Catholic Worker Movement

CATHOLIC WORKER MOVEMENT. Founded on New York’s Lower East Side during the depths of the Great Depression in 1933, the anarchistic Catholic Worker movement was the brainchild of two colorful personalities: Peter Maurin (1877–1949), an eccentric French émigré philosopher, and Dorothy Day (1897–1980), a Brooklyn-born former Wobbly and Socialist with Communist sympathies who had become a Catholic convert in 1927. It embraced four basic tenets: voluntary poverty (to build solidarity with the oppressed), and the achievement of social justice through nonviolent activism, pacifism; and personalism (a stress on the individual’s responsibility to remake society through direct, personal intervention). Primary sources for the Catholic Worker movement’s ideas are the life of Jesus, as recorded in the four Gospels of the New Testament, as well as papal encyclicals such as Rerum novarum (1891) and Quadragesimo anno (1931). In addition, the lives of such saints as Teresa of Ávila and Thérèse of Lisieux and the writings of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Jacques Maritain, Emmanuel Mounier, and others have been important influences. Catholic Worker Houses of Hospitality, which feed and shelter the poor, first appeared in 1933 in New York City and then throughout the United States (especially in the Northeast and Midwest) as well as, to a lesser degree, abroad. By the early twenty-first century, the Houses of Hospitality in the United States numbered about two hundred. Less long-lived have been the dozen or so Catholic Worker farming communes that have appeared in the United States since 1933.

Inspiring Day with his ideas, Maurin left the practical execution of them largely to her. In the Catholic church of the 1930s, such a role at the helm of a radical lay organization was rare for a woman—especially one who, like Day, was a Catholic convert, single parent, and veteran of the Old Left. For Day, the Catholic Worker movement united the secular radical activism of her youth with the traditional Catholic piety of her later adulthood. Indeed, as a Catholic Worker she continued her civil-disobedience activities, including several arrests and jailings in the period 1955–1960 resulting from her protests against civilian defense air-raid drills in New York City.

In these activities Day was joined by Ammon Hennacy, a World War I draft resister who energized the Catholic Worker movement during the 1950s with his colorful, old-time pacifism and anarchism. Fearless, witty, and committed to fomenting change, the indefatigable Hennacy picketed and traveled around the country to proselytize for Catholic Worker principles and wrote about it in the Catholic Worker (which he served as associate editor).

A former writer for the Socialist Call, the Masses, and the Liberator, Day instinctively recognized the centrality of reform journalism to the Catholic Worker cause. On May Day, 1933, the first issue of the movement’s tabloid-size paper, the Catholic Worker, was distributed in Union Square. Day remained publisher, editor, and chief writer until her death, living in voluntary poverty at Saint Joseph’s, the Catholic Worker House of Hospitality in New York City. She attracted artists such as Fritz Eichenberg, Adé Bethune, and Rita Corbin, and writers such as Jacques Maritain, J. F. Powers, Lewis Mumford, Claude McKay, Catherine de Hueck Doherty, Danilo Dolci, Daniel and Philip Berrigan, Thomas Merton, and Michael Harrington. Through the Spanish Civil War, World War II (when internal discord over the pacifism issue threatened to split the movement and subscriptions plummeted to 50,500), the Korean War, and the Vietnam War, Day hewed the editorial line to social justice and pacifism. Circulation revived, and in early twenty-first century publication moved on-line. With an annual subscription rate of 25 cents, Catholic Worker may be considered one of the most significant (and editorially consistent) advocacy publications in US history.

Over the years, the radical stance of the Catholic Worker movement and its paper has attracted the close scrutiny of both the Catholic church hierarchy and J. Edgar Hoover’s Federal Bureau of Investigation. However, the Catholic Worker survived to challenge several generations of Americans to strengthen their commitment to social justice and peace. It invigorated Catholic, non-Catholic, and secular justice and peace activism. In May 2019, in an anniversary issue of the newspaper, the movement reaffirmed its commitment to social justice, the poor, a decentralized society, and endorsed the Green Revolution.

Coy, Patrick G., ed. A Revolution of the Heart: Essays on the Catholic Worker. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988.

Klejment, Anne, and Alice Klejment. Dorothy Day and “The Catholic Worker”: A Bibliography and Index. New York: Garland, 1986.

Klejment, Anne, and Nancy L. Roberts, eds. American Catholic Pacifism: The Influence of Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker Movement. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1996.

Miller, William D. A Harsh and Dreadful Love: Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker Movement. New York: Liveright, 1973.

Miller, William D. Dorothy Day: A Biography. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1982.

Piehl, Mel. Breaking Bread: The Catholic Worker and the Origin of Catholic Radicalism in America. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982.

Roberts, Nancy L. Dorothy Day and the “Catholic Worker.” Albany: State University of New York Press, 1984.

Stoughton, Judith L. Proud Donkey of Schaerbeeck: Ade Bethune, Catholic Worker Artist. Saint Cloud, Minn.: North Star Press, 1988.

The Dorothy Day-Catholic Worker Collection, 1897- . Special Collections and University Archives. Marquette University. https://www.marquette.edu/library/archives/Mss/DDCW/DD-main.php