BOOK Review
Jack Rakosky of VOTF Cleveland OH

The Catholic Worker Movement: Intellectual and Spiritual Origins. Paulist Press, New York/Mahwah, New Jersey, 2005

Mark and Louise Zwick write in their book, “The Catholic Worker was and is a lay movement without official status in the church and without formally defined leadership.” According to the authors , Dorothy Day has been called “the most significant, interesting and influential person in the history of American Catholicism” and “the most outstanding lay Catholic of the twentieth Century.” They also say that co-founder Peter Maurin was described as “the best-read man that he had ever met” by the Jesuit who edited America magazine at the time. “He can cram more truth into your cranium at high speed in a single hour than any ordinary person in a week,” said John Moody of Moody’s Investors. His obituaries were found not only in the Industrial Worker, which was on the government’s list of subversive organizations, but also on the front page of the Vatican newspaper.

VOTF may be able to learn much from the strengths and weaknesses of the Catholic Worker movement. Mark and Louise Zwick are the founders of the Houston Catholic Worker called Casa Juan Diego as well as the founders and editors of the Houston Catholic Worker Newspaper. In this book they do much to document two strengths of the movement. Broad intellectuality and deep spirituality were combined with constant and persistent activism.

Although Dorothy Day remains the better known public face of the Catholic Worker movement, she always acknowledged that Peter Maurin was her primary teacher. Peter had been a Christian Brother for a few years in France. He then became a member of a lay movement for greater involvement in the world that used small study groups. Peter was very strong on both intellectual and spiritual formation. He liked the 100 Great Books program that was widely publicized in the 1930’s and felt that the Catholic Worker ought to have a similar list of books. Peter was both a peasant and a scholar. He saw the integration of study and work as essential to Christian life. Monasticism, especially Irish monasticism with its emphasis upon intellectual and physical labor, provided the model for “making laborers out of scholars, and scholars out of laborers,” or as we might say, making doers out of thinkers and thinkers out of doers.

The book documents the Catholic Worker’s varied intellectual interests including: writings that supported its communitarian personalist philosophy, the Liturgical Movement because of Virgil Michel’s emphasis upon the connection between liturgy and social justice, the history of Christianity because of its evidence for Christian nonviolent thinking and practice, and the social teachings of the Popes. Their intellectual interests stood them well in dealing with bishops (who were ignorant of many of these things) and average Catholics (the Catholic New York police were reluctant to arrest people with signs proclaiming papal teaching). Ultimately their homework on the history of nonviolence paved the way for the papacy’s current view that the possibility of a just war is unlikely.

Both Peter Maurin and Dorothy Day believed that the most important thing to do was to be a saint. This book documents the extensive list of spirituality employed within the Catholic Worker movement including monasticism, Franciscan, Jesuit, and Carmelite spirituality. They brought all this together to support their movement. Again it was helpful in dealing with bishops (the New York chancery did not want to be known for having persecuted a saint) and laity, as well as for their own personal edification.

The issues of labor, poverty and violence that spawned the Catholic Worker movement are very different from the issues of child sexual abuse and accountability that spawned VOTF. However our issues like their issues involve everyone, not just the Church. The exploitation of children and lack of management accountability by large institutions are national and international issues. They deserve all the intellectual and spiritual resources that we can assemble.

The communitarian personalist philosophy was at the heart of the Catholic Worker movement. It emphasized both individual personal responsibility (doing something not just talking and complaining) as well as working together locally in houses of hospitality. The Catholic Worker national organization was a very loose one, mainly using the Catholic Worker newspaper. Their organizational philosophy and practices merit close study by VOTF. See my more extended review essay “Blowing the Dynamite of the Church: What Can VOTF Learn from the Catholic Worker Movement?” on the VOTF Cleveland web site .



In the Vineyard
June 28, 2007
Volume 6, Issue 12 Printer Friendly Version (PDF)


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Survivor Community News

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CONVENTION 2007

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