Dorothy Day: A Saint For Our Time" program at Wisdom House on Oct. 3

On Saturday, October 3, 2020, Wisdom House Retreat and Conference Center at 229 East Litchfield Road in Litchfield will present a program on Dorothy Day, the founder of the Catholic Worker movement. Presented by Robert Ellsberg, the revered author of “The Duty of Delight: The Diaries of Dorothy Day” and “All The Way to Heaven: The Selected Letters of Dorothy Day”, and will run from 9:30 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. The cost of the program is $60 which will include lunch.

Program presenter Robert Ellsberg, editor in chief and publisher of Orbis Books, the publishing arm of Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers. In addition to his books on Dorothy Day, he is the prolific author of numerous books on Catholic Faith, including “Blessed Among Us: Day by Day with Saintly Witnesses”; “Blessed Among All Women: Women Saints, Prophets and Witnesses”; “The Franciscan Saints”; and “All Saints: Daily Reflections on Saints, Prophets, and Witnesses”.

Co-sponsored by Fairfield University’s Center for Catholic Studies, the October 3^rd program will offer insights into the ambitions, accomplishments, and devotions of Dorothy Day (1897-1980), one of the nation’s most influential nonviolent speakers for the rights of workers.

Dorothy Day was an American journalist, social activist, and anarchist who, after a bohemian youth, became a Catholic Christian without abandoning her social and anarchist activism. She described the process of her conversion in her autobiography, "The Long Loneliness". Today she is perhaps the best-known political radical in the American Catholic Church and is currently under consideration for sainthood.

An active journalist, Day described her social activism in her writings. In 1917 she was imprisoned as a member of suffragist Alice Paul's nonviolent Silent Sentinels.  In the 1930s, she worked closely with fellow activist Peter Maurin to establish the Catholic Worker Movement, a pacifist movement that combines direct aid for the poor and homeless with nonviolent direct action on their behalf. She practiced civil disobedience, which led to additional arrests in 1955, 1957, and in 1973 at the age of seventy-five.

As part of the Catholic Worker Movement, Day co-founded the "Catholic Worker" newspaper in 1933 and served as its editor from 1933 until her death in 1980. In this newspaper, she advocated the Catholic economic theory of distributism, which she considered a third way between capitalism and socialism. Pope Benedict XVI used her conversion story as an example of how to "journey towards faith... in a secularized environment." Pope Francis included her in a list of four exemplary Americans who "built a better future", yet for much of her life Day was considered a fairly marginal figure, if not viewed with outright suspicion.

The October 3^rd program will be offered in four sessions. The morning sessions will introduce Dorothy Day and her accomplishments and the story of her conversion. These sessions will include a showing of the documentary, “Revolution of the Heart: The Dorothy Day Story”, which features an interview with Robert Ellsberg. The afternoon sessions will explore the social program of The Catholic Worker Movement: Works of Mercy, Social Justice, and Peace and focus on Day’s spirituality and reflections on the question of sainthood.

Wisdom House Executive Director Deborah Kelly commented, “We are honored to co-present this program because Dorothy Day is being widely publicly heralded and celebrated for the enormity of her offerings to the rights of social justice for Catholic workers in the past that is still a need today. She was an exemplary ‘true force of reason’ in unreasonable circumstances.”

Face masks, social distancing protocols, and registration for this event will be required. To register, call Wisdom House at 860-567-3163, or visit www.wisdomhouse.org.