Dorothy Day, co-founder of the Catholic Worker Movement and its newspaper, The Catholic Worker, is depicted in a stained-glass window at Our Lady of Lourdes Church in New York.

CNS PHOTO | GREGORY SHEMITZ

Dorothy Day, co-founder of the Catholic Worker Movement and its newspaper, The Catholic Worker, is depicted in a stained-glass window at Our Lady of Lourdes Church in New York.
May 2, 2016
CATHOLIC NEWS SERVICE

An inquiry into the life of Dorothy Day, co-founder of the Catholic Worker Movement, will begin soon and run to the end of 2016.

The Archdiocese of New York, which is sponsoring her sainthood cause and is where Day oversaw Catholic Worker houses, made the announcement.

The Dorothy Day Guild, established in 2005 to promote her life and works, said on its website that 52 people have been chosen for interviews in the inquiry.

From the interviews, the archdiocese will gather evidence and present it to the Vatican's Congregation for Saints' Causes and to Pope Francis.

In 2012, the U.S. bishops unanimously endorsed Day's sainthood cause during their fall general assembly.

"Dorothy Day created or inspired dozens of houses of hospitality throughout the English-speaking world, but she was also a journalist who published The Catholic Worker newspaper. Her articles in that paper alone total over 3,000 pages," said George Horton, the liaison for the Dorothy Day Guild.

"Add her books and other publications and we will probably surpass 8,000 pages of manuscripts."

Shortly after Day was born in Brooklyn in 1897, her family moved to San Francisco, where she was baptized an Episcopalian.

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However, she left college in Illinois to go to New York City to work as a journalist. While in New York, she got involved in the causes of her day, such as women's suffrage and peace, and was part of a circle of top literary and artistic figures.

Day's personal life was chaotic; she went through a string of love affairs, a failed marriage, a suicide attempt and an abortion.

But with the birth of her daughter, Tamar, in 1926, Day embraced Catholicism. She had Tamar baptized Catholic, which ended her common-law marriage and brought dismay to her friends.

As she sought to fuse her life and her faith, she wrote for such Catholic publications as America and Commonweal and later took part in civil disobedience against against racial discrimination and the military-industrial complex.

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In 1932, she met Peter Maurin, a French immigrant and former Christian Brother. Together they started the Catholic Worker newspaper - and later, several houses of hospitality and farm communities in the United States and elsewhere.

While working for racial integration, Day was shot at. She prayed and fasted for peace at the Second Vatican Council. She died in 1980 in Maryhouse, one of the Catholic Worker houses she established in New York City.

Pope Benedict once said Day's conversion was a model of how to "journey towards faith . . . in a secularized environment."

She has been the focus of a number of biographies. A film biography, Entertaining Angels: The Dorothy Day Story, was made in 1996.