Spend Advent with Dorothy Day

Reflections during Advent: Dorothy Day on Prayer, Poverty, Chastity, and Obedience
 
In his September 2015 speech to Congress, Pope Francis credited American journalist Dorothy Day (1897−1980), cofounder of the Catholic Worker movement, for her deep faith and social activism.

During Advent of 1966, Day wrote a series of four reflections in The Ave Maria magazine that emphasized her devotion to her Catholic faith and its deep traditions. These reflections, available for the first time as an eBook collection with a new reader’s guide and an excerpt from On Pilgrimage, are as important today as they were fifty years ago. Written a year after the close of the Second Vatican Council, the collection address a Catholic Church in a time of tremendous upheaval. Catholic devotions fell out of practice and American affluence and materialism seemed to know no bounds. It was a time in the Church not unlike the world today. Each of the four reflections on prayer, poverty, chasity, and obedience are presented in Day’s unique voice and way of storytelling and includes personal stories about her childhood, conversion to Catholicism, work with Peter Maurin, Catholic Worker Communities, and much more.


Servant of God Dorothy Day (1897–1980) was a pacifist, social commentator, journalist, convert to
Catholicism, and cofounder of the Catholic Worker movement.

Born in Brooklyn, New York, she was baptized in the Episcopal Church. Day lived her young adult
life as a political radical and socialist, sympathizing with anarchists and communists. She was increasingly drawn to Catholicism because she saw it as the Church of immigrants and the poor. After giving birth to her daughter,Tamar, in 1926, Day converted to Catholicism. Day cofounded the Catholic Worker movement in 1933 with Peter Maurin to live and spread the vision of Catholic
social teaching.

Day was honored by the University of Notre Dame with the Laetare Medal in 1972. She died in 1980 in New York and her cause for canonization was launched by Cardinal John J. O’Connor, Archbishop of New York, in 1997 on what would have been her one-hundredth birthday