You really do have to feel as though maybe grace and justice -- and the broader view -- are returning to our lives, whether we're Catholics or whatevers. New York's conservative Cardinal Dolan is calling for the beatification of Dorothy Day.
What? A leftist hussy? A danger to all right-thinking dudes?
Cardinal Dolan has embraced her cause with striking zeal: speaking on the anniversaries of her birth and death, distributing Dorothy Day prayer cards to parishes and even buying roughly 100 copies of her biography to give out last year as Christmas gifts to civic officials including Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg.
This month, at Cardinal Dolan’s recommendation, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops voted unanimously to move forward with her canonization cause, even though, as some of the bishops noted, she had an abortion as a young woman and at one point flirted with joining the Communist Party.
“I am convinced she is a saint for our time,” Cardinal Dolan said at the bishops’ meeting. She exemplifies, he said, “what’s best in Catholic life, that ability we have to be ‘both-and’ not ‘either-or.’ ”...NYT
"Both-and" has been missing for quite some time. The political content of the arguments about Dorothy Day's canonization will put off a lot of liberals no less than it puts off conservatives. The left can take it (and may even agree with some of it). The right is going to have a harder time relearning "both-and."
