She spent her youth among socialists, anarchists and communists and considered herself to be one of them.

She lived a rootless, bohemian life, the nights of bars and parties and unhappy love affairs. One child she aborted, another she kept, both conceived out of wedlock by different men – whom you could not call “fathers”.

She shocked her friends by being baptised and received into the Roman Catholic Church. They called her a traitor.

By the time she died in New York in 1980, she had become the conscience of the Church in the United States of America.

In 2000, just twenty years after her death, the Vatican officially recognised her cause for canonisation: Dorothy Day.

Dorothy Day revered priests, but she hated clericalism, as quite a few clerics discovered. Once she visited a friend in prison and was upset to discover that no priest had made contact with the prisoner.

She later recorded this in her diary:

“As I came down the street afterwards, a well dressed priest drove by in a big car.  Then I passed another priest... also well dressed and comfortable.  Then another in front of a most luxurious mansion, the Parish House, playing with a dog on a leash.  All these priests were well fed, well housed, comfortable, caring for the safe people just like themselves.  And where are the priests for the poor, for the down and outs?  It is the little of God’s children who do not get cared for.  God help them, and God help the priest who is caught in the bourgeois system and cannot get out.”

“God help the priest who is caught in the bourgeois system and cannot get out...” A naive prayer? A judgemental prayer? An unfair prayer? A necessary prayer? Certainly a Dorothy Day prayer!

What about your prayer?  The “Year for Priests” continues and will not end until June. Are you praying for priests in this special year?

If you are not quite sure how to pray for priests, perhaps Saint Therese of Lisieux can help you. She wrote a really beautiful prayer, not just for priests in general, but especially for priests that she knew.  Copies of this prayer are available at the back of the church. Please take one if you wish but, in her words or your own, pray for priests.

Incidentally, Dorothy Day had a great love and devotion to Saint Therese of Lisieux and wrote an amazing biography of her. What could possibly unite these two utterly different women? You will have to read the biography to find out!  It is well worth it.