The social activism of Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin who founded both a newspaper and a movement

This rich oral history weaves a tapestry of memories and experience from interviews, roundtable discussions, personal memoirs, and thorough research. In the sixtieth anniversary year of the Catholic Worker, Rosalie Riegle Troester reconfirms the diversity and commitment of a movement that applies basic Christianity to social problems. Founded in 1933 by Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin, the Catholic Worker has continued to apply the principles of voluntary poverty and nonviolence to changing social and political realities. Over 200 interviews with Workers from all over the United States reveal how people came to this movement, how they were changed by it, and how they faced contradictions between the Catholic Worker philosophy and the call of contemporary life. Vivid memoirs of Dorothy Day, Peter Maurin, and Ammon Hennacy are interwoven with accounts of involvement with labor unions, war resistance, and life on Catholic Worker farms. The author also addresses the Worker's relationship with the Catholic Church and with the movement's wrenching debates over abortion, homosexuality, and the role of women. Author note: Rosalie Riegle Troester is Professor of English at Saginaw Valley State University in Michigan.

In 1933, in the shadow of the Great Depression, Dorothy Day launched the Catholic Worker Movement, a worldwide crusade for equality. In Unruly Saint, D. L. Mayfield illuminates the ways in which Day found the love of God in, and expressed it for, her neighbors during a time of great upheaval.

“Magisterial and glorious” (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette), the first full authoritative biography of Dorothy Day—American icon, radical pacifist, Catholic convert, and advocate for the homeless—is “a vivid account of her political and religious development” (Karen Armstrong, The New York Times). After growing up in a conservative middle-class Republican household and working several years as a left-wing journalist, Dorothy Day converted to Catholicism and became an anomaly in American life for the next fifty years. As an orthodox Catholic, political radical, and a rebel who courted controversy, she attracted three generations of admirers. A believer in civil disobedience, Day went to jail several times protesting the nuclear arms race. She was critical of capitalism and US foreign policy, and as skeptical of modern liberalism as political conservatism. Her protests began in 1917, leading to her arrest during the suffrage demonstration outside President Wilson’s White House. In 1940 she spoke in Congress against the draft and urged young men not to register. She told audiences in 1962 that the US was as much to blame for the Cuban missile crisis as Cuba and the USSR. She refused to hear any criticism of the pope, though she sparred with American bishops and priests who lived in well-appointed rectories while tolerating racial segregation in their parishes. Dorothy Day is the exceptional biography of a dedicated modern-day pacifist, an outspoken advocate for the poor, and a lifelong anarchist. This definitive and insightful account is “a monumental exploration of the life, legacy, and spirituality of the Catholic activist” (Spirituality & Practice).