She had lots of affairs, a broken marriage, an illegitimate child, a few failed suicides. She even had an abortion. Now they want to canonise her. Dorothy Day was born 100 years ago this month. Cardinal John O'Connor of New York announced recently that he believed the founder of the Catholic Worker movement should be put forward for sainthood 17 years after her death.
How Day, whom Abbie Hoffman called the "first hippie" and whom gangsters admired because "she could drink them under the table", is heading for canonisation is an inspiring story, but the idea of sainthood would probably have left her cold. She said: "When they call you a saint, it means basically that you are not to be taken seriously."
The Catholic journal Commonweal certainly took her seriously when it dubbed her "the most significant, interesting, and influential person in the history of American Catholicism".
But the legendary head of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, was not too impressed and wrote in her file that she was "a very erratic and irresponsible person" whose activities "strongly suggest she is consciously or unconsciously being used by communist groups".
Hoover was writing during the Cold War, when Day was declaring her rejection of ideologies of left and right, but in her young days she certainly enjoyed the company of Greenwich Village Marxist intellectuals, such as Max Eastman and John Reed. As a journalist she interviewed Leon Trotsky.
These were her wild days when, as a strikingly beautiful woman, she lived and played hard before she converted to Catholicism in 1927. There was a string of affairs, including one with the playwright, Eugene O'Neill. She had an abortion from another affair and a rebound marriage with a man who married eight times; she was 23 and they went off on a drinking binge around Europe.
Day was born in Brooklyn in 1897 to a working-class Protestant family going through hard times. The family moved to San Francisco and lived through the 1906 earthquake. Her father eventually found work as sports editor of a Chicago newspaper and Dorothy was then able to attend university.
She was already attracted to socialism, influenced by Upton Sinclair's graphic novel of the Chicago meatyards, The Jungle. She dropped out of college and became a reporter for New York's only socialist daily paper, The Call.
She also became a suffragette and went to jail with others who protested in front of the White House for women's votes. After a hunger strike they were released.
With money from the film rights to a novel based on her abortion experience, The Eleventh Virgin, she bought a cottage on Staten Island and began a four-year affair with an English botanist called Foster Batterham by whom she had a daughter. Day was by this time increasingly attracted to Catholicism and insisted on having her daughter baptised. The baptism caused a rift with the agnostic Batterham and five months later Day herself was received into the Catholic Church on December 28th, 1927.
After covering a hunger march during the Depression for Catholic newspapers, Day prayed in Washington's National Shrine "that some way would open up for me to use what talents I possessed for my fellow workers, for the poor". The next day back in New York she met Peter Maurin, a former French Christian Brother who was living in voluntary poverty and preaching his vision of a social order based on the values of the Gospel.
Maurin told Day she should start a paper to publicise Catholic social teaching and put it into practice by opening "hospitality houses" for the poor. Five months later on May Day 1933, the first issue of Catholic Worker, put together in Day's small kitchen, went on sale for one cent. By the end of the year it was selling 40,000. The circulation later grew to 200,000 and the paper became an inspiration to generations of Catholics.
The houses for the poor, always referred to as "guests", also grew and spread abroad. Today there are over 120.
Day preached pacifism and was jailed frequently for protests. Her stand against the second World War was not popular and lost her many readers.
Nevertheless, her influence spread. Catholic intellectuals, including Jacques Maritain and Hilaire Belloc, visited her. Thomas Merton, the Cistercian mystic (who also sowed some wild oats in his time) once said he would not have converted to Catholicism, let alone enter a monastery, "if there were no Catholic Worker".
Daniel Berrigan, the Jesuit anti-war activist and poet, says his whole life would have been different if there had been no Dorothy Day. As a young Jesuit he used to be cautioned about Dorothy Day by his superiors. The message was: "Dorothy's fine if she hangs around the poor. But she doesn't know anything about international politics."
Another priest whom she inspired to be an anti-war, civil rights activist and worker for the poor, Charles Rice, once said of Day: "She should be canonised but that won't happen because of the abortion." Cardinal O'Connor, one of the most outspoken opponents of abortion among the US hierarchy, seems to think otherwise.