Catholic Worker

Catholic and Christian activists call for a cease-fire outside the White House in Washington, D.C., during a “pray-in” on Nov. 2, 2023. Juliann Ventura/Medill News Service for Sojourners

Fifty protesters gathered for a “pray-in” in Lafayette Square on Thursday afternoon, holding signs directly facing the White House that said, “Catholics say ceasefire now.”

Kris Brunelli 10-30-2023
The image is a collage of many people who are a part of the Catholic Worker community

Top row, left to right: Dimitri Van Den Wittenboer, Bud Courtney, Lyn Lamadrid. Bottom row, left to right: Gerald Howard, Hideko Otake, Tom Heuser. / Photos by Kris Brunelli 

“CATHOLIC WORKER” is shorthand for a movement, a place of hospitality, and a one-penny newspaper started by activist visionaries Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin in the early 1930s in New York City. They imagined urban and rural communities where poverty and loneliness could be alleviated by compassion, connection, shelter, and meaningful work rooted in the teachings of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. Catholic Workers are also the people who dish soup, pour coffee, sweep floors, and work for peace at more than 100 loosely affiliated Catholic Worker houses around the world.

Kris Brunelli has been involved in Catholic Worker communities since 2011 when she started serving soup in New York City’s East Village. She met her husband, Marcus, while they were live-in volunteers at the Denver Catholic Worker. Now the two live in Harlem and volunteer at two Catholic Worker houses of hospitality: St. Joseph House and Maryhouse. Marcus is one of a dozen St. Joseph Catholic Workers that Brunelli interviewed for this story.

Between the clang of ladles and the splash of dishwater, community is born and reborn each day. Although people experiencing hunger and homelessness come to St. Joe’s for obvious needs, everyone who walks in the doors needs something. “We volunteers need community — need it just as much, if not more, as the guests who come and eat,” Brunelli says. “We would be lonely without it — lost, even.” — The Editors

Hideko

AT 8 IN the morning, my husband and I knock on the graffiti-splattered, candy-blue door. Most Mondays, alongside other St. Joseph Catholic Worker volunteers, we help serve breakfast to roughly 80 people. Since 1968, off First Street and Second Avenue in the East Village, people have found community.

“Come in! Come in!” Hideko says.

Five feet tall, a black braid down her back, she smiles over her shoulder. “The boss” several days a week, Hideko asks if we want to help make sandwiches — and heads back to the door when someone else knocks.

She stays busy. Originally from Japan, she’s worked on the Japanese translation of Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor’s 2021 edition of From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, as well as for Democracy Now! Japan, and regularly organizes protests against U.S. military bases in Okinawa. She is “stubborn.” She says, “you have to be to do this work.”

Rose Marie Berger 8-10-2023

A photo of protesters in the Netherlands. Courtesy The Nuclear Report. 

Dutch military police arrested 25 people nonviolently protesting against nuclear weapons and carbon dioxide emissions at Volkel Air Base about 80 miles south of Amsterdam on Aug. 8 and 9, according to Dutch News and Nukewatch.

Rosalie G. Riegle 7-20-2021
The cover of 'Dorothy Day: On Pilgrimage' has a black-and-white profile photo of her looking at the camera.

On Pilgrimage: The Sixties, by Dorothy Day

LOVE IS LACED liberally through this compendium, skillfully edited by Robert Ellsberg, of Dorothy Day’s monthly columns from The Catholic Worker, the newspaper of the movement Day co-founded. Love for God, especially as it lives in the poor whose burdens of poverty she tried to share, shines through Day’s accounts of her travels and her life at the Catholic Worker houses of hospitality in New York and the community’s farms. Seeing examples of living love seems even more important today as our country faces the same problems as in the ’60s: racism, poverty in a land of plenty, and endless wars that consume needed resources.

Day writes of these issues, but love as lived through acts of mercy is what unites the essays. She describes Catholic Worker houses of hospitality across the country where, daily, the hungry are fed, the naked are clothed, the dead are mourned and buried, and the sick and the imprisoned are visited. In these essays, these acts are presented in opposition to works of war and racism. She documents that the latter are fueled by an out-of-control U.S. military whose expenditures rob the poor.

Coming in for special notice are prisoners of conscience, Day’s colleagues who are imprisoned for resisting the draft that fueled the Vietnam War, including, in 1968, burning draft files in Catonsville, Md., and Milwaukee, in nonviolent destruction of what Jesuit priest Dan Berrigan called “improper property.” These nonviolent trespasses against the law by the anti-war and civil rights movements were in obedience to God’s laws. After several good recent biographies of Day, reading again the words that first introduced me to the Catholic Worker movement brought back memories of those days when Day helped so many commit to nonviolence as a way to make a world where, as her mentor Peter Maurin would say, “it’s easier for people to be good.”

