- [Anne] Hey friends, it's Anne. Are there people you think of as saints? Well, on this episode of "To The Best Of Our Knowledge" producer Shannon Henry Kleiber is gonna take us on a journey through New York City in the footsteps of peace activist, journalist, and single mother, Dorothy Day. And if you haven't heard of her, well, she is up for sainthood in the Catholic Church. Keep listening.
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- [Anne] It's "To The Best Of Our Knowledge". I'm Anne Strainchamps. And today Shannon Henry Kleiber is taking us on a journey through New York City on pilgrimage with Dorothy Day.
- Hi, I'm Shannon.
- She doesn't lose time. Hi Shannon.
- Nice to meet you.
- Hi, I'm Alex Avitabile.
- Hi Alex. I'm Shannon, it's nice meet you.
- Yes, nice to meet you.
- [Anne] Shannon I can hear the city all around you. Where exactly are you?
- [Shannon] We're standing under the statue of George Washington near the entrance to Union Square.
- [Alex] This is where it all began. On May 1, 1933, issue one, volume one of the Catholic Worker newspaper was distributed here in Union Square on May Day, among all the communists and the socialists. In fact, informing everyone, and to many Catholics' surprise, that the Catholic church had teachings that were pro-labor.
- [Anne] So I think a lot of people have probably never even heard of Dorothy Day. What should we know?
- [Shannon] Right, so in 2015, Pope Francis spoke to Congress and praised who he called four representatives of the American people. Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Merton, Martin Luther King Jr., and Dorothy Day. A lot of people said at that moment, "Dorothy Day?"
- [Anne] But not you.
- [Shannon] Right, so growing up Catholic, and with a father who was a former Jesuit priest, Day was someone talked about in my house. I've always been fascinated by her.
- [Anne] How come?
- [Shannon] She was a radical peace activist, a journalist and a single mother. She co-founded with Peter Maurin, the Catholic Worker Movement in 1933.
- [Anne] I feel like I should know what that was, but I don't really know that much. What was the Catholic Worker Movement?
- [Shannon] Yeah, so it's still a newspaper, the Catholic Worker newspaper, which is sold for a penny a copy, and it's a network of houses that feed and house the poor. And there are actually now more Catholic Worker houses, nearly 200 today than there were in Dorothy Day's lifetime.
- [Anne] Wow. So she died in 1980, and yet it seems like a lot of people think she would make a very relevant saint for our times.
- [Shannon] Yeah, for some people she would definitely be an untraditional saint. She had an abortion and then a child out of marriage before her conversion to Catholicism. She was an anarchist. A supporter of nonviolent protests. She marched and picketed for farm worker labor rights with Caesar Chavez. She was arrested several times and she had an FBI record.
- [Anne] That does not sound like somebody many Catholics would even want as a saint.
- [Shannon] Oh yeah, she was complicated. And that's part of why I was curious about how she might become a modern saint, and maybe even give us a new way of seeing the Catholic Church.
- [Anne] So you set out on a pilgrimage basically, in New York City, walking around to places where she lived and worked, and you met a bunch of people. Who are we gonna meet?
- [Shannon] My first guides are three people working towards her canonization. Alex Avitabile. He's a retired attorney. Also Deirdre Cornell, a third generation Catholic Worker who knew Dorothy through her parents. And Dr. Joe Sclafani. He's a retired physician focused especially on the search for miracles.
- [Anne] A crucial part of the sainthood process, right?
- [Shannon] Exactly.
- [Dr. Sclafani] The peace movement was very active in Union Square where there was always somebody on a soapbox discussing their views on the Vietnam War. There was the anti-nuclear movement, and Dorothy Day was sort of the epicenter. She was involved in all of them in some way, shape or form, and that's because of her fundamental beliefs on peace for the poor, for the underserved. And so this was her home.
- [Shannon] I grew up Catholic and I have this little saints book that so many of us had when we were elementary school probably. And I loved reading about the lives of the saints, the ordinary parts of their lives, the extraordinary parts of their lives. And especially was connected to Saint Clair because that was the saint I loved the most. I wanted to ask you about why saints matter to us in this time.
- [Father Martin] Well, in Catholic tradition, the Saints have always performed two roles.
- [Shannon] Father James Martin is an American Jesuit priest.
- [Father Martin] One, they are our patrons. So they're people who pray from us, from their posts in heaven. And two, they are our companion. So they're kind of our examples basically. And you know, there have been saints as long as there's been a Christian Church. I mean, we have St. Peter and all the apostles, and Mary Magdalene. They've always been important to Catholics, through thick and thin.
- [Shannon] It's kind of an incredible thing to think about that there'll be new saints. And that process is, I think for many people, kind of confusing. How does someone become a saint?
- [Father Martin] So basically what happens is it starts usually with the local bishop and the local diocese who declares the person, for example, Dorothy Day, a servant of God. That's kind of the beginning. And then it goes to the Vatican. And when all the papers are kind of reviewed and they're called venerable at that stage, then it's sort of up to God, which means that people start to pray to them, right? Ask for their prayers. We have to be clear about that. And once a miracle is approved, and let me tell you, the standards are pretty high. Once one miracle is approved, they are what's called beatified, which means they're called blessed. And then the next miracle means that they can be canonized.
