Let's talk about DOROTHY DAY and THE CATHOLIC WORKER MOVEMENT

"If you feed the poor, you're a saint. If you ask why they're poor, you're a Communist."

Dorothy Day (1897-1980) was a deeply fascinating, beautiful, inspiring, and odd human that we should probably talk about. She was identified variously as an anarchist and as a communist (often by herself), but differs from the other characters we've talked about so far in that she's under consideration for canonization as a saint in the Roman Catholic Church.

Together with Peter Maurin, she founded the Catholic Worker Movement, which published a radical newspaper and fed, clothed, housed, and helped to educate countless people in "Houses of Hospitality" in New York and eventually around the world.

"Poverty is a strange and elusive thing. ... I condemn poverty and I advocate it; poverty is simple and complex at once; it is a social phenomenon and a personal matter. Poverty is an elusive thing, and a paradoxical one. We need always to be thinking and writing about it, for if we are not among its victims its reality fades from us. We must talk about poverty because people insulated by their own comfort lose sight of it."

Dorothy Day was not your typical Radical, nor was she your typical Catholic. She too was strange, elusive, and paradoxical and I think we can learn a lot from thinking and talking about her, whatever our own political or religious persuasions may be. So, let's.

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VIDEO :

• Revolution of the Heart: The Dorothy Day Story: Documentary streaming from PBS (57 minutes)
• Dorothy Day: Don't Call Me a Saint: Documentary (57 minutes. I've linked a trailer here, but can privately share a download link to the film when you RSVP).
• Dorothy Day on Anarchy (4.5 minutes)
• "Radical nonviolence", TV Appearance from 1971 (10 minutes)