SUFFRAGETTE | Dorothy Day (Updated June 18, 2016)

Dorothy Day showing the prison uniform she wore, autographed
by other women who were arrested for picketing on behalf of
the Anthony Amendment and then went on a hunger strike and
were force-fed. This was the Turning Point for woman suffrage.

Dorothy Rebecca Dickenson Day is best known for being a co-founder of the Catholic Worker newspaper and movement.

She was also one of the 40 women arrested for picketing the White House in 1917 and then going on a hunger strike in prison. 

These 40 women, who included Inez Milholland's sister Vida Milholland, were inspired by the death of Inez Milholland and turned the tide of public opinion by refusing to give up their fight after being force-fed like geese, a practice that is properly classified as torture.

Day had an abortion and her conversion to Roman Catholicism stemmed from her feelings after having been through the abortion. 

Hilda van Stockum and Dorothy Day shared being writers and being converts to Catholicism within about a decade of each other (Day in 1927, van Stockum to Anglo-Catholicism in 1935 and Roman Catholicism in 1939).

I have, as my mother's executor, the letters sent to my mother by Dorothy Day in 1949 and 1951. I am publishing them here in the interest of obtaining information in return on the letters sent by my mother to Day and would welcome information on where they might be found–possibly Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisc.? The three letters from Dorothy Day are dated:

• 1949, Feb. 3, DD to HvS
• 1951, March?, DD to HvS
• 1951, Dec. 20, DD to HvS

Their 1949-51 correspondence indicates they shared interests in the business of writing, education and books for children.

Dorothy Day's Earliest Years

A biography of Dorothy Day appears on the Catholic Worker web site in 2013, adapted from text originally written by Jim Forest for the Encyclopedia of American Catholic History, under the heading "Servant of God Dorothy Day", which was expanded into All Is Grace: A Biography of Dorothy Day, published by Orbis Press in 2011. The following is based on the web site information and other sources. I have added some notes in square brackets to show the connections to Hilda van Stockum and Inez Milholland.

Day was born into a journalist’s family in Brooklyn, N.Y., on November 8, 1897. Her father, John Day, was a Tennessee native of Irish heritage; her mother, Grace Satterlee, was a native of upstate New York, of English ancestry. Her parents were married in an Episcopal church in Greenwich Village.  Day's parents were nominal Christians who rarely attended church. Dorothy had three brothers and a sister. 

They all moved to Oakland and survived the San Francisco earthquake in 1906, but her father lost his job. The Day family migrated to Chicago for a new job, with the family moving into a tenement flat on Chicago's South Side. It was a step down in the world. When John Day was appointed sports editor of a Chicago newspaper, the Day family moved into a comfortable house on the North Side. 

Here Dorothy began to read books that stirred her conscience. A novel by Upton Sinclair, The Jungle, inspired Day to take long walks in poor neighborhoods on Chicago's South Side, the area where much of Sinclair’s novel was set. These long walks were the start of a life-long attraction to areas many people avoid. [Upton Sinclair professed his love for Inez Milholland in a letter to her. JTM]

When she was ten, Day started to attend an Episcopal church, whose liturgy and music she loved. She studied the catechism and was baptized and confirmed in that church.

In her teens, particularly fond of other writers with strong social views, like Jack London, Herbert Spencer, Charles Darwin and Aldous Huxley. She was drawn to Peter Kropotkin's writing about cooperation in contrast to Darwin and Spencer’s competition for survival. She also liked other Russian writers, such as Dostoesvky, Tolstoy, and Gorky.

In 1914, Day attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign on a scholarship. Her reading was chiefly in a Christian radical social direction. She avoided campus social life and lived simply, supporting  herself rather than relying on money from her father. She dropped out after two years to avoid burdening her father.

New York City, 1916

She moved to New York where she settled on the Lower East Side and worked on the staff of several Socialist publications, starting with The Call, the socialist daily. Years later, Day described how she was pulled in different directions: 

I was only eighteen, so I wavered between my allegiance to Socialism, Syndicalism (the I.W.W.'s) and Anarchism. When I read Tolstoy I was an Anarchist. My allegiance to The Call kept me a Socialist, although a left-wing one, and my Americanism inclined me to the I.W.W. movement.

