[Congressional Record Volume 143, Number 160 (Thursday, November 13, 1997)]
[Senate]
[Pages S12707-S12710]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




 NATIONAL WEEK OF RECOGNITION FOR DOROTHY DAY AND THOSE WHOM SHE SERVED

  Mr. NICKLES. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent the Senate 
proceed to the immediate consideration of Senate Resolution 163 
introduced earlier today by Senator Moynihan, D'Amato, and others.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will report.
  The legislative clerk read as follows:

       A resolution (S. Res. 163) expressing the sense of the 
     Senate on the 100th anniversary of the birth of Dorothy Day, 
     and designating the week of November 8 through November 14, 
     1997 as ``National Week of Recognition for Dorothy Day and 
     those whom she served.''

  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there objection to the immediate 
consideration of the resolution?
  There being no objection, the Senate proceeded to consider the 
resolution.
  Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, I rise today to introduce a sense of the 
Senate resolution commemorating the 100th anniversary of the birth of 
Dorothy Day, a woman who embodies the very idea of service to others. I 
am pleased to be joined by Senators D'Amato, Wellstone, Levin, Dodd, 
Torricelli, Reed, Durbin, Mikulski, and Kennedy in paying tribute to 
her life.
  The life of Dorothy Day is central to modern Catholic social thought. 
Hers was a radical brand of discipleship, akin to what the German 
theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer described as ``costly grace'' in The 
Cost of Discipleship. She lived a life of voluntary poverty and 
hardship, forsaking material comfort and opting to live among the poor 
whom she served. Just as Jesus befriended the tax collector and the 
prostitute, Dorothy Day embraced the drug addicted and the 
disenfranchised. She saw Christ in everyone--especially in the poor and 
the oppressed--and treated people accordingly. In short, she lived the 
Gospel.
  In 1933, Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin joined to found the Catholic 
Worker Movement and the Catholic Worker newspaper ``to realize in the 
individual and society the express and implied teachings of Christ.'' 
That same year, they opened the first Catholic Worker Hospitality 
house, St. Joseph's House, in Manhattan's Lower East Side. The country 
was, by then, in the throes of the Great Depression, a period of 
suffering unknown to this country before or since. Dorothy Day 
ministered to the physical and spiritual needs of the legions of poor 
who arrived on the doorstep at St. Joseph House. Today, some 64 years 
after its creation, the Catholic Worker Movement remains a vibrant 
legacy to her life. There are now more than 125 Catholic Worker 
``Houses of Hospitality'' in the United States and around the world.
  Perhaps Dorothy Day's life was summed up best by those at the 
University of Notre Dame who bestowed the Laetare Medal upon her in 
1972 for ``comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable 
virtually all of her life.'' Indeed she did and we are all the better 
for it.
  I ask unanimous consent that the text of a tribute by Patrick Jordan, 
who knew Dorothy Day from his days living at the Catholic Worker, from 
Commonweal and the text of the Resolution be printed into the Record.
  There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

                  [From the Commonweal, Oct. 24, 1997]

                          An Appetite for God

                          (By Patrick Jordan)

       Dorothy Day was born on Pineapple Street in Brooklyn 
     Heights on November 8, 1897. On the hundredth anniversary of 
     her birth, her spirit is alive in the Catholic Worker 
     movement she and Peter Maurin founded in 1933. The movements 
     is still building, a rather remarkable feat in the history of 
     American religious communities, now with over 125 houses and 
     farming communes in the United States and in seven other 
     countries. There are a variety of Catholic Worker 
     publications that display strong writing and intellectual 
     vitality: critical voices in the midst of the capitalist 
     state, and lively antidotes to the spirit of bourgeois 
     Christianity. Day and Maurin would be pleased.
       In a real sense, Day was an Augustinian figure. She was a 
     captivating, commanding presence, full of personal paradoxes 
     (vulnerable and yet like steel) and inconsistencies (patient 
     but fretful), who nonetheless cohered and remained 
     consistently stalwart. She had been around (as she attests in 
     her classic spiritual autobiography. The Long Loneliness), 
     knew the full joys and sorrows of life from her harsh 
     experience, and had gone through a life-searing conversion. 
     She possessed marvelous observational skills and wrote with 
     uncommon beauty and alacrity about her times: describing the 
     challenge of

