor, healing the homeless, demonstrating
for justice and peace; they’re true to the voluntary poverty Dorothy
practiced,” Horton said.
Korgen, whose title is “director of the
inquiry,” had been director of development and planning for the Diocese of
Metuchen, New Jersey. In his work, he combines his training in both canon law
and his prior career in social ministry.
The Vatican has an exacting process for how
documents for a sainthood cause are to be prepared. With the help of 50
volunteers who are transcribing every word Day uttered or published, the work
is getting done. Korgen estimates it could run up to 30,000 pages once it is
completed.
He wouldn’t say if he found any surprises
about Day, but Korgen did take exception to characterization of her
pre-Catholic Worker life as “bohemian.”
“Bohemian, bohemian, bohemian. You think
about any young adult living in New York City in their 20s. Maybe in their 20s
they weren’t talking about big ideas, but she was hanging out with journalists
and radicals and talking about making a better world,” Korgen said. “It doesn’t
seem to me her lifestyle was all that out of sync with what people today in
their 20s do now.”
However, “we see the signs of what she
became in her young adult life,” Korgen added. “She would finish one of those
long nights drinking with a trip to one of the parishes in Greenwich Village.”
After becoming pregnant by her common-law husband, Forster Batterham, she
wanted to get married, but he refused.
“He was the love of her life, but he was as
stubborn as she was,” Korgen said. “‘We have to get married,’ ‘It’s against my
principles.’” Batterham’s next paramour became incurably ill, and he called Day
asking for her help. And she complied.
“This is the woman who got her man, and
she’s taking care of her like, ‘Yeah, this is what I do.’ Many of us who have
had romantic relationships in our lives, we would say, ‘That’s heroic virtue
right there. That’s the making of a saint.”
Ellsberg said Day’s abortion should not
disqualify her for sainthood. “That gives the idea that abortion is a category
of its own and is going to burn in hell forever. That is not the way to
represent a Catholic understanding or Christian understanding of sin and
salvation. Traditionally, we teach that there is no sin that cannot be
forgiven. There is nothing we can do that separates us from the love of God if
we turn to Him with contrite hearts,” he said.
By the same token, though, it would be wrong to consider Day as only the patron saint of women who have undergone an abortion, thereby minimizing her contributions to Church and society.
Another contradiction is the oft-repeated
quote of Day: “Don’t make me out to be a saint. I don’t want to be dismissed
that easily.”
Zablotny said it is a warning against
other’s “abdicating” their call to Christian charity. “She didn’t want people
put on a pedestal. Therefore, the works of mercy — Oh, Dorothy can do that,
she’s a saint,’ which gets the rest of us off the hook. One of the key insights
of Vatican II … is that we’re all called to be saints.”