Peter Maurin’s vision for the Catholic Worker, an idea whose time has come

When I met Dorothy Day after arriving in New York City in 1975, I was 19 years old and she was 78 and the only thing that impressed her about me was that I had read Bread and Wine, a novel by Ignazio Silone published in 1936, that she cherished and often cited. The book’s protagonist is a leader in the Italian Communist party who secretly returns from exile to the village where he was born with the intention of organizing the rural masses to revolt against Fascism. He barely makes it home before falling ill and his fevered musings grasp part of the dilemma of the modern person:

“If only I could wake up tomorrow morning at dawn, put a stick to my donkey, and go the vineyard, Don Paolo said to himself. If I could go to sleep, and wake up, not only with healthy lungs, but with a normal brain, free of all intellectual abstractions. If I could only go back to a real, ordinary life. If I could dig, plow, sow, reap, earn my living, talk to the other men on Sundays, read and study; fulfill the law that says, ‘In the sweat of thy face thou shalt earn thy bread.’ On further reflection Don Paolo decided that the root of his trouble lay in his infraction of that law- in the irregular life he had been living, in cafes, libraries, and hotels, in having rudely broken the chain that for centuries had bound his ancestors to the soil. He was an outlaw, not because he contravened the arbitrary laws of the party in power, but because of his infringement of that more ancient law, ‘In the sweat of thy face thou shalt earn thy bread.’ He had ceased to be a peasant, and he had not become a townsman. It would never be possible for him to return to the soil. Still less would it be possible for him ever to forget it.”

Today it seems obvious that a return to the land, to a proper relationship with creation and to meaningful, productive work is integral to the aims of the Catholic Worker movement. For much of its history, however, since its beginning in 1933, this aspect of its founder’s original intentions was relegated to the margins of an already marginal movement.

For the next eleven years after meeting Dorothy, I lived in Catholic Worker Houses of Hospitality in New York and then Davenport, Iowa, sharing meals and giving shelter to those in need. Peter Maurin’s visions of “agronomic universities” and return to a village based craft economy were not taken too seriously in those days and most of us, I think, would have been just as happy to dump these as slightly embarrassing and quaint anachronisms.

Peter’s “Easy Essays” about Irish monks establishing salons de culture across medieval Europe did not seem relevant to our demanding work of offering hospitality, nor did his suggestion that in following these monks’ example was the answer to global hunger and the threat of nuclear annihilation. We took Dorothy Day at her word that Peter Maurin was her mentor and co-founder of the movement but there was at the time little evidence of his influence in our life and work.

Mel Piehl in his fine historical review of the Catholic Worker movement, Breaking Bread,1982, even quotes some Catholic Workers of an earlier era who suggested that Peter’s “intellectual genius was clearly exaggerated” and that Peter was uncomfortable in his “feigned role of leadership.” Piehl estimates that Dorothy Day had exaggerated Peter’s role as “co-founder” and that she “promoted the fiction that the Catholic Worker was simply an attempt to realize Peter Maurin’s ‘Idea.’” It was, Piehl said, “strategically useful to her as a woman leading a social movement in the sexually conservative Catholic Church, to be able to point to a male co-founder of the movement.”

For generations of young Americans attracted to Catholic Worker communities, the European peasant Peter Maurin might have appeared as obscure and incomprehensible as the very American radical Dorothy Day was accessible. Daniel Berrigan, in his introduction to Dorothy’s memoir, The Long Loneliness, published in 1981, a year after her death, reflected a common if less than generous perception of Peter and his vision: “They started a newspaper and the rest is history. They started houses of hospitality; that too is history. Peter was forever talking about something he called ‘agronomic universities.’ They started one, on the land; and that is something less than history.”

Dorothy’s announcement in The Catholic Worker in January 1936, “we are going to move out on a farm… and start there a true farming commune,” however, was clearly proclaimed with the expectation that history was being made: “We believe that our words will have more weight, our writings will have more conviction, if we ourselves are engaged in making a better life on the land.” While she assured her readers that “we are not going to abandon the city,” it is clear that Dorothy’s historic expectation was that the Catholic Worker was going to realize its original vision, that of a rural based “back to the land” movement keeping some presence in the city, “sending out apostles of labor from the farm, to scenes of industrial conflict, to factories and to lodging houses, to live and work with the poor.”

