All Saints Day

Apparently this quotation from Dorothy Day is authentic; it appears in Robert Ellsberg's collection of the Catholic Worker founder's letters, All the Way to Heaven. 

... It is the saints that keep appearing all through history who keep things going. ...

For Dorothy this opinion might seem a little transgressive; she was a loyal daughter of a hierarchical church which didn't know quite what to make of her pacifist, anarchist, voluntarily-poor mob of the well meaning. Now that church wants to name her a saint. A bit of pacification there?

Most of the world has forgotten or never knew who Gordon Zahn was. Zahn's pacifist convictions carried him to a conscientious objector camp during World War II and on to becoming a Roman Catholic educator on war and faith. The one of his writings which might endure is a biography of Austrian Catholic war refuser Franz Jägerstätter who was executed by the Nazis. Jägerstätter has since been beatified.

For Dorothy, in the end there was the shared bread of the communal meal as she says here -- and the ungoverned overflowing of absurd love embodied in those we remember as saints.