The Catholic Worker’s New York City office buzzed with energy in December 1934. It was a newsroom and a relief centre, a joint spiritual hub and protest centre. The Great Depression raged, President Roosevelt wrangled over the Social Security Act, and the movement’s work piled up.
Dorothy Day – the Catholic Worker’s founder and editor – wrote stories for the eight-page paper at a desk, and her daughter, Tamar, played with a microscope. But she did a lot more than that.
Day and a small group of volunteers handed out shoes, and shirts, and food to anyone who drifted in looking for help. They bounced between organising mass services and picket lines, coordinating with printers and aid workers, and taking time to listen to people who walked into the building.
“[Catholic Workers] did this work out of a sense of personal responsibility, we lived in [voluntary] poverty … we gave our work, mental and manual labour, and we tried to strip ourselves to put on Christ,” Day wrote in Poverty is the Face of Christ, a 1952 editorial.
The movement allowed – in the words of its co-founder Peter Maurin – scholars to become workers and workers to become scholars. It set up houses of hospitality and collective farms where volunteers prayed, studied, and worked, refusing to distinguish between the acts.
“It is beautiful here [at the Catholic Worker’s Easton Farm]. I scrubbed the outhouse and kitchen this morning … I never see [workers at their] manual labours in the morning without wishing to take a hand,” Day wrote to Joe Zarrella, a longtime supporter, in June 1938. But that did not stop her from editing the movement’s newspaper that month.
Labour, in Day’s mind, was a divine act channelled toward God’s human forms, from the working mother needing a home to a destitute crowd yearning for food. In her view, working toward the common good was a form of honourable devotion that deepened the mystical union between the individual and Christ.
“One gets a feeling and a knowledge of materials, of God’s creation, and becomes co-creator, in fashioning wool from a fleece and towels from hemp,” she wrote in a January 1960 diary entry.
Day saw humble labour, directed towards the transcendent, as the basis of a pacifist revolutionary programme. In her 1960 biography of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux – a cloistered Carmelite nun – she expressed her hope that everyone would adopt the saint’s commitment to thoughtful, holy labour.
Saint Thérèse, whose feast day passed on 1 October, lived her life with an absolute belief in the power of contemplative and contentious labour to bring people into closer union with the transcendent.
She spent weeks nursing nuns during flu outbreaks and laboured in her isolated convent for years. Even after falling sick with an eventually fatal illness, she persisted and refused efforts to weaken her workload. The saint struggled to dress herself, but still cleaned clothes and windows, swept floors and made beds.
Saint Thérèse presented Day with a model for social action. “When the whole world seems given over to preparedness for war and the show of force, the message of Thérèse is a different one,” she wrote.
“[Thérèse] speaks to our condition… It is an explosive force that can transform our lives and the life of the world,” she added.
But Day never romanticised the shop floor or the mine shaft. She had spent her 20s as a Marxist, and retained the movement’s concerns and analytical insights long after her conversion to Catholicism.
Industrial capitalism inflicted subtle spiritual violence onto workers, degrading and dehumanising them, she argued in her 1946 essay, The Church and Work. Workers on a factory floor lose any connection to the products of their labour, turn into extensions of machines, and give themselves up to their employers, she explained.
But that is the path to spiritual harm. “When one gives one’s self up to one’s work, when one ceases to think and becomes a machine himself, the devil enters in,” Day said.
“As soon as one becomes beside one’s self, as soon as we lose ourselves … there is the danger of the devil entering in. He looks for just such opportunities, and modern life is full of them,” she added.
The Catholic Worker movement did not discount material concerns, despite its spiritual focus. Day personally spent decades standing in solidarity with striking unionists and organisers, sparking conflicts with the US Government and the Archdiocese of New York.
In April 1949, after Cardinal Francis Spellman described himself as a strike-breaker and called in seminarians to replace striking gravediggers, Day stood with the workers in the pages of the Catholic Worker.
“The terrible significance of the [dispute] lay in the fact that … here in our peaceful New York, a Cardinal, ill-advised, exercised so overwhelming a show of force against a handful of poor working men,” she wrote.
“It was a temptation of the devil to that most awful of wars, the war between the clergy and the laity,” she added.
Decades later – in August 1973 – a 75-year-old Day was arrested at the United Farm Workers’ (UFW) Delano grape strike. She had travelled across the country to picket with the union, at Joan Baez’s request, and marched onto a grape orchard at 4 am, breaking a court injunction.
She spent days in prison, haunted by escalating violence outside, and prayed for justice. But Baez also visited to serenade her. “[Baez’s] voice, her complete control of it is remarkable,” Day accurately wrote of the singer.
But despite Day’s commitment to labour, the opposition to capitalism was not purely instrumental. She viewed inequality as grotesque and injustice as intolerable. Yet she could forget the deeper question that guided most of her life: How do we create a society where it is easier to be good?
In her view, wages and working conditions needed to be improved, but economic reform could not – by itself – solve the deeper material and spiritual challenges that workers face.
By Avinash Govind