By Kimberley Heatherington, OSV News
(OSV News) — A famous saying attributed to Dorothy Day, the 20th century Catholic peace activist and potentially future saint, reads: “If peace is to be built, it must begin with the individual. “It is built brick by brick.”
For more than 50 years, Pax Christi USA, a Catholic peace movement founded in 1972 based on the Gospel and Catholic social teaching, has been dedicated to building a world free of conflict.
On June 11, at a breakfast prior to the annual spring meeting of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops in Louisville, Kentucky, Pax Christi received the first Dorothy Day Peacemaker Award from the Confraternity of Dorothy Day (Dorothy Day Guild). The award was entrusted to Bishop John E. Stowe of Lexington, Kentucky, presiding bishop of the national council of Pax Christi, who accepted the award on behalf of the organization.
The Confraternity of Dorothy Day supports and promotes Day’s cause of sainthood, initiated by the Archdiocese of New York in 2000.
Day (1897-1980), a Catholic journalist and social activist, co-founded in 1933 with Peter Maurin the Catholic Worker Movement, whose 187 intentional communities are committed to nonviolence, voluntary prayer, and hospitality for the homeless and marginalized.
“With so much conflict in the world today, we thought it could be a sign of hope,” Deirdre Cornell, co-chair of the executive committee of the Dorothy Day Guild and editor of Maryknoll magazine, told OSV News. “We could connect Dorothy’s commitment to peace and justice to Catholic social teaching that addresses peace and justice very directly.”
Cornell said the world “really needs this testimony from people who draw our attention to the possibility of using nonviolent means to address conflict, not to ignore it, but who have the courage to say: are there other ways to stop violence? ”.
The award comes as a new report from the Oslo Peace Research Institute, published on June 10, confirms that in 2023 the world experienced the most armed conflicts (59 conflicts globally, 28 in Africa) of any another year since the end of World War II (1939-1945).
“A very essential part of Dorothy Day’s vision and legacy is her commitment to peace and justice, using especially nonviolent means to achieve peaceful and just situations,” Cornell said.
“So, as we look at how to carry her legacy into the future — and how to promote what she stood for — we feel that peace is a great need of our time; In our world. And we thought it was a very opportune time to highlight this aspect of Dorothy’s vision,” Cornell said.
“She, of course, is well known for her service to the poor; She is well known for living a life of voluntary simplicity, or poverty. But,” Cornell added, “the peace aspect is something we don’t want to see forgotten.”
Discerning that legacy is not easy, Cornell admitted.
“It’s not that he left us a road map or a plan: he leaves us a legacy that we now have to figure out how to carry out in our own time and in our own situations,” Cornell said. “But at least we want to bring it to the present and not lose that challenging and countercultural part of its message.”
Dorothy Day Guild co-president Kevin Ahern told OSV News: “We thought that by having a national award on peacebuilding, it could be a way to highlight the goodness that is happening in the Church today… people who continue to live out Dorothy’s legacy.”
Day’s connection to the Eucharist is also timely, said Ahern, who is also director of the Dorothy Day Center for the Study and Promotion of Social Catholicism at Manhattan College in the Bronx borough of New York, where he is a professor of religious studies.
“As the Church celebrates the National Eucharistic Revival, we might remember that the last time there was a Eucharistic congress in the United States, in Philadelphia, that was one of the last conferences in which Dorothy Day participated,” Ahern said. “One of the main points of her talk was linking the Eucharist with peace, and especially with the fight to end nuclear weapons and war.”
To achieve this, Ahern said, many more peacebuilders are needed.
“There is a great need for peacemakers; a need for peacebuilders. It is one of the most pressing issues of our time. If you read a newspaper, you will see the need for more people to work for peace,” Ahern said. “So if we can inspire more Catholics to do that, I think it’s an appropriate way to promote Dorothy’s legacy.”
“We are just excited to be given an award that reminds people of Dorothy’s testimony and legacy,” said Johnny Zokovitch, executive director of Pax Christi USA.
Zokovitch, who steps down this summer after five years, said the organization has many connections to Dorothy Day.
“In one way or another, Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker Movement have been an influence on Pax Christi USA,” Zokovitch noted.
“Dorothy was the first speaker at our first national conference, and many people, like me, have spent time living and working in a Catholic Worker community.”
Like Cornell, Zokivitch feels that Day’s peacebuilding efforts are an important aspect of his legacy.
“I think people who research Dorothy’s life understand that her testimony was a testimony of peace. One of the things we have been reflecting on a lot is how, at the Second Vatican Council, she and other women specifically testified, calling the church to a greater and more explicit repudiation of war and a greater articulation of the teachings of the church about peace,” Zokovitch said. “And that is certainly the essence of who we are as Pax Christi.”
He reflected on what Day might think about the current state of conflict in the world.
“I think Dorothy was a realist,” Zokovitch said. “I think she would look at what is happening in the world today, and what she would be most concerned about is the Church’s own witness to peace, that regardless of the conflicts that are happening in the world; regardless of the war and violence that exists: may the Church be unique in its position; unequivocal in her stance of promoting peace and non-violence.”
Featured image: (from left to right) Charlene Howard, president of the national council of Pax Christi, Kevin Ahern, co-president of the Confraternity of Dorothy Day and Bishop John E. Stowe, president bishop of the national council of Pax Christi at the presentation of the inaugural award Dorothy Day Peacemaker Award by the Dorothy Day Guild on June 11, 2024 in Louisville, Kentucky. (Courtesy of Pax Christi USA, Flickr)