If this and other early experimental farming communes came and went as “something less than history,” as Dan offers, or as the abject failures that others have named them, the concept did continue to limp along somehow for the next decades. Rather than the cutting edge of a revolution as Peter envisioned the agronomic university, however, most Catholic Worker farms were planned and grew, if they did, as dependent branches of urban Catholic Worker houses of hospitality. Most of these few farms were seen even by those who lived and worked at them in an urban context, as auxiliaries, existing to provide cheap food for soup lines, hospitality for the urban poor and places for retreat and recreation for Catholic Workers from the city. Most were rural responses to urban poverty and homelessness with little regard to the poverty of their neighbors. By and by, the “true farming communes” originally proposed gave way to “retreat centers.”

Some few here and there in the most obscure and remote places have always remembered and stood by Peter’s vision. These were often marginalized and misunderstood by the larger Catholic Worker movement as much as by their neighbors and the culture at large. When in 1986, Betsy Keenan and I moved with our children from the Catholic Worker hospitality house in Davenport, Iowa, to Maloy, a town of less than 30 souls just north of Iowa’s border with Missouri, many friends assumed that we had left the Catholic Worker movement. Some challenged us, what need is there for a soup line in so small a town? No soup line? What kind of Catholic Worker house are you? Whose farm are we, we were challenged, meaning what city house owns and controls our farm, assuming that the legitimate existence of any rural entity is bound to its tie to an urban one. About that time our good friend Chuck Trapkus included in his iconic “Catholic Worker Primer” a cartoon of a man in overalls holding a chicken and saying, “We’re Catholic Workers, too, don’t you forget it!”

Over the past 30 years there has been a great shift in understanding and respect for Peter’s vision and what it means. At one of the sporadically convened national Catholic Worker gatherings, I think that this was in 1987, a “round table” discussion of Peter’s agronomic university was attended by a few of us farmers and the most pressing question that surfaced from the few mildly curious others who wandered in was “why bother with a garden when we have more donated old vegetables from the market than we can ever sort out?” Since that time, there has been a resurgence in Peter’s dreams of farming communes in the movement. At more recent gatherings, roundtables on rural issues and Peter Maurin are among the liveliest and best attended and this, the fourth biannual national Catholic Worker gathering is the largest ever.

This resurgence is evidenced not only in the unprecedented plethora of Catholic Worker farms around the country and abroad. It is also shown in the level of discussion given Peter and his ideas in the newspapers of the various houses. Peter’s influence is seen in the growth of urban gardens in the yards and vacant lots around our city houses. Catholic Worker cottage industries, such as carving spoons, repairing bicycles, making soap, all are examples of a growing movement.

In Maloy each winter we host a craft retreat, when up to a dozen Catholic Workers from around the Midwest crowd into our farmhouse to join us and some neighbors to weave, make cheese, carve wood, dip candles, knit, make baskets, cook, eat, pray, dance and sing. We have fun but these sessions were not recreational in the conventional sense nor are we really “on retreat.” These gatherings are the Catholic Worker movement going about some of its most serious business. As it happens, the craft retreat often gets scheduled just before or after the annual Witness Against Torture event in Washington, DC, an intense time of fasting and action to demand the closing of the prison at Guantanamo and the abolition of torture that I usually attend. In my mind, these two yearly events have melded into one continuum.

This shift of paradigm has come in part, I think, as people who come to Catholic Worker houses are staying longer. While many still come to Worker houses to donate a “gap year” or two of their lives in service to the poor between college and “real life,” from the 1970s on, more and more came and stayed. It has been suggested that some of these moved out to farms looking for a better place to raise kids than an inner city house of hospitality. There may be something to that, but I offer that for many of us, living and working for years with the urban poor made us look deeper into the roots of the world’s problems and see that serving soup, good work that it is, is not enough. Speaking for myself, I needed to live in urban hospitality houses for many years before I could make any sense of Peter’s talk about revolution on the land.

For many of us, too, solidarity work and travel to places exploited by economic and other kinds of colonialism brought us to see that Peter was right when he pointedly insisted that issues of war and peace always are, at the heart, issues of the land and its use. In New York City or Los Angeles as in Jerusalem or Mexico City or San Salvador, the peace and good order of society requires justice on the land. It strikes us, finally, that even the food that we serve on our soup lines that is donated or gleaned from dumpsters depends on slave labor and is grown in ways that cannot be sustained. When the peace for which we yearn and struggle finally comes and our global neighbors will no longer be forced by debt and oppression to clothe and feed us but will use their own labor, land and water to care for themselves, how then will we live?