[[Page S12708]]

     living good, and yes, holy lives in an era of warring 
     empires. She loved heroic figures, and aspired to be one. She 
     hoped that her books would be read by millions and would lead 
     to nonviolent, revolutionary change. She had a sense of humor 
     about herself and her work, and told the story of having been 
     asked to speak at a college on the topic ``Saints and 
     Heroes.'' She was greatly surprised (and delighted) when she 
     found the lecture hall packed. Only later did she discover 
     the reason: her talk had been mistakenly billed ``Saints and 
     Eros.''
       For me, Dorothy Day was the most engaging and engaged 
     person I have ever met. Even now, seventeen years after her 
     death in 1980, I think of her almost daily, with deep 
     affection. What would she have thought of this moral dilemma, 
     this political situation, this church teaching? How would she 
     have approached a certain crisis, dealt with that obnoxious 
     persons? If the problem happens to be several-sided and 
     particularly dicey, I can be sure her response would be 
     challenging, distinct, and unpredictable. Not that it would 
     necessarily come as a surprise (she used to love to repeat 
     the phrase, based on her sense of the Gospels. ``There are 
     always answers; they are just not calculated to soothe''). 
     Her principles were doggedly clear: The admonitions of the 
     Gospels, the Psalms, and Saint Paul. These ran so deeply in 
     her that they seemed to issue from her marrow. When TV 
     newsman Mike Wallace asked her, ``Does God love murderers, 
     does he love a Hitler, a Stalin?'' she responded reflexively: 
     ``God loves all men, and all men are brothers''.
       In person, even in her seventies, Day was physically 
     striking: tall, lean, her pale blue eyes keen but not 
     intrusive. In the ideal movie of Dorothy's life, Jessica 
     Lange would be cast in the part. Dorothy was one of those 
     individuals whose presence can affect the tone of whole 
     gatherings. When she entered a crowded room, people with 
     their backs to the door would turn spontaneously. Yet she was 
     unfailingly modest, and almost painfully shy in public.
       Dorothy's mind, while not that of a trained intellectual, 
     was one of the most acute and supple I have seen at work; she 
     was highly intuitive, shrewd when it came to money, morally 
     rugged. She seemed to know herself with perfect clarify, the 
     fruit of a lifetime of self-examination: ``Cleanse us of our 
     unknown faults,'' she would repeat often. Lecturing about the 
     Catholic Worker, she would say of herself: ``There is always 
     a subtle self-aggrandizement. One may not intend it, yet 
     there it crops out to humiliate one. Perhaps it is good to 
     have this come out in the open.'' Both spiritually and 
     personally, she was the genuine article.
       If you went to talk to Dorothy in her small room on the 
     third floor of the East First Street house, where she lived 
     from 1968-76, you might be ensnared for hours. She would 
     regale you with stories. In her early years as a reporter she 
     had interviewed everyone from Trotsky to Jack Dempsey. She 
     knew Eugene O'Neill and Dos Passos, and had inspired Auden. 
     She had testified before Congress on conscientious objection, 
     and while in Moscow in 1971, had defended Solzhenitsyn before 
     the Soviet writers' group, breaking up their meeting. She had 
     been shot at for her civil rights protests, been thrown into 
     solitary confinement; she had taken on both church and state, 
     loved both the opera and folk singer Joan Baez, was a doting 
     mother, grandmother, great-grandmother, received Communion 
     from the hands of the pope, and was a voracious reader. Yet 
     for all that, when you were with her you felt perfectly at 
     home; so much so you wanted to stay, maybe forever--at least 
     I wanted to.
       Even after over forty years of the hard Catholic Worker 
