Jesuit missionary Jacques de Brébeuf worked with the Indigenous Huron people for years and wanted to give the people a carol of their own, in their own language.
Pietro Di Donato wrote 'The Penitent' because he thought it to be a profoundly human story—though both the murderer and the victim became larger than life in reality.
After Dorothy Day's death in 1980, her biographer William Miller wrote her obituary for America, noting that "the amazing thing about her life was the improbability of it all."