She covered rallies and demonstrations and interviewed people ranging from butlers to revolutionaries. [That year 1916 there were many demonstrations for Votes for Women, the War in Europe, and so forth. It is the year Inez Milholland died campaigning against Woodrow Wilson. JTM]

She next worked for The Masses, a magazine that opposed American involvement in the European war. In September, the Post Office rescinded the magazine's mailing permit. Federal officers seized back issues, manuscripts, subscriber lists and correspondence. Five editors were charged with sedition. Day, the newest member of the staff, was able to get out the journal’s final issue. [The editor of The Masses, Max Eastman, was in love with Inez Milholland, who married my mother’s uncle, Eugen Boissevain. Max speaks highly of Eugen in his book Great Companions. JTM]

She celebrated the February Revolution in Russia in 1917, the bloodless overthrow of the monarchy and establishment of a reformist government.

In November 1917, she was arrested along with 39 other women for picketing at the White House on behalf of women's suffrage as part of a campaign called the Silent Sentinels, organized by Alice Paul and the National Woman's Party after President Wilson insulted a delegation of 250-300 women who called on him with memorials for the death of Inez Milholland. Sentenced to 30 days in jail, Day and the others were brought to a rural workhouse in Lorton, Va. The women were roughly handled. The women responded with a hunger strike, and they were force-fed. Word was smuggled out of the prison and newspaper readers were shocked. Public opinion changed. This was the Turning Point. Day served 15 days before being released on a presidential directive, ten of them on a hunger strike. The President changed his mind about supporting the Anthony Amendment. It soon passed the Congress and was ratified as the 19^th Amendment by the last state, Tennessee, in August 1920.

Returning to New York, Day felt that journalism was a meager response to a world at war. In the spring of 1918, she signed up for a nurses’ training program in Brooklyn. Later, she moved to the farm on Staten Island.

Her life in New York City was Bohemian. Her friends and lovers included:

• Eugene O'Neill, whom she later credited with having produced "an intensification of the religious sense that was in me”. 
• Mike Gold, a radical writer who later became a prominent Communist. 
• Anna Louise Strong and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Communists. Flynn became the head of the Communist Party USA.
• Lionel Moise, with whom she had an unhappy affair ending in an abortion.
• Berkeley Tobey, whom she married in a civil ceremony and then spent a year with in Europe.

Europe

Of her European trip she wrote a semi-autobiographical novel, The Eleventh Virgin (1924). In its "Epilogue", she tried to draw lessons about the status of women from her experience:

I thought I was a free and emancipated young woman and found out I wasn't at all ... [F]reedom is just a modernity gown, a new trapping that we women affect to capture the man we want.

The sale of the movie rights to the novel gave her $2,500, and she bought a beach cottage as a writing retreat in Staten Island, N.Y.

Staten Island, N.Y.

A new lover, Forster Batterham, an activist and biologist, who joined her there on weekends. Day, who had thought herself sterile following her abortion, was elated to find she was pregnant in mid-1925, while Batterham dreaded fatherhood. While she visited her mother in Florida and separated from Batterham for several months, she intensified her exploration of Catholicism.

Conversion, 1927

When she returned to Staten Island, Batterham was alienated by her increasing devotion, attendance at Mass, and religious reading. Soon after the birth of their daughter Tamar Teresa, on March 4, 1926, Day encountered a local Catholic Religious Sister, Sister Aloysia, S.C., and with her help educated herself in the Catholic faith and had her baby baptized in July 1927. After a fight in late December, Day refused to allow Batterham to return. On December 28, 1927 she had herself baptized with Sister Aloysia as her godparent.

In summer of 1929, Day accepted a job writing film dialogue for Pathé Motion Pictures, left Staten Island and moved to Los Angeles with Tamar. A few months later, following the 1929 stock market crash, her contract was not renewed.

She returned to New York via Mexico and a visit to her mother in Florida. Day supported herself as a journalist, writing a gardening column for the local paper, the Staten Island Advance and features articles and book reviews for several Catholic publications, like Commonweal.

During one of her assignments for The Commonweal in Washington, D.C. she decided to take a greater role in social activism and Catholicism. During the hunger strikes in D.C. in December 1932, she noted that she was filled with pride watching the marchers. She writes in her autobiography:

I could write, I could protest, to arouse the conscience, but where was the Catholic leadership in the gathering of bands of men and women together, for the actual works of mercy that the comrades had always made part of their technique in reaching the workers? 

