‘Catholic Worker’ at 75: Long Ties with Union Movement

Catholic Worker founder Dorothy Day

It was 75 years ago when two priests, a nun and a devout Catholic woman named Dorothy Day scraped together $57 and printed 2,500 copies of a tabloid newspaper they called the Catholic Worker. They made their way to Union Square in lower Manhattan, where they sold copies of their paper for one cent each.

The impact of the first issue, according to the author Dwight MacDonald, was “an ambiguous thud.” The Catholic Worker wasn’t exactly a media giant. The first several issues were written by Day on her kitchen table. She had to sell her typewriter to pay for the second issue.

But that shoestring operation was the beginning of the Catholic Worker movement, one of the most remarkable allies American union members have ever had.

For Day, the demands of Catholicism were clear. As she told the moral philosopher and psychiatrist Robert Coles:

Jesus meant us to fight for those He fought for, to fight for those He chose to be with. He lived with the rejected ones, the scorned ones, and the more luxurious and important our lives, the further we are from Him, from living His life.

She would conclude from this that “to pledge yourself to voluntary poverty for life so that you can share with your brothers is not enough. One must live with them, share with them their suffering, too.”

Until her death in 1980, that was exactly what she did. She and Peter Maurin, a former Christian Brother and French peasant anarchist, founded Catholic Worker hospitality houses in Little Italy and Harlem in New York City to feed the hungry and provide shelter for the homeless, no questions asked. Day herself lived in a small, austere hospitality house room. Over time, other hospitality houses based on the Catholic Worker model were created around the country.

Day took very seriously the church’s papal encyclicals about the moral rights and duties of workers to join together in unions. But her high regard for unionism didn’t spring only from encyclicals. She saw on the streets the vast difference that unions could make in workers’ lives. She once wrote in a Catholic Worker column:

We have lived with the unemployed, the sick, the unemployables. The contrast between the worker who is organized and has his union, the fellowship of his own trade to give him strength, and those who have no organization and come in to us on a breadline, is pitiable.

Small wonder that Day was constantly doing whatever she could to help working people and their unions.

In her time, that often meant strike support, especially in New York City. She joined with picketing strikers at the Orbach-Klein Department Store in Manhattan, supported other strikers at the Borden Milk Co. in Brooklyn, started a soup line on 10th avenue for striking seamen—and during the momentous sit-down strike by UAW members at General Motor’s Fisher Body plant, she traveled to Michigan to meet with the strikers and called their action “both legal and moral.”

Much of the time, the authorities had no idea what to make of the Catholic Workers.

The Orbach-Klein strike was an example, as Day reported:

When we entered the dispute with our slogans drawn from the writings of the Popes regarding the condition of labor, the police around Union Square were taken aback and did not know what to do. It was as though they were arresting the Holy Father himself, one of them said, were they to load our pickets and their signs into their patrol wagons.

In the end, the befuddled police just issued them injunctions.

As devout as she was—she said several times that she would shut down the Catholic Worker movement if the church told her to do so—she didn’t hesitate for a second to support striking gravediggers at the church-owned Calvary Cemetery in 1949.

New York’s Cardinal Francis Spellman refused to negotiate with the cemetery workers and their Congress of Industrial Organization (CIO) union. Day and other Catholic Workers defied the cardinal, joined the picketers, declared that “the strike was justified” and denounced Spellman because he had “exercised so overwhelming a show of force against a handful of poor working men.”

The last of many times she was arrested for civil disobedience occurred when she was 75 years old. She was in California’s San Joaquin Valley demonstrating with farmworkers locked in a bitter organizing dispute with the Teamsters that poisoned relations between the two unions for years.

Newspapers around the country published photos of her sitting in a portable chair just as she was about to be taken off to jail.

Day and her movement have been widely admired, and not only by Catholics and workers.  The radical yippie activist Abbie Hoffman told her she was “the first hippie,” which amused her immensely.

Perhaps one reason for the compliment was that Day actually started out as a radical journalist in Greenwich Village after World War I. After a bohemian life filled with heavy drinking, love affairs with (among others) the Communist journalist Mike Gold and probably the playwright Eugene O’Neill, an abortion and the birth of her daughter, she converted to Catholicism and transformed her life.

