And it’s still going on…

The Catholic Worker after Dorothy

Practicing the Works of Mercy in a New Generation

by Dan McKanan

Liturgical Press, 2008

Reviewed by Brian Terrell

A few years before Dorothy Day’s death in 1980, I overheard a journalist ask her if she thought that the Catholic Worker movement she cofounded with Peter Maurin in 1933 would survive her. “Why shouldn’t it?” Dorothy replied, “It has already survived more than forty years of me!” Several historians who had studied the movement up to that time had already decided that the Catholic Worker’s best days were long past, presenting it as an artifact of Depression-era radicalism. More recently, some observers both inside and outside the movement have expressed the belief that Dorothy’s death stands as a dramatic and sharp boundary between a better, more orthodox past and a very different, less coherent present and suggest that the Worker today has largely abandoned the original vision of Day and Maurin.

Dan McKanan’s book, The Catholic Worker after Dorothy- Practicing the Works of Mercy in a New Generation, gives a more optimistic perspective than these and belies its title by presenting the history of the Catholic Worker as a living tradition in an unbroken sweep from its founding to the present. McKanan successfully offers what he calls “a general account of the Catholic Worker movement that takes the last few decades as seriously as the founding generation and that takes the houses and farms spread across the nation as seriously as the New York houses of hospitality.” (page 3) His conclusions that present trends in the movement are not a departure from its foundations and that the movement has experienced phenomenal growth in recent years are amply documented and certainly resonate with my own experience of the Catholic Worker in various places from 1975 to the present.

Not only have the number of houses of hospitality and farms doubled in the years since Dorothy’s death, McKanan notes, but the number of communities that are more than 25 years old has increased tenfold! Such resiliency is rare in the histories of communal movements with charismatic founders. I sometimes wonder if the many reports of the movement’s disintegration might be because a breakdown like that is so much expected that it is perceived even against all evidence to the contrary. “Yet herein lies the key to the Catholic Worker’s endurance: it has never really tried to endure.” (page 22) Dorothy “consistently took more interest in the people who were drawn to her movement than in the preservation of the movement itself.” (page 4)  McKanan understands that the Catholic Worker was never intended to be a formal institution or school of theology but rather an organic network of relationships and as such it endures and thrives. Paradoxically, it is precarity- the state of existing on the brink of extinction that is feared and fended off at all costs by most institutions and movements- that has proved to be the natural and healthy condition of the Catholic Worker.

Catholic Worker personalism- valuing the person over the institution- extends beyond the intentional communities of Catholic Workers to those who come to the movement’s houses of hospitality out of need for food, clothing and shelter. Dorothy and Peter Maurin had no interest in founding a charity but rather they intended to change a society. McKanan quotes Dorothy’s realization after she joined the church that her strong sense of human dignity made her “resent rather than feel proud of the sum total of Catholic (charitable) institutions.”  “Charity,” Dorothy insisted, “was a word to choke over,” and she recommended “the spiritual and corporal works of mercy and the following of Christ to be the best revolutionary technique and a means of changing the social order rather than perpetuating it.” (page 9)

These “works of mercy” commended by Dorothy and that McKanan places at “the heart of the Catholic Worker movement” (page 6) are based on the vision of judgment in the 25th chapter of Matthew’s Gospel, where it is revealed in the end that whatever was done for (and whatever was neglected to be done) for the “least of these” was done for (or not done for) Christ Himself. By the Middle Ages a standard list of seven “corporal works of mercy”: feeding the hungry, giving drink to the thirsty, clothing the naked, sheltering the homeless, visiting the sick, freeing the prisoner and burying the dead was established, along with seven “spiritual works of mercy”: instructing the ignorant, counseling the doubtful, admonishing sinners, bearing wrongs patiently, forgiving offenses, comforting the afflicted and praying for the living and the dead.

The Catholic Worker has never held that the only way to live out the works of mercy is in the context of the large urban hospitality house that the movement is best known for, or, indeed, that this is even the best place to live them. “We always have more to feed, and to house, and to clothe than we can humanly handle,” Dorothy critiqued her own house in New York, “Breadlines are a disgrace.” (page 138) Meeting and knowing Christ in the poor, living in solidarity with the poor and serving at a personal sacrifice can be done in many ways. The “Christ room” that St. John Chrysostom suggested every family provide for a stranger in need has often been cited by Dorothy as an ideal- “We must never cease emphasizing the fact that the work must be kept small.” (page 43)

