Suggest an Edit — Dorothy Day

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Dorothy Day was born on 8 November 1897 in Brooklyn, New York, the third of five children of John Irving Day, a sportswriter, and Grace Satterlee Day. The family was nominally Episcopalian. After the 1906 San Francisco earthquake disrupted her father's employment, they settled in Chicago, where she came of age. An avid reader, she was influenced by social-protest literature and by the visible poverty of urban America. She studied at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign from 1914 until 1916, then left for New York City to work as a journalist. She wrote for socialist newspapers including The Call and The Masses, reported on labor and the poor, and moved in Greenwich Village radical and literary circles. In 1917 she was arrested during a National Woman's Party suffrage protest at the White House and imprisoned at the Occoquan Workhouse in Virginia.

Her early adulthood included painful personal episodes. A liaison with journalist Lionel Moise resulted in a pregnancy and an abortion, which she later described with remorse. She contracted a short-lived civil marriage with Berkeley Tobey around 1921. She then entered a common-law relationship with Forster Batterham, an anarchist and biologist, living with him on Staten Island. Their daughter, Tamar Teresa, was born in March 1926. The experience of motherhood and a long-developing spiritual search led Day to the Catholic Church; she was baptized in December 1927. Batterham rejected both marriage and institutional religion, and the couple separated, though they never entirely lost contact.

In late 1932 Day met Peter Maurin, a French immigrant steeped in the personalist tradition, the lives of the saints, and Catholic social teaching. With him she founded The Catholic Worker, whose first issue appeared on 1 May 1933, and soon opened houses of hospitality in New York to practice the works of mercy among the unemployed and homeless of the Depression. The movement combined round-table discussion, houses of hospitality, and farming communes, and it spread to other cities. Day lived in voluntary poverty, edited the paper for decades, and insisted on a pacifist witness. She opposed the Second World War, nuclear weapons, conscription, and later the Vietnam War; she was jailed repeatedly, including for civil-defense-drill protests in New York in the 1950s and for solidarity with farmworkers. She supported labor organizing and the civil rights movement while remaining a traditional, Mass-going Catholic who accepted the Church's teaching on abortion and contraception, positions that distanced her from much of the secular left.

Day spent her last years at Maryhouse, the Catholic Worker house for women on Manhattan's Lower East Side. She received the University of Notre Dame's Laetare Medal in 1972 and other honors, yet she declined to be called a saint in her lifetime, asking that she not be dismissed that easily. She died of a heart attack on 29 November 1980. She is buried in the Cemetery of the Resurrection on Staten Island. The Archdiocese of New York opened her cause for canonization in 2000; she is a Servant of God. In 2015 Pope Francis named her, with Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr., and Thomas Merton, as an exemplary American in his address to the United States Congress.

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