Dorothy Day
Dorothy Day: Her Life and the Influences She MadeIn our culture today we see many new forms of service, but it always seems like the same people are giving. One woman who gave all the time, influenced many people, and showed others how to love was Dorothy Day. Dorothy Day was born in Brooklyn, New York on November 8, 1897. After surviving the San Francisco earthquake in 1906, her family moved into a tenement flat in Chicago's South Side. It was a big step down in the world made necessary because Dorothy's father was out of work. It was in Chicago that Day began to form positive impressions of Catholicism. (Forest 3) Day recalled when her father was appointed sports editor of a Chicago newspaper, the Day family moved in to a comfortable house on the North Side. Here Dorothy began to read books that affected her conscience. Upon Sinclair's novel, The Jungle, inspired Day to take long walks in poor neighborhoods in Chicago's South Side. It was the start of a life-long attraction to areas many people avoid. Day won a scholarshi!p that brought her to the University of Illinois at Urbana in the fall of 1914. However, she was a reluctant student. Her reading was chiefly in a radical and social direction, she avoided campus social lif
in Miller 121) a Catholic Worker leaflet explained. Every issue of The Catholic Worker reaffirmed her understanding of the Christian life. It proved to be the last year of dress rehearsals of nuclear war in New York. Or rather they always were members of the family. Day could think of nothing better to do with the gratitude that overwhelmed her than arrange Tamar's baptism in the Catholic Church. in Coles 201-202) I think that Dorothy Day is what people are capable of doing today. Francis of Assisi had revived the pacifist way, but the twentieth century it was unknown for Catholics to take such position. (Miller 137-138)Day herself was last jailed in 1973 for taking part in a banned picket line in support of farm workers. " (Kent 163-164) Not all members of the Catholic Worker communities agreed. Didn't Jesus say that the poor would be with us always?" Yes," Day once replied, "but we are not content that there should be so many of them. Acts of war causing "the indiscriminate destruction of . Probably there has nev!er been a newspaper so many of whose editors have been jailed for acts of conscience. " (98-108)Maurin opposed the idea that Christians should take is only of their friends and leaves care of strangers to impersonal charitable agencies. Then came 1960, when instead of a handful of people coming to City Hall Park, 500 turned up.
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