For the longest time, perhaps over a decade, I’ve been encouraging my good friend Robert Ellsberg, the publisher of Orbis Books, to write a book about the time he spent with Dorothy Day when he was a young college student. Of course, Robert has spoken and written about her a great deal and edited both her journals and her letters. But I’m always curious to know more about the woman who is now a Servant of God. I think he is too humble to write an entire book on their relationship, but I was happy that he spoke so openly about their time together on the latest episode of “The Spiritual Life.” Frankly, I could listen to him talk about her for hours.

At the time of her death, the church historian David O’Brien, writing in Commonweal, called Dorothy Day “the most significant, interesting, and influential person in the history of American Catholicism.” To my mind, the only possible “competition” she might have in that field would be either Thomas Merton or, more recently, Pope Leo XIV.

Despite that praise, I’m embarrassed to say that I knew absolutely nothing about her before I entered the Jesuits in 1988. Ironically, just a few years ago, I discovered that during the 1976 Eucharistic Congress in Philadelphia, at an outdoor Mass I attended as a 15-year-old boy, the participants included Mother Teresa (the future St. Teresa of Calcutta), Cardinal Karol Wojytla (the future St. John Paul II), Pedro Arrupe, S.J. (a future Servant of God), and Dorothy Day. If pressed then, I might have been able to identify Mother Teresa (maybe) but none of the others. 

But almost as soon as I entered the Jesuits, a fellow novice who had spent time at a Catholic Worker house gave me a copy of Dorothy’s memoir The Long Loneliness. And I admit that it was the photo on the cover that made me want to read the book: an elderly woman in a simple coat and knit cap, her hands thrust into her pockets as she walked through the woods. Before I knew much about the church, I found that some photos (like one of Thomas Merton featured in a documentary) were a powerful call to me.

Reading the book over the next few months, I learned the outline of her life: from journalist to activist to Catholic to co-foundress to, well, icon. Not long afterward, I started working at the Nativity School in New York City and living at the Jesuit community at Nativity Parish. I had brought her book with me and read it late at night. One day I realized that I was living in her old parish and mentioned it to one of the Jesuits with whom I lived. “Of course!” he laughed. “Don’t you know that you’re living in her world?” I loved that line. It reminded me that we are all, in a sense, living in her world. Not on the Lower East Side, but in a world of poverty, injustice and suffering, and a world in which we are called to respond, perhaps not as she did—by helping to start a newspaper, founding houses of hospitality and then helping to give birth to a full-fledged movement (not to mention unintentionally setting herself on the path to sainthood)—but in our own ways, in our own times and in our own worlds.

The Rev. James Martin, S.J., is a Jesuit priest, author, editor at large at America and founder of Outreach.