- [Shannon] When you were going to the holy land and doing pilgrimages, how did that connect you to your faith in a different way?
- [Father Martin] Someone said to me once, "Visiting a saint's locale is like going to the childhood house of a friend. You feel like you understand the friend, but then when you see their house and their family, you understand them much better." It's one thing to read about Dorothy Day and say, oh yeah, I really admire her. It's another to say, boy, she was actually physically here. And it grounds the saints in a way that I think is really important.
- [Shannon] So interesting. Oh, Father Martin, this is wonderful.
- [Father Martin] My pleasure. Have a great pilgrimage and pray for me on that pilgrimage when you can.
- [Shannon] So you are looking for favors and graces and miracles. Literally.
- [Dr. Sclafani] Yes, we are. We've been doing, looking for favors, graces, and miracles and have been collecting them for quite a number of years.
- [Shannon] This is Dr. Joe Sclafani again.
- [Dr. Sclafani] We ended up investigating about 25 and we settled in on about a half a dozen, and then worked with our postulator in Rome to determine whether they meet the criteria of a true miracle. And unfortunately, we have yet to find one that meets all of the criteria.
- [Shannon] So you're still looking?
- [Dr. Sclafani] We're still looking.
- [Shannon] So as you talk about the half dozen that were kind of potential.
- [Dr. Sclafani] Yes.
- [Shannon] Tell me the attributes of those. What were those like?
- [Dr. Sclafani] Well, the one thing is that you have to determine that there was no medical intervention that could explain a miracle.
- [Shannon] Okay.
- [Dr. Sclafani] So if you have patients who have been treated with chemotherapy, it has to be very clear that that did not contribute at any substantial way to the success or the survival of that individual.
- [Shannon] And you're a doctor, you're an obstetrician.
- Right.
- So you know medical life.
- Right.
- [Shannon] And this is in part why you're working on this aspect
- That's right.
- of the canonization process.
- [Dr. Sclafani] The biggest problem is obtaining medical records. Many times these stories are old, and we can't obtain the medical records. We had one case from New York City that seemed very meritorious and we just were unable to get the medical records to confirm what people were saying about a particular individual who had apparent lung cancer, which resolved spontaneously after prayers to Dorothy Day. It's a difficult process as you can imagine.
- [Shannon] I understand in studying the lives of the saints that so many are related to healing.
- Right.
- But could there be a non-medical miracle?
- [Dr. Sclafani] Almost all miracles are medical, and almost all miracles occur after the death of the saint. You have to show that there was someone who specifically prayed to Dorothy for that specific intervention. They cannot be praying for anyone else except to Jesus or to Our Lady.
- [Shannon] And Our Lady is Mary, for those non-Catholics listening to us.
- Yes, yes.
- Yeah.
- [Robert] Dorothy had a kind of pious phase in her childhood. She went to college and put that all aside. She was more impressed by socialists and the labor movement. Christians were just people who sort of went to church on Sunday, and it didn't seem to relate to the real issues of the day.
- [Shannon] This is Robert Ellsberg. He came to the Catholic Worker as a teenager, became managing editor of the newspaper, and worked closely with Day in her later life. Day left behind many journals and diaries, which he's edited.
- [Robert] So she had drifted away from that. And then she decided to quit college and move to New York where she found work on a socialist newspaper. So she knew all of these great radicals of the day. And she was involved in this atmosphere of revolt and protest during World War I. She was arrested with the suffragists in Washington, DC and went to jail. But she also had some hard experiences. She had a desperate love affair that ended with her becoming pregnant and having an abortion, trying to commit suicide. A very dark time in her life. And then we move ahead some while. She's written an autobiographical novel, and with the money that she got for the sale of film rights, she bought a little bungalow on Staten Island. And that's the time when she met the love of her life, Forster Batterham. It was a kind of time of healing. She experienced love, a domestic life, she loved being around the ocean. And he was a scientist and he kind of awakened her interest in nature. And it was during that time that she says that she found that she was pregnant. And so then comes the kind of turning point in her life. She said she felt just this enormous sense of gratitude and joy at the idea that she was gonna have a child. And with that came this religious impulse. She found herself praying.
- [Shannon] That's so interesting that her pregnancy, giving birth to another human, coincided with that moment.
- [Robert] Well, I think that also is unique in the Annals of the Saints. The idea that her conversion was prompted by the experience of pregnancy. She wanted to respond. She said that God was the only thing big enough to receive my gratitude. So she, walking down the beach in Staten Island where she was living, she saw the Sister of Charity, and went up to her and said, "How could I get my child baptized?" You know, become a Catholic. Now, Forster, the father had no interest in marriage, wasn't really interested in bringing children into the world, and had no interest in Catholicism. So it was already a looming tension between them. She describes a very moving section in her autobiography is about the kind of looming shadow that was over her happiness because she had this fear of where this was heading. Tamar was born, she was baptized. And it was like a year later that Dorothy decided to become a Catholic herself.