     life, Dorothy's voice was young and there was merriment in 
     her laughter. Vivian Gornick, the feminist writer, did a 
     perspective on Day for the Village Voice in November 1969. At 
     one point during their four-hour conversation, Gornick sensed 
     that Dorothy had read her thoughts--a not uncommon experience 
     if you spent time with her. While Day had not been critical 
     of Gornick, the experience had raised questions for the 
     latter. According to Martin Buber, the zaddik (or righteous 
     teacher) responds to people's needs but first elevates them. 
     Sitting there in the soup kitchen at 36 First Street, Gornick 
     observed in Day ``a love that categorically refuses to deny 
     the irreducible humanity'' of each person. ``I felt in her a 
     woman who has done many things she would wish not to have 
     done; . . . been alone a long, long time in a curious, 
     exalted, exhausting manner; and more important, that all of 
     this was not a comfortable matter of the past; all of this 
     was an ongoing affair . . . [in which Day's] faith is put 
     through the fires daily.'' What comes through in Gornick's 
     article is the journalist's keen respect for the older woman.
       Dorothy once told Robert Coles--in a different context--``I 
     have never wanted to lecture people; I have hoped to act in 
     such a way that I will be reaching out to many others who 
     will never be part of the Catholic Worker movement.'' It 
     seems to have worked with Gornick and countless others.
       I recently asked Tom Sullivan and Nina Polcyn Moore, both 
     old friends and Catholic Workers, what made Day tick.
       Sullivan, now in his eighties and in poor health in New 
     York City, told me ``her spirituality is basic. She started 
     with the saints, and was oriented to the early Christians.'' 
     For Moore, who now lives in Illinois, it was a matter of 
     ``love, divine and human.'' Dorothy ``was not content with 
     anything but the best,'' Moore told me. ``She loved God with 
     all her heart.''
       But it was Day's constancy in the hard vocation she had 
     chosen that most amazed Moore: ``Her availability to people 
     and events, her fidelity to the Gospels, and her embracing 
     the precariousness of the Worker life are keys to her 
     greatness.'' According to Moore, who traveled with her here 
     and abroad, Day evolved from a young radical to a person of 
     international significance ``because she was on fire with the 
     love of God.''
       In From Union Square to Rome, Dorothy's first book about 
     her conversion, she defines a mystic as someone in live with 
     God: ``Not one who loves God, but who is in love with God.'' 
     Years later, she quoted with relish Sonya's last line in 
     Uncle Vanya: ``I have faith Uncle, I have fervent, passionate 
     faith.''
       That faith was evident in every aspect of Day's life, I 
     suppose it is what attracted so many of us to her: In seeing 
     her faith we experienced our own hoped-for faith being 
     validated and strengthened. ``Every act of faith increases 
     your faith,'' she instructed me over and over. But her faith 
     was not a cold series of propositions or legalisms. It was 
     rather a vital relationship. ``More and more I see [that] 
     prayer is the answer,'' she wrote in 1970. ``It is the clasp 
     of the hand, the joy and keen delight in the consciousness of 
     the Other. Indeed, it is like falling in love.'' Not many 
     people can write or speak of prayer that way because we don't 
     practice it. C.S. Lewis advised that we develop not simply a 
     spirituality, but an ``appetite for God.''
       To see Dorothy at prayer was to observe someone completely 
     engrossed. I can vividly picture her praying, off to the left 
     side in one of the pews at Nativity Church in Manhattan. 
     Coupled with this memory is another of my walking into her 
     room one Saturday afternoon as she was listening to the 