In 1932, Day met Peter Maurin, the man she always credited as the founder of the movement with which she is identified. Maurin, a French immigrant, lacked much of a formal education, but had a deep intellect and strong identification with the poor inspired by St. Francis of Assisi. He had a vision of action based on a sharing of ideas and action by the poor themselves. Maurin was deeply versed in the writings of the Church Fathers and the papal documents on social matters that had been issued by Pope Leo XIII and his successors. Maurin provided Day with the grounding in Catholic theology of the need for social action they both felt.

Years later Day described how Maurin also broadened her knowledge by bringing "a digest of the writings of Kropotkin one day, calling my attention especially to Fields, Factories, and Workshops".

The Catholic Worker

The Catholic Worker movement started when the first issue of the Catholic Worker appeared in the first year of FDR's presidency, on May 1, 1933, priced at one cent, and published continuously since then. It was aimed at those suffering the most in the depths of the Great Depression, "those who think there is no hope for the future", and announced to them that

the Catholic Church has a social program... there are men of God who are working not only for their spiritual but for their material welfare. 

It accepted no advertising and did not pay its staff. Like many other newspapers of the day, including those for which Day had been writing, it engaged unapologetically in advocacy journalism. It  covered strikes, working conditions, especially of women and blacks, and explained papal teaching on social issues. Its stories were designed to move its readers to take action locally–for example, by patronizing laundries recommended by the Laundry Workers' Union. Although she was suspicious of government intruding into people’s private lives, Day was a persistent advocate of federal child labor laws, which put The Catholic Worker at odds with the American Church hierarchy from its first issue. However, Day moderated some of Maurin's attacks on the Church hierarchy and tried to present a collection of the papers to Pope Pius XI in 1935.

Day opposed her principal competitor, the Communist Daily Worker because of its atheism, its "class hatred" and advocacy of violent revolution, and its opposition to private property. Day defended FDR's government relief programs, like the Civilian Conservation Corps, that the Communists ridiculed. The publisher sponsored a shelter that provided food and clothing to poor residents of New York City's Lower East Side, and then some communal farms. The movement quickly spread to other cities and to Canada and the UK. More than 30 independent but affiliated Catholic Worker communities had been founded by 1941.

The Daily Worker responded by mocking the Catholic Worker for its charity work and for sympathizing with landlords who evicted tenants. In this fight, the Catholic hierarchy supported Day. Commonweal said of Day: "There are few laymen in this country who are so completely conversant with Communist propaganda and its exponents."

Over several decades, the Catholic Worker attracted top writers and editors, like Michael Harrington, Thomas Merton, and Daniel Berrigan. Beginning in 1935, the Catholic Worker began publishing articles advocating pacifism, breaking with the traditional Catholic doctrine of the Just War.  The two sides that fought the Spanish Civil War roughly approximated Day's divided allegiances–with the Church allied with Franco on one side, and a diverse collection of radicals on the other. Day refused to support Franco against the anticlerical Republican forces, while acknowledging the martyrdom of priests and nuns in Spain.

Who of us if he were attacked now would not react quickly and humanly against such attack? Would we love our brother who strikes us? Of all at The Catholic Worker how many would not instinctively defend himself with any forceful means in his power?

Many Catholic churches, schools, and hospitals that had previously served as its distribution points during this period withdrew their support, and circulation fell from 150,000 to 30,000.

In 1938, she published an account of the transformation of her political activism into religiously motivated activism in From Union Square to Rome. She said:

What I want to bring out in this book is a succession of events that led me to His feet, glimpses of Him that I received through many years which made me feel the vital need of Him and of religion.

The Cardinal's Literature Committee of the New York Archdiocese recommended the book to Catholic readers.

In the early 1940s she affiliated with the Benedictines, professing as an oblate of St. Procopius Abbey in 1955. This gave her a spiritual practice and connection that sustained her through the rest of her life.

Day reaffirmed her pacifism (supporting the lone vote in Congress by Rep. Jeanne Rankin against the war) following the U.S. declaration of war in 1941. She urged noncooperation in a speech that day:

We must make a start. We must renounce war as an instrument of policy. . . . Even as I speak to you I may be guilty of what some men call treason. But we must reject war. . . . You young men should refuse to take up arms. Young women tear down the patriotic posters. And all of you–young and old–put away your flags.

