While I was pleased to see Sally Read's article about Dorothy Day (The Tablet, 13 December) I was disappointed by the content. Dorothy's conversion is certainly a moving story, but it is hardly remarkable that as a Catholic she lived a chaste and sober life. Millions of Catholic women and men did and continue to do that admirably.
Your article it failed to mention that Dorothy was the co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement, or that the movement is still flourishing and growing, including here in the UK, and witnessing to the kind of faith and politics Dorothy lived, talked and wrote about. It also virtually airbrushed out her political radicalism, her continuing commitment as a Catholic to pacifism and Christian anarchism, and her support for civil disobedience, including several arrests for non-violent protests, her last being in 1971.
Dorothy is known primarily because she founded the Catholic Worker movement and defined a new model of personal and political holiness that continues to inspire and challenge Christians and others around the world.
Dorothy was not attracted to plaster saints, and any airbrushing out of her very real challenge to comfortable Catholicism only reduces her ability to inspire the missionary disciples Pope Francis is calling us to be, canonised, beatified or not.
Fr Martin Newell CP, Sparkhill, Birmingham
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