Dorothy Day knew to receive our Faith through the prism of the lives of the saints and at the same time to reverence our hierarchy (source of efficacious sacraments and infallible teaching) with a brutal, candid realism about the failings and sins of any particular priest, bishop and pope. Dorothy's life and spirituality provide a marvelous template by which to receive the contrasting pontificates of Francis and John-Paul-Benedict. She is unsurpassed (excepting Mother Theresa of course) in the boldness and vigor with which she reached out to those at the margins: the homeless, addicted, mentally ill, radicals, communists, artists, bohemians and all the rejected. She epitomizes like no one else Francis' passion to reach out to those who feel neglected and rejected by the Church. Indeed, she was most at home with these very people and clearly had problems with someone like Cardinal Spellman and his conviviality with war, wealth, status and power. At the same time, she was rigorous and uncompromising in her acclamation of the Truth of our faith in all its splendor and depth. There was nothing puritanical or prurient in her view of sexuality and romance: she was flamingly passionate in her love affairs even as she later embraced the rigorous, vigorous Catholic ethos of chastity, largely from her exquisitely feminine sense of the needs and vulnerabilities of women and children. If the dual JPB pontificate announced Truth with impeccable clarity, depth and gentleness; and Francis burns with desire to share the Love of Christ with the alienated; than Dorothy is a splendid, fascinating, synthesizing embodiment of both impulses, which require crave each other in a marriage made in heaven.
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