Her January 1942 column was headlined "We Continue Our Christian Pacifist Stand". She wrote:

We are still pacifists. Our manifesto is the Sermon on the Mount, which means that we will try to be peacemakers. Speaking for many of our conscientious objectors, we will not participate in armed warfare or in making munitions, or by buying government bonds to prosecute the war, or in urging others to these efforts. But neither will we be carping in our criticism. We love our country and we love our President.

The circulation of the Catholic Worker, following its losses during the Spanish Civil War, had risen to 75,000, but now plummeted again. Day's pacifism had limited appeal even within the Catholic Worker community.

On January 13, 1949, unions representing workers at cemeteries managed by the Archdiocese of New York went on strike. After several weeks, Cardinal Francis Spellman used lay brothers from the local Maryknoll seminary and then diocesan seminarians under his own supervision to break the strike by digging graves. He called the union action "Communist-inspired". Spellman stood fast until the strike ended on March 11 when the union members accepted the Archdiocese's original offer of a 48-hour 6-day work week. Day wrote in the Catholic Worker in April:

A Cardinal, ill-advised, exercised so overwhelming a show of force against the union of poor working men. There is a temptation of the devil to that most awful of all wars, the war between the clergy and the laity.

Years later she said of Spellman:

[H]e is our chief priest and confessor; he is our spiritual leader–of all of us who live here in New York. But he is not our ruler.

Correspondence with Hilda van Stockum

Probably as a Christmas gift, Hilda van Stockum offered to send some of her books to Dorothy Day. Here is Day's response: 

[Peter Maurin Farm]

[469 Bloomingdale Rd.]

[Pleasant Plains, Staten Island, N.Y.]

Feb 3, 1949 [Feast of] St. Blaise
Dear Hilda [in Montreal] –
After your so good and friendly letter I must call you by your Christian name. It was good to get your generous letter and we would be delighted to get the books and I know my daughter would too. Her address is Ridge Road, Westminster, Md. Our farm address–where I am most often–is Peter Maurin Farm, 469 Bloomingdale Rd., Pleasant Plains, Staten Island, N.Y.
Do you know our friends–Dr. Karl Stern, 4137 Marlowe Ave., Montreal? They too have children. You would love them. [We visited with them in Westmount. I remember them well. Several Marlin children became friends with the Stern children in Montreal in 1949-1951.- JTM] [Comment from Olga Marlin: I remember mother talking about Dorothy Day, as she did about many other people. She became friends with Karl Stern and often talked about him.]
My daughter is going to have her fifth child in June. Her husband is now working at the Newman Book Shop until 9 at night which leaves her much alone, out in the country and still with no conveniences.
When your books come I will read them too. I love children's books and would love to write one some day. Right now I am engaged on a story of my life which Harpers asked for after reading On Pilgrimage. [Her autobiography was published and is still in print - JTM] I'm having an awful struggle getting it done. How do you write with 6 children?
Have you heard of the Grail? Started by two Dutch women in this country? A marvelous school for girls.
My son-in-law, having no formal education, read all of the Chesterton & Belloc to get their education. A good idea.
Got to rush now. Too many people. Write again.  

Sincerely in Christ,   

Dorothy Day

The next correspondence we have is from Day in about March 1951:

[Peter Maurin Farm, 469 Bloomingdale Rd.]

[Pleasant Plains, Staten Island, N.Y.]

1951 [March?]
Dear Hilda [in Ireland] –
Thank you for your most interesting letters from Ireland. Just back myself from a 4 mos. trip to the coast and south, and return to 10 degrees above zero and rheumatism in my hands.
How do you ever get so much writing done, and such good writing. I'm trying mainly to finish a St. Therese book. I am too attached to people.
My daughter's children have been sick with mumps, & the oldest with pneumonia. She is 8 this April. Tamar will have her 6th in Aug.–6 under 9. Quite a handful. And noisy. All in a 4 room house! Poverty indeed.
However if we can raise the money to put on one big room and porch it will do, as they have 4 acres around them and the house only cost $6,000. Housing is still a problem here. One of the worst parts of poverty is the necessity to be always scheming, planning, figuring, how to get bills paid.
That's voluntary poverty too, altho we would like to think romantically about it as freedom from care.
Pray for us, and God bless you.                                     

