Dorothy Day (November 8, 1897 - November 29, 1980) was the cofounder in 1933 of the Catholic Worker Movement, a religious organization that espouses nonviolence, voluntary poverty and hospitality for the homeless, hungry and forsaken.
The movement started with the Catholic Worker newspaper that she and Peter Maurin founded to stake out a neutral, pacifist position in the increasingly war-torn 1930s.
Day later opened a "House of Hospitality" in the slums of New York City to carry out good works, and by the 1960s was embraced by left-wing Catholics—although Day was opposed to the sexual revolution of that decade, saying she had seen the ill effects of a similar sexual revolution in the 1920s, when she had a then-illegal abortion.
Day's vow of poverty means she left no money when she died; her funeral was paid for by the archdiocese of New York.
There is a movement to have her canonized by the Catholic Church as well as a movement to have her not canonized. Day supported the distributist economic ideas of G. K. Chesterton.
