MICHAEL O. ALLEN

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DOROTHY DAY Life of a Saint?

By Homepage, New York Daily NewsNo Comments

Sunday, November 16, 1997

By MICHAEL O. ALLEN, Daily News Staff Writer

In the clatter of spoons on soup bowls and excited voices absorbed into murmurs in the smoke-filled first-floor kitchen of St. Joseph House last week, it was hard to tell the poor from their helpers.

The house was not unlike a home, its inhabitants restless siblings in an uncommonly large family, which was as Dorothy Day would have it.

They are, after all, her children continuing her life’s work.

A couple of dozen people had taken shelter for the night in the five-story hostel on First St. in the heart of the Bowery, and another couple of hundred poor and homeless, society’s derelicts and rejects, had just been fed that day.

It has been 100 years, almost to the day, since Dorothy Day was born in Brooklyn Heights, and 17 years since she died at her movement’s Maryhouse for women at 55 E. Third St.

Her life encompassed a breathtaking pilgrimage, including a period of fast living that gave way to an ascetic, intellectual and spiritual quest that seared generations of Roman Catholics.

By 30, she had run with the suffragettes and had drunk intellectuals under the table in Greenwich Village. After the birth of her daughter in 1927, Day converted to Catholicism.

In 1933, with mentor Peter Maurin, she started The Catholic Worker movement and the newspaper of the same name.

Reared an Episcopalian, she practiced a brand of Catholicism leavened by her earlier radicalism that scorched the Church’s leaders with its purity.

She took to heart the Sermon on the Mount, living among and as one of the poor, as the Bible said Christians should.

But it was her pacifism, social activism and philosophy of nonviolence that often brought her in conflict with the Church’s hierarchy and with governments everywhere. It would lead to her being jailed and fined numerous times in New York and elsewhere.

Supporters like Jesuit priest the Rev. Daniel Berrigan, a friend of Day and an ardent peace activist, said the Church eventually adopted some of her pacifism, but it never was an easy fit.

“They couldn’t sleep at night with Dorothy around,” Berrigan said.

“The Church was very uncomfortable with her. The Church was officially silent all during the Vietnam War and approved the Second World War. She said no war.”

In the very same Catholic Church she drove to distraction with her radicalism, the air now is filled with talk of sainthood for her.

Day’s ‘Children’

Such talk sets the teeth of Day disciples such as Carmen Trotta and Joanne Kennedy on edge.

Day’s granddaughter Kate Hennessy, in a rueful reminiscence in a recent issue of The Catholic Worker, explained the wariness in her own way.

She said her grandmother turned the life of poverty into something dynamic, full of richly simple moments. But the “impulse to send her off into sainthood, which can be as lethal as complete rejection,” risks placing her beyond the reach of average folks, she said.

In Trotta and Kennedy and countless other young people of conscience who continue to commit to the movement, Day could not have found more faithful followers.

Kennedy, who aspired to be a criminal defense attorney, bagged law school after completing the first year at the University of Missouri in Kansas City.

“I was starting to lose faith in that, anyway,” she said.

As others tidied up after a meal at St. Joe’s, as the movement’s unpaid staff calls the place at 36 E. First St., Trotta sat sharing smokes and enduring good-natured ribbing from Kennedy.

At another table, next to a stack of recent issues of the movement’s 1-cent newspaper, The Catholic Worker, Gerry Howard talked to a couple of indifferent companions.

Kennedy, 29, was chatting about the movement’s work with the poor and an ideal of personal responsibility.

“I believe that each person takes care of the other,” she said. “It is not about evangelization, not about making people feel like they are getting a handout, or even about me feeling good about myself because I’m doing this thing. It is about the dignity of every human being.”

Kennedy came to the New York City Catholic Worker community seven months ago from another one in Des Moines.

About 125 hospitality houses, farms and communes inspired by Day are now spread across the nation and seven countries.

Howard, 48, lived in the abyss of homelessness for nine years, including six in the subway tunnels near the St. Joseph House. Transit police officers roused him from sleep daily in time for him to get on the soup line at the hospitality house, where he found his salvation.

Walking down First St. one day 2 1/2 years ago, wracked with the pain of his myriad sufferings, Howard said he burst into uncontrollable sobbing.

“I was trying to figure out why my life was going the way it had gone for so long and wanted a way to turn it around,” he said.

A staffer beckoned him inside and allowed him into the basement, where he spent a couple of hours crying and begging God and pleading with his parents, long dead, to forgive him for the shame that was his life at the time.

Six months later, he walked back into the life of a son that, because of his addiction to crack, he had never seen. He has been clean since and now has a job at an antique shop. He continues to live at the house as he puts back together pieces of a life shattered by addiction.

The movement does not consider the assistance the shelter shared with Howard as charity.

Trotta decries the practice in some churches in the city where they set aside a few cots a night for the poor and homeless only to turn them out in the morning.

“The coat that hangs in your closet belongs to the poor,” Trotta said. “Someone said, ‘You must pray that the poor forgive you the charity you give them,’ because in reality all that the Earth contains is meant for us to share.”

