The Legacy of Dorothy Day: A Beacon of Hope and Peace in New York
In the spirit of peace and hope, a series of events in New York will commemorate the legacy and relevance of the words and actions of the journalist, servant of God, who cared for the discarded of America.
Giulia Galeotti – Vatican City
After visiting the Catholic Worker house at 436 East Fifteenth Street in Manhattan in November 1934, Jacques Maritain wrote a letter of thanks to Dorothy Day (1897-1980), the journalist, single mother, activist, anarchist, and pacifist who, with Peter Maurin, founded the Worker the previous year. The French philosopher was particularly happy and impressed because he felt he had found a sign of new hope in the community at 436, “a preparation for the future we ardently desire.”
A Sign of Hope
Maritain hit the mark: indeed, what Pope Francis has defined as “the humblest of the three theological virtues, because it remains hidden,” is the driving force that, since 1933 – the birth of the newspaper and the movement of the same name – has guided the life of the Catholic Worker through pickets, hospitality houses, soup lines, discussion meetings, and the pages of the monthly publication.
The Discarded of America
It is hope, in fact, that moves and guides Dorothy Day as she cares for the discarded of America, those living on the extreme margins; people victimized by too many wars that enrich a few and devastate many; women, men, and children victims of a poverty that affects many aspects of existence. An commitment and vocation in the name of peace and non-violence that are particularly precious and essential in this historical moment.
Peace Practices in the Jubilee Year
Titled Dorothy Day: Practices of Peace in the Year of Jubilee, a symposium organized in New York by Manhattan University and the Dorothy Day Guild will reflect on the contributions that the words and actions of the servant of God can offer to the Church and society in this jubilee year. The first event of the symposium will be on March 28 in Manhattan, specifically at 55 East Third Street, at the hospitality house “Maryhouse,” a symbolic place of the Worker, where Dorothy Day lived her last years and where she died on November 29, 1980. Theologians Kevin Ahern (Professor of Religious Studies at Manhattan College and former director of the Peace and Justice Studies and Labor Studies programs) and Casey Mullaney (Professor in South Bend, Indiana, and coordinator of the Dorothy Day Guild) will officially open the symposium by discussing the legacy and relevance of Dorothy Day.
The works will continue on March 29 at Manhattan University in the Bronx. Robert Ellsberg, curator of the diaries and letters of the servant of God, as well as editor of Orbis Books, will open the second day with a talk on Dorothy Day and the future of theology. The theologian Magdalena Muñoz Pizzulic will be in dialogue with him.
Blessed Are the Peacemakers
This will be followed by a series of panel discussions, each time featuring three speakers on the following themes, which cover the main aspects of Day’s life: Blessed Are the Peacemakers, On Pilgrimage, Worker, Prophet. The final roundtable – Dorothy and Lay Vocation – will include the participation of Martha Hennessy, the seventh granddaughter of Dorothy Day and the only one in the family to return to the Catholic Church.
Pilgrims in New York
Also in the jubilee year, between March and October 2025, the Dorothy Day Center at Manhattan College and the Dorothy Day Guild have organized a series of pilgrimages involving community paths of listening, praise, and prayer in three neighborhoods of New York: Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Staten Island. Community paths that will retrace the fundamental stages of Dorothy Day’s life – from birth at 71 Pineapple Street to burial in the Resurrection Cemetery on Staten Island – sifting through the places that witnessed crucial moments of the long and full decades of the Worker in the Big Apple. Locations of historic demonstrations and pickets among squares, streets, still functioning buildings, no longer existing buildings, houses, churches, nightclubs, prisons, as well as works of art (stained glass and murals primarily) that remind us of Dorothy Day.
Restoring Hope
The journey begins at Union Square, the famous square of New York protests where the first issue of the newspaper was distributed on May 1, 1933, and ends at “Maryhouse” in the Lower East Side.
A pilgrimage, therefore, to the places where Day and the Worker fed the hungry, housed the homeless, supported peace and non-violence, testified to the needs of the poor and discarded, visited prisoners (she herself ended up behind bars multiple times for her pacifist views). An opportunity for a journey to find inspiration to restore, at least a little, hope in these complex times.
In Prayer for Peace in front of the UN
A hope that effectively opened the 2025 Lenten season when, on Ash Wednesday, hundreds of supporters gathered in New York in front of the United Nations at the end of a week of prayer, protest, and acts of civil disobedience, concurrent with the Third Meeting of States Parties to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW). Archbishop John Wester of Santa Fe, New Mexico, distributed ashes and blessed the participants, 17 of whom were arrested shortly after. Before making the sign of the cross on each of them, Wester addressed the assembly, praising the preciousness of choosing to lend “your voices, your bodies, your presence to this very important cause of peace. (…) whatever your organization, we thank you. Thank you for your testimony.”
