A floating monument to Catholic Worker Movement co-founder Dorothy Day made its maiden voyage to Manhattan Friday afternoon, sailing forth from Day’s adopted home of Staten Island.

Day had deep roots on Staten Island, one of New York’s five boroughs. She was received into the Catholic Church there and lived part of her life there. 

Retired New York Auxiliary Bishop John J. O’Hara, Auxiliary Bishop Peter J. Byrne, and Monsignor Kevin O’Sullivan of Catholic Charities represented the Archdiocese of New York.

“Our saint. Our Dorothy Day. Whom the Lord called over the years, and then in an encounter on the South Shore on the beach with a Sister of Charity, He began drawing her closer and closer and closer. As He formed those prophets of old, so too did He form this great woman,” said Bishop O’Hara in remarks at the ferry’s launch.

Bishop O’Hara was referring to Sister Aloysia Mary Mulhern, whom Day had approached in 1926 to ask where she could have her newborn daughter, Tamar, baptized. The conversation led to Sister Mulhern instructing Day in the Catholic faith and she was baptized Dec. 28, 1927.

Day is a candidate for sainthood and was given the title “Servant of God” when her cause was officially opened in 2000.

“She is not to be admired; she is to be imitated. And as we set sail today on this vessel which bears her name, this ‘Servant of God,’ whom we pray will one day be St. Dorothy Day – I think she’s St. Dorothy Day already,” said Bishop O’Hara, to applause from the approximately 200 guests in attendance.

“Dorothy Day is just the third Staten Island Ferry boat ever to be named after a specific woman. It is only fitting and appropriate to have this new Ferry enshrined the name Dorothy Day,” said New York State Assemblyman Charles D. Fall, in a statement. “Just as she did with her activism, the Ferry continues to bring all walks of life, ethnicity, and faith together as we sail forward. We are proud as a community to have this Ferry today commissioned after the legendary 20th-century Catholic peace icon.”

“In 1997, which was the centenary of her birth, I wrote to Cardinal [John] O’Connor and said I hoped he would use the occasion to promote her cause for canonization, which he did,” Robert Ellsberg, who attended the inaugural cruise and who worked with Day as a teenager at The Catholic Worker, said in an interview with The Good Newsroom. He later served as the newspaper’s managing editor for two years and converted to Catholicism, before editing a number of collections of Day’s writings.

“She was a woman who really took seriously the Beatitudes. She not only lived them but stretched them to apply to the issues of her time,” Ellsberg said.

“She was the model of a saint who didn’t just try to care for the poor, care for those who are wounded or sick but tried to change the social system that creates so many poor people. She did that all as a layperson, as a woman in the Church, created a lay movement without asking permission, but just read the Gospels and set out to live that in the most radical way,” he added.

The Dorothy Day is an Ollis-class ferry, costing $85 million and with a maximum capacity of 4,500 passengers, New York City’s Department of Transportation said in a statement. The vessel was commissioned in November 2022. The Staten Island Ferry provides free transportation for pedestrians and non-motorized vehicles between St. George on Staten Island’s northern tip, and Lower Manhattan.

Guests and other passengers marveled at the cleanliness of the brand-new ferry. The 25-minute voyage cruised past the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island on calm New York Harbor waters, a cloudy sky the only low point of the occasion.

A convert to Catholicism later in life, Day was baptized at Our Lady Help of Christians Church in Tottenville, a neighborhood in the borough of Staten Island that borders New Jersey, in 1927.

Day also began a cooperative farm in Pleasant Plains in 1950, operating it for the needy and Catholic Worker members until 1964, when it was sold. She died in 1980 at age 83 and is buried in Resurrection Cemetery, also in Pleasant Plains.

It was in Manhattan where Day met Peter Maurin and started The Catholic Worker newspaper in the depths of the Great Depression and Mary House, the first Catholic Worker hospitality house, of which there are more than 250 worldwide today.

Our Sunday Visitor contributed to this report.