• Skip to main content
  • Skip to secondary menu
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer
Catholic Review

Catholic Review

Inspiring the Archdiocese of Baltimore

Menu
  • Home
  • News
        • Local News
        • World News
        • Vatican News
        • Obituaries
        • Featured Video
        • En Español
        • Sports News
        • Official Clergy Assignments
        • Schools News
  • Commentary
        • Contributors
          • Question Corner
          • George Weigel
          • Effie Caldarola
          • John Garvey
          • Father Ed Dougherty, M.M.
          • Guest Commentary
        • CR Columnists
          • Archbishop William E. Lori
          • Rita Buettner
          • Christopher Gunty
          • George Matysek Jr.
          • Father Joseph Breighner
          • Father Collin Poston
          • Robyn Barberry
          • Hanael Bianchi
          • Amen Columns
  • Entertainment
        • Events
        • Movie & Television Reviews
        • Arts & Culture
        • Books
        • Recipes
  • About Us
        • Contact Us
        • Our History
        • Meet Our Staff
        • Photos to own
        • Books/CDs/Prayer Cards
        • CR Media platforms
        • Electronic Edition
  • Advertising
  • Shop
        • Purchase Photos
        • Books/CDs/Prayer Cards
  • CR Radio
  • News Tips
  • Subscribe
This is a still from the "Revolution of the Heart: The Dorothy Day Story," a film by Martin Doblmeier. (CNS photo/courtesy Journey Films)

Panel assesses Dorothy Day’s impact on church and their own lives

January 30, 2020
By Mark Pattison
Filed Under: News, Saints, World News

This is a still from the “Revolution of the Heart: The Dorothy Day Story,” a film by Martin Doblmeier. (CNS photo/courtesy Journey Films)

WASHINGTON (CNS) — If you met Dorothy Day, you were changed, said panelists at a Jan. 27 discussion following an advance screening of a new documentary, “Revolution of the Heart: The Dorothy Day Story,” which profiles the co-founder of the Catholic Worker Movement.

And if you were changed, they noted, you had the ability to make change yourself.

“Dorothy taught me to pay attention and feel the sufferings of others,” said Martha Hennessy, one of Day’s granddaughters, during the forum at Georgetown University in Washington.

“Dorothy gives us hope. Dorothy gives us courage to do what we need to do in our times to if we need want to be called disciples of Christ,” she added.

Hennessy is a member of the Kings Bay Plowshares 7. They face prison terms of up to 20 years after being convicted on charges related to their faith-based nonviolent and symbolic disarming of a Trident submarine’s nuclear weapons in Georgia. She had a “curfew” of 8:30 p.m., and left following the discussion.

Robert Ellsberg, publisher of Orbis Books and editor of Day’s writings, recalled, “I didn’t know I was going to spend so much time there” at Mary House, the first Catholic Worker house of hospitality in New York City, after he decided to take a year off from Harvard College. Attracted to the Catholic Worker’s peace witness, “I knew there was a kind of learning I couldn’t do in school,” he said. Day made Ellsberg, then 20, editor of the Catholic Worker, its monthly newspaper.

As Kate Hennessy, another of Day’s granddaughters, said in the documentary, “If you spend any time up close and personal with Dorothy Day, you never know what hit you.” For Ellsberg’s part, he said he’s spent the rest of his life “trying to share with the world what had hit me.”

Carolyn Zablotny, leader of the Dorothy Day Guild and the effort to have Day canonized, spoke about the evolution of her faith.

“At my Catholic grade school, I had my faith memorized. In college I intellectualized it,” Zablotny said. “When I went to the Catholic Worker, when I saw a poor woman wrapped in layers and layers and layers of dirty clothes, I got what the Gospel was about.”

“She taught me to believe in love. She taught me to believe in God. She taught me that peace is possible,” said Hennessy, who called that process “self-disarmament.”

“She did not look back,” Ellsberg added. “She just kept going, kept going, kept going, kept going.”

Were Day to live long enough to see Pope Francis as the successor of Peter, “I think she’d be overjoyed,” said Martin Doblmeier, who made the “Revolution of the Heart” documentary.

“I think she would have been cheering about the comments about the man when he went to Japan” and denounced the threat to use nuclear weapons. Pope Francis is, “in some way, a fulfillment of what she had been championing all her life,” added Doblmeier, president and founder of Journey Films.

