Very human saints …

… Dorothy Day and W.H. Auden: On poetry, piety and the pope | The Economist. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

1933 was of crucial religious significance to both Day and Auden. It was in this year, when the Great Depression was at its bleakest, that Day co-founded the Catholic Worker Movement with Peter Maurin, a radical French immigrant and garrulous autodidact. The first issue of the Catholic Worker appeared on May Day. That summer, a 26-year-old schoolteacher in England was sitting on the school lawns late one evening when he had what he famously called a vision of agape. Auden felt “invaded” by a higher power and for the first time in his life “knew exactly…what it means to love one’s neighbour as oneself.”