Dorothy Day sought to emulate Jesus and live the Gospel, embracing a Christianity true to its historical roots. She was greatly influenced by Peter Maurin, a French peasant who’d travelled widely in the United States, taking odd jobs and giving speeches about Catholic social justice. While her downtown contemporaries looked to Marx and Engels for guidance, Day now regarded the Sermon on the Mount as her manifesto: Care little about material possessions or food. Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, pray for those who persecute you. Blessed are the meek and the peacemakers. In 1933, Day and Maurin founded the Catholic Worker, a monthly newspaper that sold for a penny. It published the sort of advocacy journalism that Day had written for years, now imbued with a biblical perspective. The print run of the first edition was about 2,500, and she sold copies of it on May Day in Union Square. The paper’s critique of capitalism and defence of labour fit the popular mood at the height of the Great Depression. By the late 1930s, the Catholic Worker had a circulation of about 200,000.

No longer content simply to advocate on behalf of the dispossessed, Day and Maurin opened a ‘house of hospitality’ on Charles Street, in the West Village. It fed and housed the poor, as well as Day and fellow Catholic Workers. Like Jesus, she’d decided to live with ‘the rejected ones, the scorned ones’, convinced that ‘the more luxurious our lives, the further we are from Him’. About thirty hospitality houses soon opened nationwide, along with rural communes that embodied the growing movement’s ideal of decentralized power and self-sufficiency. Day no longer cared for socialism or communism. She’d become an anarchist – but preferred the term libertarian, not wanting to offend. She opposed most of the New Deal, believed in changing the world through ‘direct action’, and never voted in an election.

When the United States entered the Second World War, Dorothy Day urged young men to oppose the war and avoid the draft. Day had little use for traditional Catholic teachings about the morality of armed conflict. She thought there was no such thing as a ‘just war’. All wars were sinful, she argued, and a true Christian should be willing to shed one’s own blood before taking the life of another human being. Her pacifism alienated many close friends and supporters. Turning the other cheek seemed dangerous, immoral, and ludicrous, at a time when Nazi Germany was massacring civilians. But Day would not budge. She didn’t care if her views appeared ‘impractical’. They were based on the teachings of the early Christian church, and she vowed to live her faith without compromise, however reckless that might seem. The Catholic Worker lost three-quarters of its circulation during the Second World War, and more than half of the hospitality houses closed.