By Thea Jarvis

This July, nearly 200 people gathered for a weekend at Immaculate Conception Seminary in New Jersey to commemorate 50 years of workers from the 80 or so autonomous but loosely affiliated houses of hospitality around the country and those who had been connected in some way to the Catholic Worker movement over the years.

“Throughout the weekend there were indications that our time together was as much a seedbed for ongoing thought and action, as it was an opportunity for exchanging information and ideas, or learning something of the past,” editor Peggy Scherer wrote of the meeting in the August issue of The Catholic Worker newspaper published in New York.

No doubt Dorothy Day would have appreciated the fact that contemporary fellowship and renewal – were looking to the present and future they were shaping, as much as to the past in which they are significantly rooted.

On May Day of 1933, Dorothy Day and the young helpers who hawked the first issues of The Catholic Worker tabloid in New York City’s Union Square had before them that same vision of past roots and present experience that would make their movement soar.

Dorothy had met Peter Maurin in 1932, shortly after her memorable visit to the national shrine in Washington, D.C. on the feast of the Immaculate Conception. There, she had prayed fervently that “some way would open up for me to do something” for the poor, “to line myself up on their side, to work for them,” she recounted in her story of the Catholic Worker movement, “Loaves and Fishes.”

Answer To Prayer

Her encounter with Peter Maurin she later perceived as the result of her prayer. Maurin introduced her to his own Christian personalist philosophy, which included the founding of a newspaper for “clarification of thought,” the opening of houses of hospitality and the establishment of farming communes. He also steeped her in what Dorothy Day called “a Catholic outline of history,” a helpful adjunct to her secular education since she had only embraced the Catholic faith in 1927.

The social teachings of the Church brought them together at a time when the country was floundering and people were suffering. Unemployment, homelessness and hunger were all a part of the picture painted by a depression economy and both felt the Catholic Church had an answer to the hopelessness that was the prevailing malady of the times.

The first issue of The Catholic Worker contained “news accounts of the exploitation of Negroes in the South, and the plight of the sharecroppers; child labor in our own neighborhood; some recent evictions, a local strike over wages and hours; pleas for better home relief, and so on,” Dorothy Day recalled in “Loaves and Fishes.”

The newspaper was but the first step in the progression of Catholic Worker growth. Opening a house of hospitality where, in Peter Maurin’s words, the rich were given the opportunity to serve the poor, followed quite naturally as homeless men came to the New York newspaper office and were fed and young college students and intellectuals stopped by for what Dorothy called “coffee and talk.”

Visitors

Distinguished speakers, authors and scholars visited the office as well, giving lectures on scripture, worship and peacemaking that were, no doubt, the predecessors of the Friday night meetings held regularly in present day Worker houses.

In “Loaves and Fishes,” Dorothy Day remembered, “It sometimes seemed that the more space we had, the more people came to us for help, so that our quarters were never quite adequate.” Because of this, the Worker center enlarged and changed, moved and re-established itself over the years to accommodate volunteers and residents, street guests and visitors.

It did not take long before The Catholic Worker newspaper had established a circulation of over a hundred thousand subscribers, and houses of hospitality patterned on the New York effort were opening up around the country and abroad.

Peter Maurin’s three-pronged philosophy was implemented in 1933 with the acquisition of a small Staten Island farm. It was the first of several agricultural efforts that moved toward Maurin’s ideal of an agronomic university, where people learned to love the labor of the land while being renewed by their closeness to the earth.

Worker Goals

Throughout its history, the Catholic Worker movement has had as its goal the carrying out of the corporal and spiritual works of mercy. In addition, workers espoused, insofar as possible, a life of voluntary poverty, allowing them a union with those they served.

From its beginnings, the Worker has had a pacifist orientation, opposing war in all its forms, in the hearts of men as well as on their battlefields. Such opposition frequently has meant facing prison for civil disobedience, an experience neither scorned nor rejected by workers willing to stand by their principles.

Peter Maurin died in 1949, Dorothy Day in 1980. Some call them social activists; others say they were radical reformers. Many view them as saints. Surely, time will designate their proper place in the world’s view of history.

But 50 years after they began the Catholic Worker movement with the publication of a modest, eight-page newspaper, their dynamic approach to life and its complex challenges continues to exercise a profound influence on the Church and the secular world as well.

Their movement was, in its simplest reduction, about the business of loving. Not the superficial, threadbare loving that leaves us empty and dry of heart, but the harsh and dreadful loving that, in its power, calls forth the best in us and those with whom we share this love.

Forty years after its inception, the Catholic Worker movement continues to succeed because it has attempted to follow the basic blueprint of its founders, what Dorothy Day called “a revolution of the heart.”

“When we begin to take the lowest place, to wash the feet of others, to love our brothers with that burning love, that passion, which led to the Cross, then,” she reflected in “Loaves and Fishes,” “we can truly say, ‘Now I have begun.’”