Dorothy Day

American journalist, anarchist, and convert to Catholicism who in 1933 — at the depth of the Great Depression — co-founded The Catholic Worker newspaper with Peter Maurin for a penny a copy. Out of the paper grew houses of hospitality where the poor were not "served" but lived with, and farms where worker and intellectual shared the same table. She refused to pay federal taxes for war, was jailed repeatedly for civil disobedience (her last arrest was at 75, supporting Cesar Chavez and the farm workers), and wrote a clear-eyed autobiography, The Long Loneliness. She insisted she was not a saint — "Don't call me a saint, I don't want to be dismissed so easily" — yet her cause for canonization is now open in Rome.