EWTN News portal reports that the intersection of Pineapple and Henry streets in Brooklyn Heights was renamed “Dorothy Day Way” on May 2, honoring the American journalist, social activist, and Catholic convert Dorothy Day, born nearby in 1897. Day’s granddaughter Martha Hennessy and members of the Dorothy Day Guild attended the ceremony, with Hennessy calling it “a beautiful moment” and expressing belief that Day “will bring so much good to the Catholic Church and bring people back to the Church.” Alex Avitabile, a guild member who spearheaded the campaign, recalled meeting Day in 1970 and recognizing her as a “holy person” with “saintly” qualities. Kevin Ahern, board chairman of the guild, suggested the street name could serve as an “evangelization tool” to inspire people to “make the world a better place.” Day’s cause for canonization opened in 2000, and she is now recognized as a Servant of God. The article details Day’s background: baptized Episcopalian at 12, influenced by socialist and anarchist circles, relationship with anarchist Forster Batterham, single motherhood, conversion to Catholicism in 1927, and founding of the Catholic Worker Movement in 1933 with Peter Maurin. The movement combined “direct service with a radical commitment to living out the Gospel through voluntary poverty,” establishing houses of hospitality, soup kitchens, and farming communities. Day is described as a “lifelong pacifist” who spoke out against war including the Vietnam War, supported labor rights and civil rights, and never took a salary for her work. The article mentions Pope Francis praised Day in a preface to a collection of her work. This celebration of Dorothy Day as a model of holiness and potential saint reveals the profound theological corruption of the post-conciliar sect, which elevates a woman whose life and work embodied the very errors condemned by the pre-conciliar Magisterium—Modernism, indifferentism, and the reduction of the Gospel to mere social activism—while true martyrs and confessors of the faith are ignored or persecuted.
