‘A saint for our time’

Richard A. Sokerka

When Pope Francis made history on Sept. 24, 2015 by being the first pope ever to address a joint meeting of Congress, he invoked four iconic U.S. citizens as relevant models of virtue for Americans today: Abraham Lincoln, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Dorothy Day and Thomas Merton.

“A nation can be considered great when it defends liberty as Lincoln did; when it fosters a culture which enables people to ‘dream’ of full rights for all their brothers and sisters as Martin Luther King sought to do; when it strives for justice and the cause of the oppressed as Dorothy Day did by her tireless work; the fruit of a faith which becomes dialogue and sows peace in the contemplative style of Thomas Merton,” the Pope said.

For the Pope to mention Dorothy Day in the same breath with Abraham Lincoln and the others points to the high esteem in which he holds the co-founder of the Catholic Worker Movement.

Similar recognition of Dorothy Day came from the U.S. bishops in 2012, when, on a voice vote, they endorsed the sainthood cause of Day, who was famously quoted as saying, “Don’t call me a saint. I don’t want to be dismissed so easily.”

This past June, the Archdiocese of New York published an edict, the Diocesan Inquiry on the life, heroic virtues and reputation of holiness and of the intercessory power of the Servant of God Dorothy Day.

The cause of her canonization was officially opened in 2000 at the request of the late Cardinal John O’Connor of New York and the Vatican provided its nihil obstat, naming Day “Servant of God.”

As her cause moves along, it now seems likely she could become a saint despite her own protestations and the issues in her early life that would cause some consternation about her cause. To those with trepidation about her being named a saint someday, Pope Francis might say: “Who am I to judge?”

Dorothy Day, one of New York’s own, dealt with tumult in her life before finding her way to the Church. She left college to work as a journalist for a socialist newspaper, had a string of love affairs, attempted suicide and aborted her first child.

But 1926 was a seminal moment in her life when she became pregnant with her only child by her common-law husband. The joy of her pregnancy stirred feelings of redemption and she embraced Catholicism. She and her baby were baptized contributing to the end of her common-law marriage. With a new found faith, she embarked on a writing career, contributing to a number of Catholic publications, such as America and Commonweal. While covering the 1932 Hunger March in Washington, D.C. for, she prayed at the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception that some way would open up for her to serve the poor and the unemployed.

This led her to be one of the founders of the Catholic Worker newspaper, which was published to promote Catholic social teachings. In the 1950s, it was one of the first organizations to embrace the civil rights movement, and Day was even shot at while working for integration.

Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York has called Day’s journey “Augustinian,” saying that “she was the first to admit it: sexual immorality, there was a religious search, there was a pregnancy out of wedlock and an abortion. Like Saul on the way to Damascus, she was radically changed and has become ‘a saint for our time.’ ”

And sooner, rather than later, she will indeed become a “saint for our time.”