By Sharon Otterman
Dorothy Day (click here)
is a hero of the Catholic left, a fiery 20th-century social activist
who protested war, supported labor strikes and lived voluntarily in
poverty as she cared for the needy.
But Day has found a seemingly unlikely champion in New York’s conservative archbishop, Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan, who has breathed new life into an effort to declare the Brooklyn native a saint.
Cardinal
Dolan has embraced her cause with striking zeal: speaking on the
anniversaries of her birth and death, distributing Dorothy Day prayer
cards to parishes and even buying roughly 100 copies of her biography to
give out last year as Christmas gifts to civic officials including
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg.
This month, at Cardinal Dolan’s recommendation, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops
voted unanimously to move forward with her canonization cause, even
though, as some of the bishops noted, she had an abortion as a young
woman and at one point flirted with joining the Communist Party.
“I
am convinced she is a saint for our time,” Cardinal Dolan said at the
bishops’ meeting. She exemplifies, he said, “what’s best in Catholic
life, that ability we have to be ‘both-and’ not ‘either-or.’ ”...
