The Monday after our show “On Pilgrimage With Dorothy Day” aired last week on Easter weekend, Pope Francis died. I’ve been thinking about him so much these days, especially as a Catholic, because of his sickness, but also what I think he has done to make the church more inclusive and unified than any other pope in my lifetime.
Pope Francis was a supporter of Dorothy Day, who is a candidate for sainthood in the Catholic Church. He said this in an address to U.S. Congress in 2015:
“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.”
In the days following the pope’s death, one of the guests on our show, Fr. James Martin, traveled to Rome to pay homage to the pope, who he had met and corresponded with many times. Martin, a Jesuit like Pope Francis, has written about Pope Francis’ work to include LGBTQ Catholics in the church and had a great back and forth with The New York Times' Ross Douthat about what may happen next. I also really enjoyed this story from AP about the relationship between a reporter and Pope Francis, who was known to not give many interviews.
In 2023, Pope Francis wrote the foreword to an Italian translation of Dorothy Day’s 1938 autobiography, “From Union Square to Rome.” In it, he writes that Day’s path shows “an adventure that is good for the heart.”
– Shannon