The crisis of climate change on our threshold, too, makes Peter’s dream of agrarian revolution look less like a medieval utopian fantasy and more like an urgent and rational plan for a new and sustainable social order of the future.

Some criticize such changes in the movement as if they are evidence that we are losing our way. My perspective is that, with some growing pains, the Catholic Worker is rather finding its way now after so many years. “Our houses of hospitality are scarcely the kind of houses that Peter Maurin has envisioned in his plan for a new social order,” Dorothy Day wrote in her column in September 1942. “He recognizes that himself, and thinks in terms of the future to accomplish true centers of Catholic Action and rural centers such as he speaks of.” Perhaps it is true that Peter Maurin’s role as “co-founder” of the Catholic Worker was exaggerated in the past. If so, it might also be true that he is now posthumously growing into that role as the movement matures into the dynamic revolutionary social force it was meant to be.

While I am gratified to see this revival, I must confess that, along with Silone’s Don Paolo, I am still a townsman and after three decades of rural living I am far more at home in the city, “in cafes, libraries, and hotels,” than I am on the farm and in the small town where I live. In recent years as a co-coordinator of Voices for Creative Nonviolence, I am spending about half my time on the farm, half on the road, often in cities in America and abroad, sometimes in war zones and in jails and prisons. Some friends assume that my time on the farm is a respite from the stresses of activism, but the opposite is true. I love my home but often do not feel at rest there- the farm is the place where I feel most challenged and humbled and the city is where I go to escape.

Betsy has become an accomplished weaver, goatherd and gardener, but the skills and attitudes needed to be a farmer continue to elude and frustrate me. Going to jail comes easier for me than fixing a fence or attending a church pot luck. I can make many varieties of cheeses from the milk of our goats, but find more satisfaction writing a press release or organizing a protest. A shopping trip to the county seat can be more daunting to me than traveling alone to Seoul or Kabul. By education, aptitude and temperament, I am not able to return to the soil but neither can I forget it.

We are gathered here, Catholic Worker farmers and friends, at a time of extraordinary uncertainty and peril. It is unclear if the damage our wars and industrialized lifestyles are inflicting on the planet can be reversed at this late date. Never have so many people been displaced and the danger of nuclear war is more imminent now than ever before in the lifetimes of most of us here. If previous generations of Catholic Worker farms have measured in the end as “somewhat less than history,” our efforts today must be of historic proportions, God help us, if we are to contribute to the continuation of life on earth.

- Brian Terrell

Conference on Dorothy Day

A conference that will examine both the person and the teachings of Catholic Worker co-founder Dorothy Day will be held at the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio, TX, at the end of October

London calling: war is over

May this Christmas inspire you to fight the good fight...

Yeah! Dorothy Day is a real human being

Not being a Roman Catholic I do not like the idea of beatification of Dorothy Day, even though I respect the feelings of our Catholic brothers and sisters who would love to see her canonised. Remember, we are all called to saintly behaviour (even though we do not succeed - I remain a staunch Protestant in this respect).

There is one aspect of her biography which I specifically disliked: the sudden separation from her non-believing husband/man/partner (however you want to call him).
And now the indispensable Robert Ellsberg comes up with the story of Day who apparently still loved the man she seemed to have discarded for Rome.
For me it is a reason to rejoice a bit about her and put aside my feelings of doubt about the episode of her conversion.

DOROTHY DAY IN LOVE

Generally speaking, there is not much to say about the sex lives of the saints. Yes, they were great lovers of God, and if Bernini’s famous sculpture “St. Teresa in Ecstasy” is any evidence, one can appreciate that such love was not merely platonic. But what about passionate, erotic, physical love between flesh-and-blood humans? Even if one looked carefully at the lives of the virgin martyrs and the celibate monks, priests and religious who dominate the religious calendar, it would be hard to fill a page on the subject of sex and holiness.

New letters reveal the frank sexuality of a possible saint.

