The Shrine had the privilege of having Martha Hennessey
spent a day with the community and the general public talking about her
grandmother and the Catholic Worker movement. She presented a retreat to the LaSalette
Community in the morning and gave two talks one in the late afternoon and the
last in the evening. Her talks centered on her and her family's relationship
with her grandmother, Dorothy Day.
Martha spoke about the difficulties of being related to a
noted person like her Granny. These
difficulties caused her both to rebel and return to Catholicism. Her journey
back to Catholicism began when a LaSalette priest helped her as her spiritual
director. She also has taken up the
legacy of her Granny by returning to work in Maryhouse, a Catholic Worker house
for women in New York City. She began this work after marring, raising a family,
seeing them through college and working as an occupational therapist.
Martha also provided some materials in a bibliography of
writings by and about Dorothy Day and an article in The Catholic Worker about the aims and means of the movement. She
quoted the last sentence from this article as particularly meaningful to her. "We
must be prepared to accept seeming failure with these aims, for sacrifice and
suffering are part of the Christian life. Success, as the world determines it,
is not the final criteria for judgment. The most important thing is the love of
Jesus Christ and how to live His truth."
