Dorothy Day

Lived

1897–1980

Era

Twentieth century and after

Where

New York

Tradition

Roman Catholic

The Catholic Worker

A radical journalist who had been jailed as a suffragist and had an abortion in her twenties, and who converted to Catholicism in 1927 — losing her partner and most of her political circle by doing so.

Why it matters

With Peter Maurin she founded the Catholic Worker in 1933, a penny paper and then a movement of houses of hospitality feeding and sheltering anyone who came, run without funding or bureaucracy and still operating. She held to it through the Second World War as an absolute pacifist, which cost the movement most of its readership, and was arrested repeatedly into her seventies. She disliked being called a saint: she said it was a way of dismissing her.

All the figures, from the apostolic age to the present, or the timeline they stand in.