social reformer

At the National Prayer Breakfast on Thursday, President Obama named Dorothy Day as a “great reformer in American history."

Who woulda thunk it?

This is the same woman J. Edgar Hoover once called a "threat to national security."

Here’s the exact quote from the Obama’s speech:

We can’t leave our values at the door. If we leave our values at the door, we abandon much of the moral glue that has held our nation together for centuries, and allowed us to become somewhat more perfect a union. Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, Jane Addams, Martin Luther King, Jr., Dorothy Day, Abraham Heschel — the majority of great reformers in American history did their work not just because it was sound policy, or they had done good analysis, or understood how to exercise good politics, but because their faith and their values dictated it, and called for bold action — sometimes in the face of indifference, sometimes in the face of resistance.