On Pilgrimage The Seventies

Upon her death in 1980, Dorothy Day, co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement, was famously described as “the most significant, interesting, and influential figure in the history of American Catholicism.” That significance has become only more evident in the last decades as her distinctive integration of faith with the cause of peace, care for the earth, and solidarity with the poor has become an integral challenge for the mission of the church. This collection of her final columns illustrates her signature effort to balance three impulses: direct service of the poor; protest against the system that causes so much poverty and injustice; and an appeal to the possibility of a new society, animated by new values. Even as she aged, her last years were marked by her final protests and arrests, the opening of a shelter for homeless women, and the slow culmination of her earthly “pilgrimage.” These writings, the last testament of a life of faith, service, activism, point toward a new saintliness for our time.