One afternoon in July, I was carrying plates of potato salad and chicken to groups of homeless people in the dining room of a Berkeley parish. The church hosts a monthly sit-down dinner for two hundred people, and each table has a host, who sits with the guests, in addition to a server. I recognized the guy hosting the table I was serving; I’d often seen him running a food line with a group of volunteers in People's Park near the university.

With his long white beard and all black wardrobe, J.C. Orton looks like a lot of other Berkeley guys, but the stencil on the side of his VW Van is unusual: it reads  “Night on the Streets: Catholic Worker.” Almost every morning since 1997, J.C. has gotten up at the crack of dawn to serve hot food in the park. On rainy and cold winter nights, he offers an emergency shelter and a hot meal to Berkeley’s semi-permanent indigent population. He also helps long term homeless find rooms, receive medical care, get jobs, and open bank accounts. “Night on the Streets” is run on a completely volunteer basis, and J.C. recently received a Jefferson Award for public service. The work of J.C. and his colleagues wouldn’t be possible without the inspiration of Dorothy Day, the founder of the Catholic Worker movement, a radical socialist writer and single mother.

The case for Day’s canonization as a saint in the Catholic Church began almost immediately after her death in 1980. Today, she’s been declared “venerable,” meaning that her case is headed up the Vatican’s rungs toward sainthood, after which she may be beatified — that’s to say, officially acknowledged as an intercessor, or a person to be prayed to — before she can arrive at the official title of Saint.

Day would hate every moment the cardinals spend debating her case. For one thing, making the case for sainthood is expensive. Miracles done in the name of the person have to be officially verified, which requires a Vatican-appointed squadron of investigators and years of work, all of which have to be paid for by the people making the case for sainthood. For Day, an ardent Catholic who nonetheless once said that the modern Church is the “cross on which Christ is crucified”, the idea of comfortably seated, well-fed cardinals combing over her life would have been nauseating. She would have thought the money should be spent feeding and clothing the poor. Not to mention her feeling about the notion of sainthood: “Don’t call me a saint,” she once snapped to an overly ardent acolyte. “I don’t want to be dismissed so easily.”