"The Catholic Worker was famous for being the vehicle of a famous Catholic laywoman, Dorothy Day. Day started out as a radical freethinker, had an abortion, etc. but then experienced an awaking, got married, had about three kids and devoted her life to the poor and dispossessed in general and the labor movement in particular. The Catholic Worker was about as radical as a publication could get and still call itself Catholic. Day called herself 'a fool for Christ.' Even the iconoclastic Trotskyite critic Dwight MacDonald, who had no use for Catholicism, called her 'the holiest person I know.' Today there is a genuine movement afoot to have her canonized, but some people think she won't make it because none of children have stayed Catholic."

"It was not only a publication but a movement," Bowen adds, "founded in New York early in the 20th century by a Frenchman named Peter Maurin and a convert to Catholicism named Dorothy Day, who was still alive at the time St. Fidgeta was written. Their philosophy was pacifist, left-wing anarchist, and Catholic all at the same time, and they certainly provoked reactions similar to the one in the letter in many Catholics (though most never heard of them)."