SEEK24 Gathering

If you’ve been keeping pace with these random reports during the last two months about travel outside of the monastery, you might recall a visit I made to New York City in December, and then one earlier this month to St. Louis for the annual F.O.C.U.S. conference called SEEK24. Both cities provided plentiful food for thought about saints and Servants of God. This particular story will reveal more about my own ruminations between the bookends of my visits to those two cities.

The day following the Portsmouth Abbey School Board of Directors meeting, and the Abbot’s Reception at the New York Yacht Club later that evening, the Church celebrated the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception on December 8, which was also the travel day back to RI for many of us. It has been a holy day of obligation since 1708, so missing Mass was not option. What was optional, however, was the choice of which Manhattan church to attend. Having spent the morning of the previous day exploring the behind-the-scenes sacristies and other areas of St. Patrick’s Cathedral on 5th Avenue, the choice was easy: The Shrine and Parish Church of the Holy Innocents at 128 West 37th Street.

After checking out of my hotel, it was a short 7-block walk south to the church for the 8:00 a.m. Mass in the Extraordinary Form. There were about 100 people in attendance, a good mix of folks, some obviously catching the Latin Mass before heading off to work in midtown offices, a few young dads shouldering their own Holy Innocents, and a kind lady who told me she had taken the train in from New Jersey just for this Mass. Many of us stayed in our pews for the period of Adoration which followed. At Portsmouth, we talk a lot about the Servant of God Dorothy Day. Abbot Matthew Stark leads us once a month in the prayer for her canonization (see below), and he still relates the story about the day she gave him a “tongue-lashing” in response to a question he raised. “She put me in my place,” recalls our Abbot Emeritus. Some of us also remember hearing the address titled Servant of God Dorothy Day, Saint and Troublemaker delivered by the late author Jim Forest at the Portsmouth Institute’s 2013 Summer Conference. (Jim wrote All is Grace: A Biography of Dorothy Day.)

Cesar Chavez, Coretta Scott King, Dorothy Day
at St. John the Divine

Dorothy Day (1897-1980) was an Oblate of Saint Benedict, the honorific which most interests us here in a newsletter particularly aimed at our own Oblates and friends connected with Portsmouth Abbey. Despite her close friendship with Portsmouth Oblate and artist, Ade Bethune, also of blessed memory, Dorothy made her promise of oblation to Abbot Ambrose L. Ondrak O.S.B. (1892-1961) of St. Procopius Abbey in Lisle, Illinois. She did so in New York City, on April 26, 1955, in the Church of the Holy Innocents. Abbot Ambrose and his monks made periodic trips to NYC where they offered retreats and days of recollection for oblates in the city, trips which included visits to “The Little Catholic Church Around the Corner, at the Crossroads of the World,” on 37th Street, as they call themselves. Participating in the Latin Mass that morning of December 8 brought me somehow even closer to Dorothy Day, visiting the same church that she visited and celebrating the Latin Mass there of my own childhood, as she did.

“Meta-photo” of Cesar Chavez by Br. Sixtus

For those unversed in the language of the Church, a person designated as a Servant of God is one who is deemed to be on the first step to possible canonization as a saint of the Church. Dorothy Day told a Chicago reporter in 1977, "If you're a saint, then you must be impractical and utopian, and nobody has to pay any attention to you. That kind of talk makes me sick." Jim Forest related a similar retort in his Institute address when he quoted Dorothy as saying, "Don't call me a saint. I don't want to be dismissed that easily." As I write this on Martin Luther King Jr. Day (January 15), I am reviewing a photograph I came across years ago of Dorothy Day sitting next to Coretta Scott King and Cesar Chavez in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in NY in the spring of 1973, about a one-minute walk from Columbia University. They each spoke in support of and with encouragement for the continuing nationwide non-violent boycott of grapes and iceberg lettuce by the United Farm Workers, a movement for which I volunteered while still in college fifty years ago. In her own writings, Dorothy Day reflects on her words that day: “They must also, I told them, be aided by St. Benedict whose motto was, To work is to pray.” As for the other bookend being St. Louis and the 1,200-mile drive from Portsmouth to get there, I carried with me an actual snapshot of Cesar Chavez which I took on the day I met him in Lattimer, Pennsylvania, on September 10, 1972, about six months before he was in St. John the Divine with Mrs. King and Dorothy Day. In the photo he is seen speaking at the dedication of a memorial to 19 anthracite coal miners who had been murdered in cold blood by sheriff’s deputies in 1897 as they marched peacefully through the patch town of Lattimer, three miles from where I was born. In a purely meta-moment, I exited the interstate on Dec. 28 and photographed the photograph of Senor Chavez taken almost 52 years earlier on the exact spot. To say that he seemed saintlike at the time may be reading too much into my feelings that morning. Was he a controversial figure in labor history, and in fact, is he still considered a controversial figure by some? Yes. Was Dorothy Day? By all means. In discussing these talking points with friends, two of them told me they thought Cesar Chavez had been named a Servant of God like Dorothy Day, but I’ve yet to uncover anything supporting that claim.

Chavez, King, and Day at St. John the Divine (1973)

Three days after the Lattimer stop, finally in St. Louis and entering the America’s Center arena for SEEK24, 20,000 of us were guided through a portal exhorting us to “Be the Light,” the same command given by St. Pope John Paul II to the young people of the world during his 1999 Papal Visit in the same venue twenty-five years earlier. It followed on last year’s slogan of “Be Not Afraid,” also a favorite quote from Scripture used by the late pontiff. The motto for SEEK25 next January in Salt Lake City is “Follow me.” Even a saintly Servant like Dorothy Day, who once was a troublemaker but who was also a light in the darkness for many, is a good role model for anyone today looking to “Be the light,” young or old or in between. The day I write this, MLK Day 2024, is also the memorial of Saints Maurus and Placid (January 15). young disciples of St. Benedict. I noticed this day a responsory verse that delivers the same message to us: “May you be children of God, blameless and innocent, shining as lights in the world and holding fast to the word of life.”

PRAYER FOR THE CANONIZATION OF SERVANT OF GOD DOROTHY DAY

God our Father, your servant Dorothy Day exemplified the Catholic faith by her life of prayer, voluntary poverty, works of mercy, and witness to the justice and peace of the Gospel of Jesus. May her life inspire your people to turn to Christ as their Savior, to see His face in the world’s poor, and to raise their voices for the justice of God’s kingdom. I pray that her holiness may be recognized by your Church and that you grant the following favor that I humbly ask through her intercession (here mention your request). I ask this through Christ our Lord. Amen.