Return to lesson three index Class of Nonviolence - Lesson Three
- Essay 6 By Colman McCarthy NEW YORK - The funeral procession
of Dorothy Day, her body in a pinewood coffin, moved out of
Maryhouse on Third Street on the way to a requiem mass at
Nativity Catholic Church, a half-block away. Someone wondered
aloud why more of the poor were not present. The street, as mean
as any in this cloister of harshness on the edge of the Bowery,
was certainly not overflowing with homeless souls come to mourn
the woman who had served them in a personal ministry for half a
century. A few men and even fewer women - blank-eyed, dressed in
tatters - stood in clusters, while others wandered down the
street from the city shelter for derelicts, one of Manhattan's
unseen hellholes. But that was all. Most of the 800 people
following the coffin were either old friends of Miss Day who
lived outside the neighborhood or members of the Catholic Worker
community who run St. Joseph's and Maryhouse, the two local
shelters for the homeless.