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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 .
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