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The Cedar Valley Catholic Social Justice Network
and Waterloo Catholic Worker Present
A Social Justice
Lenten Retreat
Saturday, March 6, 2010
9:00am-3:00pm
•
O'Hagan Hall
Sacred Heart Parish, Waterloo
Guest Presenter
Brian Terrell
Registration Fee Collected at the Door
$20.00/person • $15.00/students and seniors
(includes lunch)
• • •
Our Social Justice Lenten Retreat
Our annual Advent and Lenten Social Justice Retreats are
designed to help participants enter into the spirit of these key
liturgical seasons with a greater appreciation for our call to
be disciples of peace and justice. By reason of our birth and
baptism, we are called to be agents of a new Kingdom promised in
Creation, restored by the Incarnation, and initiated through the
life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
This Year's Theme:
“Lent Through the Eyes of Dorothy Day”
Dorothy Day once wrote: “To keep united to God through the
suffering Humanity of His son--that is the aim of Lent.”
Lent is the traditional season for Christians to repent and to
meditate on the last days of Jesus, to spiritually follow in
Jesus’ steps on the way to the cross. What does Lent mean for us
in 2010? What does repentance mean for Christians living in a
time of economic confusion and as citizens of a nation waging
unjust wars of aggression?
Through Dorothy’s writings, the example of her life and the
Gospel readings for the Sundays of Lent, we will discuss and
meditate upon the basic themes of the Lenten season: prayer, fasting,
almsgiving, study, conversion
Brian Terrell writes:
"Few Christians have realized and articulated the 'real
presence' of Christ in the poor and marginalized, in the
homeless, in the prisoner, in the tortured and those named and
targeted by the state as 'enemy,' the 'least of these' (Matthew
25) so clearly as the famous Catholic convert Dorothy Day
(1897-1980). For Dorothy, to fast and pray, to meditate on the
last days, the suffering and death of Jesus during Lent could
not be a diversion or distraction from the world’s problems but
rather must be an immersion in them. Her deep love and gratitude
for the Catholic Church did not blind her to its shortcomings:
'When I see the church taking the side of the powerful and
forgetting the weak, and when I see bishops living in luxury and
the poor being ignored or thrown crumbs, I know that Jesus is
being insulted, as He once was, and sent to His death, as He
once was.'”
About the Presenter
Brian Terrell
has been active in the peace and justice movement nationally and
internationally for over 33 years. He joined the Catholic
Worker community in New York City in 1975 and was an associate
editor of The Catholic Worker newspaper during the last
years of Dorothy Day's life. In 1979 he moved to Davenport,
Iowa where he lived and worked at a hospitality house for the
homeless. In 1986 Brian and his wife Betsy moved to Maloy, Iowa
where they now live with their children at the Strangers and
Guests Catholic Worker Farm. Brian was executive director of
the Catholic Peace Ministry in Des Moines until 2008 and has
been arrested numerous times for committing acts of nonviolent
resistance to war and injustice.
About Dorothy
Day
After spending her youth
as a radical and a "bohemian,"
Dorothy Day
(1897-1980) converted to Catholicism in 1927. Devout
and fervently orthodox, Day surrendered none of her
political radicalism. During the Great Depression
she founded the Catholic Worker movement to serve
the poor. She argued for pacifism. She challenged
her new co-religionists to live their faith more
fully, to minister to the poor, and to challenge
rather than be conformed to the age - not to settle
too easily into the socially comfortable positions
that were finally becoming available to Catholics.
"I have long since come
to believe that people never mean half of what they
say, and that it is best to disregard their talk and
judge only their actions."
-- The Long Loneliness
"Tradition! We scarcely
know the word anymore. We are afraid to be either
proud of our ancestors or ashamed of them. We cling
to a bourgeois mediocrity which would make it appear
we are all Americans, made in the image and likeness
of George Washington."
-- The Long Loneliness
"We have all known the
long loneliness and we have learned that the only
solution is love and that love comes with
community."
-- The Long Loneliness
"I wanted to die in
order to live, to put off the old man and put on
Christ. I loved, in other words, and like all women
in love, I wanted to be united to my love.... I
loved the church for Christ made visible. Not for
itself, because it was so often a scandal for me....
There was plenty of charity but too little justice."
-- The Long Loneliness
"In fact, to this very day, common sense in
religion is rare, and we are too often trying to be
heroic instead of just ordinarily good and kind."
-- Dorothy Day: A Biography
• • •
Resources
Click
here to watch a series of interviews with Dorothy Day.
Click here to read an article about Dorothy Day by Fr. Ultan
McGoohan.
Click here for more resources on Dorothy Day
Registration
•
By phone: call 319-234-9912
• By email: <DBQ208s3@arch.pvt.k12.ia.us>
• Online:
Click here to register online
• • •
For information contact:
Director of Adult
Faith Formation
320 Mulberry St., Waterloo IA 50703 • Phone:
319-234-9912 Email: DBQ208s3@arch.pvt.k12.ia.us
Posted 01.06.10 •
Last Update: 02.04.10 |