Explore "Dorothy Day: Dissenting Voice of the American Century" by John Loughery on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
In November 1997, on the occasion of what would have been her hundredth birthday, Cardinal John O'Connor, the head of the Archdiocese of New York, announced in a homily from the pulpit of St. Patrick's Cathedral that he was considering a proposal to begin the process that could lead to Dorothy Day's canonization. He invited those who had known her most intimately to offer their views in the coming months. The following February and again in March, a number of people who had worked closely with Dorothy met with the cardinal to share memories and talk about the advisability of proceeding with what is an exacting, time-consuming, expensive, and arcane process. Not long after, the cardinal wrote to the prefect of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints in Rome to do just that.
The long road to official recognition of sainthood for Dorothy Day hadn't originated with O'Connor, though. Rather, soon after his arrival in New York in 1984, he had taken up the cause of his immediate predecessor, the late Cardinal Cooke. It was the Claretians of Chicago, a religious order, that in 1983 first argued the desirability of promoting Dorothy's canonization, soliciting prayers and testimonials and eventually devoting part of their website to that end. But it required someone of O'Connor's stature to advance the initiative, and the longer O'Connor was at the helm in New York, the more he came to feel the wisdom of acting on it.