     opera. It was Wagner and Dorothy's face was transfixed. She 
     didn't know I was there, and I retreated hastily, almost 
     embarrassed to have intruded at such a private moment. But 
     from those instances I learned something about the 
     intercourse between prayer and ecstasy, and how they relate 
     to beauty and love, human and divine.
       For Nina Moore, it was Day's constancy in prayer, study, 
     and reading that explained what could be explained about her 
     continued spiritual growth. Lacking the structure of a formal 
     monastic regimen (she was a Benedictine oblate and attached 
     to the Jesu Caritas fellowship), Day had to steal the early 
     morning hours for her spiritual exercises. She did this 
     almost daily, year in and out: ``My strength . . . returns to 
     me with my cup of coffee and the reading of the psalms,'' she 
     said.
       Dorothy's take on life of the soul was anything but 
     ``spiritualized.'' It was sacramental and sensual, but it was 
     not romantic. ``I can't bear the romantics,'' she told 
     Gornick. ``I want a religious realist. I want one who prays 
     to see things as they are and do something about it.'' Her 
     own faith had required a terrible price: the end of her 
     marriage and the breakup of her family: ``For me, Christ was 
     not bought for thirty pieces of silver,'' she wrote forty 
     years after her conversion, ``but with my heart's blood. We 
     buy not cheap in this market.''
       What was essential for Dorothy--and what a popular mid-
     century retreated movement and the Catholic Workers fostered 
     (see box)--was the serious attention and self-discipline 
     required for growth in the life of the spirit. In this 
     matter, I believe, Dorothy's mentor was Friedrich von Hugel, 
     who wrote, in Victorian style, of the ``costingness'' of such 
     growth. ``Plant yourself,'' von Hugel counseled,'' on 
     foundations that are secure: God, Christ, suffering, the 
     Cross.'' I often saw Dorothy with his short classic, The Life 
     of Prayer.
       But the life of the spirit has to be cultivated, not merely 
     for the sake of one's own self-improvement, but for the well-
     being of the whole church. As Dorothy prayed in Rome in 1965: 
     ``Give us, O Lord, peace, strength, and joy, so that we in 
     turn may give them to others.''
       Theologically, Dorothy Day's chief contributions have to do 
     with the issues of freedom, poverty, and violence.
       Freedom. Perhaps her deepest personal, intuitive insight. 
     Without freedom, there can be neither faith nor love.
       When Dorothy first met Peter Maurin in 1932, she was 
     impressed that he was carrying two books in his building 
     pockets: Saint Francis and Peter Kropotkin. Kropotkin known 
     as the anarchist prince, was, like Charles de Foucauld, a 
     soldier and scientist. He had forsaken his title and had been 
     jailed and exiled for agitating for reform in Czarist Russia. 
     Even before meeting Maurin, Day held nonviolent anarchist 
     views (she was a decentralist who felt more at home with the 
     Wobblies than the Communists). The theoretical value Day saw 
     in anarchism was its emphasis on personal freedom and 
     responsibility, and on developing social patterns that foster 
     them.
       On the spiritual level, the highest rung of being, God 
     gives freedom so that men and women can become human; thus 
     the story of Adam and Eve. Charles Peguy, poet and essayist, 
     and an influence on both Maurin and Day, has God address the 
     issue this way: ``But what kind of salvation would it be that 
     was not free?'' And then God validates ``man's'' power ``to 
     decide'' by declaring: ``And that freedom of his is my 
     creation'' (and therefore good).
       Along with freedom comes the possibility--the 
     inevitability--of sin. On this point Day would refer to 
     Augustine and Julian of Norwich: God has already repaired the 
     worst

