There was Always Bread

"Who was Brezhnev?” a Russian child of the future asks his grandfather in a contemporary Soviet joke. And he responds, “A minor politician of the Solzhenitsyn and the Sakharov period.”

Perhaps the day will come when a child will ask, “Who was Billy Graham? Who was Pope Paul?” And the answer may be, “Minor religious figures of the Dorothy Day period.”

Dorothy Day wouldn’t approve of the joke, of course. For one thing, she has great appreciation for Pope Paul. For another, she doesn’t want to be burdened with admiration. “Don’t call me a saint,” she fired back at one starry-eyed soul, “I don’t want to be dismissed so easily.”

Nor would she appreciate being torn from her context, the Catholic Worker movement. For others, that movement is incarnated in her; in her own vision it is nothing more than an awkward but necessary expression of the practical life (and the hard sayings) of Jesus. She would emphasize, without a trace of false modesty, the founding role played by a wandering scholar from France, Peter Maurin. She would talk of all those who have come into the Worker community over its 43 long years.

And yet her friends and co-workers know, in both love and bruises, the Catholic Worker movement would be a very different thing, if it existed at all, were it not for the volcanic stubbornness of Dorothy Day.

Apart from that religious stubbornness that has become such a signature of the Catholic Worker movement, it is unlikely that contemporary Christianity would be dotted with so many occasions of hope, so many communities dedicated to the works of mercy and of peace, as many lives so closely centered on the simplicity, poverty, and vulnerability of Jesus.

To look at recent history with a biblical consciousness is to see in the Catholic Worker movement, and in Dorothy Day and others who have been its parents and guardians, one of the main vehicles of God’s presence in recent history, transforming individual lives and even reviving the conscience of religious institutions. Had there been no Catholic Worker, no Christian body would be quite as respectful of the sacredness of conscience and of life.

Yet the recognition of this is rather new. If Dorothy Day is prominently featured in the latest Who’s Who and has a full page of four-color presence in Life’s recent special issue on women, only a few years ago she, with the Catholic Worker movement, was often viewed as a borderline heretic who rightly belonged in the prison cells she so often inhabited. Catholic theologians and bishops (but it could have been Niebuhr or Tillich) denounced the Catholic Worker pacifism -- even while grudgingly admiring the Worker’s houses of hospitality (which were nothing more than the Worker’s witness to that absolute reverence for life which the theologians condemned).

Dorothy was viewed with intense suspicion. After all, as she herself sometimes puts it, “The bottle always smells of the liquor it once held.” And Dorothy used to be a communist, if never a docile pupil of party line. She was a militantly radical secular journalist (first jailed in a feminist demonstration in front of Woodrow Wilson’s White House). She was the common-law wife of an anarchist -- and mother of a daughter out of wedlock. She used to drink into the small hours of the morning with Eugene O’Neill and many other Greenwich Village visionaries who were only too willing to agree with Marx that religion is the opiate of the people. “Convert” though she might be, she would never be cleansed of her absurd and dangerous notions. Why, she calls herself an “anarchist” and recommends books by Kropotkin! In a “Catholic” newspaper!

But there was in Dorothy no wolf in sheep’s wraps. In 1927, in a conversion process brought on by her pregnancy and the birth of Tamar, she had been slowly drawn to the end of her “long loneliness,” intoxicated with an ardor not only for the life taking root within herself, but for that mystery in which all life is rooted. “How can there be no God, when there are all these beautiful things?”

She became, to the scandal of most of her friends, not merely religious, not just Christian, but a Catholic -- so often seen as the worst, the most reactionary, the least free, the least tolerant of all the major religious bodies. A Catholic.

