Dorothy Day

I inexplicably missed Dorothy Day’s 109th birthday which was this past November 8. For those of you who don’t know, Day was an American journalist turned social activist, anarchist, and devout member of the Catholic Church. She became known for her social justice campaigns in defense of the poor, forsaken, hungry and homeless. Alongside Peter Maurin, she founded the Catholic Worker Movement in 1933, espousing nonviolence, and hospitality for the impoverished and downtrodden.

Tom Cornell, a longtime friend of Dorothy Day, and the editor of the Catholic Worker newspaper for many years penned the following in memory of Dorothy:

“Nonviolence has another side, the obverse of the coin. Gandhi called it “the constructive program.” We call it the practice of the corporal works of mercy and the building up of community, “cells of good living,” as Catholic Worker groups do in greater and greater numbers around this country and in Europe and Australia.

Nonviolence is a revolution, the revolution of the heart, a campaign that proceeds one by one, cell by cell. It must be revolutionary because the order we suffer now, the social, political, economic order, (“this lousy, rotten system,” as Dorothy once called it), violates the human person. It is more accurately not an order but dis-order. It kills and maims by withholding the means to life from the poor, it thrives on lies -- turn your radio or TV on and listen -- lies upon lies, the withholding of truth and the dissemination of sheer deception, and the violation of conscience.

The human conscience shrinks in horror from killing our own. A prime task of the military is to desensitize this voice of conscience. They have made a science of it. This system cries to heaven for revolution. The Twentieth Century saw enough of violent revolution for us to conclude that the only genuine revolution is the one Dorothy Day called for, a nonviolent revolution, a revolution of the heart. That is her gift to us.”