W.H. Auden, one of the most honored poets in the English language, said that “the nicest poetical compliment I have ever received” came from Dorothy Day. While she was in New York’s Women’s Prison for protesting against air-raid warnings, Day overheard a prostitute on her way to the shower quoting a line from an Auden poem:

Thousands have lived without love, not one without water.

When she told this to Auden, his response was, “My God, I haven’t written in vain.” It was a quintessential Dorothy Day moment.

But while she was loved and admired, she also was frequently misunderstood. Mainstream liberals and progressives often made the mistake of thinking that Day was fully one of them. She was not.

Unlike more-liberal Catholics, she supported conservative church doctrines against birth control, abortion and homosexuality. A strong and independent woman, Day was highly critical of feminism. Early on, she demonstrated and went to jail in solidarity with imprisoned suffragettes, not because Day was strongly committed to women’s suffrage—she, like Mother Jones, was not—but because she disapproved of how the suffragettes were being treated in prison.

And when most progressives and liberals looked to the nation’s capital to provide a safety net for those in need and to strengthen workers’ freedoms, Day was intensely skeptical. During the Depression, she attacked the New Deal because the state entered “to solve these problems by dole and work relief, by setting up so many bureaus that we were swamped with initials.” The result, she said, was that “the problem of the modern state loomed up as never before in American life.”

So Dorothy Day and her movement, without even trying, have always demolished every comfortable stereotype about labor’s friends.

What is the connection between unions and the Catholic Worker movement today? It’s hard to know for sure. The Catholic Workers, who are still true to the classical anarchist tradition that inspired Day, don’t closely track their communities around the country. They do have a list of houses of hospitality in 139 U.S. cities and 22 cities abroad, but they say the list is “far from complete.”

Indeed, the movement has no institutional rules or requirements. Anyone can use the Catholic Worker name. “You can be a Jewish Buddhist and set up a Catholic Worker community somewhere, and that’s OK,” says Tom Cornell, a longtime adviser to Day who is now at the Peter Maurin Farm in upstate New York.

However, if there’s a representative Catholic Worker community anywhere, it may be Casa Juan Diego in Houston. It’s believed to be the largest in the country, with 10 houses providing services for the needy.

It was set up in 1980 by Louise and Mark Zwick to serve immigrants from Central America. “My wife and I started it to receive refugees from Nicaragua and Guatemala and El Salvador,” Mark Zwick says. “The first ones were political refugees. They came up here to flee the wars.”

That changed after violence subsided in those countries and bad trade deals like the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) went into effect.

We’re seeing a lot more Mexicans at Casa Juan Diego in the last several years. Over a million small farmers in Mexico lost their farms after NAFTA. They don’t have any choice but to come up here to try to feed their families.

Altogether, some 70,000 immigrants have been helped by Casa Juan Diego since it opened its doors with food, shelter, medical care, and a safe refuge for battered and homeless women. Casa Juan Diego has always had a strong relationship with the local union movement.

For example, when the largely immigrant workforce was fired for striking at an airduct company, Catholic Workers took part in a press conference with the Harris County Central Labor Council to defend the workers, joined a picket line to press for their rehiring, and paid the rent for several dozen workers so they could continue their strike.

And Casa Juan Diego has worked with the Central Labor Council and other community groups to try to set up sites where day laborers can gather and connect with the jobs they need.

That’s certainly the kind of relationship Dorothy Day valued.

Not long after she and her three friends made their way to Union Square with Volume 1, Number 1, of the Catholic Worker, Day made a promise.

Month by month, in every struggle, in every strike, on every picket line, we shall do our best to join with the worker in his struggle for recognition.

We reiterate the slogan of the old I.W.W.’s: ‘An injury to one is an injury to all. St. Paul says, ‘When the health of one member of the Mystical Body suffers, the health of the whole body is lowered.’

It’s a promise that, after three-quarters of a turbulent and complicated century, the Catholic Workers still keep.

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