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We’ve been cheering on the Dorothy Day sainthood cause for a long time, and we’re even more happy now that the process has taken another important step forward.
With Cardinal Dolan’s enthusiastic support, the archdiocese has opened the canonical “inquiry on the life” of Dorothy Day, a New Yorker who founded the Catholic Worker Movement to serve the poor and who fought for justice and peace in the world. A Catholic convert, she died in 1980.
The inquiry announced last week involves interviewing people who knew her and reviewing her published and unpublished writings, culminating in a report on her life for submission to the Vatican’s Congregation for the Saints as the next step in a lengthy process.
If the congregation determines that she lived with “heroic virtue,” she will be named Venerable and the cause will continue.
With or without canonization, however, Dorothy Day is one of those towering figures in the Catholic world whose virtuous life and holiness is recognized by major figures in the Church and by day-to-day Catholics who are familiar with her ministry.
No less than Pope Francis, in his Sept. 24, 2015, address before a joint session of the U.S. Congress, named her as one of four outstanding Americans, along with Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr. and Thomas Merton.
“Her social activism, her passion for justice and for the cause of the oppressed, were inspired by the Gospel, her faith and the example of the saints,” the pope said.
Exemplary for sure was her work in setting up Catholic Worker soup kitchens and shelters for the nation’s downtrodden—a Depression-era effort that started with one such house in Manhattan and grew to the 185 Catholic Worker communities around the world today.
Indeed, her work on behalf of the poor would seem to make her a perfect “Francis saint,” given the pope’s emphasis on the Church teachings regarding care for the poor, mercy and social justice.
Cardinal Dolan, too, publicly praised her, calling her “a saint for our times” in a 2012 appeal to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops to support the cause, which the bishops unanimously granted.
And while some of her most dedicated followers have questioned whether Ms. Day would have wanted to be a saint, given that she did not seek honors for herself, we think the honor would inspire future generations of Catholics to embrace her values.
As Cardinal Dolan said in his speech to the bishops, she “exemplifies what’s best in Catholic life” by championing the Church’s teachings on both social justice and the dignity of human life.
Although not all of Ms. Day’s public stances were popular—she not only opposed the very unpopular Vietnam War but also called for resistance to World War II, for instance, and was arrested several times in anti-war and anti-nuclear protests.
As a young adult, she lived a bohemian lifestyle with several affairs and a pregnancy that she ended with an abortion—a decision she later regretted deeply. It was some years after she gave birth to a daughter, her only child, that she turned firmly toward the active Catholicism that came to define her.
It was a move certainly guided by the Holy Spirit, and one that we pray will continue as her sainthood cause proceeds.
