American journalist, activist, and co-founder (with Peter Maurin in 1933) of the Catholic Worker movement, whose houses of hospitality, farms, and penny-a-copy newspaper The Catholic Worker remain an unusual working fusion of radical politics, pacifism, and traditional Catholic devotion. Day's life moved through two phases that she herself thought of as one long story. The young bohemian journalist on the Lower East Side in the 1910s — friend of Eugene O'Neill, reporter for The Masses, Greenwich Village socialist, mother of an out-of-wedlock daughter — was, in her own retelling, reaching for something the Left did not have and the Church eventually offered. Her 1927 conversion to Catholicism cost her her common-law marriage, most of her political friends, and some years of drift before she met Maurin in 1932.
The Catholic Worker movement that grew out of their collaboration was — is — an attempt to take the Sermon on the Mount literally: feed the hungry, house the homeless, refuse to participate in war. During the 1930s its New York houses fed thousands through the Depression. Its pacifism cost it heavily during the Second World War, when Day refused to equivocate even against Nazism. During the Cold War she was repeatedly jailed for civil disobedience against civil defense drills; she supported King and Cesar Chavez; she fasted in Rome for peace during Vatican II.
Her writings — The Long Loneliness (1952), her autobiography, and decades of "On Pilgrimage" columns in The Catholic Worker — are direct, unliterary, and theologically uncompromising. They sit alongside Simone Weil's and Thomas Merton's as distinct expressions of 20th-century religious radicalism that refused to be domesticated into either respectable politics or private piety. Her canonization cause is now underway, though she would have found the machinery of sanctity uncomfortable.