But for Dorothy Catholicism was something altogether different from what her friends perceived. It was that immense net that had caught not only scoundrels but saints beyond counting. It was the church of the Mass: the persistently present Jesus waiting in bread and wine on the altar. A church of respect for those who have died, a church which, in G.K. Chesterton’s words, thought of tradition as being “democracy extended through time ... the universal suffrage of giving the vote to one’s ancestors.” It was a church in which there was not only the thanksgiving sacrament on the altar but the healing sacrament of forgiveness in the confessional. It was a church insistent about the demands and discipline of faith. And it was the church of the working masses of the poor. So she saw it. Such was her experience. And she could not resist saying yes to a longing to be in it rather than at its edges.

Yet in December, 1932, a freelance journalist watching a “hunger march” parading past heavily armed police into the city of Washington, she was filled with grief that, however spiritually fulfilling the church had become for her, it offered her no adequate vehicle to respond to injustice and suffering. The march she was reporting for a Catholic journal had been inspired and led by Communists, not Christians. She ached with the realization that there were so many “comfortable churchgoers” who gave “little heed to the misery of the needy and the groaning of the poor.”

She went from the march route to the crypt of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception. It was the feast day for which the Shrine was named. “There I offered up a special prayer, a prayer which came with tears and with anguish, that some way would open for me to use what talent I possessed for my fellow workers, for the poor.”

One has to watch out about prayers, particularly those of the heart. There is always the danger they will be answered.

When Dorothy returned from Washington to her New York tenement apartment, Peter Maurin was waiting for her: a rumpled, tramp-like man in his 50s who spoke with a thick French accent. He came because, having read her articles, he had decided she alone could start a unique newspaper, to be the voice of a major movement. He wanted to call it The Catholic Radical.

Not everyone could stand Peter. He was a better talker than a listener. He had an intense vision of what needed to be done, and he pushed his ideas with seldom a pause. But Dorothy, though not a bad talker herself, was fascinated. Peter had a plan for a movement that would help produce a society “in which it is easier for people to be good,” and the vision struck a chord in Dorothy that has never stopped resonating.

By May 1, 1933, the first issue of the paper minted from their friendship appeared. Its name had evolved into The Catholic Worker, and it was distributed first at a Communist rally at Union Square.

From the first, the paper stood for certain rather definite programs. What made the Worker different, however, from numerous publications was that the editors felt it a duty to carry out their own ideas and not just write about them. Thus, The Catholic Worker’s proposal that every parish have a house of hospitality translated itself into the Catholic Worker’s first house of hospitality: a place of welcome and sustenance for those who had no food or welcome.

The Catholic Worker advocated communities on the land, and soon they had such a community. The Worker saw scant hope for a more human society within the industrial system, whether capitalist or Marxist in sponsorship -- nor did it see cities as having much reason apart from industry. The Worker stood instead for a culture founded in faith, agriculture and decentralism -- the sort of thing which Gandhi was already saying, half the world away, and Schumacher and the ecology movement have said more recently. While the urban houses of hospitality responded to devastating needs and sufferings in practical ways, its rural communities were the seeds of “a new society within the shell of the old.”

The editors advocated, but, more significantly, they practiced “voluntary poverty,” a way of life resting on the New Testament admonition, “Let the person with two coats give to the one who has none.” When some have nothing, let no one have too much. Nor let anyone imagine that owning and controlling make life more meaningful or secure -- rather, more hemmed in by fears and less secure. They yield more days, perhaps, but less love, less sense of dependence on God’s providence, less need for community and human caring.

But the Workers’ most dangerous and alarming affirmation was of nonviolence. They found in Jesus no closet general. He was the one who not only ordered his disciples to “put away the sword” but who made himself a victim of the sword -- who submitted to the electric chair of his day, and made it a passage-way to life, a sign of freedom from bondage to those who would, in the name of law or idolatry to flags and borders, make murderers of us.

The Catholic Worker’s oft-tested pacifism was given its first trial in the Spanish Civil War. The Worker was one of three Catholic papers in the U.S. that refused to sanction Franco’s war against the Republic. Nor did The Worker offer its blessing to the Republican side. It published articles decrying the violence of both sides -- for which it was excommunicated from the Catholic Press Association and shorn of the bundle orders, nearly 100,000 copies in all, which went into parish newspaper racks.

