Originally published at National Catholic Register
By Jeffry Odell Korgen and Christopher Cardinale
Paulist Press, 2024
114 pages, $16.95
By Colin Miller
Ave Maria Press, 2024
175 pages, $17.95
There was nothing ordinary about the life of Dorothy Day. She was a left-wing radical, a sometime communist sympathizer and a believer in free love. She hung out in the early part of 20th-century New York City with some of the great writers of the age as well as gangsters, whom it is said she could drink under the table.
But Day is proof that God can take the rawest of materials and make them shine with holiness.
Day, who died Nov. 29, 1980, is now on the ladder to canonization, having been declared a “Servant of God” in 2000 following the petition of Cardinal John O’Connor, then archbishop of New York.
She became a Catholic in 1927 after giving birth to a baby daughter out of wedlock. She named her Tamar Teresa, the second name for St. Teresa of Ávila. She understood the Gospels in the way of the early Church, with a strong emphasis on community and communal help.
She was inspired by itinerant French Catholic
