These prints were created as a collaboration between the Institute for Social Concerns, the University of Notre Dame’s scholarly home for interdisciplinary responses to questions of justice, and Our Lady of the Road, a ministry of St. Peter Claver Catholic Worker in South Bend that practices the works of mercy and eschews the works of war. Throughout the Spring of 2026, students in the Institute’s Art and Social Change course worked alongside community members at Our Lady of the Road in launching a printmaking studio space and creating prints to honor the legacies of Dorothy Day and Thomas Merton. The project is supported by the National Endowment for the Arts’ Celebrating America 250: Arts Projects Honoring the National Garden of American Heroes.

Rachel Mills, Our Lady of the Road community member, created the Dorothy Day portrait. She said: “I am a printmaker because of the Catholic Worker, which is to say: I am a printmaker because of Dorothy Day. I began creating prints in dialogue with the tradition of printmaking in the movement and continue to find creativity in this lived conversation. 

Here I depict Dorothy with a humble yet harsh kind of halo. A glow emanating from her face. Her embodied life and her written word illuminating one another. The stark simplicity of the path of precarity and proximity, always alongside our neighbors. Understanding that we know each other and know God in community, our liberation bound up together, even and especially in the face of violent systems. Just as Dorothy repeatedly quoted Dostoevsky’s ‘Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared to love in dreams,’ this light, this love, this lived presence, is humble and harsh and concrete and real.”

“We have all known the long loneliness and we have learned that the only solution is love and that love comes in community.”―Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness

“Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time. The mind that responds to the intellectual and spiritual values that lie hidden in a poem, a painting, or a piece of music, discovers a spiritual vitality that lifts it above itself, takes it out of itself, and makes it present to itself on a level of being that it did not know it could ever achieve.” ―Thomas Merton, No Man Is an Island

Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker movement, would quote author Fyodor Dostoyevsky in saying “The world will be saved by beauty.” This attention to beauty in art was and is at the core of the Catholic Worker, perhaps most notably in the black and white prints that have illustrated the Catholic Worker newspaper for the past 90 years. Today we continue to see Catholic Worker communities across the country carry on this tradition in their own unique ways. It has been such a gift to have this printmaking workshop hosted at Our Lady of the Road drop-in center to empower our own community to participate in this tradition of beauty as healing. During these past months of workshops we’ve seen guests, volunteers, and staff learn new ways to make art through printmaking as well as explore how this practice can connect with Justice and Peace. -Jon Schommer, ‘14, PLS/CE; ‘15, MS, Executive Director of Our Lady of the Road