During World War II, the Korean War, and the Indochina War, it continued to stand for “peace without victory.” Despite a controversy within the Worker movement in the early '40s, Dorothy’s conviction prevailed that the way of Jesus had nothing to do with “just wars,” or killing of any kind. The Worker would instead continue with “the works of mercy,” a way that answered to hunger, thirst, illness, homelessness, rejection and grief -- and which would add nothing to those forces (such as war) which create hunger, thirst, illness, homelessness, rejection, and grief.

Amazingly, the Catholic Worker community lived its dissenting life in a joyful spirit. “All the way to heaven is heaven,” Dorothy would say over and over, quoting from one of the saints, "because Jesus said, 'I am the way.' " In The Worker’s pages one would often find a sentence of Leon Bloy’s, “Joy is the most infallible sign of the presence of God.”

The Worker witness has often been marked, however, with sacrifices, not only of material comforts, but of freedom. No one has counted how many in the Catholic Worker movement have gone to prison for work against war and racism and various other injustices, but it has been the norm rather than the exception. Dorothy herself was arrested repeatedly for her unwillingness, in the ‘50s and early ‘60s, to join in New York City’s annual war game: Citizens were required to obey a siren’s wail and hurry into basements and subways -- ”shelters,” it was advertised, from a potential nuclear blast. (Finally, as the number of resisters to the war ritual grew, the city gave up the annual drill.)

The Worker’s history (read Dorothy’s books or William Miller’s A Harsh and Dreadful Love) is full of such episodes. They all offer evidence to sustain a conviction that this is a witness transcending any particular religious tradition or non-tradition. The Worker is less a body of doctrine than a way of life founded in compassion, a compassion so genuine -- and thus so practical -- that it has kept its adherents in day-to-day community with those most scarred by what Dorothy calls, in her usual plain speech, “this filthy, rotten system.”

The spirit of the Worker is of love, but of a love willing to resist, and of conversation, but conversation ready for action and argument. Yet love, resistance, and action is all in the spirit of conversation -- of friends sitting around a table late into the night, drinking tea or coffee, and eating stale scavenged bread. Thus I often recall the words in which Dorothy ended her autobiography, The Long Loneliness:

We were just sitting there talking when Peter Maurin came in.

We were just sitting there talking when lines of people began to form, saying, ‘We need bread.’ We could not say, ‘Go, be thou filled.’ If there were six small loaves and a few fishes, we had to divide them. There was always bread.

We were just sitting there talking and people moved in on us. Let those who can take it, take it. Some moved out and that made room for more. And somehow the walls expanded.

We were just sitting there talking and someone said, ‘Let’s all go live on a farm.’

It was as casual as that, I often think. It just came about. It just happened.

I found myself, a barren woman, the joyful mother of children. It is not easy always to be joyful, to keep in mind the duty of delight.

The most significant thing about the Catholic Worker is poverty, some say.

The most significant thing is community, others say. We are not alone anymore.

But the final word is love. At times it has been, in the words of Father Zossima [in The Brothers Karamazov], a harsh and dreadful thing, and our very faith in love has been tried through fire.

We cannot love God unless we love each other, and to love we must know each other. We know Him in the breaking of the bread, and we know each other in the breaking of bread, and we are not alone anymore. Heaven is a banquet and life is a banquet, too, even with a crust, where there is companionship.

We have all known the long loneliness and we have learned the only solution is love and that love comes with community.

It all happened while we sat there talking, and it is still going on.

Jim Forest was an editor of The Catholic Worker in the early '60s. With Tom Cornell he co-edited a Catholic Worker anthology entitled A Penny C Copy (MacMillan, $2). When this article appeared, he was leaving the editorship of Fellowship magazine to serve as coordinator of the International Fellowship of Reconciliation secretariat at its headquarters in Alkmaar, Holland.