[[Page S12709]]

     possible catastrophe the Fall) by taking on our human flesh, 
     suffering our fate, and redeeming us.
       Unlike many birthright Catholics, Day did not feel 
     constrained by the institution. She took as her own Saint 
     Paul's phrase--``You are no longer foreigners and aliens, but 
     fellow citizens with the saints'' (Ephesians 2:19)--and 
     placed her trust in the church, which she loved and which is 
     itself held accountable to the Gospels. For encouragement, 
     Day looked to the lives of the saints, whom she found to be 
     anything but toadies. Partiarchy? When it came to ``this 
     business of `asking Father' what to do about something,'' she 
     said, it ``never occurred to us.''
       At Vatican II, she noted her admiration for John Courtney 
     Murray. She felt grateful for the church's clear but long 
     overdue statement on religious freedom and the primacy of 
     conscience.
       Poverty. As noted above, Maurin brought with him Kropotkin 
     and Francis. For the Christian, poverty is not only a matter 
     of the soul--it is a social concern. It entails not only 
     personal spiritual obligations, but matters of strict justice 
     and compassion.
       We begin by looking at our own lives. When asked to address 
     the relations between individuals, Day said, Jesus always 
     emphasized the problems of wealth and poverty. Looking at 
     society this way, Day was explicit: ``It is impossible, save 
     by heroic charity, to live in the present social order and be 
     a Christian.'' After reading Abbie Hoffman's Revolution for 
     the Hell of It in 1968, she commented: ``A terrifying book; 
     bitterness, hatred, hell unleashed. The fruits of war, 
     materialism, prosperity. . . . God help our children.''
       Dorothy Day's own approach was twofold. First, there was a 
     line she repeated often from Saint John of the Cross: ``Where 
     there is no love, put love, and you will find love.'' And 
     second, cultivate a life of detachment and share the plight 
     of the poor: ``We [Catholic Workers] believe in an economy 
     based on human needs, rather than the profit motive. . . .We 
     are not judging [wealthy] individuals, but are trying to make 
     a judgment on the system . . . which we try to withdraw from 
     as much as possible. . . . What is worst of all is using God 
     and religion to bolster up our own greed, our own attachment 
     to property, and putting God and country on an equality.'' 
     Finally, she pointed out, ``we are not going to win the 
     masses to Christianity until we live it,'' and that included 
     having a willingness to embrace poverty.
       For Day, to live poorly meant to share the life of the 
     poor: ``Let us love to live with the poor because they are 
     especially loved by Christ.'' Each person who presents 
     himself or herself to us--rich, middle class, or poor--must 
     be given love, ``not because it might be Christ . . . but 
     because they are Christ.'' How did she know for sure? 
     ``Because we have seen his hands and his feet in the poor 
     around us. . . . We start by loving them for him, and soon we 
     love them for themselves, each one a unique person, most 
     special. . . . It is through such exercises that we grow, and 
     the joy of our vocation assures us we are on the right 
     path.'' According to Kate Hennessy, Day's granddaughter, 
     ``she turned the life of poverty into something dynamic, full 
     of richly simple moments for those who have nothing.''
       How Dorothy Day managed to keep her psychological wholeness 
     over the years in the disorder, disease, mental confusion, 
     and violence that mark Catholic Worker houses was a practical 
     miracle to me. ``Pray and endure,'' she would repeat. Some of 
     her stamina came from knowing the critical distinction 
     between love and pity. ``The law of love is reciprocity,'' 
     Georges Bernanos had written, ``and reciprocity is not 
     possible where there is pity.'' Martin Buber explained it 
     more eloquently: ``Help is no virtue, but an artery of 
     existence.'' To really help someone, however, ``the helper 
     must live with the other; only help that arises out of living 
     with the other can stand before the eyes of God.'' Day 
     insisted that she ``would not dare write or speak or follow 
     the vocation God has given me to work with the poor and for 
     peace if I did not have the constant reassurance of the 
     Mass.''
       Violence I need not recount at length Day's work for 
     justice, peace, and nonviolence. Historically, she had a 
     critical if indirect bearing on Vatican II's condemnation of 
     nuclear war and its endorsement of the right to conscientious 
     objection. Her pacifist stand in World WAr II was intensely 
     controversial, not only among Americans in general but even 
     among Catholic Workers; Mike Wallace's question indicates 
     that it still is today. Day's repeated stints in jail for 
     protesting war preparation and the war economy--including her 
     challenge that people withdraw from participating in both--
     achieved modest success, symbolically--by helping to end the 
     air-raid drills in New York City during the fifties and 
     sixties--and practically in the lives of not a few 
     individuals who refused induction, changed their jobs, or 
     resisted paying war taxes.
       Day's staunch views on pacifism drew a deep line between 
     just-war teaching and gospel nonviolence. She shared with 
     Saint James the view that the roots of violence are fear, 
     lack of forgiveness, and greed. Fear leads us to strike out 
     at enemies; it may even help to create them. Day believed the 
     Catholic Worker must be a school of nonviolence. The 
     young volunteers who came in search of their vocation, she 
     wrote, ``learn not only to love with compassion, but to 
     overcome fear, that dangerous emotion that precipitates 
     violence. They may go on feeling fear, but they know the 
