[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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