“As a hermeneutical principle, the works of mercy help account for the extraordinary depth of the Catholic Worker movement,” McKanan suggests. (page 11) The practice of the works of mercy must be interpreted more broadly than simply providing direct service to those in need. The one time that Dorothy Day mentioned me in her “On Pilgrimage” column was when I was arrested with a group blocking railshipment of plutonium into a nuclear weapons’ factory. “I rejoice to see the young people thinking of ‘the works of mercy’ as a truly revolutionary, but nonviolent program. The spiritual and corporal certainly go together,” she wrote, “and often involve suffering. To oppose the nuclear buildup has led to the imprisonment of two of our workers, Robert Ellsberg and Brian Terrell, in Rocky Flats, Colorado.” (The Catholic Worker, June 1978, 2)

McKanan corrects several misconceptions about the Catholic Worker and its founders that are held not only by scholars who study the movement but are also widely accepted among those who have dedicated their lives to living it. He makes and supports these challenges gently and with generosity and good humor toward those whom he sees as mistaken.

My hope is that many who are attempting to live the Catholic Worker but who feel alienated by what has been presented as the Worker tradition in various books and newsletters will find the clarifications McKanan offers reassuring. To parents who are raising children in Catholic Worker communities and have always heard that Dorothy Day never welcomed families, McKanan shows that “she always believed that it was possible to combine family life with the works of mercy” (page 5) and gives examples from around the country and over the generations, including Dorothy’s own family, where this has been done. For those troubled to read declarations such as “presently the Catholic Worker movement is suffering from the post- Vatican II quagmire of thought” (Houston Catholic Worker, March 1995) or that “Dorothy Day would turn over in her grave!” (Stephen Hand, Traditional Catholic Reflections and Reports) McKanan establishes that vigorous discussion of the controversial issues facing the church has been going on all along and that the tensions around these discussions are not new but have “existed within many Catholic Worker communities, both during and after Day’s lifetime.”(page 184) Diversity and dissent on these issues are “certainly not a drift away from the unambiguous sense of Catholic identity that prevailed during Dorothy Day’s lifetime,” but represent instead “communities across the ideological spectrum … struggling valiantly to sort out the spiritual ambiguities that Dorothy Day had tolerated.”(page 142) As much as the movement cannot be separated from its Catholic origins and context, it is also true that “the Catholic Worker has never been exclusively Catholic in its inspiration or its membership” and that “from the beginning, the Worker’s blend of Catholicism and radicalism also leaves plenty of space for Catholics who aren’t especially radical and radicals who aren’t Catholic in the slightest.”(page 17)

McKanan remembers that “when Dorothy Day became a Catholic in 1927, she was not attracted by the church’s orthodoxy but by the fact that it was the religion of the masses.”(page 182) When Jack Cook, an associate editor of the Catholic Worker challenged the assumption of monolithic doctrinal orthodoxy in the movement by writing in that paper, as McKanan reports, that “criticism of such defined dogmas as the perpetual virginity of Mary was not ‘unthinkable’ in the Worker… but rather ‘irrelevant in the face of war, poverty, starvation, oppression and nuclear holocaust,’” and insisted that “the most profound criticism of the ecclesial establishment is the very existence of the Catholic Worker- in words and acts, past and present,”(page 184) Dorothy was not turning in her grave as some might suggest she should have been. For one thing, this was published in 1968 when Dorothy was still alive and vitally involved as editor and publisher of the paper.  It was under Dorothy’s editorship that Ammon Hennacy’s harsh criticism of the church and articles challenging church teaching on birth control and in favor the ordination of women were published. “Such commentary has actually been less common in the pages of the New York Catholic Worker since Day’s death.” (page 192)

Many who are critical of what they see as present day Catholic Workers succumbing to the secular confusion of the age might find themselves uncomfortable with some of Dorothy Day’s own attitudes as well. The chapter title, “Wrestling with the Church,” aptly describes not only the relationship of contemporary Workers with the Catholic Church but also that of Dorothy with the church that she loved with all her heart yet still found to be “a scandal at times” and that she often counseled to others that one must live with in a “state of permanent dissatisfaction.”(page 185)