In Christ                                                 

Dorothy Day
P.S. I speak as to a kindred soul. My royalty check went in 10 minutes.

The third letter to Hilda van Stockum was in December 1951.

[Peter Maurin Farm, 469 Bloomingdale Rd.] 

[Pleasant Plains, Staten Island, N.Y.]

PAX

Dec. 20, 1951 

Dear Hilda –Thank you for your lovely letter of Sept 30! Please excuse delay. I've been travelling about the country & am not half done yet. What a life you have! I envy you living in Ireland near the sea.Yes, you must come to one our retreats. They are going better than ever this year. Amos [?] became a Catholic as a result of one.Tamar [Day's daughter] is having a hard winter with her little flock. Too shut in. Their house is too small. They are fearfully overcrowded. A big family needs a big house to be happy.I'm writing a new book on The Little Flower and I'm hoping it sells well enough for me to help her build a big extra living room in back & a porch on the front. She lives in real poverty, poor child. Pray for her. I'm enjoying this trip very much. It is both work and vacation. There is so much to write about – I could fill two Catholic Workers!  

Thank you very much for writing me. A Happy Christmas and New Year to you all                                     

In Christ,                                                 

Dorothy Day

Dorothy Day's Later Life

Day's autobiography, The Long Loneliness, was published in 1952 with illustrations by the Quaker Fritz Eichenberg.

On June 15, 1955, Day joined a group of pacifists in refusing to participate in civil defense drills scheduled that day. Some of them challenged the constitutionality of the law under which they were charged, but Day and six others took the position that their refusal was not a legal dispute but one of philosophy. Day said she was doing "public penance" for the United States' first use of an atom bomb. They pleaded guilty on September 28, 1955, but the judge refused to send them to jail saying "I'm not making any martyrs." She did the same in each of the next five years. In 1958, instead of taking shelter she joined a group picketing the offices of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission. She served 30 days in jail.

In 1956, along with David Dellinger and Rev. A.J. Muste, two veteran allies in the pacifist movement, she helped found Liberation magazine.

In 1960, she praised Fidel Castro's "promise of social justice". She said: "Far better to revolt violently than to do nothing about the poor destitute." Several months later, Day traveled to Cuba and reported her experiences in a four-part series in the Catholic Worker. In the first of these, she wrote:

I am most of all interested in the religious life of the people and so must not be on the side of a regime that favors the extirpation of religion. On the other hand, when that regime is bending all its efforts to make a good life for the people, a naturally good life (on which grace can build) one cannot help but be in favor of the measures taken.

Day hoped that the Second Vatican Council would endorse nonviolence as a fundamental tenet of Catholic life and denounce nuclear arms, both their use in warfare and the "idea of arms being used as deterrents, to establish a balance of terror". She lobbied bishops in Rome and joined with other women in a ten-day fast.

She was pleased when the Council in Gaudium et spes (1965), its statement on "the Church in the Modern World", said that nuclear warfare was incompatible with traditional Catholic just war theory:

Every act of war directed to the indiscriminate destruction of whole cities or vast areas with their inhabitants is a crime against God and man, which merits firm and unequivocal condemnation.

Day's account of the Catholic Worker movement, Loaves and Fishes, was published in 1963. Despite her anti-establishment sympathies, Day's judgment of the 60s counterculture was nuanced. She enjoyed it when Abbie Hoffman told her she was the original hippie. At the same time she disapproved of many who called themselves hippies.

Day struggled as a leader with influence but without direct authority over the Catholic Worker houses, even the Tivoli Catholic Worker Farm that she visited regularly. She recorded her frustration in her diary: "I have no power to control smoking of pot, for instance, or sexual promiscuity, or solitary sins.”

In 1966, Spellman visited U.S. troops in Vietnam at Christmas, where he was reported as saying: "This war in Vietnam is ... a war for civilization." Day authored a response in the January 1967 issue of the Catholic Worker that avoided direct criticism but cataloged all the war zones Spellman had visited over the years. She asked: "Oh, God, what are all these Americans doing all over the world so far from our own shores?”

In 1970, at the height of American participation in the Vietnam War, she described Ho Chi Minh as "a man of vision, as a patriot, a rebel against foreign invaders" while telling a story of a holiday gathering with relatives where one needs "to find points of agreement and concordance, if possible, rather than the painful differences, religious and political."

