New Day at the video store

John Paul II has been canonizing people left and right during his pontificate, while wishing there were more laypeople he could add to the roles of the saints. Meanwhile, there are very few American saints.

Imagine the advance for the Church, therefore, if he could be persuaded to canonize an American laywoman who has become an inspiration to single parents, a patron for those who have abortions and regret it, a model to those who struggle for social justice, and an example of Christians willing to put themselves on the front lines to proclaim their beliefs.

Imagine something even more miraculous: that he is convinced by a Hollywood film about such a woman that she deserves the title of "Saint."

Those are far-fetched imaginings, aren't they? Hollywood, given to rarely showing religion on the screen, would never make such a movie, especially one that celebrated someone who rejected sexual excess and sacrificed her own ease for the benefit of the poor.

Day time

But here's the surprise ending: There is such a woman and there is such a movie: "Entertaining Angels: The Dorothy Day Story." It stars Moira Kelly and Martin Sheen as two real-life Catholics who fed the poor, housed the homeless and worked against social injustice.

They were Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin, the founders of the Catholic Worker movement, which continues today in many cities as a solace to the forgotten and a rebuke to the powerful.

"Entertaining Angels" was released last year to theaters, where it didn't enjoy much success. Now it is out on videotape -- and therefore readily available to Catholic individuals, families, schools, religious education programs, study clubs and other institutions that want to learn more about two significant persons who planted the roots of 20th-century American Catholicism's efforts against poverty, racism, the exploitation of labor, and violence, including war, abortion and capital punishment.

Early Day

The movie focuses on Day's early years and her search for meaning in her own life and for ways to help the poor, a search that led her into a flirtation with communism, a love affair and abortion, another love affair and an illegitimate child, and finally Catholicism.

Once baptized, she continued to seek ways to combat the outrageous poverty of her times (the 1920s and '30s) and then to turn from writing about it to doing something about it, goaded by the irrepressible Maurin.

The film, produced by Paulist Father Ellwood Kieser, demonstrates that "Catholic" is something we do as well as something we are.

St. Day?

With one surprise down (the existence of a Hollywood movie about Dorothy Day), might another -- her canonization -- be far behind? If more of us learn about Day and petition for it, perhaps someday she might become St. Dorothy.

There are very few films about saints; even fewer good ones. This is one of the latter. It is an education and an inspiration that American Catholics should not miss.

("Entertaining Angels: The Dorothy Day Story" is now in video rental stores. In November, it will be for sale for $29.95.)