Dorothy Day

Day grew up in a middle-class newspaper family that moved from Brooklyn to Oakland and then, after the 1906 earthquake flattened her father's paper, to Chicago. She left the University of Illinois after two years for New York's Lower East Side, wrote for socialist magazines, and in November 1917 was arrested picketing the White House for women's suffrage — fifteen days in jail, ten of them on a hunger strike. Greenwich Village followed: a close friendship with the playwright Eugene O'Neill, a long affair with the radical writer Mike Gold, a brief and unhappy marriage to Berkeley Tobey, and an abortion she later called the great tragedy of her life. She published a thinly disguised novel about it at twenty-seven and called the book, honestly, very bad.

Living with the biologist Forster Batterham on Staten Island, Day had a daughter, Tamar, in 1926 — a shock, since she had believed an earlier abortion left her sterile. Batterham's refusal to marry her or accept religion ended things when she had Tamar baptized Catholic and, in December 1927, was baptized herself. In 1932 she met Peter Maurin, a French lay philosopher who gave her a working theology of poverty and hospitality, and on May 1, 1933 the two launched The Catholic Worker at a penny a copy. Houses of hospitality followed in city after city, feeding and housing the Depression's poor. She kept the paper pacifist through the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War, a stand that cost most of her circulation and half her houses, and she was still getting arrested into her seventies.

Day fought her own church hierarchy in public. When Cardinal Francis Spellman used seminarians to break a 1949 cemetery workers' strike, she picketed against her own archbishop and called him misinformed about the dignity of labor — while still naming him, in the same breath, her chief priest and confessor. She was just as ready to enforce the rules she otherwise defied: when the priest Daniel Berrigan tried to say Mass at her farm wearing only a stole, she stopped him and told him plainly that on her farm they obeyed the laws of the Church. She never joined the Communist Party her old lover Mike Gold belonged to, but she kept his friendship for life, defended Alexander Solzhenitsyn against Soviet persecution, and called Ho Chi Minh a man of vision, all without apparent tension in her own mind.

Day died of a heart attack at Maryhouse in Manhattan on November 29, 1980, with Tamar at her side, and is buried on Staten Island a few blocks from the cottage where she first went to Mass. Rome opened her cause for canonization in 2000, giving her the title Servant of God; the Archdiocese of New York closed its portion of the case and forwarded the file to the Vatican in December 2021, where it has sat since, awaiting two certified miracles. Some members of her own movement object to sainthood as a betrayal of what she stood for. Others, including her granddaughter, are pushing it forward.

Dorothy Day's life against the full span of the corpus.

• The Eleventh Virgin book
  A thinly veiled novel she later dismissed as bad 1924
• The Catholic Worker other
  Launched at one cent a copy — still published today 1933
• Catholic Worker houses of hospitality company
  More than 30 independent houses by 1941 1933
• The Long Loneliness book
  Her principal autobiography 1952
• Loaves and Fishes book
  A history of the movement she founded 1963

• 1906 aged ~9 The San Francisco earthquake destroys her father's newspaper and uproots the family
• November 1917 aged 19 Arrested picketing the White House for women's suffrage Served fifteen days in jail, ten of them on hunger strike.
• March 4, 1926 aged 28 Her daughter, Tamar, is born
• December 28, 1927 aged 30 Baptized into the Catholic Church on Staten Island
• May 1, 1933 aged 35 Launches The Catholic Worker with Peter Maurin
• 1949 aged ~52 Pickets Cardinal Spellman's use of seminarians to break a cemetery strike
• June 15, 1955 aged 57 Refuses to take shelter during a civil defense drill The first of five annual arrests for the same protest.
• 1973 aged ~76 Arrested at seventy-five, joining Cesar Chavez's farm labor campaign
• November 29, 1980 aged 83 Dies of a heart attack at Maryhouse, Manhattan

• Thomas Merton 1915–1968
  Trappist monk and writer whose books popularized contemplative spirituality, social criticism, and interfaith dialogue. named together by Pope Francis before Congress
• Martin Luther King Jr. 1929–1968
  Baptist minister and civil rights leader whose nonviolent activism ended legal segregation in America. named together by Pope Francis before Congress
• César Chávez 1927–1993
  Labor leader and civil rights activist who co-founded the United Farm Workers union. joined his farm labor campaign at 75
• Abraham Lincoln 1809–1865
  16th President who preserved the Union during the Civil War and issued the Emancipation Proclamation. named together by Pope Francis before Congress