The newest Staten Island Ferry boat is named for Dorothy Day. Ms. Day was born in Brooklyn Heights in 1897, but her father, a journalist, took a job in San Francisco in 1903. The family later moved to Chicago, where she reached adulthood. As a young woman, she returned to New York and lived a Bohemian life, espousing radical causes. In her early thirties she became a convert to Roman Catholicism, but combined her faith with a continued advocacy of social justice. She lived much of her later life on Staten Island. Along with Peter Maurin she founded the Catholic Worker Movement, which advocates nonviolence, works of mercy, the dignity of manual labor, and “voluntary poverty,” meaning
by casting our lot freely with those whose impoverishment is not a choice, we would ask for the grace to abandon ourselves to the love of God. It would put us on the path to incarnate the Church’s “preferential option for the poor.”
Photo: New York World-Telegram & Sun Collection, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