- [Shannon] You became her editor and you have for years been editing Dorothy Day's diaries and letters. You knew her, but you must have gotten a new sense of Dorothy Day by reading her writings.
- [Robert] Oh, completely. Reading her diaries and her letters was a real revelation to me. I got to know a different Dorothy Day. And it was thousands of pages. You see her interior life. It's when I really took the measure of the holiness of this person, you get a sense of the strain and the difficulty of life in the Catholic Worker. The pressures that were on her from every direction. The complaints from people who always were accusing her of being a hypocrite or being a dictator, or of not living up to the ideals of the Catholic Worker or whatever it was. Having to be the kind of abbess, or mother of this very fractious community and a movement, the strains that she felt as a mother, not being more available to her daughter growing up. And really this effort to examine her conscience and her life and the presence of God and the measure of the gospel. She did not wanna be called a saint if that meant putting her on a pedestal, treating her like some person who was utterly, you know, different from ordinary human beings, or someone who had no faults or no flaws.
- [Shannon] Okay, so where are we now?
- [Dr. Sclafani] So right now we're at the front of the Church of St. Francis Xavier, and it is here where Dorothy did occasionally come. We wanna show you the tapestries that were just installed here.
- [Shannon] Oh, yeah the tapestries.
- [Dr. Sclafani] This is called the Narthex right here. The point where you enter the church, but not into the.
- [Shannon] Oh, I see Dorothy Day right there. Wow. What do you think of her expression in this? I mean, she's just really looking down at us. I don't know, what do you, Deirdre, what do you think? I mean, you knew her.
- [Deirdre] I think she's saying, "What are you up to? Are you working? There's a lot of work to be done."
- [Shannon] This is Deirdre Cornell. She's managing editor of a Catholic overseas mission magazine. And she knew Dorothy Day through her parents and her grandparents.
- [Deirdre] She wants to know that we're keeping the vision alive and that we're working for a better world. And I think she just was so in touch with misery and poverty and suffering and racism and war and so on. I think that's why she's at the center because she connects so much. She connects people and she connects different types of suffering with multiple causes. You know, we talk now about intersectionality and I think she had a lot of wisdom in that type of thinking.
- [Shannon] It also seems like there's some, I don't know, humor there.
- [Deirdre] Right, right.
- Yeah.
- Yeah. My father used to love to tell stories. You know, he came in '53, so she was still young and vibrant relatively. Someone once came to the hospitality house and they expected to see this very visionary person, a saint, you know, having these beautiful spiritual experiences. And said to her, "Dorothy, do you have visions?" And she kind of snapped back, "Visions of unpaid bills."
- [Shannon] I wanted to ask you how you first came to know Dorothy Day?
- [Deirdre] Well, my grandparents had known Dorothy because they helped to start a house of hospitality in Cleveland, Ohio. So my mother's family stayed in touch with the Catholic Worker. She received the newspaper, and she came to New York City at the age of 21 to join other young people who wanted to be around, or they wanted to be near her because they were looking for ways to build a better world. My father had read "The Long Loneliness" when he was a college student at 19.
- [Shannon] So they came each of them on their own to be near Dorothy.
- Right. Right. They were both volunteers at the Catholic Worker at that time. You know.
- So she kind of was a matchmaker.
- [Deirdre] My father says that, yeah. Yeah.
- Yeah.
- [Deirdre] And then when he burned his draft cards, my mother, brother and I lived at the Catholic Worker farm while he was in the Danbury prison. And that's where I took my first steps as I learned to walk.
- At the Danbury prison, wow. Wow, that's amazing. So, I have to say, those are miracles too. Maybe they're not medical miracles.
- [Deirdre] I don't think those are the real miracles. The real miracles are that people who knew Dorothy were changed forever. That's the miracle, right?
- [Shannon] So you were telling me about a dream you had about Dorothy Day. Can you tell me about that?
- [Deirdre] When I was in college, I went to Central America a couple of times on immersion trips, and I worked for the American Friends Service Committee, but I really had no idea what I was gonna do when I graduated. And so during that time, I had a very vivid dream. I dreamed of Dorothy, and she didn't look as I remembered her. I saw her in this dream having a blue, kind of a blue suit. Not a business suit exactly, but you know, it wasn't the Dorothy that I exactly remembered. And I said to her, Dorothy, can you help me? I'm gonna need to find work. And she looked at me and she said, "I'll see what I can do." And I just felt after that, I felt very peaceful. It sounds corny, but it was, I received that as a message that everything would be okay. And you know, I didn't have to exactly try to follow what my parents had done. You can't replicate. You can just take inspiration and try to find your own path and your own calling. And I think at that time in my life, that was the message that I needed from her and I got it.
- [Shannon] And you found work.
- [Deirdre] Yeah, I've been working. I've been working, Dorothy.
- [Shannon] And here we are at Mary House. We've gotten here.
- Yes.
- Yeah, right here. So thank you, Alex.
- Thank you.
- Thank you Joe. And thank you Deirdre. And I'm sure I will talk to you again.
