The Catholic Worker

On a cool Saturday afternoon, I was walking along East 1st Street in Lower Manhattan’s East  Village.  The plan was to get my nails done and then walk to the corner of Kenmare and Mott Streets in Nolita to take pictures of a mural that someone had painted of intricate angel wings in hopes of writing about it as a religious artifact in New York City.  When I got there, the wings were replaced but luckily, I had already found my religious artifact.  

I got to the salon and immediately my eye was drawn to the bright blue door across the street.  Low and behold, I had stumbled upon the office of the Catholic Worker.  The outside of the Catholic Worker is unsuspecting.  You wouldn’t walk past and guess right away that the building with foggy windows and bricks covered in graffiti would be the center of a Catholic Worker Movement in New York City.  

It’s the site at which Dorothy Day, a woman now being considered for Sainthood, and Peter Maurin, whom Day personally considered to be of the utmost holiness, started on a journey to spread the messages of positivity and acceptance from the Catholic Church in 1933.  

The way that Day, Maurin, and their Catholic Workers reached people was by creating a newspaper filled with “protest[s of] injustice, war, racism, and violence of all forms,” (Catholic Worker).  At the end of the day, I don’t think that these messages of equality solely represent the Catholic faith.  Instead, I think that you can find this love in people of all religions and varying levels of spirituality.

In Dorothy Day’s autobiography, The Long Loneliness, she talks about the love of her life, Forster, and what he, a scientist, taught her about sacramentality: 

“If breath is life, then I was beginning to be full of it because of him.  I was filling my lungs with it, walking on the beach, resting on the pier beside him while he fished, rowing with him in the calm bay, walking through fields and woods—a new experience entirely for me, one which brought me to life, and filled me with joy,” (Day 136).  

The humble quality of the Catholic Worker speaks to the people and causes that it celebrates.  I think that the above passage represents the Catholic Worker lifestyle.  The goal is to live simply and within your means, giving to others all the while.  There is nothing explicitly exciting about Dorothy and Forster’s day at the pier, yet there’s a spiritual spirit in the air that she can’t resist.  It is a sensation that can be felt all throughout the city.

The neighborhood that surrounds this little brick building on the Lower East Side is filled with people of different ethnic and religious backgrounds, as well as varying levels of economic standing.  The building itself is a bit run down on the outside, as you can see by the graffiti and griminess in the windows; just like everyone trying to find their way in the city, it could use a little bit of help so perhaps we can do something for the Catholic Workers inside printing their newspapers to spread their faith to all of us in New York City and beyond.  

For more information about the Catholic Worker, please visit http://www.catholicworker.org/.  

Day, Dorothy. The Long Loneliness: The Autobiography of the Legendary Catholic Social Activist. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc., 1952. 136. Print.