Copyright 2003 The Irish Times
The Irish Times
May 5, 2003
HEADLINE: 'Living simply so that others can simply live'
Members of the Catholic Worker Movement have been to the fore in recent
protests. Who are these people? Dr Mary Condren explains
BODY:
Relatively new to Ireland, the Catholic Worker is a radical pacifist movement.
Some of its central aims, often still misunderstood even in the US, the land of
its genesis, are to respect the sacredness of conscience and of life and to
address hunger, illness, homelessness, rejection and grief, thus attempting to
conform our lives to "the folly of the cross".
The Catholic Worker maintains that Jesus had nothing to do with "just wars" or
killing, but ordered followers to renounce the sword.
The dynamic partnership of Dorothy Day, a left-wing journalist and Catholic
convert, and Peter Maurin, a French philosopher and manual labourer, sparked
the movement in New York in 1933. The Catholic Worker newspaper espoused the
budding movement's belief in personalism, voluntary poverty and pacifism. They
established many houses of hospitality for the poor during the Depression era.
Living in public tenements in solidarity with the exploited and dispossessed,
Day and Maurin's philosophy was that of "living simply so that others can
simply live".
Day was deeply influenced by Maurin's long-term vision of ownership by workers
of the means of production, decentralisation of workplaces and the revival of
skilled work such as crafts to replace the assembly line. The movement's long-
term social vision has always had an agrarian emphasis.
Day often noted the disparity between the life of Christ and the institutional
Church, which at first regarded the movement as a harmless embarrassment,
denouncing its pacifism but admiring its houses of hospitality. But Day noted
that "For Christ Himself, housed in the tabernacles in the Church, no
magnificence is too great; but for the priest who serves Christ, and for the
priesthood of the laity, no such magnificence, in the face of the hunger and
homelessness of the world, can be understood."
An unwed mother and college dropout, Day claimed that she was just an ordinary
woman touched by an extraordinary grace freely available to all.
Intrinsic to her understanding of Catholicism was the willingness to be jailed
for acts of civil disobedience/divine obedience (anti-war protests and workers'
rights demonstrations), embracing voluntary poverty (embodying the Church's
preferential option for the poor), and continuously highlighting the injustices
wrought by private and state capitalism.
Many important figures - Thomas Merton, Daniel Berrigan S.J. and his brother,
the late Phillip Berrigan - were influenced by Catholic Worker philosophy and
praxis, taking part in and supporting the draft-card burnings of the 1960s. The
contention that human life is sacred was central to their thinking.
To highlight the criminality of warfare and of nuclear arms, the Berrigans
started the Ploughshares movement in 1980, breaking into a General Electric
plant in Pennsylvania and disarming warheads. Their aim was to embody the
prophecy of Isaiah to "beat swords into ploughshares".
Catholic Worker philosophy regards poverty and militarism as symptoms of the
same deeply flawed system, so hospitality and resistance in the context of
community are equally important.
Some 140 Catholic Worker communities now exist around the world, the majority
in the US.
Some are hospitality-oriented, while others hold hospitality to the poor and
resistance-oriented activities in a balanced tension.
Perhaps their ethos is perhaps best captured in Day's description of the
genesis of the movement: "We were just sitting there talking when Peter Maurin
came in . . . lines of people began to form saying 'We need bread.' We could
not say 'Go, be thou filled'.
"If there were six small loaves and a few fishes, we had to divide them. There
was always bread. . . Heaven is a banquet and life is a banquet, too, even with
a crust, where there is companionship."
Day defined the spiritual works of mercy thus: "enlightening the ignorant,
rebuking the sinner, consoling the afflicted as well as bearing wrongs
patiently, and we have always classed picket lines and the distribution of
literature among these works."
The movement considers Christian non-violence to be actively resistant, rather
than submissive. At the time of the Spanish Civil War in 1937, Day wrote
that "We must stand opposed to the use of force We are not talking of passive
resistance. Love and prayer are not passive, but a most active, glowing force."
But jail, resistance, poverty, and marginalisation all take their toll, what
Day described in her autobiography as "the long loneliness". But their hidden
weapon was community, an essential ingredient to living the dissenting life
with a joyful spirit.
Ironically, Day's canonisation is now under way. Traditional Catholics have
difficulty with aspects of her politics and life history: radical Catholics
believe that canonisation would sanitise the true radicalism of Day's vision.
She will have the last word herself: "Don't call me a saint, I don't want to be
dismissed that easily."
Dr Mary Condren is a theologian, director of the Institute for Feminism and
Religion, and author of The Serpent and the Goddess.
SECTION: CITY EDITION; OPINION AND ANALYSIS; RITE AND REASON; Pg. 14
LENGTH: 852 words