- [Anne] Coming up, Shannon takes us to Mary House, the Catholic Worker house where Dorothy Day lived and died. It's "To The Best Of Our Knowledge" from Wisconsin Public Radio and PRX. It's "To The Best Of Our Knowledge", I'm Anne Strainchamps and we are on pilgrimage, following in the footsteps of Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker Movement, and the woman who could be the next American saint. Shannon Henry Kleiber is about to visit Mary House where Dorothy Day fed and housed the poor. So first, let's hear how Day herself described it.
- [Dorothy] House of Hospitality are maintained in that way, you see, by the voluntary poverty of those who are participating in the work. Lodging is free, the food is free, people are not questioned. The clothes come in are free. In the cold winter like this last, there have been any number of cases reported by the police of men who have frozen to death, men who have slept in empty buildings. The whole gesture towards trying to provide, trying to go ahead and through voluntary poverty and through a personal sacrifice. This has been the very basic position of the Catholic Worker.
- Hi I'm Shannon.
- Alex, Shannon, and Joe.
- [Shannon] So Mary House is a bustling place. People are serving and eating food, coming in and out of their rooms, chatting and catching up.
- [Shannon] Every evening there's a community gathering to say prayers called Vespers together.
- [Jane] I remember the first day that she came that I met her. I didn't meet her right away.
- [Shannon] This is Jane Salmon, a long time Catholic Worker volunteer. She's lived in Mary House for many years.
- [Jane] She comes through the door looking very elegant and like a lot of young people, I suppose I thought she was gonna be, "Hello, girl." Or, "Hello, daughter." You know, like this older person's cliche driven voice. And she was as clear and commanding as one could be. And I was literally mopping the floor. And I'm like that sign, Jesus is coming, look busy. Dorothy is coming, I'm mopping away on the floor. And so I went up to her. I can't say who said what first, but you know, we introduced, I said, hello my name's Jane Salmon. And she wanted to know immediately where I was from. And then she wanted to know if I knew the Cleveland folks, the people that were out at the Catholic Worker. I said, well, I don't know. I said, but we do have a picture of my dad in front of the Blessed Martin de Porres House in Cleveland. And she said, "You're second generation Catholic Worker," is what she said.
- Oh, wow. It was sweet, right?
- Oh.
- [Jane] The women who were volunteers. None of us was a paid employee. And we lived on a common dorm together in one room with a lot of people who stayed half the night up. And some of the women who lived on that floor, their lives were people who were out on the street. The sixties were the sixties, but not to us yet. There was so much conflict. And there were people that were not all on board with the Catholic thing. Some people wanted to do things that weren't what we would call nonviolent response to Vietnam. And then when we got there in this early seventies, she seemed to like the fact that we had some Catholic roots, as you said.
- Roots, yeah.
- And when I said that, I said, oh, we must seem really kind, put my head down, kind of boring to you, you know? She says, "You do not know how happy you people make me." I'll always remember that. I'll always remember, "You do not know how happy you people make me." You know?
- Yeah.
- [Shannon] One of Day's traits was connecting and influencing people wherever she went, in her Catholic Worker community. But she also had her own biological family. Her daughter Tamar and nine grandchildren. Martha Hennessy is one of them. Martha, I wanted to go back to Mary House.
- [Martha] Mm hm.
- [Shannon] You know, Mary House is this place where people who really, you know, they're experiencing poverty, they're experiencing mental illness. It is in some ways a place you might not expect there to be so much beauty and fun. How does that work?
- [Martha] How does it work, yes. Well, I call it the agony and the ecstasy. How could Dorothy have done this for 50 years without experiencing joy, without seeing the beauty, everyday beauty? In our world today, in you know, the Lower East Side where our lives are completely dictated by this, what Dorothy called the lousy rotten system of capitalism, and the church's complicity in it. Resistance to what's wrong and what's evil is a challenge, but also a joy to participate in. And of course none of us can do it, first of all, without God. And second of all, without each other. So we cannot separate our faith from our works.
- [Shannon] How long were you in prison for? Can you tell me what you were arrested for? And these experiences that you have in your peaceful protesting also seems so inspired by Dorothy.
- [Martha] Yes, I would say all aspects of my life have been interwoven with Dorothy. And reentering Mary House community was certainly through these anti-war actions. So myself and six other Catholics, many of them Catholic Workers, we walked onto Kings Bay naval base, which houses the Trident nuclear submarine fleet on the East Coast. We prayed, we poured our blood, we symbolically hammered on these weapons of mass destruction. We waited to be arrested. I was given a 10 month prison sentence. And I spent over a year with an ankle monitor and house arrests and curfew, et cetera, et cetera. Now, Dorothy's wrote an essay in September of 1945 called "We Go on Record: the Catholic Worker Response to Hiroshima." So I understood what these weapons were about from the get-go, and these weapons were being tested atmospherically, when I was in utero and when I was born in the mid 1950s. And so it is in my bones, literally, and it's embedded in my psyche and my spirituality. This is what Dorothy handed me. "Are you going to stand up and speak against this abomination against God's creation?" We're not created to destroy, we're created to love.