Robert Ellsberg

Generally speaking, there is not much to say about the sex lives of the saints. Yes, they were great lovers of God, and if Bernini’s famous sculpture “St. Teresa in Ecstasy” is any evidence, one can appreciate that such love was not merely platonic. But what about passionate, erotic, physical love between flesh-and-blood humans? Even if one looked carefully at the lives of the virgin martyrs and the celibate monks, priests and religious who dominate the religious calendar, it would be hard to fill a page on the subject of sex and holiness.

There is St. Augustine, who writes about his youthful search for “some object for my love.” In different forms and persons, including his mistress of many years, he evidently found it. But in every case Augustine wants to show how the “clear waters” of love were invariably spoiled by the “black rivers of lust.” Augustine describes his relationship with his unnamed mistress, the mother of his son, in these unflattering terms: “In those days I lived with a woman, not my lawful wedded wife, but a mistress whom I had chosen for no special reason but that my restless passions had alighted on her.”

Dorothy and Forster

It is striking to compare Augustine’s treatment with a similar passage in The Long Loneliness, the memoir of Dorothy Day, the American-born co-founder of the Catholic Worker. There she introduces the story of her love affair with Forster Batterham, and the role he played in hastening her spiritual journey: “The man I loved, with whom I entered into a common-law marriage, was an anarchist, an Englishman by descent, and a biologist.” They met at a party in Greenwich Village in the early 1920s and soon thereafter began to live together—as she put it, “in the fullest sense of the phrase”—in a house on Staten Island.

Among their bohemian set there was nothing scandalous about such a relationship. It was evidently Dorothy who liked to think of it as a “common-law marriage.” For Forster, who never masked his scorn for the “institution of the family,” their relationship was simply a “comradeship.” Nevertheless, she loved him “in every way.” As she wrote: “I loved him for all he knew and pitied him for all he didn’t know. I loved him for the odds and ends I had to fish out of his sweater pockets and for the sand and shells he brought in with his fishing. I loved his lean cold body as he got into bed smelling of the sea and I loved his integrity and stubborn pride.”

Wait a minute! Day is here describing, without any hint of Augustine’s obligatory shame or regret, her physical relationship with a man to whom she was not married. Needless to say, she was not yet a Catholic. Yet her point is to show how this lesson in love, this time of “natural happiness,” as she called it, awakened her thirst for an even greater happiness. She began to pray during her walks and started to attend Mass. This religious impulse was strengthened when she discovered she was pregnant—an event that inspired a sense of gratitude so large that only God could receive it. With that came the determination that she would have her child baptized, “come what may.”

As a dedicated anarchist, Forster would not be married by either church or state. And so to become a Catholic, Dorothy recognized, would mean separating from the man she loved. “It got to the point where it was the simple question of whether I chose God or man.” Ultimately, painfully, she chose God. In December 1927 she forced Forster to leave the house. That month she was received into the church.

The New Letters

So goes the familiar story recounted in her memoir. But it is not the whole story. In editing Day’s personal letters, All the Way to Heaven, I was astonished to read an extraordinary collection of letters to Forster dating from 1925, soon after their first meeting, until December 1932, the eve of her new life in the Catholic Worker.

The early letters certainly reflect the passionate love described in The Long Loneliness. In her first letter she writes: “I miss you so much. I was very cold last night. Not because there wasn’t enough covers but because I didn’t have you.” In the next, “I think of you much and dream of you every night and if my dreams could affect you over long distance, I am sure they would keep you awake.” Separated for some weeks, she writes Forster: “My desire for you is a painful rather than pleasurable emotion. It is a ravishing hunger which makes me want you more than anything in the world and makes me feel as though I could barely exist until I saw you again...I have never wanted you as much as I have ever since I left, from the first week on, although I’ve thought before that my desires were almost too strong to be borne.”

The letters skip over the time of Tamar’s birth and Dorothy’s conversion, but after her parting from Forster they resume with poignant intensity. Despite the implication in Dorothy’s memoir that her conversion had marked an end, once and for all, to their relationship, this was far from the case. In fact, the letters continue for another five years, as Dorothy pleaded, cajoled and prayed that Forster would give up his stubbornness and consent to marry her.

In vain, she assured him that he would be “involving [himself] in nothing” if he married her. “Religion would be obtruded on you in no way except that you would have to see me go to church once a week, and five times a year on various saints’ days. I would have nothing around the house to jar upon you—no pictures and books. I am really not obsessed as you think I am.”

