08 December 2005
For the 25th anniversary of the death of Dorothy Day, here are two tributes. One in writing, from the editors of The New York Times, who praise Day’s “pacifism and cranky independence” as traits which survive her in the loosely-organized, but devoted, Catholic Worker’s movement, which they describe as still, truly radical, avoiding the “temporal fray…because it focuses so relentlessly on the personal and the particular.” A second tribute comes in action, and the march which started today, of 25 Christians in Day’s tradition who will walk 50 miles from Santiago, Cuba, to Guantanamo Bay to “defend human dignity” by visiting the hundreds of detainees held at the U.S. camp and to witness and bring comfort to the prisoners on hunger strike. Explained one Catholic Worker, Matthew Daloisio, “‘As a Christian, I feel compelled to reach out across national boundaries to perform one of the most basic acts of faith as described in the gospel of Matthew 25, I was in prison and you visited me.'”