- [Shannon] Tell me about your childhood growing up. So you are her granddaughter. You really knew her well. You are family. Can you remember the first time, your first memory of your grandmother?
- [Martha] I was a 3-year-old and I was sitting on her lap and she was either just arriving or getting ready to leave. She was a great storyteller. I had my ear on her chest and her voice was resonating. And it was my first memory of her and also of feeling the presence of God. I mean, it took me years to process that memory and what it meant. But that was my first memory of her.
- [Shannon] That's beautiful. What did you call her?
- [Martha] Granny.
- [Shannon] Granny.
- We left Geoff upstairs.
- Yes.
- And Dorothy.
- Yeah.
- [Shannon] So Deirdre, tell me where we're going here.
- [Deirdre] We're going up to Dorothy's room in here in Mary House. This is where she lived during her last years. So here, and Geoff will be able to explain a lot more.
- Oh, hi.
- Hi. Hello.
- Hi, I'm Shannon.
- Shannon, hi.
- [Shannon] Oh wow, so this was Dorothy's room.
- [Father Gneuhs] This is her room.
- [Shannon] So, yeah, actually if you could start with how you knew Dorothy.
- [Father Gneuhs] Oh, first time I met Dorothy, I came to New York in 1974 for the summer.
- [Shannon] This is Father Geoffrey Gneuhs.
- [Father Gneuhs] With some strong negotiations with superiors, got permission to be a chaplain here.
- [Shannon] Okay.
- [Father Gneuhs] I do recall Dorothy said to me, "Father, your being assigned here is the affirmation of my life." She was officially recognized by the church.
- The church.
- Yes.
- [Father Gneuhs] So, but I, it was very touching. So there's several volunteers, but they asked me to stay in this building 'cause down the block the Hell's Angels.
- I remember that.
- And they were not very friendly. And they had a nasty habit at about 3:00 AM, a whole contention, they would purposely stop in front of Mary House and gun their motorcycles. They were very obnoxious. I said, Dorothy, they wake me up every night, and how do you sleep? And she said, "I'm deaf in one ear and I sleep on the good ear."
- [Shannon] Did she die in this room?
- [Father Gneuhs] Yes. Yeah. And Tamar was with her, her daughter.
- [Deirdre] Tamar, her daughter was, came to be with her.
- [Father Gneuhs] Yeah, that week, it was Thanksgiving week. Dorothy was getting weaker, but there was no imminent sense that she would pass away.
- [Shannon] I mean, it's pretty powerful to be in this room where she died.
- Yeah.
- Look at all the books.
- [Shannon] I just, yeah, I'm looking around there. These were her books, right?
- [Deirdre] Yes.
- [Father Gneuhs] She was a great reader, but she also especially loved the Russian writers, Dostoevsky's and.
- [Shannon] George Orwell. And there's this, yeah. Oh, a quote from Peter Maurin.
- From Peter Maurin.
- [Shannon] "The future will be different if we make the present different." I imagine she died right here.
- Uh yeah, in that bed.
- Yeah in the bed.
- [Shannon] She died right there. Wow.
- Yeah.
- [Shannon] This is her desk.
- [Deirdre] Uh huh, her desk.
- [Shannon] Are these her post cards?
- [Father Gneuhs] Oh, what were these? I know she must have collected these.
- Right, to be able to.
- That's kind of an incredible collection of her, these were her postcards that.
- She was a great correspondent.
- She hasn't sent yet.
- [Father Gneuhs] Right, she hadn't sent yet.
- [Shannon] Wow.
- [Father Gneuhs] But yes, I would bring Dorothy when she couldn't come down for mass, I would bring communion to her here.
- [Shannon] Right.
- [Father Gneuhs] And then sometimes in the evening, later evening, one of us would come to make sure she took her medications. Sometimes she would sit and we would have a glass of sherry together.
- Oh, that sounds nice.
- It was.
- [Shannon] What would you talk about?
- [Father Gneuhs] Oh, well, again, she would be telling stories or reminiscing. But yeah, so those were sweet times. The wake was here. And, so there are people lined up on the street. And Abbie Hoffman came for the wake and he quipped that Dorothy was the first hippie. And then we had the prayer service. That was on Monday. And then Tuesday was the funeral at the church, it's now torn down, on Second Avenue then.
- [Shannon] You knew her so well.
- [Father Gneuhs] Yeah.
- [Shannon] And you had probably given funeral homilies before.
- Right.
- [Shannon] But what was it like to create that homily for Dorothy Day's funeral?
- [Father Gneuhs] Well, it was, I have to admit rather humbling and profound. But I preached on a line from John. And a whole theme in the homily was, it was all about truth. And she, once she converted she was set on that Christ is the way, the truth and the light. And I pointed out that in her life, she tried to incarnate that. The burial was out on Staten Island, Resurrection Cemetery. And one curious thing, before kind of her conversion, she was friends with Eugene O'Neill and he could recite Francis Thompson's poem, "The Hound of Heaven." But at the cemetery that day, as we were placing her body in the earth, three greyhound dogs showed up and were kind of jumping and dancing around.
- [Shannon] Wow.