     means [the `spiritual weapons,' as she called them, of 
     self-discipline, willingness to take up the cross, 
     forgiving `seventy times seven,' and readiness to lay down 
     one's life for one's fellows] to overcome it.'' Here, 
     prayer and daily Mass were the best offense. From her own 
     testimony of sitting through nights of threatened violence 
     in the racially divided South in the 1960s, it is prayer 
     that ``gives courage.''
       Was she critical of her own track record? Always. 
     Repeatedly I heard her say of herself and her co-workers, 
     quoting the Letter to the Hebrews: ``We have not yet resisted 
     unto blood.'' She felt she might yet prove to be as avenging 
     as any potential adversary.
       One of Day's most notable achievements for peace took place 
     quietly behind the scenes. In Rome in 1965 for the last 
     session of the council, she joined a small group of women at 
     a convent to fast for ten days, on water only, as the 
     conciliar debate raged over what would be the church's 
     official teaching on modern war.
       Dorothy did not like to fast (she said her besetting sins 
     were gluttony and sloth), and made sure she had filled her 
     senses by going to the opera (Cavalleria Rusticana) before 
     the fast. Her report in the November 1995 Catholic Worker 
     included the daily schedule of the group and concluded as 
     follows:
       As for me, I did not suffer at all from the hunger or 
     headache or nausea which usually accompanied the first few 
     days of a fast, but I had offered my fast in part for the 
     victims of famine all over the world, and it seemed to me 
     that I had very special pains. They were certainly of a kind 
     I have never had before, and they seemed to pierce the very 
     marrow of my bones . . . They were not like the arthritic 
     pains, which, aggravated by tension and fatigue, are part of 
     my life now that I am sixty-eight. One accepts them as part 
     of age, and also part and parcel of the life or work, which 
     is the lot of the poor. So often I see grandmothers in Puerto 
     Rican families bearing the burden of children, the home, 
     cooking, sewing, and contributing to the work of mother and 
     father, who are trying to make a better life for their 
     children. I am glad to share their fatigue with them.
       But these pains . . . seemed to reach into my very bones, 
     and I could only feel that I had been given some little 
     intimation of the hunger of the world. God help us, living as 
     we do, in the richest country in the world, and so far from 
     approaching the voluntary poverty we esteem and reach toward. 
     . . May we try harder to do more in the future.
       This is vintage Dorothy Day: the immediacy of concerns; the 
     challenge, complexity, and interrelation of the big issues 
     (war and poverty); the incorporation of her personal 
     experience; the self-criticism and pledge to do better; and 
     the radical, foundational nature of her Christian 
     perspective.
       No retrospect of Dorothy Day's spirituality would be 
     complete without mentioning her tremendous personal 
     struggles. These centered, in her late years, on two related 
     areas: discouragement and perseverance. From her earliest 
     Catholic Worker writings, Day speaks of discouragement in the 
     work (see, House of Hospitality). The utter hopelessness of 
     the situation of some of the people with whom she lived (``we 
     are a community of need, not an international community'') 
     included physical violence, broken families, addiction, 
     suicides, evictions, fires, poor food, attrition of co-
     workers. All of these could be overwhelming. Dorothy was 
     sometimes so jangled by them--and by family concerns, 
     overwork, travel, writing, speechmaking, and innumerable 
     obligations--that she would break into tears. ``Don't let 
     yourself get into this state!'' she would tell me, better 
     escaping for a reprieve to her sister's or daughter's.
       Dorothy also told me that twice in her life she had 
     overcome serious bouts of depression by reading herself out 
     of them (she recommended Dickens), but said that if she ever 
     were to experience such depression again, she would consider 
     shock treatment.
       Another line of cure--which she had learned from her 
     mother--was to clean the house. And then there were the 
     theater and music: ``Saw My Fair Lady. A very good cure for 
     melancholy. Theme: Man's capacity to change.'' Again, ``I am 
     now listening to a concert, Brahms's Second Symphony, joyful 
     music to heal my sadness. All day I have felt sad. I am 
     oppressed by a sense of failure, of sin.''
       On the conjunction between what Dorothy called ``the dark 
     night of the senses and the dark night of the soul,'' she 
     reflected: ``It seems to me that they often intermingle.'' 
     this led her to prescribe Ruskin's ``Duty of Delight'': ``I 
     found a copy of Ruskin, The True and the Beautiful,'' she 
     wrote while visiting her daughter in Vermont, and ``the 
     beautiful quotation on the duty of delight. Making cucumber 
     pickles, chili sauce, and grape juice. Delightful smells.'' 
     And the ``duty'' must be taken seriously, not only for 
     oneself but ``for the sake of others who are on the verge of 
     desperation.''
       And then there was use of the other serious spiritual 
     weapons: prayer, Scripture, community, the sacraments. The 
     ancient Christian writers had long been concerned with 
     acedia, spiritual sloth, which is associated with a failure 
     against hope. Depression, a modern manifestation, is, in 
     part, a constricting of that virtue, and of the power of the 
     will to act. Day often prayed to Saint Ephraim, one of the 
     desert fathers. He seemed to have struggled with the problem 
     of discouragement, and spoke of the distress caused by his 
     own procrastination. The best practical remedy for such a 
     condition, Day

