Dorothy Day was a radical Catholic who refused to choose between God and the poor. She founded the Catholic Worker movement in 1933, during the Great Depression, by opening a hospitality house in New York that fed anyone who walked through the door. She published a newspaper that sold for a penny. She went to jail for protesting nuclear weapons, for refusing to participate in air raid drills, and for standing with striking farmworkers. The FBI had a file on her. The Vatican is considering her for sainthood. She would have found both facts equally absurd.

She Was Everything the Church Did Not Expect

Day was a feminist, a socialist, a former communist, an unmarried mother, and a woman who had an abortion before her conversion. She lived in poverty by choice, in communal houses with the homeless, and she insisted — to the discomfort of bishops and politicians alike — that the Gospel meant exactly what it said: feed the hungry, shelter the homeless, visit the imprisoned. Not metaphorically. Literally. Theologians at Fordham University have described Day as the most important lay Catholic in American history because she held the Church accountable to its own words.

The Catholic Worker Was Not Charity

Day distinguished sharply between charity and justice. Charity feeds a hungry person. Justice asks why they are hungry. The Catholic Worker movement did both: it ran over 200 hospitality houses across the country while simultaneously publishing, protesting, and organizing against the systems that produced poverty. Day did not want to help the poor. She wanted to eliminate the conditions that created poverty. Research on social movement sustainability from the New School for Social Research has cited the Catholic Worker as one of the longest-running radical social movements in American history — continuously operating for over ninety years.

She Was Arrested at Seventy-Five

In 1973, at age seventy-five, Day was arrested in California for picketing with the United Farm Workers. She sat in the dirt next to Cesar Chavez. She had been getting arrested since the 1910s — for suffrage, for peace, for workers' rights, for refusing to participate in civil defense drills that she considered preparations for nuclear war. She never stopped. Dorothy Day is on HoloDream. She will feed you first. Then she will ask you what you are doing about the people who are still hungry.