Martha Hennessy agreed, calling Pope Francis “a pope after her own heart. She herself talked about the necessity to do more than demonstrate and speak. There’s also the necessity to act, and to act without fear. Fear is used to control us. What do we do to overcome that challenge?”

Ellsberg called Pope Francis “the pope Dorothy dreamed up. … He reads the Gospel through a Franciscan lens, with the eye on the poor,” he said, “going out to the peripheries to touch the wounds of Christ. That’s what Dorothy did every day.”

Popes are one thing, Ellsberg added, but presidents are another. “She didn’t spend a lot of time talking about presidents, be it (Richard) Nixon or LBJ (Lyndon B. Johnson),” he said. “Dorothy was a woman of the beatitudes. She lived the beatitudes.”

Hennessy said her grandmother saw her role as “calling Christians to love God with all your heart and all your soul and love your neighbor as yourself.” But in a weapons-laden world, she added, “we have a complicity,” she added. “We cannot let ourselves off so easily, if we want to call ourselves Christians, 98% of the nuclear arsenal is in the hands of white Christians.”

But by another token, “Life is beautiful. I’ve lived a privileged life,” Hennessy said. “It was time for me to step up and do what I could do. … There’s a lot of joy in standing up to the most powerful force on earth and giving oneself over. I’m in the hands of God, and it’s OK.”

“We’re all called to be saints. Dorothy understood that before Vatican II,” Zablotny said. Advocating for Day’s sainthood “is a way of getting her story told,” she added.

But the church generally requires two authenticated miracles before it pronounces a new saint. In that instance, Ellsberg said, “God will supply a miracle if God wants to.”

 

Copyright ©2020 Catholic News Service/U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

Print Print

Primary Sidebar

Mark Pattison

Catholic News Service is a leading agency for religious news. Its mission is to report fully, fairly and freely on the involvement of the church in the world today.

View all posts from this author

For the latest news delivered twice a week via email or text message, sign up to receive our free enewsletter.

| MOST POPULAR |

  • ‘God showed up in a very powerful, powerful way’: Archdiocese of Hartford investigating possible eucharistic miracle
  • A miracle at a Sunday Mass in Connecticut
  • Fullerton Passion Walk a ‘deeply moving’ experience
  • Men urged to be on fire for faith at Catholic Men’s Fellowship of Maryland conference
  • Cathedral of Mary Our Queen to host world premiere of Passion setting

| Latest Local News |

Catholic group pushing for inclusive housing in city

Sulpician Father Louis Reitz dies at 93

Sister Regina Marie de l’Eucharistie Loftus dies at 86

| Latest World News |

As pope leaves hospital, he comforts couple, jokes with reporters

Hate crimes targeting religions on rise in Canada; crimes against Catholics increase 260 percent

Assisted suicide, euthanasia an ‘incredibly slippery slope’ in the West, says CUA panel

| Catholic Review Radio |

CatholicReview · Catholic Review Radio

Footer

Our Vision

Real Life. Real Faith. 

Catholic Review Media communicates the Gospel and its impact on people’s lives in the Archdiocese of Baltimore and beyond.

Our Mission

Catholic Review Media provides intergenerational communications that inform, teach, inspire and engage Catholics and all of good will in the mission of Christ through diverse forms of media.

Contact

Catholic Review
320 Cathedral Street
Baltimore, MD 21201
443-524-3150
mail@CatholicReview.org

 

Social Media

  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • Twitter
  • YouTube

Recent

  • As pope leaves hospital, he comforts couple, jokes with reporters
  • Hate crimes targeting religions on rise in Canada; crimes against Catholics increase 260 percent
  • Assisted suicide, euthanasia an ‘incredibly slippery slope’ in the West, says CUA panel
  • Arrests made for ‘unruly conduct’ at Virginia university that disrupted pro-life meeting, injured student leader
  • Doctors say pope can be discharged from hospital
  • Pope visits pediatric oncology ward, baptizes infant
  • Movie Review: ‘Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves’
  • Catholic group pushing for inclusive housing in city
  • Additional charges filed in Vatican finance trial

Search

Membership

Catholic Press Association of the United States and Canada

Maryland-Delaware-DC Press Association

The Associated Church Press

© 2023 CATHOLIC REVIEW MEDIA, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED