Religious Rebels 06 | Dorothy Day: Rebel for the poor, saint for the restless

A bohemian journalist who found God in the slums — and built a movement that unsettled both Church and State.

Born in Brooklyn in 1897, Dorothy Day lived many lives: radical writer, suffragist, single mother, and eventually Catholic convert. 

In the midst of the Great Depression, she co-founded the Catholic Worker movement, opening houses of hospitality for the poor and protesting every war America fought. 

To admirers, she was a saint in street clothes; to critics, a communist in disguise. Can holiness and revolution coexist? Day’s life suggests that faith and rebellion may be closer than we think.

GUESTS:

• Paul Elie — author of The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage
• Martha Hennessy — granddaughter of Dorothy Day and lifelong member of Catholic Worker Movement.
• Robert Ellsberg — former editor of Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker newspaper. He worked closely with her in the final years of her life and is the editor of her published diaries and selected letters, The Duty Of Delight and All the Way to Heaven. 
• Rev Simon Moyle — ordained Baptist Minister and elder at the Grace Tree Christian community in Coburg Melbourne.

This is the sixth and final episode of God Forbid's Religious Rebels, a six-part special series exploring the lives of spiritual revolutionaries who defied empires, reshaped traditions — and sometimes paid with their lives.