05/14/00

Mother’s Day/ Women’s Day/ Dorothy Day

Cardinal John O’Connor, the Archbishop of New York, was buried on May 8 from St. Patrick’s Cathedral. The last time I saw him alive was in that same cathedral on January 16. I had come to New York for the great banquet celebrating his 80th birthday on January 15 at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel. The following morning, representatives from all the parishes of the Archdiocese of New York attended a special Mass he celebrated at St. Patrick’s. Cardinal O’Connor was an obviously sick man, but his habitual courage and humor surmounted his weakness; and the Mass was a joyful thanksgiving to God for the Cardinal’s life in New York. At the beginning of the Mass, much to my surprise, he announced to the assembly that he was not the only Cardinal celebrating a birthday. He told a cathedral packed with New Yorkers, whether they were interested or not, that my birthday was January 16. The remembrance of a small detail that shifted attention to another even in the midst of an occasion in his own honor was typical of John O’Connor. And anyone who has never heard “Happy Birthday” sung by choir and congregation to the accompaniment of full organ in a great cathedral has something to look forward to.

The last letter I received from Cardinal O’Connor was one sent to all the bishops of the country some months ago. He announced that the Archdiocese of New York would sponsor Dorothy Day’s cause for beatification and asked us to support it. A sponsor—usually a diocese or a religious order—takes responsibility for the long historical study and personal investigation needed to bring to the Church someone whose sanctity can be publicly recognized. Dorothy Day died in New York City on November 29, 1980, and it is appropriate that New York sponsor her cause. Her influence was national, however, so it is also appropriate that others contribute to the investigation to determine whether the Church can declare that she is now in heaven.

While most of her life was spent in New York, she lived and worked also in Chicago; and there is still a “Catholic Worker” house here (5045 S. Laflin St.). The Catholic Worker movement she helped found and nurtured for so many years established her reputation as an activist, concerned with workers, with the poor, with those against war and violence of all sorts. She was suspicious of the modern state, especially of its bureaucracies and its wars, and she befriended folks who styled themselves “Christian anarchists”.

Behind and around her activism was her life with God in the Catholic Church, which she joined in 1927, when she was 30 years old. She came to know and love God through having a child, a daughter she named Tamar. Her daughter brought her such delight that she turned to God in her joy, had her baby baptized and then followed her daughter into the Church. The miracle of new life brought her to faith, and her faith gave her an understanding of the poor that was far removed from a social welfare mindset.

She believed that it is not a duty to serve the poor but a privilege, because every one of those hungry, thirsty, naked, imprisoned souls is Christ Himself. And if it is a privilege to serve them, then it is a delight. She wrote: “For a total Christian, the goal of duty is not needed—always prodding one to perform this or that good deed. It is not a duty to help Christ; it is a privilege. Is it likely that Martha and Mary sat back and considered that they had done all that was required of them? Is it likely that Peter’s mother-in-law grudgingly served the chicken she had meant to keep till Sunday because she thought it was her ‘duty’? She did it gladly; she would have served ten chickens if she had had them. If that is the way they gave hospitality to Christ, it is certain that that is the way it should still be given. Not for the sake of humanity. Not because it might be Christ who stays with us, comes to see us, takes up our time. Not because these people remind us of Christ, but because they are Christ, asking us to find room for him, exactly as He did at the first Christmas.”

One time, given a diamond ring to help support the Catholic Worker movement, she did not sell it to buy food or pay rent; she gave the ring to an older woman who lived alone and often came to the Worker House of Hospitality for meals. Dorothy explained that the woman had her dignity. She could sell it if she liked and spend the money for rent, a trip to the Bahamas, or keep the ring to admire. “Do you suppose God created diamonds only for the rich?” Dorothy Day asked. It’s a question each of us should answer from the heart. Dorothy Day took to heart the doctrine of the Church as Christ’s body. It informed not just her work but her prayer, her love of the liturgy of the Church and her keeping of the liturgical seasons. Her life was of a single piece. This is a definition of fanaticism, if the unity is around an idea or a utopian project; it is a definition of sanctity, if the unity is around a Person, Jesus Christ.

Dorothy Day often spoke of changing things “little by little”. Her life was a whole, but it contained many parts. Part of her attractiveness lies, I believe, in the way elements of her personal journey spoke to her time. She rejected organized religion in college because she didn’t see “religious people” helping the poor. She went to jail with a group of suffragettes in 1917; they were demonstrating in favor of giving women the right to vote. She had an abortion in an effort to save a failing relationship when she was 22. The daughter born in 1927 was the child of a man she was not legally married to. She was a single parent who supported herself as a free-lance journalist, a profession which was also her father’s. These concerns continued to shape her life after her conversion of life and entry into the Church. She bears in her life story many of the tensions of the contemporary women’s movement.

Much of that tension comes from the argument about what it means to be human. Does it mean being independent or being related? Does it get in the way of being an independent woman if one is a wife and mother, someone for whom a relationship lies at the center of her life? Dorothy Day was able to reconcile independence and relationship through her faith, which tells us that we find our true selves in relationship to God and to those he gives us to love and to serve, even with our very lives. We receive our very self back as a gift once we are strong and free enough to give our self to another. In that vision, the differences between women and men are a gift to be shared, not a threat to be defined away politically. If freedom to do only what I want and combat over the right to do what I want are what it means to be human, then the world is peopled by neither women nor men but only moral monsters.

Last March 25, the feast of the Annunciation of the Lord, the Church celebrated the Jubilee for Women. In the Archdiocese of Chicago, the Archdiocesan Council for Catholic Women, which is the umbrella group for all Catholic women’s organizations, held celebrations in different parts of the Archdiocese. Celebrations make people and their contributions visible for a moment. They are important to the extent that that visibility is made a part of everyday life. In 1995, Pope John Paul II spoke of women’s participation in the life of the Church: “Today I appeal to the whole Church community to be willing to foster feminine participation in every way in its internal life.... This is the way to be courageously taken. To a large extent it is a question of making full use of the ample room for lay and feminine presence recognized by the Church’s law.... Who can imagine the great advantages to pastoral care and the new beauty that the Church’s face will assume when the feminine genius is fully involved in the various areas of her life?” Those sentences perhaps open up more questions than they resolve; but at the very least they are the occasion to thank Catholic women for being women of faith and to thank the Archdiocesan Council of Catholic Women, the newly formed Archdiocesan Women’s Commission of the Archdiocesan Pastoral Council and the women pastoral associates and pastoral coordinators and numerous lay ministers and volunteers and, of the greatest importance, consecrated women in religious communities, for being themselves.

This Sunday, Mother’s Day, our whole society thanks women who are mothers. Each of us will be praying for the one who gave us birth and nurtured us with her own life, whether she is living or dead. Appropriately, it is also the Sunday when the Archdiocese takes up the annual collection for Catholic Charities. The Mother’s Day Appeal made at all Masses on May 13 and 14 is for people and works which do what mothers do: give life and strength and hope to the weakest among us. Please be generous, because your generosity is a way of establishing a relationship to the poor and to people who, like Dorothy Day, learned how to serve them in learning what it means to be a mother in the Church. God bless you.

Sincerely yours in Christ,

Francis Cardinal George, OMI
Archbishop of Chicago

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