Dorothy Day, Patroness of Crabs

November 29, 2010 at 2:03 pm | Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment
Tags: " Religion Dispatches, Advent, Archbishop Timothy Dolan of New York, Death of Dorothy Day, Dorothy Day, Dorothy Day Servant of God, Pax Christi USA

Today is the thirtieth anniversary of the death of Dorothy Day. As some of you know, I had a few things to say on Religion Dispatches about New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan’s take on her as he celebrated the anniversary of Dorothy’s birthday at a Pax Christi vespers in Greenwich Village a while back.

Judy Coode, it seems to me, is much more realistic about Dorothy, in the reflections she shares with readers in this year’s Pax Christi Advent reflection booklet. Coode invites us to rejoice  in Dorothy’s charity and focus and strict simplicity. but she also mentions that Dorothy was “by some accounts a difficult person with whom to live.” Indeed, the only time I met Dorothy Day, when she had come to Grailville, where I lived in the 70s, to speak at a Catholic Art Association meeting, her comments about a film we had just watched, “Three Men and a Wardrobe,” seemed to me downright crotchety. And when a friend, long before the invention of the computer, submitted a manuscript to The Catholic Worker,  Dorothy wrote all over it before rejecting it, forcing my friend to retype the thing from scratch before submitting it elsewhere. 

But, as Coode suggests, human flaws like these are less a source scandal than of comfort to those of us who struggle to “match (Dorothy’s) life of integrity.” Dorothy Day, Servant of God and patroness of the crotchety, pray for us.

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