The movement started with the Catholic Worker newspaper that she and Peter Maurin founded to stake out a neutral, pacifist position in the increasingly war-torn 1930s.
Day later opened a "House of Hospitality" in the slums of New York City to carry out good works, and by the 1960s was embraced by left-wing Catholics—although Day was opposed to the sexual revolution of that decade, saying she had seen the ill effects of a similar sexual revolution in the 1920s, when she had a then-illegal abortion.
Day's vow of poverty means she left no money when she died; her funeral was paid for by the archdiocese of New York.
There is a movement to have her canonized by the Catholic Church as well as a movement to have her not canonized. Day supported the distributist economic ideas of G. K. Chesterton.