There are many of them out there, of course, but this one is rather different – in 1966, Dorothy Day wrote a series of Advent reflections for Ave Maria magazine. Here is the first. In it, her compassion, her faith, and her wide-ranging knowledge are all powerfully in evidence. It begins, intriguingly enough, with reflections on the changes in the Church in which she was living. This column, focused on Mary, seems to be directly inspired by the non-inclusion of the Hail Mary in the Dutch Catechism. (There seem to be a few errors in the transcription of the piece, so apply sic as needed.)

Old and beautiful prayers of the Mass may be meaningless one Sunday and suddenly strike you between the eyes on another. A prayer which stands out to your understanding and wraps itself around your heart with a warm comfort or pierces it with new meaning is suddenly dropped out and lost. And the accent on hearing the word instead of reading It sometimes means that you neither hear nor read it because the celebrant has a cold in the head or the congregation coughs too much, or the celebrant races along at breakneck speed through the familiar words, and again they are lost to the congregation. I keep taking my missal along to Mass in case. Anyway, for me to take it in with the eyes as well as the ears makes a double impression on the mind.

And now even the prayer, the Hail Mary, has been left out of the listing of Catholic prayers from the new Dutch catechism, so we are told in our diocesan paper.

After reading this I changed my mind about writing about the counsels for this first of an Advent series and decided to write about the Blessed Mother instead. She is, of course, a controversial figure, the last thing in the world she would want to be.

It is fitting to write about her in Advent, and I would like to tell in simple fashion about Mary in my life.