Dorothy Day, declared a Servant of God by the Catholic Church, is well known for her Social Justice work and helping start the Catholic Worker Movement. She is truely a great leader both of her day and for us now. I couldn’t find a good collection of her powerful words so I thought I’d leave you with some here. I’ll write more of my thoughts later.
Quotes from Dorothy Day:
We have all known the long loneliness and we have learned that the only solution is love and that love comes with community.
The work is more important than the talking and the writing about the work.
I have long since come to believe that people never mean half of what they say, and that it is best to disregard their talk and judge only their actions
Don’t call me a saint. I don’t want to be dismissed so easily.
The best thing to do with the best things in life is to give them up.
Young people say, What is the sense of our small effort? They cannot see that we must lay one brick at at time, take one step at a time; we can be responsible only for the one action in the present moment. But we can beg for an increase of love in our hearts that will vitalize and transform all our individual actions, and know that God will take them and multiply them, as Jesus multiplied the loaves and fishes.
The greatest challenge of the day is: how to bring about a revolution of the heart, a revolution which has to start with each one of us?
Love and ever more love is the only solution to every problem that comes up.
(The following are from a compilation by Robert Ellsberg as published in Geez Magazine)
Love of Brother means…non-participation in those comforts and luxuries which have been manufactured by the exploitation of others.
Poverty means having a bare minimum in the way of clothes and seeing to it that these are made under decent working conditions, proper wages and hours, etc. The union label tries to guarantee this.
Poverty means not riding on rubber while horrible working conditions prevail in the rubber industry. Poverty means not riding on rails while bad conditions exist in the coal mines and steel mills. Poverty means not accepting that courteous bribe from railroads, the clergy rate.
Of course, we are not all given the grace to do such things. But it is good to call to mind the vision. It is true, indeed, that until we begin to develop a few apostles along these lines, we will have no mass conversions, no social justice, no peace. We need saints. God, give us saints!
How far we all are from it! We do not even see our infirmities. Common sense tells us, “Why live in a slum? It is actually cheaper to live in a model housing project, have heat and hot water, a mauve or pink bath and toilet, etc. We can manage better; we have more time to pray to meditate, study….Yes, we will have more time with modern conveniences, but we will not have more love.
