www.AndrewSullivan.com - Daily Dish:

"EMAIL OF THE DAY: 'I am a 67 year old gay man (born in the reign of Pius XI and have suffered under 5 popes - John XXIII being a breath of clean air - and Benedict XVI promises to continue the tradition of the others). I read and sympathize with your agony; may I offer some advice?
"1) If you want to be a Catholic, be one. Let no one define your Catholicity for you. Conservative Catholics, alternating between crowing and fulminating, do not speak for the whole church as it has marched down through the ages. (Think Dorothy Day, Bernadette Soubirous, Francis of Assisi, the fathers Berrigan, GK Chesterton, to name but a few.) Although I don't have precise figures, my guess is that, in the Western hemisphere, they are in the minority. In America, they make 'majority' noises because they have united with evangelical Protestants to vote for the Bush Imperium. It is a dangerous liaison; to the fundamentalists, the Church of Rome has always been the Whore of Babylon."

GK Chesterton fought against the Church? That's way out there. Francis was very strictly obedient to the Church. He just happened to get instructions directly from Chirst. I don't think Mr. Sullivan would make progress claiming those criteria. Same w/Bernadette, but substitute Mary. Note that both were taken seriously by the Church w/in their lifetimes. Dorthy Day is a complicated figure theologically. Where Church doctrine was clear she toed the line.

See here:

"She was theologically and liturgically traditional, while radical in her social justice activism. She once stated, "[w]hen it comes to labor and politics, . . . I am inclined to be sympathetic to the left, but when it comes to the Catholic Church, then I am far to the right." 478"

"478. For example, the Catholic Worker has never concentrated significant attention to issues of abortion or homosexuality. See Voices from the Catholic Worker 63 (Rosalie Riegle Troester ed., 1993). "That was a very funny thing about Dorothy. For all her radicalism politically, Dorothy had a profoundly conservative streak in her makeup. She was a very conservative Catholic, theologically ...." Id. at 75. "Dorothy was an extremely orthodox Catholic, not at all theologically a dissident. She certainly would not at all favor abortion. She would, I think take a very dim view of homosexual behavior." Id. at 80; see also Alden Whitman, Dorothy Day, Outspoken Catholic Activist, Dies at 83, N.Y. Times, Nov. 30, 1980, at 45."