[[Page S12710]]

     noted, was ``faithfulness to the means to overcome it: 
     recitation of the psalms each day, prayer and solitude, and 
     by these means arriving--or hoping to arrive--at a state of 
     well-being.'' The psalms she found particularly helpful in 
     this regard: ``I have stilled and quieted my soul'' (Ps. 
     131), and ``Relieve the troubles of my heart'' (Ps. 25). She 
     would also quote Saint Paul's Letter to the Romans, chapter 
     8--``Nothing can separate us from the love of Christ''--and 
     his advice not to judge others or even oneself, for Christ 
     understands our failures: he was, after all, the world's 
     greatest failure.
       Among contemporary spiritual writings, she recommended in 
     this regard Dom Hubert van Zeller's Approach to Calvary: 
     ``Awoke at 5:30,'' she penned in 1965. ``Usual depression 
     over failures, inefficiency, incapacity to cope. Van Zeller's 
     book invaluable, teaching on how to accept all this 
     discouragement, which he says will increase with age. . . . 
     One must just keep going.''
       And that connects with the matter of perseverance, a 
     subject on which she corresponded sporadically with Thomas 
     Merton: ``I am often full of fear about my final 
     perseverance,'' she told him in 1960. But then, during his 
     own long struggles with the problem, she advised: Your work 
     ``is the work God wants of you, no matter how much you want 
     to run away from it.''
       She eventually came to terms with the fact that her 
     difficulties were not going to end in this life. In the last 
     book she gave me, Spiritual Autobiography of Charles de 
     Foucauld (she was always giving gifts and books, prayer books 
     and Bibles especially), she had underlined the following 
     passage from de Foucauld: ``Our difficulties are not a 
     transitory state of affairs. . . . No, they are the normal 
     state of affairs and we should reckon on being in angustia 
     temporum [`in straightness of times,' Dan. 9:21] all our 
     lives, so far as the good we want to do is concerned.''
       In 1960, Dorothy Day commented favorably on a then-current 
     appraisal of the state of the American Catholic church, 
     rendered by the Jesuit theologian, Gustave Weigel. Three 
     things were most needed in the U.S. church, said Weigel: 
     Austerity, preached and lived; a deeper awareness of the 
     reality of God; and a truer and more effective love for all 
     people, including those who are our enemies. One could not 
     find a more succinct summary of Day's own views. In 1968, she 
     complained that the Catholic press in the United States was 
     too much concerned with the problems of authority, birth 
     control, and celibacy, whereas the real problems were ``war, 
     race, poverty and wealth, violence, sex, and drugs.'' Some 
     things change slowly. Or not at all.
       Without the saints, Bernanos said fifty years ago, the 
     church is only dead stones: Without them, the very grace 
     lying within the church's institutional and sacramental forms 
     remains fallow. Despite the unparalleled upheavals of our 
     times, grace has not remained hidden. We have been its 
     appealing power.

