Dorothy Day's Bread Line on Mott Street

In 1933, Dorothy Day stood on a cold New York sidewalk and handed a bowl of soup to a man whose shoes had no soles. She was a journalist, a convert, a woman who had spent years in churches where the liturgy was beautiful and the pews were warm. But something in her would not let her sit still.

She rented an apartment at 436 East Mott Street in Manhattan and opened the door to anyone who was hungry. Within months, the Catholic Worker house was feeding hundreds daily — longshoremen without work, families evicted from tenements, old men forgotten by everyone. Day slept on the same thin mattresses her guests used. She wore donated clothes. She owned almost nothing.

Critics called her a radical. Some churchgoers questioned whether this was proper ministry. Day had a plain answer: "The Gospel takes away our right forever to discriminate between the deserving and the undeserving poor."

She had read Isaiah 58 and took it at face value — that the Almighty measures worship not by the beauty of our fasting but by whether the hungry are fed, the homeless are sheltered, the naked are clothed. "Then your light will break forth like the dawn," the prophet promised, "and your healing will quickly appear."