- [Father Gneuhs] I even said to a fellow Dominican colleague, look at that. The hounds of heaven are there.
- Wow.
- Yeah.
- [Shannon] You have tears in your eyes. It's really touching to, I'm sorry,
- Oh, wow.
- [Shannon] I don't mean to make it worse, but no, it's just touching 'cause you're remembering that so clearly. And she was such a good friend to you. And how do you think of her as your friend and a saint?
- [Father Gneuhs] Well, no, my feeling of the relationship with her was just, a dear loving person. Because the last time I brought her communion was about maybe five or six days before she passed away. She was in bed and she was weak. And this were her last words, "Father, it takes so long to die." I mean, that to me was terribly profound. And it was, I think, in her soul, she had done what she had done and it was time to go.
- [Shannon] Was there a moment when you realized that Granny was important to other people other than your family?
- [Martha] Yeah, yeah, I had to come to the understanding that she belonged to the world. She didn't just belong to us.
- [Shannon] Is it hard to share her with the world?
- [Martha] Yeah, of course. I think when it came to going to her funeral, when I was 25, that was super hard.
- [Shannon] Why?
- [Martha] Well, because she was part of this community that was very big, very broad. And I was standing in line at her wake at Mary House, and the woman in front of me, who I have no idea to this day who she was, she kissed Dorothy on the lips. And that was really hard for me. You know, this was my grandmother. This is what this stranger was doing with her body.
- Yeah.
- [Martha] I don't know how to explain it. It, it's, it's, you know, it's a public life and it's a private life.
- [Anne] We're talking about the life and death of Dorothy Day, and following her path to sainthood. Coming up, what does it take to be a saint? What do we even want from saints? Keep listening here on "To The Best Of Our Knowledge" from Wisconsin Public Radio and PRX. ♪ We will hold our ground forever ♪ ♪ Hold our ground forever ♪
- [Anne] In the years since her death, Dorothy Day's reputation as an activist and social leader has grown. There's no doubt she did a lot of good in her life, but she certainly wasn't perfect. So what exactly does it mean to call someone a saint? Shannon Henry Kleiber asked Father James Martin more about the complexity of Dorothy Day's life.
- [Shannon] When you think of Dorothy Day, how do you describe her?
- [Father Martin] Sure, I usually say apostle of the poor.
- Mm hm.
- She was tough. You know, you read her diaries, her letters, her journals, and struggled with anger. She talks a lot about that in her journals. You know, a real person who lived during our times, who was also very holy. She's pretty amazing. I think Robert Ellsberg said that she was the first saint who you could call a kind of a, a political kind of saint.
- [Shannon] Mm hmm.
- [Father Martin] So you can say there's a difference between someone like St. Teresa of Calcutta, also called Mother Teresa, and Dorothy Day. While both of them worked with the poor, Dorothy Day, really looked at the systems that caused them to be poor.
- [Shannon] It's known that she had had an abortion, which is so unusual, I think, in so many ways when you think about the teachings of the Catholic Church and what is traditionally accepted. Do you think something like that is going to keep her from some people wanting her to be a saint? But at the same time, maybe some Catholics will say, well, if she went through that, maybe, you know, I'm not a bad person. Or we can all be Catholics in a different way.
- [Father Martin] You know, this was, she had her abortion, I would say before her conversion experience. And in the lives of the saints, there are stories with the saints doing all sorts of things before they embrace the faith. I mean, we're speaking on the Feast Day of Saint Augustine, whose confessions talk famously about all the things that he did before his conversion.
- Yes.
- [Father Martin] So, you know, as the saying goes, no saint without a past, no sinner without a future.
- [Shannon] They might be more like us in some ways. I have been fascinated with Dorothy Day for many years because I'm a Catholic, because I'm a journalist. I'm a mother, and I relate to her in some ways. I also think that she is entirely not like me, in so many other ways. I don't have a vow of poverty. I'm not as radical as she was. But I feel like she's somebody who I can learn from. And that's something I think that Saints can help us as Catholics do.
- [Father Martin] Absolutely. Very well put. And I would say they might not be exactly like us, but they are like us because they struggle. You know, she struggled with raising her kids, just physically. So yeah, you're not exactly like Dorothy Day, but you are like her in lots of ways. And I think the beauty of the saint's life is that it can teach us lots about the Christian path and remind us that it is possible to be holy even in the midst of all the craziness. So they're human beings.
- [Shannon] They're human beings.
- [Father Martin] The Jesuits, we have an expression called the loved sinner, right? We are all loved sinners. So, you know, if you're a mother, being a holy mother, if you're an attorney, a holy attorney, and being generous and charitable and loving and self-sacrificing, which everyone can do. It's hard though, right? It's tough.
- Mm hm.
- [Father Martin] And the saints found it hard as well. So yeah, we're all called to be saints.
- [Shannon] That's kind of amazing. And this is not just for Catholics, right?
- No.
- I mean.
- No.
- This is for everybody.
- [Father Martin] Yeah, yeah, I mean, I'm talking as a Catholic priest, but I believe it's for everyone. I think we're all called to be holy in our own way. And that Thomas Merton quote, I come back to again and again, "For me to be a saint means to be myself."
