Dorothy Day
1897-1980 20th century
Holding together daily prayer and the open table.
Who was Dorothy Day?
A New York journalist and anarchist activist, converted to Catholicism after the birth of her daughter. In 1933, with Peter Maurin, she founded the Catholic Worker: a penny newspaper and houses of hospitality where one lives with the poor one welcomes. An unyielding pacifist, arrested at a protest at seventy-five, she prayed the psalms every morning for decades. Her cause for canonization is open.
In their own words
We have all known the long loneliness and we have learned that the only solution is love and that love comes with community.
My strength returns to me with my cup of coffee and the reading of the psalms.
The greatest challenge of the day is: how to bring about a revolution of the heart, a revolution which has to start with each one of us?
No human creature could receive or contain so vast a flood of love and joy as I often felt after the birth of my child. With this came the need to worship, to adore.