At times she could not hide her frustration: “Do I have to be condemned to celibacy all my days, just because of your pig-headedness? Damn it, do I have to remind you that Tamar needs a father?” Her tone fluctuated between tenderness and bitter reproach: “I am not restrained when I am lying in your arms, am I? You know I am not a promiscuous creature in my love.... But it is all so damned hopeless that I do hope I fall in love again and marry since there seems to be no possibility for a happy outcome to our love for each other.”

By the fall of 1932 Dorothy was living in New York. In December she traveled to Washington, D.C., to cover the Hunger March of the Unemployed. There on the feast of the Immaculate Conception, she offered a prayer that God would show her some way to combine her Catholic faith and her commitment to social justice. Immediately afterward she would meet Peter Maurin, the French peasant philosopher who would inspire her to launch the Catholic Worker and whose ideas would dominate the rest of her life. Whether there was any relation between the opening of this new door and the decision finally to close the door on her hope of marrying Forster, Dorothy’s letter to him of Dec. 10 would be her last for many years.

After describing her strong commitment to the prohibition of sex outside of marriage, she writes: “The ache in my heart is intolerable at times, and sometimes for days I can feel your lips upon me, waking and sleeping. It is because I love you so much that I want you to marry me.” Nevertheless, she concluded: “It all is hopeless of course, tho [sic] it has often seemed to me a simple thing. Imaginatively I can understand your hatred and rebellion against my beliefs and I can’t blame you. I have really given up hope now, so I won’t try to persuade you anymore.”

But even this did not mark the end of their relationship. Over the years they remained connected through Tamar. There would be friendly notes, the exchange of gifts and visits in the hospital. In Dorothy’s final years Forster took to calling every day. He was present at her funeral in 1980, and later at a memorial Mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral.

More Fully Human

So what, in the end, do these newly published letters reveal? They certainly confirm the deep, passionate love described in Dorothy’s memoir, thus underscoring the incredible sacrifice she endured for the sake of her faith. That sacrifice lay at the heart of her vocation; it was the foundation for a lifetime of courage, perseverance and dedication. It marked her deep sense of the heroic demands of faith. But in no sense did it represent a conflict in her mind between “merely” human love and “higher” religious aspirations. “I could not see that love between man and woman was incompatible with love of God,” she wrote. And if she had had her way, she would have embraced a happy family life with Forster and the many children she dreamed of.

Although, as Dorothy reported, some of her radical friends insinuated that her turn to God was because she was “tired of sex, satiated, disillusioned,” her true feelings were quite different. “It was because through a whole love, both physical and spiritual, I came to know God.”

If Dorothy Day is one day canonized, these letters will provide a fairly unusual resource. They serve to remind us, if that were necessary, that saints are fully human—perhaps, as Thomas Merton put it in Life and Holiness, more fully human: “This implies a greater capacity for concern, for suffering, for understanding, for sympathy, and also for humor, for joy, for appreciation for the good and beautiful things of life.”

Dorothy considered her love for Forster to be one of the primary encounters with grace in her life, one for which she never ceased to rejoice. That insight and that witness are among her many gifts.

*

Some letters - it may look like voyeurism, but it may also be comforting for the doubtful...

The angelic preaching of Christian anarchism

A must-see if you do not want to read about Christian anarchism: A peace of the anarchy.

A very short but informative introduction to Dorothy Day

An extraordinary weakness of Christianity is that it has become respectable. The word Christian conjures up images of sober, upstanding, solid, safe and responsible citizens. One wonders if a combination of those terms is not in fact a betrayal of the essence of Christianity. When you read the Gospels you are left strongly with the impression that Christianity has little to do with respectability.

One of the constant criticisms of Jesus by his opponents is that he was not respectable enough. Jesus kept bad company, hanging out with sinners, prostitutes, tax collectors, and other unreliable characters. One modern Christian who combined a deep faith with a radical lifestyle was a lady called Dorothy Day. She is not well known on this side of the world but she made a huge impact in the United States in the 20th century and I would like to share her story with you.

Further reading.
One comment on this piece of Fr. Ultan McGoohan: to infer from a novel that the author has experienced what the protagonist experiences is the wrong way to read a novel.
Presumably Dorothy Day had an abortion, but we cannot decide that from a novel. As far as I am aware Day never concedes to this event.

h/t Christian Radical

Margaret Pfeil on Dorothy Day

Margaret Pfeil of Notre Dame (I think Andy Alexis-Baker studied languages there) has written a little reflection on Dorothy Day here.

