Dorothy Day was an apostle of non-violence who influenced the bishops of the Second Vatican Council. She founded a newspaper, the Catholic Worker, which became a movement. The reasons why her cause for sainthood may soon be opened are here unfolded by a former chaplain at the Catholic Worker house in New York. When she was alive, Dorothy Day used to quip in irritation, Don?t call me a saint. I don?t want to be dismissed so easily!

Now, nearly 20 years after her death, Cardinal John O?Connor, Archbishop of New York, will soon formally petition the Vatican?s Congregation for the Causes of Saints to begin the long process of investigation of the life of the most significant Catholic woman in the history of the American Catholic Church.

She was born in Brooklyn, New York, on 8 November 1897, the third of five children of John Day, a sportswriter, and Grace Satterlee Day. Her family moved to San Francisco, then to Chicago. From being vaguely Episcopalian, by the time she was a student at the University of Illinois she had declared herself an atheist and joined several socialist groups and causes.

She dropped out of college and went to New York City, where she wrote for The Call and The Masses, socialist newspapers. She protested against the First World War as imperialist and was arrested with a group of suffragists picketing the White House in 1917. Back in Greenwich Village in New York, she lived a rather loose life by the standards of the time. In a drunken stupor at a village pub named the Hell Hole, Eugene O?Neill, who was in love with her, would recite to her verbatim Francis Thompson?s poem, The Hound of Heaven. Often after these all-night drinking sessions she found herself in the early morning praying at St Joseph?s Church in the Village.

She became pregnant by a sometime journalist, Lionel Moise, with whom she was in love. He threatened to leave her if she did not have an abortion. Not wanting to lose him, she went ahead with it ? and would regret it for the rest of her life.

On the rebound, Day married a man named Barkeley Toby; they travelled to Europe in 1920 and spent several months in Italy, where Day wrote a novel, The Eleventh Virgin, which was published in 1924. When they returned to the United States, the relationship ended. It is not clear why, as Day did not like to discuss this period of her life.

In the meantime she met Foster Batterham, an anarchist. They lived near the beach on Staten Island in a small cottage, which Day had purchased from the sale of the film rights to her novel. By 1926 she was pregnant with his child. The stirring of life within her awakened her to the stirring of God in her own life. Years later, in her book Union Square to Rome, she wrote: I knew that I was going to have my baby baptised a Catholic, cost what it may. I knew that I was not going to have her floundering through as many years as I had done, doubting and hesitating, undisciplined and amoral.

Her daughter, Tamar Teresa, was born in March 1927. Day described it as a stupendous fact of creation, and the following December she was received into the Catholic Church. It was something I had to do, she recalled. In her autobiography, The Long Loneliness, she wrote that she had reached the point where I wanted to obey. . . . I was tired of following the devices of my own heart, of doing what I wanted to do, what my desires told me to do, which always seemed to lead me astray.

Foster, rabidly anti-Catholic, left her and their baby, but for Day there was no turning back. She never regretted her decision to convert, although her atheist, left-leaning friends from her Village days dropped away. I wanted to be poor, chaste, obedient, Day wrote, I wanted to die in order to live, to put off the old man and put on Christ. . . . I loved the Church for Christ made visible.

The next few years were not easy for her. She agonised over how to live her faith and her concern for the poor.

Then on 9 December 1932, after a trip to Washington DC where she had prayed at the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, Day was visited in her Manhattan apartment by a French peasant ?migr?, named Peter Maurin. Twenty years her senior, he had once been a Christian Brother in Paris, but had not renewed his vows. Instead he made his way to Canada and eventually to the United States. For Day this vagabond with a keen intellect was sent from God. He was the man who showed me the way. She said: His ideas and spirit would dominate the rest of my life. He was the saint.

He introduced Day to the Christian personalism of Nicholas Berdyaev and Jacques Maritain, to the doctrine of the common good of St Thomas Aquinas, and to the decentralism of the English Distributists: G.K. Chesterton, the Dominican Vincent McNabb, Hilaire Belloc and Eric Gill. Maurin?s communitarian vision was rooted in voluntary poverty and the performance of the corporal works of mercy. He called for a Green Revolution and a return to the land.

At his urging Day started a newspaper which she called the Catholic Worker, a direct challenge to the Daily Worker, the name of the paper of her former Marxist associates. She deliberately chose to bring out the first edition on May Day, the Communist holy day. Within a year the Catholic Worker reached a monthly circulation of nearly 100,000 copies, at a penny a copy. It continues today, at the same price, to promote personalism, decentralisation and pacifism.

The New York Catholic Worker opened a house of hospitality for the homeless, also called the Catholic Worker, and a farming community. There are now nearly 150 urban houses of hospitality throughout the world, as well as farming communities. Over the years, Day regularly visited the new communities, but she never went about starting them up, believing rather in the power of example and the need for people locally to respond to the requirements of others. Thus what became a movement maintains an organised decentralised life, sheltering the homeless and living in community with those on the margins of society. All at the CW are volunteers; none receives a salary.