The ideal that Dorothy Day lived, and which The Catholic Worker movement continues to practice, Trotta said, is that “each Christian conscious of a duty in the Lord . . . should take in one of the homeless as an honored guest into their homes.

She Urged Action, Duty

Trotta, behind the desk later in the day at the Mary Gearhart Gallery at 252 Mott St., where an exhibit of Day’s photographs and writings are on display through Dec. 7, railed against the American government, the World Bank, the greed of American corporations and society’s complacency in the face of injustices everywhere.

Reared a Catholic and a rock-ribbed Republican in Inwood, L.I., Trotta came to the movement disillusioned with the lies of American history and the Church. Private studies, he said, allowed him to shed his “mindless conservatism” and led him to The Catholic Worker movement.

Some visitors to the exhibit, devotees of Mother Teresa, departed, and Trotta mentioned how someone called Day “The Mother Teresa of Mott St.” in a recent article on Cardinal O’Connor’s assertion that he would begin the formal process to declare Day a saint.

Trotta did not take the comment as a compliment to Day.

“I am not speaking against Mother Teresa . . . ” he said, “but I have a devotion to the sort of sharpness of Dorothy Day, that doing of charity that didn’t come at the expense of justice, of speaking out about justice.”

Making Dorothy Day a saint could allow people to shirk this duty that she expects of them, some of her supporters say.

“I don’t care to be dismissed so easily,” she had said when during her own life people thrust sainthood on her.

Patrick Jordan, the managing editor of Commonweal magazine, who lived at St. Joseph House from 1969 to 1975, said making her a saint would be good if it meant that her whole life would be taught, not just the part that the Church finds comfortable.

“When the lives of the saints are recounted, often you only hear certain aspects of those lives,” Jordan said.

“If you study more deeply, you find out that some of these people were very challenging, not only to individuals and society, but to the Church itself.”

Day’s pacifism, her real attempt to love her neighbor, sacrifice herself for just causes, place herself in God’s hands and pray for her persecutor, were all a real part of her legacy.

“If those aspects of her life were forgotten because of her canonization,” Jordan said, “then that would be a loss to the whole Church.”

Said Berrigan: “Anyone who knew Dorothy or has done any reading of what she wrote would say she is already a saint. She doesn’t need this official kind of mark on her life.”

The Road to Sainthood

A long-time friend of Dorothy Day’s likened the Catholic Church’s canonization ritual to shooting someone out of a cannon.

Some of the early Christians did come by sainthood in a sudden and violent fashion, but today the Catholic Church puts candidates through a complex, decades-long saint-making ritual.

  • The process begins with a local bishop, in this case, Cardinal O’Connor, confirming the local fame of a servant of God for good works or martyrdom after examining evidence gathered by an informal guild of supporters. That examination, even before the process moves to Rome, can take years. O’Connor is about to embark on that process.
  • A bishop then will argue the person’s cause before a Congregation of the Causes of Saints, which will investigate the candidate’s heroic practice of virtues in a trial-like setting. Success at this level would lead to the candidate being declared “venerable.”
  • The candidate would be deemed “blessed” when two provable miracles occur in his or her name after death.
  • A third miracle would allow the person’s cause to be taken up again so he or she could be canonized as a saint.

SENIOR CITY-ZENS; They left only to find there’s no place like home

By Homepage, New York Daily NewsNo Comments

Sunday, October 26, 1997

by MICHAEL O. ALLEN, Daily News Staff Writer

Horst Liepolt left New York City in 1995 for Berlin, where he was born 70 years ago, only to discover his heart belongs to the Big Apple.

Ditto for Dolores White, now retired, who yearns to live in the city again.

Howard and Arlene Sommer, in their 50s, are giving the city another whirl after their children flew the coop. And, two years into their return from a 40-year sojourn in suburbia, Mort and Sonia Goldstein are loving every second of life in the city.

In all the good notices New York City is getting for its historic reduction in crime and improved quality of life, not to mention the burgeoning economy, a little-remarked-upon but growing trend is that the city is also becoming haven to a group that appreciates the big town’s excitement: retirees and the so-called “empty nesters.”

Although statistically difficult to measure, anecdotal evidence confirms that a growing number of retirees, especially former New Yorkers, are choosing the city and spurning such traditional retirement locales as Florida, California and Arizona.

Commissioner Herbert Stupp of the city Department for the Aging said he is not surprised.

“It’s a very senior-friendly city, perhaps the most in the country,” he said.

New York is a good place to grow old because of all its conveniences, including access to health care, the most developed mass transit network in the Western Hemisphere and discounts everywhere for seniors, Stupp said.

Retirees themselves cite the ease with which they can live, the excitement of the city and its cultural offerings.

But Charles Longino Jr., a demographer at Wake Forest University, was brutally blunt on the reason the elderly are returning to the city.

“They are coming back because they’ve gotten old and widowed in Florida, and their health is failing, and they want to be near their families,” he said.

Andrew McPherson, a junior equity research analyst at Salomon Brothers, concurs.