- [Shannon] So you think it's gonna happen, that she's gonna become a saint? Do you have any idea how long this is gonna take?
- [Father Martin] No, it's up to God because, you know, we're waiting on that miracle.
- [Shannon] Miracles take a while.
- [Father Martin] Miracles take a while. She's gotta do what she needs to do and God has to do what God needs to do. I know this sounds very supernatural and strange probably to a lot of listeners, but look, here's how I explain it. You often ask people on earth to pray for you. And people say, yeah, sure. Well, why wouldn't you ask people in heaven to pray for you? And why wouldn't you think that those prayers are listened to? Now when it happens, who knows. But I really do believe in miracles, thanks to the intercession of the saints.
- [Shannon] We left the Lower East side and headed to the Bronx and Manhattan University. I met a lovely couple, George Horton and Carolyn Zablotny, who are working on the canonization process. And they introduced me to theologian, Kevin Ahern. He teaches at the university. He also directs the Dorothy Day Center for the Study and Promotion of Social Catholicism.
- [Kevin] This is our student center.
- [Shannon] This is the student center.
- [Kevin] And this is really kind of the heart of our campus. And we have, we call it our Campus Ministry Social Action Suite. We have these two display cases featuring items from Dorothy's life.
- [Shannon] Oh wow. Oh wow. That's her hat.
- [Kevin] Yes. Yes. That's her hat.
- I've seen pictures of her wearing that hat and that's the actual hat.
- [Kevin] Yeah, please.
- Wow.
- The real thing.
- [Kevin] We have one display case here that features items most famously from her last arrest with the United Farm Workers in 1973 in California. We also have a flag that was given to her by Cesar Chavez from the United Farm Workers. A cane that she used, a wooden cane that she used when she met Mother Teresa.
- [Shannon] These are her rosaries.
- [Kevin] These are some rosaries of hers, some stained glass decorations that she liked. We have a whole collection of postcards that she wrote to her family members that her family donated to us. She apparently loved to write, use postcards because postcards limited how much you could say. I opened it.
- [Shannon] I like that. That's a lot about her personality, right?
- [Carolyn] Yeah, very Dorothy.
- [Kevin] We have a copy of her FBI file right here.
- [Shannon] And so what does the FBI file say?
- It talks.
- Oh, it's really good.
- So people.
- She loved it. She loved it. Apparently she said, "That was good, read that again."
- [Shannon] She liked hearing about her FBI records, yeah.
- [Kevin] Yeah, it has you know, responses of J. Edgar Hoover's. She was on a list of Americans that were most dangerous Americans. How many saints have arrest records?
- [Shannon] Right. It's so fascinating that we're here at a university because this is so much about the next generation and how people are inspired by Dorothy Day. And they might relate to her in some way and be inspired. What do you teach about her to your students?
- [Kevin] Every spring for the last three years, I've taught a course more focused on Dorothy's life and witness. And so we read some of her autobiographies. We read about people who were inspired by her, but we also give students the chance as part of the class to go down and to do community engaged learning. Where they go down and they volunteer with the Catholic Worker or with another related organization. Going out and serving the poor, going out and working for environmental justice, going out and working for peace. To value careers that are people centered and not money centered. I've had students who will go down part of my classes and volunteer at the Catholic Worker community and they will come to me in tears because they've had an experience where they said, "I didn't believe Christians actually practiced what they preached."
- [Shannon] Hmm.
- [Kevin] And I don't know if that's a miracle or not, but in my view, it is a miracle to watch a student's life and vision of the universe transformed.
- Yeah.
- You know, this woman inspires me.
- [Shannon] I can imagine a lot of students who go here, and maybe a lot of people who know Dorothy in some way, might think she's already a saint.
- [Carolyn] Most of us, I think would say, we do think she is already a saint. And the church doesn't make saints. They only recognize it.
- Recognize, yes, exactly.
- [Shannon] That's a really good point, Carolyn.
- You know, there's a really good distinction.
- Yeah.
- Yeah, that's a really good point
- You know?
- because whether it happens.
- God makes saints, you know?
- [Shannon] It happens or not.
- [Carolyn] She's already a saint. But I think to ensure her story being told, the formal recognition.
- [Shannon] The, right, you would like the formal recognition.
- Would make the difference I think, in passing it on.
- And more people would know about her if the formal recognition was made and that's part of the legacy.
- Exactly.
- [Shannon] But this journey to canonization is part of it all.
- [George] And the journey has value in itself, right?
- [Shannon] Mm hm.
- [George] The relationships that have developed around the canonization, from Cardinals to Catholic Workers, to people from all the different walks of life. I think, I believe people want to do good. And I think they've soured on religion because religion has been some of the extremism in religion and the sex abuse crisis. They've put it aside. And yet when they see someone who puts in action, Martin Luther King, who puts in action the word. I think that would appeal to people. There's something there to reconnect faith and life.
- [Carolyn] I think I am more fully alive because I know this woman lived and I have her model. I hadn't really thought of it like that, but I think that's a saintly expression.
- Yeah.