Intellectuals took note of this new movement that existed on begging. The CW published articles by Emmanuel Mounier, and Jacques Maritain and Hilaire Belloc were among hundreds who lectured at the New York CW house over the years. Thomas Merton came visiting while a student at Columbia University, as did John and Joseph Kennedy.

In 1936 the CW resisted the American Catholic hierarchy, which was pro-Franco, and decried the violence of both sides in the Spanish Civil War. When the Second World War broke out, Day insisted on absolute pacifism in the pages of her newspaper. Our manifesto is the Sermon on the Mount, she declared. She paid dearly for her stand; most of the CW communities throughout the country closed down, and the circulation of the newspaper plummeted. Many of her associates left the movement to fight in the war, while she steadfastly maintained that followers of Christ were to be peacemakers.

During the 1950s, Day led the Catholic Worker in protesting against the war mentality of that period. She and members of the community refused to participate in the compulsory air-raid drills in New York, and were regularly arrested and gaoled.

IN the 1960s she travelled to England with her associate Eileen Egan, one of the founders of Pax Christi, to speak at a conference at Spode House, the Dominican-run centre in Staffordshire, and then went to Rome to be present during the Second Vatican Council?s discussion on war and peace. Earlier that summer she had sent every Catholic bishop in the world a special issue of the CW on the subject. While in Rome she joined 19 other women in a 10-day period of fasting and prayer led by Lanza del Vasto, founder of the Community of the Ark in France. In December 1965 the council recognised non-violence as a gospel value and affirmed the right to conscientious objection, calling the arms race a crime against humanity. Like an Old Testament prophet Dorothy Day had challenged the Church in loving dis-agreement, prodding it to face the technological realities of modern warfare.

Back in New York, she led the CW in its protest against the Vietnam War, and stood with four men from the community as they burned their draft cards at a protest rally in Union Square (New York?s Hyde Park) in November 1965. But this American teacher of non-violence became more and more disenchanted with the direction of the anti-war movement. In an entry in her journal of January 1967, she wrote: It makes me sick to see priests go all romantic over revolution . . . knowing nothing of genuine non- violence. . . . People are losing sight of the primacy of the spiritual. A few years later she admitted to her friend Maisie Ward, who used to chide Day for being too damn precious about her pacifism, that she regretted her role in the anti-war movement, because it had become violent and many Catholic protesters had turned away from the Church.

In 1970 she was invited to speak in Australia. From there she was able to go to India, where she met Mother Teresa, who later would visit Day when she came to New York. In Delhi, Day met Devendra Kumar Gupta of the Gandhian Centenary Committee, who gave her a spinning wheel, a symbol of the non-violent, decentralised communitarian revolution advocated by her and Gandhi.

Three years later, in 1973, she went to California to join Caesar Chavez as he struggled to organise the migrant farmworkers. Now 75, she had to sit on a stool during the protest, reading the Sermon on the Mount to two large policemen who arrested her for civil disobedience. She spent 10 days in gaol, a retreat as she called it.

In 1976, she was invited to speak in Philadelphia at the International Eucharistic Congress. Her age was showing: her tall frame was gaunt, her features more angular. Her large eyes were luminous, however, and with her white braided hair she was a formidable presence. Unwittingly, so it seems, the organising committee had picked 6 August, the anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, as the day on which to hold a Mass in honour of the United States military services. That afternoon, in her address before 8,000 people, Day wondered why on that day of all days there was such a Mass. She pleaded with those in the audience that they should regard the military Mass, and all the Masses today, as an act of penance, begging God to forgive us.

That was her last public speaking engagement. Suffering from a bad heart, she spent the next few years at Maryhouse, a shelter for the homeless which she had opened in Manhattan. She died on 29 November 1980, with her daughter at her side.

The new social order that Day advocated was not based on politics or ideology. Her seeking of community in this century which has so destroyed community was nourished by the Eucharist, as life giving life so that we may nourish others. She was committed to daily Mass, reading the psalms, praying vespers, weekly confession, fasting, regular retreats, and voluntary poverty. The latter kept her honest; when she spoke she was authentic.

Remembering her conversion, she noted: Most cradle Catholics have gone through, or need to go through, a second conversion which binds them with a more mature love and obedience to the Church, which she unabashedly called the one true Church. She was an orthodox Catholic who was dismayed by the internal rancour in the Church and with the casualness and hedonism of American society.

She never considered herself a feminist. She was a woman living out her Christian vocation as a Christian personalist, who gladly and gratefully called herself a daughter of the Church. Cardinal O?Connor, when he announced in March his intention to open Day?s cause for canonisation, observed that he found in his pastoral counselling that loneliness was the great affliction: Day, he thought, could be the saint for the lonely. Through reaching out to others through the works of mercy, which she said were the way to peace, she built up community. She believed that Christ-like self-sacrificing love was the only thing that made sense in a senseless world.

Dorothy Day was buried on a bleak December afternoon at Resurrection Cemetery on Staten Island, near the place where she had begun her pilgrimage ? hounded by God ? some 50 years earlier. Suddenly, as her plain pine coffin was put into the cold, wet earth, three greyhounds appeared. They frolicked and danced.

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