Catholic Worker Movement

You may have heard about Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker Movement. If not, here's an excerpt about its history about this movement written by Tom Cornell in his essay A Brief Introduction to the Catholic Worker Movement:

The Catholic Worker movement is made up of people motivated by the teachings of Jesus, especially as they are summarized in the Sermon on the Mount, and the teachings of the Catholic Church, in the writings of the early Fathers and the social encyclicals of the modern popes, to bring about a "new society within the shell of the old, a society in which it will be easier to be good." A society in tune with these teachings would have no place for economic exploitation or war, for racial, gender or religious discrimination, but would be marked by a cooperative social order without extremes of wealth and poverty and a nonviolent approach to legitimate defense and conflict resolution.

The movement publishes a tabloid-size organ seven times a year, The Catholic Worker. Started by an itinerant French worker-scholar (and illegal immigrant) Peter Maurin and Dorothy Day, a veteran left-wing journalist and Catholic convert, the paper was first sold in New York City, at a Communist Party May Day rally in Union Square, for a penny a copy, in 1933. The price remains the same.

Peter had an idea. Dorothy had passion and ability and an unfulfilled desire to work, as she had with the radicals of the Left, for social justice, but now as a Christian and a Catholic. Out of their meeting in 1932, the Catholic Worker was born and the paper first offered to the public five months later. Some early visitors to the Catholic Worker headquarters noted its similarity in style and tone to L'Esprit, the lay Catholic intellectual journal in Paris at that time, identified with Emmanuel Mounier, Charles Peguy and Jacques Maritain. Maritain actively encouraged the work.

The circulation of the paper quickly reached 150,000, to plummet drastically during the Spanish Civil War and World War II, when the editorial position of the paper remained consistently Christian pacifist, and many volunteers and staff members went to prison or public service camps for refusing the draft. Post war recovery was slow but steady, and the movement distinguished itself for resisting Cold War hysteria and red-baiting. The movement took a leading role in stimulating opposition to the Viet Nam War. Early in its history the movement had organized to oppose anti-Semitism and has stood steadily for racial justice.

Over the years independent Catholic Worker house of hospitality and farming communes have sprung up, now numbering over one hundred, some with their own publications. In New York hundreds are fed on a "no questions asked" basis at the soup kitchen, scores of men, women and volunteers make their home in two houses in the Bowery and a farming commune upstate. Regular Friday Night Meetings for the Clarification of Thought are held and the paper's circulation has climbed to 90,000.

Anyone may seek help at the Catholic Worker. Anyone may volunteer who has the ability to take personal responsibility and work respectfully with others. Most of the volunteers are Catholics committed to active nonviolence. There is no means test and no religious test.

You can read the whole essay by clicking on this link.

https://www.catholicworker.org/cornell-history.html