After a bohemian life as a journalist and novelist, Dorothy Day (1897-1980) converted to Catholicism in 1927 and co-founded The Catholic Worker movement with Peter Maurin in 1932. She spent the rest of her life feeding and housing the poor in hospitality houses and farms on the East Coast. She began publishing a newspaper called The Catholic Worker in 1933. It is still published today at a time when this apostle of social justice is being considered for sainthood within the Catholic Church.
Dorothy Day was a dedicated activist before and after her conversion to Catholicism. She spent her life as a nonviolent peace activist in voluntary poverty in the underworld of New York City’s outcasts and urban poor. As early as November 1917, she protested with the suffragettes in front of the White House and was arrested and imprisoned. In her September 1945 column in The Catholic Worker, she condemned the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Ten years later, on June 15, 1955, she was still among the earliest protesters against nuclear arms when she was arrested and sentenced to thirty days in the Women’s House of Detention in Greenwich Village for refusing to take shelter during compulsory air-raid drills which she considered psychological preparations for nuclear war. Day led the first protests against the war in Vietnam during the summer of 1963, almost two years before we officially had troops in that country. Finally, as late as 1973, she was arrested when she joined a banned picket line in support of the United Farm Workers.
All of Dorothy Day’s works of mercy and acts of protest emanated from her strongly held faith in the nonviolent message of Isaiah and the Christian gospels and her belief in our personal responsibility to lead lives of active love caring for the poor and the discarded victims of our materialistic society.