The Catholic Worker movement, which Day co-founded in the 1930s with her friend Peter Maurin, preaches the most radical gospel of all: voluntary poverty, the inclusion of the destitute and socially outcast in Christ’s body, a life of service. And it’s not a religious order, because all of the members are lay people. If it sounds like Socialism, there’s a reason: before she devoted herself full time to poverty issues, Day was a writer for Socialist and Marxist newspapers, and also a novelist and screenwriter who’d been raised in a home with only the loosest affiliations to religion. She was arrested for the first time during a rally for women’s suffrage while she was in her twenties, and, like her literary hero Dostoyevsky, who’d requested a Bible when he was in jail, she bent her head to scriptures while she waited out her prison sentence. The Bible changed her perspective on Socialism and activism: in her autobiography The Long Loneliness, she wrote that “if [activists] had faith in… our protest against brutality and injustice, then we were indeed casting our seeds, and there was promise of the harvest to come.”

It took some years of wandering through the deserts of radical secular culture before Day planted that harvest, and along the way she lived a very modern kind of life. For many years she was involved in what she delicately calls a “common law marriage.” She had an abortion early on, then later gave birth to a daughter, at which point her partner abandoned her, so she raised her daughter on her own, supporting them both with her writing. There are amazing descriptions in her autobiography of the desolation and fear she felt in the early years of her daughter’s life, walking up and down the deserted beaches near her shack home in New England, sitting to write, always worrying about money. Nearly a hundred years later, hers is a very contemporary story.

Day was drawn to faith from a young age; as a small child living in San Francisco, she witnessed the destruction wrought by the 1906 earthquake and thought that only a “frightening, impersonal God” could have caused it, yet by the time she was a teenager, she was inexorably drawn to Christianity via the Russian novelists she loved, even if her “faith had nothing in common with the Christians around me.”

A radical woman needs a radical gospel, and Day’s fervent desire to believe in God helped keep her open to the man who would change her life, the visionary itinerant preacher Peter Maurin. Born in France and a former Christian Brother – an order dedicated to teaching and running schools – Maurin was living the life of a hobo when he met Day, but he was likely to take off his coat and give it to anyone who was poorer than him. He was street preaching his message of voluntary poverty in Manhattan (his line of reasoning: “the way to reach the man on the street is to meet the man in the street”) when a friend introduced him to Day. She had converted to Catholicism by this point and was still supporting herself and her daughter through her writing, but Maurin’s message of living off of the land and rejecting manufactured capitalism inspired Day. She needed his vision, and he needed her pragmatism.

The newspaper they started together, The Catholic Worker, was first published in 1933. It cost a penny a copy; today, it costs 25 cents a year. Day finally had a platform of her own from which to express her ideas, and Maurin began pushing even more extreme visions of Worker life. More than protesting on picket lines, Maurin wanted Workers to live together in collectives, both urban and agrarian. He argued that every house should have a “Christ room,” a room that should be open to any poor person who needed it; Maurin always referred to the poor as “ambassadors of God.” Within a few years of the newspaper’s appearance, the Depression hit, and Day and Maurin were forced out of necessity to begin enacting some of the ideas they preached in their newspaper. Day tells the story of a homeless young woman who had read an issue of the Worker and confronted Day, saying “Why do you write about things like that when you can’t do anything about it?” Day felt ashamed, and soon enough, Catholic Worker hospitality houses – rented apartments and houses where anyone in need could stay for free – began to spring up all over New York. The Workers also began running bread lines to feed the increasing number of indigents in the Bowery. “We were pushed into it,” Day wrote of the bread lines. “Everything we’ve done, we’ve been pushed into.”