Dorothy Day was a journalist and radical activist whose early adult life included unbelief, imprisonment, broken relationships, and an abortion she later described with sorrow. After the birth of her daughter, Tamar, her search for God led her into the Catholic Church. Conversion did not make her less concerned with injustice. It forced her to ask how that concern could become a life shaped by the Gospel.
With Peter Maurin she founded the Catholic Worker in 1933. Its newspaper, houses of hospitality, voluntary poverty, and works of mercy made Catholic social teaching tangible among people who were hungry or homeless. Dorothy’s cause is open, and the Church calls her Servant of God, not Saint. Her past must never be used as spectacle. The point is that she allowed mercy received to become mercy practiced for the rest of her life.