This daughter of the church can minister, even from heaven, in a most intimate way.
“God forgive us the sins of our youth!”
Dorothy Day wrote this in 1973, in Commonweal.
She wasn’t direct. And she told us that.
Day wrote:
As Zachariah sang out, “We have knowledge of salvation through forgiveness of our sins.” I don’t think anyone recognizes the comfort of this text better than I do. I have not yet been attracted by the present tendency to bring everything out into the light of day by public and published confessions. Were we not taught by Holy Mother Church to respect the modesty of the confessional? Or is that a silly expression? But oh the joy of knowing that you can always go there and be forgiven seventy times seven times. (Even though you wonder, in your distrust of yourself, whether you really mean or have the strength to “amend your life.”) I hope your readers can read between the lines from the above and recognize what my positions on birth control and abortion are.
Dorothy Day had an abortion in her youth, before her conversion to Catholicism.
And even though she clearly went to confession with this, she was still thinking of it in her 70s. She was still grappling with God’s mercy.
She went on in the same essay to give thanks for the Catholic Church’s position on contraception and abortion, at a time when the church was a battleground over Pope Paul VI’s Humanae Vitae.
She also wrote about some of her anguish through a novel, The Eleventh Virgin.
In the Commonweal reflection, Day wrote:
Thank God we have a Pope Paul who upholds respect for life, an ideal so lofty, so high, so important even when it seems he has the whole Catholic world against him.
The best line ever about Dorothy Day goes to Archbishop José Gomez, who, at a conference we were both speaking at in 2015, said: I don’t know if Dorothy Day is a saint, but I know she makes me want to be one.
I don’t know that I would agree with Dorothy Day on everything in the news, but I sure want to love and serve God more every time I read her.
In a Christian Century essay, Laura Lasuertmer writes:
I understood that, as a farmer, I am always making decisions about what lives and what dies. God’s creation is full of life, and life is always a choice. God didn’t tell me what to do that morning at prayer. But I knew that God’s love for me was not contingent upon this choice. My options would lead to different futures but also to the consistent gift of God’s love.
When I told David about the metaphor that came to me in morning prayer, he said, “I’m right there with the peppers.” While I continued to imagine future realities, conversely frightening and beautiful, my husband stood by with an unwavering certainty. He knew, with a gut kind of knowing, that he could not raise another child. This kind of certainty is rare for David. Among his gifts to our family is his joyful support of the visions and ambitions that our children and I bring forth. I wanted to honor his vision for his future. There would be no perfect decision for us but instead a commitment to listen to each other, trust each other, and love each other well.
The ultrasound revealed a small white dot on which was another dot smaller than a blackberry seed: the embryo. I was seven weeks pregnant. The abortion procedure lasted five minutes. Compared to the physical trauma of childbirth, it was practically painless. Still, I was emotionally distraught by the experience of holding life and death together in my body. Motherhood, I learned, is also about death. I joined the community of women who have had a miscarriage, a medical termination, or an abortion, who know this tortured and sacred experience of love and loss embracing in the womb
I was surprised by the grief—maybe because many women, like Dorothy, do not share the intimate details of their experiences with abortion. Maybe I was surprised because postabortion grief does not make an appearance in proabortion rights rhetoric, while in antiabortion rhetoric it is used as a weapon. Neither side speaks to the complexity of emotion I experienced, nor to the paradoxes of choice, life, loss, and grief: I felt grateful to have had a choice about this pregnancy but also devastated by our decision. Grief led me to those dark woods where I yearned for all that I had lost in choosing not to have another child. I did not know what to do with my yearning, so I read stories and began to share my own.
Now, I’m not comparing traumas here, but it’s not right to put abortion alongside miscarriage. And anyone who believes post-abortion healing is a weapon for those of us who oppose abortion has never met some of those who lead retreats for women who want to find some healing amid the hell of knowing you chose to end the life of your unborn child. It’s misery, and folks like Theresa Bonopartis at Entering Canaan want you to give that pain to God.
Dorothy Day could be a remarkable opportunity for healing, as women come to know her. She could be a powerful patron saint for young women who have been hurt looking for love. She is someone who had an abortion and encountered God’s mercy. That’s incredible — a daughter of the church who can minister, even from heaven, in a most intimate way, to a tremendous pain of our day.
Yes, it’s complex, but it’s also clear. And there is a clear road to help. And it’s not in rationalization, or dismissing what Day knew: The church has answers the world needs. Including on contraception and abortion.