I am glad to read something in a national magazine that speaks of the Catholic Worker. I know first-hand the hard work being done by so many people through the the almost 200 houses around the world--each house so unique in their mission and understanding of the world today.

I first found the Catholic Worker by mistake in 1991 while traveling around the country visiting Intentional Communities,(the old communes of the sixties grown into the '90s) and needing a place to stay for the night. Casa Maria in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, offered me a meal and a place to lay my head. My experience in that house of hospitality opened up a new world for me. What I had seen before that in community were small groups of people trying to escape the modern world. What I found in the Catholic Worker was a group of people opening their door and welcoming all, offering their home to others through the act of direct love.

I hope there are many more stories of the Catholic Worker to be written because these people should not be a secret to the world. They just might be what it takes to save the world.

Lee Jankowski

Griggsville, IL

When I was a graduate student in theology at a Jesuit school, the motto we were taught to take into ourselves and make part of our view of life was "a man/woman for others." I was inspired by Dorothy Day's welcome to all because it reminded me of my own faith's promise that the just would be received by God no matter what their belief. She was a role model for role models, as it were.

I am so glad her work goes on, because as long as it does, she herself goes on. I know nuns who nursed and taught in Congo/Zaire and who were present at the first emergence of the Ebola virus. They went on ministering to the poor and the suffering at the risk of their own lives. That was the same spirit Dorothy Day embodied. The nuns were impacted by the corruption of Mobutu's regime but they kept going because the poverty as well as the beauty of the Africans moved them. Dorothy Day, too, was moved by the spirit of the poor and their courage.

Ksren Silver

Bronx, NY