St. Victor's Profiles: Dorothy Day

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Dorothy Day
by Robert Lentz

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When she died in 1980 at the age of eighty-three, Dorothy Day was called "the most significant, interesting and influential person in the history of American Catholicism" (Commonweal) and "a non-violent social radical of luminous personality" (The New York Times). As a writer, she considered herself primarily a journalist; indeed, she was a kind of solitary, prophetic witness and one who left a profound mark , on the American conscience. As Robert Ellsberg says in his Introduction: "... it was not what Dorothy' Day wrote that was extraordinary, nor even what she believed, but the fact that there was absolutely no distinction between what she believed, what she wrote, and the manner in which she lived."

As co-founder in 1933 (with the French peasant philosopher Peter Maurin) of the Catholic Worker movement, and for almost fifty years editor and publisher of its newspaper, Dorothy Day applied the Gospels to a sweeping, radical critique of our economic, social, and political system, and addressed the most urgent issues of our time: poverty, labor, justice, civil liberties, and disarmament. Her goal for the Catholic Worker Movement Was to realize the expressed and implied teachings of Christ in the individual and in society—in short, "to bring about the kind of society where it is easier to be good."

She espoused for herself a philosophy of voluntary poverty, and lived her life as an arduous—and joyous—pilgrimage among the truly destitute, the homeless, the sick and unwanted on Manhattan's Lower East Side, sharing their common suffering and working "by little and by little" to restore them to dignity and self-respect.

From the jacket notes of By Little and by Little: The Selected Writings of Dorothy Day, edited by Robert Ellsworth

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Read The Long Loneliness, the autobiography of Dorothy Day click on the image below	Reflect on a program of writings from Dorothy Day and Archbishop Romero: Walking with the Poor click on the image below