The Examined Life

Catholic Worker Movement

The Catholic Worker Movement was founded by Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin in 1933. The group dedicates their lives to nonvoilence, voluntary poverty, helping the homeless, prayer, and hospitality to the hungry and exiled. Even today they still fight against voilence in the form of discrimination of any kind and war.

Here are their goals as taken from this site:

--Personalism, a philosophy which regards the freedom and dignity of each person as the basis, focus and goal of all metaphysics and morals. In following such wisdom, we move away from a self-centered individualism toward the good of the other. This is to be done by taking personal responsibility for changing conditions, rather than looking to the state or other institutions to provide impersonal "charity." We pray for a Church renewed by this philosophy and for a time when all those who feel excluded from participation are welcomed with love, drawn by the gentle personalism Peter Maurin taught.

--A decentralized society, in contrast to the present bigness of government, industry, education, health care and agriculture. We encourage efforts such as family farms, rural and urban land trusts, worker ownership and management of small factories, homesteading projects, food, housing and other cooperatives--any effort in which money can once more become merely a medium of exchange, and human beings are no longer commodities.

--A "green revolution," so that it is possible to rediscover the proper meaning of our labor and/or true bonds with the land; a distributist communitarianism, self-sufficient through farming, crafting and appropriate technology; a radically new society where people will rely on the fruits of their own toil and labor; associations of mutuality, and a sense of fairness to resolve conflicts.

They accomplish this by allowing anybody to open up a house to represent the Catholic Worker Movement. One local house that does this is Karen House.

Anybody can start their own house just like Karen House and the steps can be found here. The great thing about the Catholic Worker Movement is the simple fact that anybody can help. In fact the whole thing is run on volunteer work so help is neccessary. The Catholic Worker Movement has basically been helping since 1933 and is still going on strong in the St. Louis area with Karen House.

This song called Face Another Day by The Suicide Machines reminds me a lot of what the people working for the good of the Catholic Worker Movement are doing. They are slowly working to reach there goal even though it may not be an easy thing to do. It also may not seem like they are any closer to their world goals of true personalism, a decentralized society, or a "green revolution", but the members of the Catholic Worker Movement are coming closer to that goal simply by believing in these things. They are also making their ideas open to the public by having a website. Dorothy Day even said,"What we do is very little, but its like the little boy with a few loaves and fishes. Christ took that little and increased it. He will do the rest." Being a dedicated member would be hard too. The hardest part of being a member of the Catholic Worker Movement would probably be voluntary poverty.

--Voluntary poverty. "The mystery of poverty is that by sharing in it, making ourselves poor in giving to others, we increase our knowledge and belief in love." (Dorothy Day) By embracing voluntary poverty, that is, by casting our lot freely with those whose impoverishment is not a choice, we would ask for the grace to abandon ourselves to the love of God. It would put us on the path to incarnate the Church's "preferential option for the poor."

back