Among other things she deals with the perennial question of Day's anarchism and Roman Catholicism. It's good stuff.

Dorothy Day and Ammon Hennacy speak

Salvaging my Geocities-site also implies I have to see where to stall Bas Moreel's Religious Anarchism Newsletter. They date back from the times when very few people had their own daily weblog. This is issue nr.1, from June 2001.

The real reason why I start this bulletin is that, at the moment, nobody else is known to me who does such a thing. A theoretical reason might have been that religious anarchism is too important a thing to leave it to religious anarchists as it is also not good to leave anarchism in general to anarchists alone (impurity, reformism, dirty hands is the law of survival, also for ideas, as wrote once Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, who coined the word "anarchist" and was not blind to contradictions in life, for which he saw reconciliation in the specific serial dialectics he developed).

In this first issue I have only materials from a Roman Catholic background. I came across them by chance, as is the case with much of what I pass on in my newsletters. I will be happy with materials that widen my knowledge in this field: my more or less nomadic life leaves me little opportunity for systematic searching.

I start with fragments from an interview with Dorothy Day, the American co-initiator of the Catholic Worker movement together with the Frenchman Peter Maurin, as published for the first time in 1971 in the Los Angeles Catholic Worker monthly "Catholic Agitator".

Agitator: Are you an anarchist?

Dorothy Day: In my first year of college, when I was sixteen years old, I joined the Socialist Party. But I found most of the members 'petty bourgeois', good people but very settled family people. And it was very theoretical. It had no religious connotations, none of the religious enthusiasm for the poor that you've got shining through a great deal of radical literature. Then there was the IWW moving in. The IWW has this motto: 'An injury to one is an injury to all'. That appealed to me tremendously because I felt we were all one body. I had read scripture, but I don't think I'd ever really recognized that teaching of the 'Mystical Body' - that we are all one body, we are all one.

A: Was this more of a political than a spiritual outlook at this point?

DD: No, I think it was a spiritual outlook, too. I just felt a profound truth there that appealed to me. The idea that when the health of one member suffers, the health of the whole body is lowered is a teaching of St Paul which is timeless. So I joined the IWW.

A: Would you be more specific about what it means to be an anarchist?

DD: The whole point of view of the anarchist is that everything must start from the bottom up, from man. It seems to me so human a philosophy.

A: Why did you become a Catholic?

DD: Because I felt it was the church of the poor, because I felt its continuity. I felt that no matter how corrupt or rotten it became, it had this feeling for man. It had the mark of Jesus Christ on it, walking the roads of the country, gathering a few around. You see this pattern. You see this pattern in Castro, Che Guevara; and that's why they are so attractive to people. They work where they are. They begin at the bottom. And then, of course, they go off and become the bureaucratic state. Castro wasn't a Marxist. He was a Catholic educated by the Christian Brothers and the Jesuits. The Communists in Cuba didn't assist Castro in his revolution. It wasn't until Castro marched triumphantly into Cuba that you might say the whole thing grew into a Marxist revolution.

A: Do you ever, as an anarchist, see any incompatibilities between anarchy and Catholicism?

DD: No, I think anarchy is natural to the Catholic. The Church is pretty anarchistic, you know. Who pays attention to the Pope or the Cardinals? Conscience is supreme, and that's why we print it on the front page of our The Catholic Worker monthly paper. The saying of Vatican II is above all 'Conscience is supreme'.

A: Sometimes you go to see the bishops and members of the hierarchy in the Catholic Church. What do you talk to them about?

DD: We talk about the work. As Cardinal McIntyre said to me looking at our paper: 'I never studied anything like this in the seminary'.

A: Would you talk briefly about how the Catholic Worker started with you and Peter Maurin?