- And it's possible, right? I mean, she's.
- Yes.
- [Shannon] That you could be in her path.
- [Carolyn] Yeah.
- [Kevin] Well you use the image of path, the notion of pilgrimage, the notion of path, the notion of a journey to holiness is a very central theme in Dorothy's life. And she even writes about how that the only purpose for which we have been made was to become saints. And she uses the image of a seed being planted in us when we were born, that it's struggling to grow into a tree. How do we allow that? What's that path, that growth, that organic development? I think, you know, to say that we can always be better. We can always get more, more.
- More fullness.
- More fullness.
- More fullness.
- [Kevin] More love. I mean, anyway. And it's a love story maybe.
- [Shannon] Oh yes, we're looking for the Dorothy Day ferry.
- [Resident] What?
- [Shannon] The Dorothy Day ferry.
- [Resident] Yeah.
- [Shannon] One of the places Dorothy loved to be was Staten Island. Okay, Staten Island Ferry. She had a cottage there with Tamar's father, Forster Batterham. She's buried on the island too.
- [Shannon] George and Carolyn wanted to show me, so we took a ferry called the Dorothy Day. Oh, it is the Dorothy Day.
- Oh there it is. There it is.
- [Shannon] It was commissioned only recently in 2022. It's free and enormous. Wow. Okay. It can hold 4,500 people. And it was packed on a beautiful fall day.
- [Carolyn] Oh look, Shannon. Ellis Island.
- [Shannon] Yeah, you can see Ellis Island.
- [Carolyn] Might be. I mean, that's one of the things I love about her the most.
- [Shannon] Well, thinking about immigration and.
- Yes.
- Yeah.
- [Carolyn] She knew it was the church of the immigrant poor.
- Yeah.
- And that was, that was the church for her.
- [Shannon] Yeah.
- [Carolyn] That's three. This is three. So is this top floor?
- [Ferry Announcer] Thank you for riding the Staten Island Ferry.
- [Carolyn] She loved it, yeah. Well, it was where she got pregnant. I think it was the scene of a lot of happiness, as she put it, natural happiness.
- [Shannon] Yeah.
- [Carolyn] Seen a lot of heartbreak too, because what, embraced what she was being called, she had to leave Forster whom she clearly loved. I think she wrote some place, "Faith doesn't come cheaply." You know, she thought that maybe a cost had to be paid. Particularly because of her daughter, because she wanted the daughter, Tamar baptized. But Staten Island was I think the respite place she would go to, always throughout her life.
- [Shannon] So how did it get chosen to be named of the Dorothy Day?
- [Carolyn] I think, again, 'cause it's taking, in large measure, workers to work. It's just the perfect icon for her I think.
- It is actually. Yeah.
- And if she gets canonized, she'll probably be the only saint that's had a ferry boat named after her, right?
- [Shannon] Yeah.
- [Carolyn] That'll be a odd little distinction they can throw into their description of her. You know, this is.
- [Ferry Announcer] The Staten Island Ferry is owned and operated by the city of New York and service is provided free of charge to all passengers.
- [George] But on the inaugural voyage, Martha Hennessy, her granddaughter, Martha, gave an oration from the top of the deck against nuclear weapons.
- [Carolyn] Right.
- [George] And that's what struck me as kind of, you know, there's a way we can talk to each other over these divides. And she in some sense, in my mind, can help us think about that, you know?
- [Carolyn] I think for me it's because she's never, she opens up this, for me anyway, kind of a yearning because you still can't quite totally take in what it means that there was, I think truly a saint, you know, right here in New York City.
- In our generation.
- In our generation. And that this is real stuff.
- [Shannon] Well, and it's a freeing idea for a lot of Catholics, I think. To think that, you know, we can be flawed people and.
- Yes, exactly.
- Still be good Catholics.
- [George] Yeah. And be saints.
- Mm hm.
- [Carolyn] I think it's a work program
- [Ferry Announcer] Thank you for riding the Staten Island Ferry.
- [Anne] "To The Best Of Our Knowledge" is produced at Wisconsin Public Radio in Madison, Wisconsin, and distributed by PRX. Shannon Henry Kleiber produced and guided us through this hour with help from Angelo Batista and Charles Monroe-Kane.
- [Ferry Announcer 2] Attention all passengers, ferryboat Dorothy Day
- "Long Loneliness."
- is now arriving. All passengers must go to shore.
- Did you get that?
- [Ferry Announcer 2] Please check and make sure you have your personal belongings with you.
- [Shannon] Welcome to Staten Island.
- [Anne] Our technical director and sound designer is Joe Hartke, with help from Sarah Hopeful. We're grateful for additional music this week from Tom Chapin, Si Kahn, and the Chapin sisters.
- [Ferry Announcer 3] All passengers at this time must go to shore.
- [Shannon] Okay, careful.
- [Anne] Thanks also to the Dorothy Day Guild, the Department of Special Collections and University Archives, Marquette University Archives, which houses Dorothy Day's papers and photos. The executive producer of "To The Best Of Our Knowledge" is Steve Paulson, and I'm Anne Strainchamps. Thanks to you for listening.
