Altar boy, 84: MHR’s Carlos Rodriguez receives papal blessing
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Lourdes 75th:
Blessed Rother:
Bayview parish began as shipyard chapel during WWII
‘Authentic light’ for church and world
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CATHOLIC SAN FRANCISCO Newspaper of the Archdiocese of San Francisco
Serving San Francisco, Marin & San Mateo Counties
www.catholic-sf.org
September 28, 2017
$1.00 | VOL. 19 NO. 19
Dolan: Honesty about church’s flaws might win back defectors Peter Finney Jr. Catholic News Service
NEW ORLEANS – New York Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan suggested to more than 400 priests of the state of Louisiana that humbly and openly sharing the “wounds” and shortcomings of the church might bring those who are alienated back to the practice of the faith. Using the image of the church as “our supernatural family, which we, as priests, are called to image,” Cardinal Dolan told the opening session of the three-day Louisiana Priests’ Convention that human weakness has been a part of the church from the beginning. “The church is not just our family – it’s also a dysfunctional family,” he said Sept. 19 during what is one of the largest statewide gatherings of priests in the U.S. “Everybody today talks about dysfunctional see dolan, page 12
(CNS photo/David Agren)
Mexico earthquake Mass
Bishop Ramon Castro Castro of Cuernavaca, Mexico, celebrates Mass Sept. 24 outside the city’s cathedral, which dates to the 1500s and was badly damaged by the Sept. 19 earthquake in Mexico. The magnitude 7.1 earthquake struck central Mexico especially hard, with the epicenter about 45 miles southeast of Mexico City on the border area of Morelos and Puebla states. In Morelos – served by the Diocese of Cuernavaca – at least 73 people died. Some towns reported more than half the homes there damaged or destroyed.
Granddaughter: Dorothy Day would be marching today Christina Gray Catholic San Francisco
Rendered from diaries, memories, conversations and a cache of family letters, writer Kate Hennessy’s new biography of her grandmother Dorothy Day reveals a complex, often contradictory woman of action who didn’t hesitate to “throw herself into the fray.” “She believed that not only could she change the world, it was her obligation to do so,” her youngest granddaughter writes in “Dorothy Day: The World Will Be Saved by Beauty” (Scribner, 2017), a book published 37 years after her grandmother’s death in 1980. In an interview with Catholic San Francisco at Canticle Farm, an urban enclave in Oakland’s Fruitvale District, Hennessy said that the year that has seen social discord and massive protests around the country over a Muslim travel ban, withdrawal from a climate accord, religious and historical symbols, women’s rights and the inauguration of a controversial new president, would have certainly mobilized her grandmother, one way or another.
(Photo by Christina Gray/Catholic San Francisco)
Kate Hennessy, who has written a biography of her grandmother Dorothy Day, is pictured at her home at Canticle Farm in Oakland.
“She believed in hope,” said Hennessy. “She would never say you must do this or that, but rather, examine your conscience and follow it.” She believed you have to “do what you can do,” and everyone is called to that differently, “but you can’t just do nothing.”
Day’s age and a heart condition in the later years of her life limited the momentum that had defined her, and “that was difficult for her,” Hennessy said. “She would also pray because she said a lot of times that what you do can seem to make no difference,” Hennessy said. Day was a journalist, activist and Catholic convert who co-founded the Catholic Worker Movement, a now-global network of faith-based hospitality houses established in the depths of the Great Depression to serve the poor in a direct expression of Jesus’ teachings. She transformed a tiny penny newspaper, The Catholic Worker, into an organization that today runs soup kitchens and aid centers in cities around the world. In the Archdiocese of San Francisco, Day’s disciples operate Catholic Worker houses in San Bruno, Redwood City and Half Moon Bay. Unlike the many books written by historians, theologians and biographers, Hennessy’s book is a frank yet see granddaughter, page 6
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