Amanda Abrams 3-19-2020

Photo by Kamala Saraswathi on Unsplash

This younger crop of Catholic Workers is unquestionably interested in activism, but the issues they address are different from those of their predecessors.

Ryan Hammill 4-20-2016

Image via Jim Forest / flickr.com

The famous Catholic Worker activist Dorothy Day once remarked, “Don’t call me a saint. I don’t want to be dismissed that easily.” That hasn’t stopped the Archdiocese of New York, however, from moving forward with a “canonical inquiry,” the next step required to become eligible for beatification and then canonization, when a figure officially becomes a saint.

Rachel Marie Stone 8-31-2012
Still from "Norma Rae"/20th Century Fox.

Still from "Norma Rae"/20th Century Fox.

I make no secret of the fact that there is a big soft spot in my heart for the tremendous gains of the labor movement in American history and a big sad spot for how certain unions — such as those representing meatpackers and agricultural workers — have been all but decimated.

So in no particular order, here are some of my favorite pro-labor, pro-union resources for really celebrating Labor Day. 
 

Karla Vasquez 5-08-2012
As part of Climate Impacts Day, Christians in D.C. hold circles to connect the d

As part of Climate Impacts Day, Christians in D.C. hold circles to connect the dots between weather and climate change.

Sacred the land,
Sacred the water,
Sacred the sky,
Holy and true,
Sacred all life,
Sacred each other,
All reflect God who is good.

Franciscan Brother Rufino Zaragoza, OFM

Last Friday night was the first time I uttered this refrain. As I sang, I felt a sense of gratitude to know the significance of these words and to feel the conviction of knowing that I have a responsibility in protecting that which is sacred.

Rosalie G. Riegle 3-01-2012

In “Critical Mass” (January 2012), Karen Sue Smith’s summary of changes in the U.S. Catholic Church since Vatican II, I was dismayed not to see any mention of the profound influence of the sections on peace in “The Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World.”

Shane Claiborne 2-03-2012
Dorothy Day. Getty Images.

Dorothy Day head of Catholic Worker inside the worker office. (Photo by Judd Mehlman/NY Daily News via Getty Images.)

At the National Prayer Breakfast on Thursday, President Obama named Dorothy Day as a “great reformer in American history."

Who woulda thunk it?

This is the same woman J. Edgar Hoover once called a "threat to national security."

Here’s the exact quote from the Obama’s speech:

We can’t leave our values at the door. If we leave our values at the door, we abandon much of the moral glue that has held our nation together for centuries, and allowed us to become somewhat more perfect a union. Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, Jane Addams, Martin Luther King, Jr., Dorothy Day, Abraham Heschel — the majority of great reformers in American history did their work not just because it was sound policy, or they had done good analysis, or understood how to exercise good politics, but because their faith and their values dictated it, and called for bold action — sometimes in the face of indifference, sometimes in the face of resistance.

Rosalie Riegle 12-01-2011

Dorothy Day's deep love of God and her unwavering ability to see God in those the world shuns.

Cathleen Falsani 10-31-2011

occupy london
On Sunday (10/30), the Anglican Bishop of London, the Rt. Rev. Dr. Richard Chartres, met with Occupy London protesters who have encamped for several weeks now on the ground of St. Paul's Cathedral in London, in an ongoing attempt to get the demonstrators to leave church grounds.

Chartres wants the Occupiers to vacate cathedral property and stopped short, in an interview with the BBC yesterday, of saying he would oppose their forcible removal. Other British clergy, however, are rallying behind the demonstrators, saying they would physically (and spiritually) surround protesters at St. Paul's with a circle of prayer or "circle of protection."

Jake Olzen 4-22-2011
As Lent ends and the Holy Triduum begins, my mind turns to resurrection. Perhaps a bit too soon as the Good Friday death of Jesus and his descent into darkness is still impending.
Rosalie G. Riegle 3-01-2011

All the Way to Heaven: The Selected Letters of Dorothy Day, edited by Robert Ellsberg.

Michael Komba 11-02-2010
Since I moved into Casa Maria Catholic Worker in 1999, my work has focused around hospitality for the homeless.
Logan Isaac 10-13-2010

This is the second installment of a series Logan Mehl-Laituri is writing for God's Politics focusing on selective conscientious objection. Read his first installment here.

Will Travers 7-22-2010

Since the recent passage of Arizona Senate Bill 1070, scheduled to go into effect on July 29, those of us working for social justice in the United States have a rare opportunity to register a particularly effective form of protest.

Jake Olzen 6-16-2010
For nearly two months oil has gushed into the Gulf because of BP's government-endorsed "error." The environmental destruction has reached epic prop
I've always longed to see the world through a poet's eyes -- to see the magical in the everyday and to be able to weave words in such a way as to convey that magic to others.