  Mr. NICKLES. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the 
resolution and preamble be agreed to en bloc, the motion to reconsider 
be laid upon the table, and that any statements relating thereto be 
placed in the Record at the appropriate place.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  The resolution (S. Res. 163) was agreed to.
  The preamble was agreed to.
  The resolution, with its preamble, is as follows:

                              S. Res. 163

       Whereas November 8, 1997, marks the 100th anniversary of 
     the birth of Dorothy Day on Pineapple Street in Brooklyn, New 
     York;
       Whereas Dorothy Day was a woman who lived a life of 
     voluntary poverty, guided by the principles of social justice 
     and solidarity with the poor;
       Whereas in 1933 Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin founded the 
     Catholic Worker Movement and the Catholic Worker newspaper 
     ``to realize in the individual and society the express and 
     implied teachings of Christ'';
       Whereas the Catholic Worker ``Houses of Hospitality'' 
     founded by Dorothy Day have ministered to the physical and 
     spiritual needs of the poor for over 60 years;
       Whereas there are now more than 125 Catholic Worker 
     ``Houses of Hospitality'' in the United States and throughout 
     the world;
       Whereas in 1972 Dorothy Day was awarded the Laetare Medal 
     by the University of Notre Dame for ``comforting the 
     afflicted and afflicting the comfortable virtually all of her 
     life'';
       Whereas upon the death of Dorothy Day in 1980, noted 
     Catholic historian David O'Brien called her ``the most 
     significant, interesting, and influential person in the 
     history of American Catholicism'';
       Whereas His Emminence John Cardinal O'Connor has stated 
     that he is considering recommending Dorothy Day to the Pope 
     for Cannonization; and
       Whereas Dorothy Day serves as inspiration for those who 
     strive to live their faith: Now, therefore, be it
       Resolved, That the Senate--
       (1) expresses deep admiration and respect for the life and 
     work of Dorothy Day;
       (2) recognizes that the work of Dorothy Day improved the 
     lives of countless people and that her example has inspired 
     others to follow her in a life of solidarity with the poor;
       (3) encourages all Americans to reflect on how they might 
     learn from Dorothy Day's example and continue her work of 
     ministering to the needy; and
       (4) designates the week of November 8, 1997, through 
     November 14, 1997, as the ``National Week of Recognition for 
     Dorothy Day and Those Whom She Served''.

     SEC. 2. TRANSMITTAL.

       The Secretary of the Senate shall transmit an enrolled copy 
     of this resolution to--
       (1) Maryhouse, 55 East Third Street, New York City, New 
     York;
       (2) St. Joseph House, 36 East First Street, New York City, 
     New York; and
       (3) His Emminence John Cardinal O'Connor of the Archdiocese 
     of New York, New York City, New York.

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