Dorothy Day was a journalist and convert who co-founded the Catholic Worker movement, living among the poor in voluntary poverty and witnessing for peace for nearly fifty years.
She was born in Brooklyn, New York, on 8 November 1897. As a young woman she wrote for socialist papers such as The Call and The Masses, lived among the writers and radicals of Greenwich Village, and was jailed with suffragists protesting outside the White House in 1917.
Conversion
The birth of her daughter Tamar in 1926 filled her with a gratitude she could only call religious. She had Tamar baptised and was received into the Catholic Church herself in December 1927, at the cost of the relationship with Tamar's father. She tells the story in her autobiography, The Long Loneliness (1952).
The Catholic Worker
In December 1932 she met Peter Maurin, a French itinerant thinker, and on 1 May 1933 they launched The Catholic Worker, sold for a penny a copy. Soon they opened houses of hospitality to feed and shelter the homeless, and farming communes; the movement spread to many cities.
Day held to pacifism even through the Second World War, at great cost to the paper's readership. She was jailed several times for refusing to take part in civil-defence drills in the 1950s, and for the last time in 1973, aged 75, picketing with the United Farm Workers. She died at the Catholic Worker's Maryhouse in New York on 29 November 1980. Her cause for canonisation was opened in 2000, giving her the title Servant of God.