In 1972, the University of Notre Dame awarded her its Laetare Medal.

Despite suffering from poor health, Day visited India, where she met Mother Teresa. In 1971, Day visited Poland, the Soviet Union, Hungary, and Romania as part of a group of peace activists,with the financial support of Corliss Lamont, whom she described as a "'pinko' millionaire who lived modestly and helped the Communist Party USA." She met with three members of the Writers' Union and defended Alexander Solzhenitsyn against charges that he had betrayed his country. Day informed her readers that:

Solzhenitsin lives in poverty and has been expelled from the Writers Union and cannot be published in his own country. He is harassed continually, and recently his small cottage in the country has been vandalized and papers destroyed, and a friend of his who went to bring some of his papers to him was seized and beaten.

Day visited the Kremlin, and she reported:

I was moved to see the names of the Americans, Ruthenberg and Bill Haywood, on the Kremlin Wall in Roman letters, and the name of Jack Reed (with whom I worked on the old Masses), in Cyrillac characters in a flower-covered grave. 

The individuals mentioned are:

• Ruthenberg was C. E. Ruthenberg, founder of the Communist Party USA. 
• Bill Haywood was a key figure in the IWW. 
• Jack Reed was the journalist better known as John Reed, author of Ten Days That Shook the World. [JTM: According to Max Eastman in his book Great Companions, Funding for Jack Reed's trip to Moscow was raised by Inez Milholland's widower, Eugen Boissevain, who approached Alva Vanderbilt Belmont, a close friend both of Eugen's late wife Inez Milholland and former employer of Eugen's sister-in-law Anne Boissevain.]

In 1972, the Jesuit magazine America marked her 75th birthday by devoting an entire issue to Day and the Catholic Worker movement. The editors wrote:

If one had to choose a single individual to symbolize the best in the aspiration and action of the American Catholic community during the last forty years, that one person would certainly be Dorothy Day."

Day had supported the work of Cesar Chavez in organizing California farm laborers from the beginning of his campaign in the mid-1960s. She admired him for being motivated by religious inspiration and committed to nonviolence. In the summer of 1973, she joined Cesar Chavez in his campaign for farm laborers in the fields of California. She was arrested with other protesters for defying an injunction against picketing and spent ten days in jail.

Day made her last public appearance at the Eucharistic Congress held on August 6, 1976, in Philadelphia at a service honoring the U.S. Armed Forces on the Bicentennial of the United States. She spoke about reconciliation and penance, and castigated the organizers for failing to recognize that for peace activists August 6 is the day the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, an inappropriate day to honor the military.

Day suffered a heart attack and died on November 29, 1980, at Maryhouse on East 3rd Street in Manhattan. Cardinal Terence Cooke greeted her funeral procession at the Church of the Nativity, the local parish church.

Day's daughter Tamar, the mother of nine children, was with her mother when she died, and she and her father joined the funeral procession and attended a later memorial Mass the cardinal celebrated at St. Patrick's Cathedral; Day and Batterham had remained lifelong friends. After her death,

• Her body was buried in the Cemetery of the Resurrection on Staten Island, just a few blocks from the beachside cottage where she first became interested in Catholicism. Her gravestone is inscribed with the words "Deo Gratias".
• Her body of writings, including letters, was given to Marquette University along with many records of the Catholic Worker movement. The Catholic Worker, which had a circulation of more than 100,000 for some years, reported a circulation of under 30,000 in 2013.

Sainthood Cause

In May 1983, a pastoral letter issued by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, "The Challenge of Peace", noted Dorothy Day's role in establishing non-violence as a Catholic principle:

The nonviolent witness of such figures as Dorothy Day and Martin Luther King has had profound impact upon the life of the Church in the United States.

The probability of  Dorothy Day's canonization was increased by

• The unanimous vote of the U.S. bishops at their 2012 fall assembly to pursue her sainthood cause.
• Her mention by Pope Benedict XVI in the final two weeks of his Papacy in 2013, as a model of conversion to the Catholic faith.
• Pope Francis in his address to Congress expressing his admiration for her, calling her "a great American".

The first American-born saint was St. (Mother) Elizabeth Ann Seton.

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