Don't Call Me A Saint
By Victoria Mastrangelo
“Don’t call me a saint. I don’t want to be dismissed so easily.” - Dorothy Day
Growing up Catholic, we hear a lot about the saints and over time their lives come down to one main story or fact about their life that we laud them for or that is meant to define their holiness, their reason for sainthood.
St. Augustine went from great sinner to Doctor of the Church. St. Catherine of Siena yelled at the pope. St. Thomas More died a martyr rather than give in to the king’s oath. St. Maximilian Kolbe switched places with a man and died at Auschwitz. St. Gianna Molla refused an abortion and died days after giving birth to her child. It goes on and on.
Over time, this approach makes the saints seem one-dimensional, like legends rather than people. They can become easily dismissed as someone with great courage, a great conversion story, or a heroic act that we could never do so they, in a sense, can become other. This is the great tragedy of the lives of the saints: the very men and women who are supposed to model for us, to demonstrate for us that the way of the gospel, the way of the perfect Christ, is difficult but not impossible become instead ideals or representatives of unachievable goals when, in fact, it is the call for every single ordinary person to become like them, to become a member of the heavenly hosts.
We often forget that the saints too are complicated people with simple and everyday lives and, yes, even sin. We forget this until one of them beckons to us to get to know them better. When one of these portraits of their lives begs us to zoom out and look at the full picture of their life, of what led them to that moment(s) that have become their calling card. One such person in my life has been Dorothy Day.
Dorothy Day was always the great social justice warrior who opened hospitality centers for the poor. In a way, she always seemed to me like the American Mother Teresa - living with the poor she served, lauded for her humility and generosity. That snapshot summary of her life and work was all well and good but never really interested me.
However, over the last year I have felt a tug toward her. I felt compelled to finally pull The Long Loneliness off of my shelf, where it had been sitting for years after having been gifted by a coworker. Reading that led to the memoir written by her granddaughter, The World Will Be Saved Be Beauty. What I thought I would find is a holy, humble woman, working with and for the poor who did it all so well after having done it wrong in the past and converted. I guess I expected the St. Augustine story in modern American form. Instead, what I found was a beautifully complicated woman.
I found someone who was both humble and proud, both loving and generous but also deeply tied to her own mind and convictions, someone who loved her neighbor incredibly but struggled with loving her daughter. I found someone like me. I found a woman who would probably not check most of the boxes. I found someone who made a lot of mistakes, who hurt the people closest to her, who struggled with things being different from what she imagined or expected.
But I also found someone so deeply rooted in prayer and trust in God and with a deep love and respect for the Church. She not only read and loved the gospel, but tried to find ways to be truly grounded in it in her life and to truly live it out every day. She had a true understanding of justice, a deep desire to see it lived out, and a drive to go out and change the world. Often, this drive could be detrimental to herself, her family and even to her beloved Catholic Worker, and could make waves that she didn’t intend, but just as often she used it to offer love, hope and to change people’s lives.
This whole complicated, messy, sinful, redeemed, and grace filled life is what makes her a Servant of God, a woman who has an open cause for canonization. Maybe one day, we’ll talk about St. Dorothy Day, the founder of the Catholic Worker Movement, and that’ll be her story, but for now I hope to offer through her story many unchecked boxes, many missteps side by side with many more moments of grace, in a life that shows a different and maybe more relatable way of being a Catholic woman.