Another quite different book about the Catholic Worker and its founders, The Catholic Worker Movement- Intellectual and Spiritual Origins (2005) by Mark and Louise Zwick, two good people who began their Worker “pilgrimage” in Houston in 1980, the year that Dorothy died, laments a “leadership vacuum” left in her absence. She and Peter Maurin, they write “were the acknowledged leaders, visiting other Catholic Worker communities and approving leaders for new houses. After their deaths, however, there was the question of what would happen regarding leadership of the movement.”(Zwick, 316) This question, along with “Who Will Inherit the Mantle of Dorothy Day?” (Houston Catholic Worker, May, 1994) would not, I think, occur to many who actually knew Dorothy. Dan McKanan holds a larger and better informed view and recognizes that Dorothy had wisely and most deliberately abrogated that kind of leadership role decades before she died. “On those occasions when she tried to ‘lead’ directly by appointing subordinates or setting boundaries, her efforts almost always backfired,” sometimes leaving no small damage and pain in their wake. Indeed, an honest look at the movement’s early history would show that Dorothy was not entirely disingenuous or self depreciating when she quipped that the movement had “survived” forty years of her. Not as the autocrat (or “anarch”) that her temperament might have impelled her to be “but as a mentor, friend, and teller of stories about her own mentors and friends, she inspired thousands of people to devote their lives to the works of mercy.”(page 4)

McKanan also challenges the conventional history of the movement as he names a chapter of this book “The Flowering of the Sixties,” in contrast to the chapter title describing the same period in William Miller’s 1982 biography, Dorothy Day, “The Travail of the Sixties.” Certainly the ‘60s were tumultuous years for Dorothy as they were for many and the cultural upheaval both in society at large and in the movement in those days sometimes filled her with what she could only call desolation. This was also a time, though, of growth and of amazing possibilities, giving Dorothy, McKanan says, “ample reason to feel both vindication and mortification.”(page 72) In those years Dorothy travelled to Rome to petition the Second Vatican Council to condemn nuclear weapons and greeted the council’s “Pastoral Constitution on the Church and the Modern World” with joy. She visited the revolution in Cuba that she had long admired from afar. The horrors of the Vietnam War “stirred a new generation of Workers to heroic acts of resistance” (page 72) that Dorothy celebrated. Even as some aspects of the protests that took place in the 1960s troubled Dorothy, McKanan rejects the notion that the “extreme resistance” that began with the destruction of draft board files then and the Catholic Worker represent “two rival approaches to Catholic nonviolence” (page 90) as they are sometimes portrayed.

The “flowering” that McKanan perceives as beginning in the midst of the crucible of the 1960s that most historians miss is that “the hippie generation of Catholic Workers achieved something that very few of the founders had: they figured out how to make whole lives out of the Catholic Worker movement.”(page 91) They were able to do this, he suggests, by learning from one another in a national web of friendships that did not really exist before but that endures to this day. My own memory of coming to the movement in the ‘70s is that there were very few individuals in the New York community where I lived or in others around the country who had been in the movement for more than a short time.   “The gold moves on,” Dorothy often lamented, “and the dross remains.” (page 23) Yet some few of those who arrived at the Worker in the decade before me and some who arrived in the next few years did remain. Some are still with us in various communities; some have raised families in the movement and have grown children living the life as well. McKanan credits these as much as Dorothy Day herself for the endurance of the Worker. “They are moreover,” he says, “the ones who have handed Day’s legacy on to the new generation that is now adapting the Worker vision to the twenty-first century.”(page 5)

One important development in the movement in the years “after Dorothy” that I believe McKanan might have given more attention is the growth of the rural, back to the land vision of Peter Maurin. More than ever, Catholic Worker farm communes have come to be regarded as more than mere appendages or auxiliaries to urban hospitality houses and as integral to the Worker program in their own right. I am also disappointed that while McKannan expanded his scope beyond New York, he limited it to the United States.  Since Dorothy’s death, the movement has also seen great growth in size and in spirit in Canada, Mexico, Europe, New Zealand and Australia and these are important parts of the story of the Catholic Worker. But these are minor quibbles and this is a book that I heartily recommend.

Dan McKanan’s The Catholic Worker after Dorothy- Practicing the Works of Mercy in a New Generation is a welcome addition to scholarship about the movement and deserves to be read and discussed by all who want to understand or participate in it. No other book presents so well the history of the movement over the past few decades or the present state of the Catholic Worker in this, its 75th year of existence. The Catholic Worker belongs not just to the past but perhaps even more to the present and, hopefully, to the future. McKanan opens his book quoting Dorothy Day’s autobiography The Long Loneliness “it all happened while we sat there talking, and it is still going on.” I am grateful to Dan McKanan and to his publisher, The Liturgical Press of St. John’s Abbey with its long association with the Catholic Worker movement, for this important contribution to a lively conversation that began so many years ago and is still going on today.

Brian Terrell is founder of Stranger and Guests Catholic Worker, Maloy, Iowa, and a co-coordinator with Voices for Creative NonViolence.