DD: This will madden Women's Liberationists when I say that Peter Maurin was the one who was totally responsible for it all. I met him as a result of the things I had written. When he came to see me, he was a regular tramp living on the Bowery; a French peasant and a man of great knowledge, however. He had taught in Christian Brothers' schools in France. He had tremendous knowledge of movements all over Europe. He laid down a very simple program - the kind of program people would just laugh at. Foremost in this program was the necessity for the clarification of thought. I knew that Lenin had said there could be no revolution without a theory of revolution. And when Peter talked about clarification of thought, I thought this was what he was talking about. He said we needed discussions and meetings and a paper to bring things before the public. He said we should sell it ourselves on the street. He used to have 'Friday night meetings' every night of the week. He wore us out. He talked about Houses of Hospitality where there would be direct action of the works of mercy. Round table discussions, Houses of Hospitality, and farming communes - that was his solution. And you see them coming about. You see ideas that somehow or other are in the air - communes all across the country, young people trying themselves, testing themselves in various ways. I think it's all part of a world movement. Why should so many people find assent to what we write in the paper - and such a diverse group of people, too? It's something which is coming, which is evolving. I think that just as we're in the nuclear era we're also in an era of non-violence. It's undefeatable. And the evidence of non-violence are these great movements like the Chavez movement [an American movement to get better working and living conditions for farm workers, BM]. It makes its appeal. It seems impossible to buck the agribusiness. But I've seen this with my own eyes.

A: How is the work you do in the city with the poor related to the work you do as a journalist?

DD: You can't write about things without doing them. You just have to live that same way. You start in with a table full of people and pretty soon you have a line and pretty soon you're living with some of them in a house. You don what you can. God forbid we should have great institutions. The thing is to have many small centers. The ideal is community.

A: Does the Catholic Worker offer any sort of alternative existence to the poor other than a bowl of soup and a bed to sleep for the night?

DD: It offers them community too - although we fail every time. That's also life. How can you not fail? That's the human condition. I think that at the Catholic Worker we have high aims. But how much mingling is there, really, between the worker and the scholar? You get acquainted with some and they become very dear to you. They become so much part of the family that you get mad at them. There's so much you have to endure in community. It's like parents with their children. You just have to forgive seventy times seven. There is nothing logical in all this. It's very hard to talk about. That's why I dread any kind of interviewing. Because, how can you express these intangible things that the Catholic Worker is doing? You can sit down and add up how many people were fed yesterday afternoon, how many people were served each morning at the jail, how many cups of coffee are distributed - that kind of turnstile counting. It's impossible to measure the real value of these things.






II. QUOTES FROM AMMON HENNACY'S "BOOK OF AMMON"

Ammon Hennacy became a religious anarchist at some point and had connected with Dorothy Day. The following is a quote from 1950.

I had not met Dorothy since September 1941 in Milwaukee. Now I was overjoyed to get a card from her saying that she would be here in Phoenix December 29th. The leading anarchist of this country happened to be in Phoenix just then, so I asked him if he and his atheistic Italian anarchist friends would like to meet Dorothy. Accordingly we met one evening in an anarchist home. The atheistic anarchists led off by saying that anarchism as defined by Bakunin negates all authority: that of the state and that of God. Therefore for Christian and especially Catholic anarchists to use the name anarchism is unethical. Furthermore it hurts the feelings of Italian anarchists who have felt the lash of the Catholic hierarchy.

Dorothy listened carefully to this reiterated statement and replied that this argument had not been brought to her attention before and deserved careful consideration. She felt that man of his own free will accepted God or rejected God and if a man chose to obey the authority of God and reject the authority of the state it was not unethical to do so. She inferred that we were born into a state and could not help it, but accepted God of our own free will. She and Bob Ludlow are converts to the Church. The atheistic anarchist answer was that it was entirely illogical to use the anarchist conception of freedom to accept the authority of God which denies that freedom. Dorothy felt that the authority of God only made her a better rebel and gave her courage to oppose those who sought to carry over the concept of authority from the supernatural to the natural field where it did not belong. She said that the use of the word anarchism by the CW might shock people; that Peter Maurin, although an anarchist, had generally used the word 'personalist' instead, but she felt that Bob Ludlow and myself used it rightly.

