Dorothy Day

In the final days of Rudy Giuliani's term as mayor of New York, three months after the heroism of 9/11, he quietly approved a politically wired project to build twenty-five multimillion-dollar mansions on Staten Island. An expediter for the project's mob-tied developer was already under indictment for forging the demolition permit that had illegally cleared the site. Nonetheless, Giuliani's deputy mayor secretly summoned his reluctant planning commission chairman to City Hall to read him the riot act over delaying it, forcing the final go-ahead.

The forged permit--which later led to a conviction--authorized an ambush on a sanctuary. The Catholic Worker movement owned the three wooden cottages destroyed by bulldozers in the dead of night. One had long been occupied by its founder, Dorothy Day, who spurned personal property, ate the same gruel served now in her 200 Worker hospitality houses worldwide, wore the same discarded clothes she gave the poor and carried only a prayer book and a coffee jar on her pilgrimages across America.

Nominated for canonization by Cardinal John O'Connor in 1998, Day was buried near the bungalow in 1980. She'd converted to Catholicism in 1927 while living in another bungalow a short distance down the Raritan Bay beach. She'd started the first Catholic Worker farm nearby.

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