Friend of Dorothy Day still presses for social justice

Cindy Crebbin reports, Special to your Catholic Herald, on Mary Durnin.

While a Marquette University student, she heard a professor talk about Dorothy Day. Soon after, she connected with the Holy Family House of Hospitality on Fifth and State Streets in Milwaukee.

According to Durnin’s close friend, Sr. Marion Verhaalen, a School Sister of St. Francis, that experience, "awakened in Durnin a sense of being with the poor. In 1939 she wrote Dorothy Day, who had established the Catholic Worker Movement in New York City. She used her last money to buy a bus ticket to New York."

"I loved to travel, but part of the theology of it was to be with the poor and help the poor," said Durnin. She remembered helping Day with the works of mercy and handing out clothes to the poor as well as selling The Catholic Worker Newspaper for 1 cent on the streets of New York.

She subsequently worked with other groups in Milwaukee and abroad. Today,

From Durnin's perspective, "the church is now entering a third cycle into John's Gospel of the mystics of John and of Mary Magdalene."

Which I'm guessing is her way of saying it's The Church in the Age of the Holy Spirit.