Catholic Worker at 75

At Dorothy Day's death in November 1980, at 83, talk was heard that the Catholic Worker, the movement she co-founded in 1933, would vanish without her. She was its Earth Mother--or better, its Reverend Mother, a convert to Catholicism who took literally the call of the Gospels to practice personally the works of mercy and rescue. She would do it with full-risk commitments to pacifism and nonviolent anarchism.

The talk was unfounded. With scant eyeing from the media, and far from the rites of soft-core religion that sanction coziness with Caesar and his court clerics, nearly 185 Catholic Worker houses of hospitality are currently operating in thirty-seven states and ten countries. From July 9 to 12, several hundred practitioners of Day's methods are expected to gather in Worcester, Massachusetts, hosted by two local Worker houses: Sts. Francis and Therese and The Mustard Seed. The occasion is a celebration of the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Catholic Worker, going back to May Day 1933, when Day, then a 35-year-old journalist who had written about class conflict, strikes and war resistance for The Masses and The Liberator, handed out the first copies of her monthly newspaper at a Communist rally in Manhattan's Union Square.

Through thick and thick--there is no thin in poverty's underworld--Worker houses have been models of stamina, going extra miles beyond counting. The Ammon Hennacy House in Los Angeles offers shelter and meals for homeless people and publishes The Catholic Agitator. Viva House in Baltimore runs a food pantry and family soup kitchen. St. Peter Claver House in Philadelphia gleans for food and clothing and has it on hand for all comers. Washington's Dorothy Day House shelters five families, distributes food and stages weekly antiwar demonstrations at the White House and the Pentagon. Scott Schaeffer-Duffy, who with his wife, Claire, started Sts. Francis and Therese House in 1986, echoes Day's line--"we confess to being fools and wish that we were more so"--by saying that Catholic Worker houses seek "an irrational and personalist way of doing things that trusts in the miraculous power of God.... Without government aid, salaries, grants or institutional help from the Church, and often without many volunteers, we feed and house people, deliver aid in war zones, confront local and national injustices, and still manage to have happy personal and family lives. That's pretty miraculous to me."

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