Seniors often move to warmer climates when they retire, he said. But as they hit their mid-80s, especially when one spouse dies, they have a harder time getting along on their own.

“The kids still live up in the Northeast. Then the issue is, every time Grandma slips and falls or has a problem, the kids have to hop on a plane and fly down to Florida,” McPherson said.

It makes more sense for Granny to be near the family.

And, sensing a need, developers in the city are offering upscale continuing care and assisted-living apartment buildings, where older residents receive personal care, including help with getting dressed, bathing and medication.

Glenn Kaplan, chairman of the Kapson Group, which owns and operates 20 such facilities in the region, said his firm has another 22 on the drawing board or under construction, including five scheduled to open in the city within three months. Other developers recently opened senior care apartment buildings in Manhattan and Brooklyn.

Other evidence supports retirees who say they are returning because of their love of the city and what it offers. Real estate firms, which are on the front line of selling and renting homes and apartments to the returnees, say they are experiencing a boom.

Andrew Heiberger, president of Citi Habitats, which rents more than 3,500 apartments a year in the city, said returnees make up about 6% of his business, up from about half that just a few years ago. His firm found an apartment for Horst Liepolt just this month.

Liepolt was a Grammy-winning jazz record producer who ran the Sweet Basil jazz club in Greenwich Village for 10 years before returning to Berlin with his wife, Clarita, two years ago.

“I thought with the Wall coming down, and with the whole rebuilding thing, it was going to be like the Wild West and honky-tonk, something happening, excitement,” Liepolt said.

He found quite the opposite.

“In those 2 1/2 years, there was no excitement, only Doomsville.”

Contrast that to an awestruck Liepolt visiting New York for the first time almost 40 years ago.

“You see it in movies, you see it in pictures, but it was another thing to actually be here. It was amazing. That was it. I felt very good and right at home,” Liepolt said.

It’s a sentiment Howard Sommer, a 57-year-old president of an investment fund who was born and reared in the South Bronx, understands.

Sommer’s journey took him briefly through Chicago before plopping him down in Long Island for 30 years of the whole suburban treatment: two children, a big house on 31 /2 acres, a swimming pool and a tennis court.

But when the kids grew up and went to college and, upon graduation, moved to Manhattan, Howard and Arlene Sommer, 55, found themselves with too much house. Howard was itching to get back to the city, but his wife was not too sure she was ready to give up the space and comfort of their home and the bonds she formed over the years.

They sold the home anyway and have been renting a Manhattan apartment for seven months now. Arlene is back in school studying to become a psychoanalyst. And Howard is having a terrific time.

“At this point in my life I want to be in the middle of everything,” Sommer said. “I love stepping out of my apartment and being on the streets and all the people and the energy and the excitement. . . . It’s good to be a New Yorker again.”

When she turned 65, Sonia Goldstein decided it was time that she and her husband, Mort, leave Plainview, L.I., and return to the city, where he was reared.

The dossier: 40 years in the suburbs, three children, a dog and a large house that had an office for Mort, a psychologist. He needed some convincing because the move meant ending his practice. Solution came in the form of a two-day-a-week practice on Fire Island. He feels now he has the best of both worlds.

And Sonia is just loving it.

“New York is the place to be when you are retired,” she said. “You are not dependent on a car. You can get to wherever you want to go with mass transportation, and you are not locked in isolation in your home.”

The couple has subscriptions to practically all the cultural institutions in the city.

“The way we get together with friends that we don’t see as much anymore is we have subscriptions with them,” Sonia Goldstein said. “So, I have a subscription to Lincoln Center, Manhattan Theater Club, the Roundabout and then in between, my daughter and I love the ballet so we go to that, either traditional ballet or Alvin Ailey.”

The older-than-60 crowd numbers 1.3 million in a city of 7 1/2 million people, so cultural institutions, even as they court families and younger audiences, find their base is highly dependent on retirees.

At the Roundabout Theatre Company, for instance, more than 30% of the 35,000 people on its subscription roll identify themselves as retired, said marketing director David Steffen.

“It’s important that everyone realize that there is this huge influx of people coming back into the city,” he said.

Dolores White, for one, has been to all the retirement places and thought they were nice — but not for her.

And when she says “I’m a city girl,” she doesn’t mean just any city.

“I’ve been to Chicago, which I liked. I was in San Francisco. I liked it. I’ve been to Paris, London, Madrid, Rome, but I like New York the best,” White said.

The 68-year-old former teacher grew up in Brooklyn, and remembers cutting class to see Frank Sinatra at the Paramount in the 1940s. She remembers Harlem, Little Italy and Chinatown.

She is now working on exchanging her rambling East Northport, L.I., home for an apartment in the Tribeca-Battery Park area, or in Brooklyn Heights.

“There’s such an array of cultural activities, restaurants, shopping . . . you could just sit on the stairs of some of the office buildings and people-watch for hours,” White said.

The city’s rejuvenation recalls for her the old days.

“We felt very free in those days, traveled in the subway with ease. I see that coming back. I see it coming back again. That is what is drawing me back to moving back to the city,” she said.

Original Story Date: 10/26/97