In Praise of Holy Women

There had been no overtly pacifist movement in the Catholic Church for
centuries, until the Catholic Worker. Perhaps more than any Catholic since
St. Francis, Dorothy Day began a process within her church that put Jesus,
rather than the theologians of the just war, at the center of the church’s
social teaching.
Dorothy was often imprisoned as a result of her activity in peace, civil rights,
and labor demonstrations. In the 1950's year after year, she sat on a park
bench in front of New York’s City Hall while air-raid sirens were howling,
and everyone was required by law to take shelter in what was nothing other
than a mass dress-rehearsal for nuclear war. She was occasionally arrested
for other reasons as well when they were founding a labor movement, for
example with farm workers in California. One of my favorite photos of her,
taken in 1973, shows her holding the dress she wore the last time she was
a prisoner. All the women jailed with her signed their names on the rough
prison garment, making it a treasure to her.
At the center of Dorothy’s faith was her certainty that we are saved not
because we are clever or are often found in church buildings (though daily
Mass was part of the structure of her life) but because of our loving response
to ‘the least.’ The Catholic Worker way of life is to practice daily ‘the works
of mercy’ that Jesus speaks of in the 25 th chapter of the Gospel of Matthew:
feeding the hungry, giving drink to the thirsty, clothing the naked, taking
in the homeless, caring for the sick, and being with prisoners. This same
teaching led Dorothy to oppose all those systems that cause suffering. ‘We
see that the works of mercy oppose the works of war,’ she said. She often
quoted St. John of the Cross: ‘Love is the measure by which we shall be
judged.’
Dorothy died November 29, 1980. It was a widely marked event in America,
not only noticed by Christians of every variety but by many people in other
religious traditions, or outside every religion. By then many regarded her as
one of Christianity’s great reformers and a modern saint, though Dorothy
herself had sometimes said, ‘Don’t call me a saint – I don’t want to be
dismissed so easily.’
After the funeral, an editor of The Catholic Worker was asked whether the
movement would be able to continue without its founder. ‘We have lost
Dorothy,’ Peggy Scherer said, ‘but we still have the gospel.’
The most extraordinary monuments to Dorothy Day are the many houses of
hospitality that stretch from Oakland to Amsterdam, places of welcome that
not only offer a caring response to the homeless and runaways but centers of
work for a non-violent society. We can say there is still a greater monument,
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