Dorothy Day and the Bread Line on Mott Street

During the Great Depression, Dorothy Day stood on Mott Street in Lower Manhattan, ladling soup to a line that stretched around the block. She had been a journalist, a bohemian intellectual who knew the inside of Greenwich Village salons. But after her conversion, she couldn't square comfortable Sunday worship with families sleeping in doorways. In 1933, she and Peter Maurin founded the Catholic Worker movement — not a charity office with intake forms, but actual homes where volunteers lived alongside the destitute.…