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Dorothy Day (November 8, 1897 – November 29, 1980) was an American journalist, social activist, anarchist, and devout Catholic convert. Day became most famous for founding, with Peter Maurin, the Catholic Worker movement, a nonviolent, pacifist, Christian anarchist movement which combines direct aid for the poor and homeless with nonviolent direct action on their behalf. She is being considered for sainthood by the Catholic Church.
Biography
Day was born in Brooklyn, New York, and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area and Chicago.
Discussion
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Quotations
Don't call me a saint. I don't want to be dismissed so easily.
Food for the body is not enough. There must be food for the soul.
I firmly believe that our salvation depends on the poor.
If we do not keep indoctrinating, we lose the vision. And if we lose the vision, we become merely philanthropists, doling out palliatives.
Our common action in the Sacrifice of the Mass, impersonal, anti-individualistic is the best weapon against the world.
The greatest challenge of the day is: how to bring about a revolution of the heart.
Encyclopedia
Dorothy Day (November 8, 1897 – November 29, 1980) was an American journalist, social activist, anarchist, and devout Catholic convert. Day became most famous for founding, with Peter Maurin, the Catholic Worker movement, a nonviolent, pacifist, Christian anarchist movement which combines direct aid for the poor and homeless with nonviolent direct action on their behalf. She is being considered for sainthood by the Catholic Church.
Biography
Day was born in Brooklyn, New York, and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area and Chicago. In 1914, she went to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign on a scholarship, but dropped out after two years and moved to New York City. Day was a reluctant scholar. Her reading was chiefly in a radical social direction. She avoided campus social life and insisted on supporting herself rather than live on money from her father. Settling on the lower east side, she worked on the staffs of Socialist publications (The Liberator, The Masses, The Call) and engaged in anti-war and women's suffrage protests. She spent several months in Greenwich Village, where she became close to Eugene O'Neill. Initially Day lived a bohemian life, with two common-law marriages and an abortion which she later wrote about in her semi-autobiographical novel, The Eleventh Virgin (1924). With the birth of her daughter, Tamar (1926-2008), she began a period of spiritual awakening which led her to embrace Catholicism, joining the Church in December 1927, with baptism at Our Lady Help of Christians parish on Staten Island. Subsequently, Day began writing for Catholic publications, such as Commonweal and America.
The Catholic Worker movement started with the Catholic Worker newspaper, created to promote Catholic social teaching and stake out a neutral, pacifist position in the war-torn 1930s. This grew into a "house of hospitality" in the slums of New York City and then a series of farms for people to live together communally. The movement quickly spread to other cities in the United States, and to Canada and the United Kingdom; more than 30 independent but affiliated CW communities had been founded by 1941. Well over 100 communities exist today, including several in Australia, the United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, The Netherlands, the Republic of Ireland, Mexico, New Zealand, and Sweden.
By the 1960s Day was embraced by Catholics. Yet, although Day had written passionately about women’s rights, free love and birth control in the 1910s, she opposed the sexual revolution of the sixties, saying she had seen the ill-effects of a similar sexual revolution in the 1920s. Day had a progressive attitude toward social and economic rights, alloyed with a very orthodox and traditional sense of Catholic morality and piety. She was also a member of the Industrial Workers of the World ('Wobblies').
In 1971 Day was awarded the Pacem in Terris Award. It was named after a 1963 encyclical letter by Pope John XXIII that calls upon all people of good will to secure peace among all nations. Pacem in Terris is Latin for 'Peace on Earth.' Day was accorded many other honors in her last decade, including the Laetare Medal from the University of Notre Dame, in 1972.
She died on November 29, 1980 in New York City.
Day was buried in Resurrection Cemetery on Staten Island, just a few blocks from the location of the beachside cottage where she first became interested in Catholicism. She was proposed for sainthood by the Claretian Missionaries in 1983. Pope John Paul II granted the Archdiocese of New York permission to open Day's "cause" for sainthood in March of 2000, thereby officially making her a "Servant of God" in the eyes of the Catholic Church.
Legacy
Her autobiography The Long Loneliness was published in 1952. Day's account of the Catholic Worker movement, Loaves and Fishes, was published in 1963. A popular movie called Entertaining Angels: The Dorothy Day Story was produced in 1996. Day was portrayed by Moira Kelly and Peter Maurin was portrayed by Martin Sheen, actors later known for their roles on The West Wing television series in the United States. ,a one woman play performed by Sarah Melici, premiered in 1998. A DVD of the play has been produced and Melici continues to do live performances in the United States and Canada. The first full-length documentary about Day, , by filmmaker Claudia Larson, premiered on November 29, 2005 at Marquette University, where Day's papers are housed. The documentary was also shown at the 2006 Tribeca Film Festival and is now available on DVD. Day's diaries, , edited by Robert Ellsberg, were published by the Marquette University Press in 2008.
Day has been the recipient of numerous posthumous honors and awards. Among them: in 1992, she received the Courage of Conscience Award from the Peace Abbey, and in 2001, she was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in Seneca Falls, New York.
Memorialization
A dormitory at Loyola College in Maryland is named after her. A dormitory at Lewis University in Romeoville, Illinois is being named after her. A named professorship exists in the honor of Dorothy Day at the School of Law of St. John's University, a Catholic university in Queens, New York, currently occupied by labor law scholar David L. Gregory. , a supportive housing project in New York City, opened the Dorothy Day Apartment Building in 2003. Dorothy Day Apartments supports The Dorothy Day After-School Program and The Dorothy Day Early Childhood Center. Several Catholic Worker communities are also named after Dorothy Day.
Further Reading and Biography
- Dorothy Day (1924) The Eleventh Virgin (semi-autobiographical novel)
- Dorothy Day (1940) From Union Square to Rome
- Dorothy Day (1952) The Long Loneliness: The Autobiography of Dorothy Day (autobiography)
- Dorothy Day (1992) Dorothy Day, Selected Writings: By Little and By Little
- Dorothy Day, ed. Robert Ellsberg, (2008) The Duty of Delight: The Diaries of Dorothy Day
- William Miller (1982) Dorothy Day: A Biography
- Robert Coles (1989) Dorothy Day: A Radical Devotion (biography)
- Jim Forest (1994) Love Is the Measure: A Biography of Dorothy Day
- Rosalie G. Riegel (2003) Dorothy Day: Portraits by Those Who Knew Her. Orbis Books ISBN 1-57075-467-5
- Michael Ray Rhodes (director), "Entertaining Angels: The Dorothy Day Story" (1996 movie)
- Sarah Melici, , (play, premiered 1998)
- Claudia Larson, film documentary 2006
- , Special Collections & Archives, Marquette University (archives of CW movement, including Day's papers)
See also
External links
, a documentary
, on PBS.
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