Now that the election is over, many people are putting their hopes in our new president-elect, Barack Obama. Most of us would agree that he has some tremendous challenges facing him with problems in the economy, wars going on in both Iraq and Afghanistan, so many people without health coverage.

It is evident that we cannot leave to politicians the job of confronting such great obstacles. We all have something to contribute. Certainly the example of Martin Luther King Jr. and his "I Have A Dream" speech was an inspiration to many in what has been titled a historic election. For the first time we have an African-American person serving as our president-elect.

We need models or examples of committed people to inspire us in such troubled times. In the Catholic Church, we often look to the lives of the saints for examples of the scriptures applied in everyday lives. Usually the witness of such people's lives has a profound effect on us and on people of all faiths.

Such a woman whose life offers an example to Americans is Dorothy Day, a co-founder of the Catholic Worker Movement. She has not been officially declared a saint, but the process is being pursued in Rome. She died in 1980 but her influence through Catholic Worker houses in many major cities across the country remains very compelling.

Dorothy practiced what is known to Catholics as the spiritual and corporal works of mercy - feeding and clothing the destitute, visiting the sick and those imprisoned, instructing, counseling, and comforting those feeling ignored and abandoned by the world. Her first Catholic Worker house, founded in the 1930s in the Bowery section of New York City, was a house of hospitality where all were welcomed and none were turned away. In the midst of such poverty and hopelessness, she had the gift to see not only what ails the world but to see beauty and discern signs of hope. Dorothy loved a sentence from St. Augustine in which he said: "All beauty is a revelation of God." She often spoke the words "the duty of hope."

This was her way of seeing everything in the light of Christ's resurrection. Even in the slums of New York City she was conscious of beauty, even damaged beauty, and found much hope in such experiences, as the Houston Catholic Worker states: "In the smell of garlic drifting out a tenement window, in flowers blooming in a slum neighborhood, in the battered faces of people who had been thrown away by society."

However, Dorothy Day would also be seen picketing with workers for a just wage and constantly demonstrating against war - World War II, Korea, Vietnam. She was aware of the deep connection between capitalism, war and poverty.

That was because she also saw the relationship between Catholic social teaching and her own profound Jesus-centered spirituality. In many ways she had a very traditional faith - attending Mass daily, reading the scriptures frequently, and spending long periods alone in quiet prayer either in her room or in an empty church.

Dorothy would get very upset when people, observing her actions and commitment to the poor, would call her a saint. She thought it was a way people devised to keep a distance from her and so deny their own call to holiness. She knew her shortcomings. They can be clearly seen in a recent book on her life: "The Duty of Delight: the Diaries of Dorothy Day", edited by Robert Ellsberg, Marquette University Press, 2008. She was often impatient, sometimes manipulative, and often judgmental. One of her best-known quotes was: "Don't call me a saint. I don't want to be dismissed so easily."

But it is difficult to dismiss the life of such an extraordinary woman. She shows us a clear path of how to grow not only in our faith and love of God but also in our obligation to love others, especially the people we often relegate to the margins of our society. As people of faith in God, Dorothy shows us the connection between practicing what we preach and preaching what we practice. In a period when we are trying to work together, while respecting our diversity, as one nation, she certainly is a saint for our times.

I will conclude with a quote from Dorothy which sums up the importance of the contribution of each of us to build a better world:

"People say, 'What good can one person do? What is the sense of our small effort?'

'They cannot see that we must lay one brick at a time. We can be responsible only for the one action of the present moment. But we can beg for an increase of love in our hearts that will vitalize and transform all our individual actions, and know that God will take them and multiply them, as Jesus multiplied the loaves and fishes.' "

The Rev. John Sullivan is a priest at the LaSalette Shrine in Attleboro, where he has served as a staff member for the last four years. He specializes in working with the various ethnic groups who come to the shrine for pilgrimages, especially the Hispanic population based on his experience in South America.