Another anarchist present thought that Ludlow had slipped over the use of the word anarchism on Dorothy. She replied that she stood back of all he said on the subject. This same anarchist repeated the regular argument that religion was opium for the people and that the Catholic Church always stood for the rich against the poor and that the CW was as bad as the history of the church. The anarchist leader felt that if the CW was only called the 'Anarchist Worker' instead of the CW it would be the best anarchist paper going. It was the word Catholic that spoiled it. These atheistic anarchists felt that if I had not hid behind the CW I would have been arrested long ago for my tax refusal. Dorothy answered that I had been a Christian anarchist long before the CW was ever heard of. The anarchist leader said that Tolstoy in his 'Appeal to Social Reformers' denounced the regular anarchists of his time and therefore should not be considered an anarchist. I replied that I had read that article of Tolstoy's long ago and that Tolstoy was simply decrying the atheism and violence of various types of anarchists, and saying that without pacifism and the Fatherhood of God there could not be an effective anarchistic brotherhood of man. I also quoted from a book 'Tolstoy the Man' by Prof. Stirner issued by Fleming Revel Co. about 1902. Prof. Stirner visited with Tolstoy and quoted him as saying that he was such an anarchist as Jesus and the Sermon on the Mount had made him not to be afraid of the word anarchism, for the time would come when people would know its true meaning; that one who had accepted and obeyed the laws of God was thereby divorced from obeying the laws of men and did not need them. Stirner was sort of a Fabian Socialist, and he asked Tolstoy if socialism was not a step on the way to anarchism. Tolstoy answered that it was not and that it would end in a terrible [illegible in the photocopy I'm using, BM]. Dorothy mentioned the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross, original sin, etc., emphasizing the fact that rebels who sacrifice for a cause need this supernatural help to remain true. The anarchists misunderstood this idea or else were physically unable to accept the importance of sacrifice saying that what they wanted was better material conditions and not pie in the sky; that religion made people willing slaves. Under pressure from Dorothy and myself they admitted that a good martyr now and then like the Haymarket men and Sacco and Vanzetti, was a good thing; but they did not like the emphasis upon sacrifice.

I felt that this was the trouble with the present atheistic anarchists: that they were not willing to sacrifice enough. I reviewed my prison history to prove that what changed me from being a socialist and an atheist was the example of that true rebel Jesus. That thus my sanity had been saved and I had emerged from prison an anarchist. That I was associated with the CW because of its brave stand in publicizing my anti-tax campaign when anarchist and pacifist papers said very little about it. That my idea of God was not an authority whom I obeyed like a monarch but a principle of good as laid down by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount, which I interpreted in day by day decisions as the forces of the state came in conflict with these ideals. And that in the same manner every person had to make a choice between his conception of good and of evil. The anarchist leader still felt that religious people had no right to use the word anarchist, although we knew that he as an anarchist could not go to law and prevent it. I replied that the atheistic anarchists were more atheistic than they were anarchistic, so he should not be adverse to allowing Christians or Catholic Christians to be at least as religious as they were anarchistic, if not more so. That the atheistic anarchist should be glad that the CW had left the state worship of ecclesiastical authorities and were anarchists. I said that the atheistic anarchist did not realize that it was possible for a Catholic to accept spiritual authority and not - like most Catholics - accept the state and temporal authority; that the atheistic anarchist should be glad that someone was fighting authority in one sphere - and the most difficult sphere at that - where the atheistic anarchist stood no chance of being heard. Dorothy told of losing over half of the CW subscribers because the CW opposed Franco and World War II. The summary of Bob Ludlow on this subject seems conclusive: "There is an incompatibility between anarchism and religion only if the Christian insists on transforming the authoritarian set up of the Church to the temporal field or the anarchist insists on rejecting authority in religion. In both cases it comes from a confusion of the supernatural with the natural".

I felt that a fair summary of the question would be that whenever we of the CW became cowardly because of pressure from the Pope, then it would be time for the atheistic anarchists to decry our use of the name 'anarchism'. And that as long as they had no Pope to tell them what to do they ought to assert their native anarchism and come out and be as brave fighters against war and capitalism as were Bakunin, Berkman and Goldman, whom they revere.

The New York Catholic Worker monthly magazine has since some time been bringing purely anarchist articles again. (For a while it was almost exclusively religious.) The May 2001 issue carries three short articles on the classic subject "Electoral Politics and Anarchism" that would not be treated differently in a mainstream anarchist publication. Further, it carries an almost full A3 page review of Alice and Staughton Lynd's "The New Rank and File", which might as well have been published in "Fifth Estate" or in "Echanges". Every May the magazine publishes "The Aims and Means of the Catholic Worker", a title and much of the contents that covers which might as well have appeared in a mainstream anarchist publication, e.g.: In politics, the state functions to control and regulate life. Its power has burgeoned hand in hand with growth in technology, so that military, scientific and corporate interests get the highest priority when concrete political policies are formulated.