By Isaiah Ritzmann
Published June 2023
At the beginning of May the Catholic Worker movement turned 90 years old. The newspaper Dorothy Day and her collaborator Peter Maurin launched still sells for a penny a copy. The hospitality houses they began still exist on the lower east side of Manhattan, feeding over a hundred people a day and housing some thirty-odd people. Meanwhile across the United States and around the world roughly two hundred hospitality houses and farming communes persist in the daily practice of the works of mercy and with the slow work of building a “new society in the shell of the old, where it is easier for people to be good” (as Peter Maurin put it).
I had the great privilege to stay at the New York Catholic Worker this spring for their anniversary celebrations. This privilege was also a personal pilgrimage. Having never lived in a Catholic Worker community per se, the movement has nonetheless been a formative influence on my life since my early 20s. I first arrived, by serendipitous accident, on the steps of the New York Catholic Worker weeks before I turned twenty-one. Returning over a decade later, now in my early thirties, was an occasion for reflection – not just about the impact of the movement on my own life, but on the lives of many more people over multiple generations.
When a Catholic Worker house of hospitality begins it is often a precarious enterprise. A movement dedicated to personalist action, the founders are committed individuals who don’t draw a salary for their work. A zeal for solidarity means any surplus they have is often given away to those who need it. Radical stances on justice and peace can sometimes alienate supporters. An allegiance to the principles of freedom and responsibility means there is no overarching “Catholic Worker central committee” that coordinates, organizes and resources each community. All of this, and more, is no recipe for stability or sustainability. In fact by some estimates about a hundred Catholic Worker communities have been founded each decade since the 1960s. If all of the communities that were ever founded existed today, there would be over a thousand communities in existence. But there are not. No wonder one Catholic Worker told me at the May Day celebration that “really, what we are celebrating is ninety years of failure.”
Still I wonder – how do you measure the life of a movement like the Catholic Worker? What is success? And how is it achieved? From the beginning the Catholic Worker has explicitly embraced a sort of spiritual anarchism, eschewing political and economic means of gaining and maintaining power and success. Dorothy and Peter and the movement they founded have often said “no” – “no” to weapons, “no” to wealth, “no” even to voting, “no” to different forms of organization. “No,” in other words, to forms of worldly power. At one point Peter said there would only be two powers the Catholic Worker would embrace – “the power of thought and the power of example.”
It’s not insignificant that outside of New York City, Dorothy and Peter never started any other house of hospitality. Of the thousand or so Catholic Worker communities that have existed, all began as more-or-less local initiatives. They were born out of inspiration not commandment. And these were just communities under the name of Catholic Worker. What about all the other communities and groups that drew upon the philosophy, practice, and lived witness of The Catholic Worker – including The Working Centre? What about all the individuals, like myself, who have found their own ways to live out the values and philosophy? It’s uncountable how many people have found food, shelter, clothing, and friendship because of the hidden influence of the Catholic Worker. Thought and example are indeed powerful.
There is a certain, unmeasurable and amazing success to all of it. Kierkegaard once wrote that “When the tyrant dies, his rule is over. When the martyr dies his rule begins.” Dorothy Day died at eighty-three. She was not killed for her beliefs. But she was nonetheless a martyr – in the sense of someone who suffered in that lived example she gave. It wasn’t easy for her. The loneliness. The poverty. The internal conflicts. The misunderstandings. The sense of failure. But she kept practicing and she kept preaching. And now over forty years since her death and ninety years after its founding, the Catholic Worker movement still persists. It may be a failure in some senses – it is far from perfect – but there is more love in the world because of what Dorothy and Peter started. And this is no small thing.
