Facts about Dorothy Day §
Born in 1897, she was raised in a nominally Protestant family and became a Roman Catholic in 1928.
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One of her early memories was the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and how her mother offered help to quake victims.
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Her father was a sportswriter who covered racetrack news.
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She loved reading novels from early childhood on, and her favorite author was Fydor Dostoevsky.
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She rejected organized religion in college because she didn’t see so-called “religious people” helping the poor.
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In the World War I period she was part of a circle of social radicals and literary types like Eugene O’Neill.
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She first went to jail with a group of suffragettes in 1917 who were demonstrating at the White House in favor of giving women voting rights.
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She had an abortion in a failed relationship when she was 22 years old.
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The birth of her daughter Tamar in 1927, within a common-law marriage, brought her great joy and happiness, and led to her final embrace of the Catholic faith.
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She was a single parent who supported herself as a free-lance journalist.
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She met Peter Maurin in 1932, in the midst of the Great Depression.
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The Catholic Worker newspaper appeared in May 1933 with 2,500 copies distributed by hand. Circulation grew to 190,000 by 1938, and dropped to 50,000 during World War II, largely because of the paper’s pacifist stand. (Today’s circulation is over 80,000.)
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The first House of Hospitality opened in 1933. Today over 130 Catholic Worker communities exist in thirty-two states and eight foreign countries.
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She maintained throughout her life that Peter Maurin, not she, started the Catholic Worker Movement. She called him a modern St. Francis who was responsible for completing her Catholic education.
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Her written work includes 8 books, 350 plus articles for journals and magazines, and over 1,000 articles for The Catholic Worker newspaper.
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A heavy smoker for years, she finally gave up the habit “cold turkey” after praying for several years for help in quitting.
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She went to daily Mass and weekly confession, and regularly went on religious retreats.
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She read the Bible at a time most Catholics didn’t.
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She travelled long distances by bus. She carried a Bible, a missal, the Divine Office, and a jar of instant coffee on her hundreds of trips.
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She went to jail four times from 1955 to 1959 for acts of civil disobedience. She with others refused to take shelter during civil defense drills that simulated a nuclear attack on New York City.
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In 1955 she became a professed secular oblate of the Benedictine Abbey of St. Procopius.
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She and a group of women fasted for ten days in 1963 in Rome, at Vatican Council II, wanting the bishops to condemn all war. They did condemn nuclear war.