Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker

I became a Catholic because of St. Francis and Thomas Merton. I became a Catholic Worker because Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin took the monastic idea, liberated it from the confines of walls and vows, and gave it away freely, along with soup and bread. Finally, I "left" the Church because I was not "up to par", even after running a Catholic Worker House for thirty years and hundreds of priests were literally caught with their pants down...

​Of course, these words are an over-simplification of the "stuff of life", and of particular interest to me, of my life and the 87th Anniversary of the Catholic Worker Movement. A whew is due to all who have been, are now, or will be at some point in the future, Catholic Workers. I remember sitting at a table in the dining room of Dorothy's Place Hospitality Center in Salinas. Across from me was Mia, dear friend and a co-director of Dorothy's. We were in the midst of a deep conversation when a tall gray-haired man entered and asked if he could volunteer. We pointed him in the direction of the Kitchen... and continued talking... About an hour later (yes, our meetings could continue indefinitely), and he walked back to us and asked if he could volunteer again. "Yes! Of course we would love to have you!" He handed us his card and promptly left.

This was always the way it was at Dorothy's. Mia and I looked at the photo on the card. "Oh, my God! That was Bob Fitch!" Bob Fitch, of course, was the photographer of "the movement": he was "the" photographer of Martin Luther King, Jr., Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers, Daniel Berrigan, Joan Baez and David Harris, the Hippies, and of Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker. It was Bob who took the above photo, the last time that Dorothy was arrested. On a following volunteer visit to Dorothy's, he brought a large, framed, copy of this photo which we proudly hung on the dining room wall...

This little story of our introduction to Bob Fitch is a, sort of, summary of 87 years of the Catholic Worker. The grand has a way of happening in the midst of the very ordinary: and it is precisely in and through those little moments, or cracks in the ordinary, that the grace of Mystery, like water, just seeps through, almost without notice... This, more than anything else, is the meaning and purpose of the Catholic Worker: oh, yes, there are Kitchens, there are shelters, there are farms, there is political resistance, as there are newspapers and appeals for the steady supply of emergencies... But it all happens in the midst of very ordinary days... there is always work to be done and seldom enough happy and willing bodies to do it, yet somehow, the days just flow, each one into the next...

Books of St. Francis, Teresa, Merton, and Hildegard are with others about Dorothy, Peter, Helen and Scott Nearing, MLK, Cesar Chavez, Russian spirituality, the Tao, the Gita, Celtic and Creation spirituality, and poetry and art and, well, books are essential for the heart, not just the mind: we have a very fine home library! Oh how Dorothy loved books! She would love to see Dostoevsky on our shelves! Have any of you ever read his short story The Dream of a Ridiculous Man? You could come over and read it sitting right there on our sofa...

​Quite a few people are excited about the coming day when Dorothy is declared an official saint of the Catholic Church -- in spite of her protest that she did not want to be dismissed so easily! Dorothy Day remained a faithful member of the Catholic Church from the moment of her conversion to her death. The Church didn't deserve her then and even less now. How many billions of dollars have been reluctantly handed over by the Church to the victims of sexual abuse? And to lawyers defending the Church and others defending the children? Cardinal Dolan glad-hands with Trump... Burke wears reams of flowing silks as if a living God... and still women are not good enough to be priests... To my knowledge no one ever referred to Dorothy Day as a priest, but wasn't she, though? The potatoes that she peeled for the soup-of-the-day were holy indeed: the trembling hands of the alcoholics in the soup-line received holy communion from this simple, strong, and very holy woman: worthy, I say, of any altar anywhere...

​I can't and won't bring myself to enter a Catholic Church again, even if I will always, like Dorothy, be a Catholic. I don't think of myself as a rebel any longer, that takes too much self-congratulation and energy. It's just that Dorothy, and the real saints that I admire, simply loved as well as they could in the ordinary ways of their ordinary lives. I think that this, and this alone, is reason to honor, and celebrate, 87 years of the Catholic Worker Movement: the ordinary is always good enough. Anyone who tells you something different has something to sell... or is himself looking to be canonized someday, when all that matters is loving the person right in front of you, person-by-person: this is the revolution of Dorothy Day... Anyone can do this, one day at a time, one moment into the next... Love happens, over and over again, when you least expect it...