Dorothy Day

Dorothy Day (November 8, 1897 – November 29, 1980) was an American journalist, amusing activist and adherent Catholic convert; she advocated the Catholic bread-and-butter approach of Distributism. She was additionally advised to be an anarchist,234 and did not alternate to use the term.5 In the 1930s, Day formed carefully with adolescent activist Peter Maurin to authorize the Catholic Worker movement, a nonviolent, irenic movement that continues to amalgamate absolute aid for the poor and abandoned with irenic absolute activity on their behalf.

Day's account for account is accessible in the Catholic Church.

Early life

Dorothy Day was built-in in the Brooklyn Heights adjacency of Brooklyn, New York, and aloft in San Francisco and Chicago.6 She was built-in into a ancestors declared by one biographer as "solid, patriotic, and average class".7 Her father, John Day, was a Southerner of Scotch-Irish background, while her mother, Grace Day, a built-in of upstate New York, was of English ancestry.7 Her parents were affiliated in an Episcopal abbey amid in Greenwich Village, a adjacency area Day would absorb abundant of her adolescent adulthood.7

By 1913 Dorothy Day had apprehend Peter Kropotkin, an apostle of agitator communism, which afflicted her account in how association could be organized.8 In 1914, Day abounding the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign on a scholarship, but alone out afterwards two years and confused to New York City.9 Day was a afraid scholar.9 Her account was chiefly in a abolitionist amusing direction.9 She abhorred campus amusing activity and insisted on acknowledging herself rather than alive on money from her father, a appropriate she was to advance for the blow of her life, to the point of affairs all her accouterment and shoes from abatement food to save money.10

Work and activism

Settling on the Lower East Side, she formed on the staffs of Socialist publications (The Liberator,11 The Masses, The Call), admitting she "smilingly explained to abrupt socialists that she was ‘a irenic alike in the chic war.'"12 She additionally affianced in anti-war and women's capitalism protests, and spent several months in Greenwich Village, area she became abutting to Eugene O'Neill.13

edit Awakening

Initially Day lived a bohemian life, with two common-law marriages and two abortions,13 which she afterwards declared in her semi-autobiographical novel, The Eleventh Virgin (1924)—a book she afterwards regretted writing.14 Although aloft Methodist by her parents, she had been an agnostic,15 but with the bearing of her daughter, Tamar (1926–2008), she began a aeon of airy activation which led her to embrace Catholicism, abutting the Abbey in December 1927, with ablution at Our Lady Help of Christians archdiocese on Staten Island.16 In her 1952 autobiography, The Long Loneliness, Day recalled that anon afterwards her baptism, she fabricated her aboriginal confession, and the afterward day, she accustomed communion.17 Subsequently, Day began autograph for Catholic publications, such as Commonweal18 and America.

edit Publishing

The Catholic Worker movement started with the Catholic Worker newspaper, created to advance Catholic amusing teaching and pale out a neutral, irenic position in the war-torn 1930s.19 (See The Catholic Worker: The Aims and Means of the Catholic Worker.) This grew into a "house of hospitality" in the barrio of New York City and again a alternation of farms for bodies to alive calm communally.20 She lived for a time at the now burst Spanish Camp association in the Annadale area of Staten Island.21 The movement bound advance to added cities in the United States, and to Canada and the United Kingdom; added than 30 absolute but affiliated CW communities had been founded by 1941. Well over 100 communities abide today, including several in Australia, the United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, the Republic of Ireland, Mexico, New Zealand, and Sweden.22 She was additionally a affiliate of the Industrial Workers of the World ('Wobblies').23

By the 1960s, Day was accepted by a cogent cardinal of Catholics, while at the aforementioned time, she becoming the acclaim of counterculture leaders such as Abbie Hoffman, who characterized her as the aboriginal hippie,10 a description of which Day approved,10 admitting there is some affirmation which indicates Day ability not consistently accept taken a absolute appearance of the hippie movement.24 Yet, although Day had accounting foolishly about women’s rights, chargeless adulation and bearing ascendancy in the 1910s, she against the animal anarchy of the 1960s, adage she had apparent the ill-effects of a agnate animal anarchy in the 1920s. Day had a accelerating attitude against amusing and bread-and-butter rights, adulterated with a actual accepted and acceptable faculty of Catholic chastity and piety.

Her adherence to her abbey was neither accepted nor unquestioning, however. She alienated abounding U.S. Catholics (including some accounting leaders) with her accusation of Falangist baton Francisco Franco during the Spanish Civil War;25 and, possibly in acknowledgment to her criticism of Cardinal Francis Spellman, she came beneath burden by the Archdiocese of New York in 1951 to change the name of her newspaper, "ostensibly because the chat Catholic implies an official abbey affiliation back such was not the case".26 The newspaper's name was not changed.

Awards

In 1971, Day was awarded the Pacem in Terris Award. It was called afterwards a 1963 encyclical letter by Pope John XXIII that calls aloft all bodies of acceptable will to defended accord amid all nations. Pacem in Terris is Latin for "Peace on Earth." Day was accorded abounding added ceremoniousness in her aftermost decade, including the Laetare Medal from the University of Notre Dame, in 1972.

Death

She died on November 29, 1980, in New York City.27

Day was active in the Cemetery of the Resurrection on Staten Island, aloof a few blocks from the area of the beachside cottage area she aboriginal became absorbed in Catholicism.

Cause for sainthood

She was proposed for sainthood by the Claretian Missionaries in 1983. Pope John Paul II accepted the Archdiocese of New York permission to accessible Day's "cause" for sainthood in March 2000, thereby clearly authoritative her a "Servant of God" in the eyes of the Catholic Church.