It’s May 1. Do You Know How Many Catholic Workers There Are?
We can count the years there has been a Catholic Worker movement (92, as of today), but can we count how many Catholic Worker houses are in it? Jerry Windley-Daoust tackles the question.
Good morning; it’s May 1, and we’re celebrating the 92nd anniversary of the Catholic Worker with a look at the frequently asked question, “How many Catholic Worker communities are there?” It’s a tough question to nail down, as Jerry Windley-Daoust explains. And is it really the right question to be asking?
We’re also bringing you Dorothy Day’s 1943 essay, “What the Catholic Worker Believes.” Enjoy!
They’re sure signs of spring here at CatholicWorker.org: the red-winged blackbirds are back at the feeder, the cherry blossoms perfume the air, and we start fielding frantic phone calls from journalists writing articles about the upcoming anniversary of the Catholic Worker movement.1 Why, just the other day I answered a call from a prominent media outlet that, for reasons of charity, shall remain anonymous. Here’s a rough approximation of the conversation, as best I remember it:
Me: “Hello, you’ve reached CatholicWorker.org, no we’re not the New York Catholic Worker and we can’t help you with your subscription to The Catholic Worker newspaper, we just run the website and community directory, how can I help you today?”
Journalist: “Hi there, this is (name withheld, but let’s call him Bob, after a guy I knew in journalism school), and I write for (big media company name also withheld)—you’ve probably heard of us—well, anyway, we’re running a story about the Catholic Worker movement for the anniversary coming up, and I included a paragraph kind of summing up what the whole thing is all about—you know, Dorothy meets Peter, 1933, communism, newspaper, hospitality, etcetera, etcetera, and then I have this line that’s causing a bit of a kerfuffle with Theresa over at the copy desk: ‘Today, there are more than 200 Catholic Worker communities around the world.’2 My copy editor did some checking, and it looks like Wikipedia pins the number at more than 240, while the Encyclopedia Britannica says more than 200. And then, your website only lists 178. So, it’s really a very quick and simple question: What’s the real number?”
I sigh, because this perennial question comes back every year, just as reliably as the Creeping Charlie peeking through the melting snow in my garden.
And like the Creeping Charlie, it never comes to a good end.
Me: “Bob, I’ll grant that’s a quick and simple question, but there isn’t a quick and simple answer.”
Bob: “Can’t we just go with the number on the directory? Or hasn’t it been updated in a while?”
Me: “Regardless of whether I have updated it recently or not,3 that number is at best an approximation. Catholic Worker communities are notoriously difficult to count. It’s not like counting McDonald’s franchises or chapters of Rotary International, you know.”
Bob: “Yeah, but it’s Catholic, right—?”
Me: “Meaning the Vatican keeps track? Here’s the thing, Bob: Catholic may be in the name, but we are more ‘Catholic adjacent,’ if you know what I mean—we’re not formally affiliated with the Church.”
Bob: “Yeah, I think I heard something about some friction between you guys and the institutional Church—”
Me: “It’s more than that, Bob: we’re not institutional at all. See, each Catholic Worker community is completely autonomous; in theory, each one embodies the values of the larger movement, but in its own particular way. In your reporting, did you run across anything about personalism or Christian anarchism?”
Bob: “Yeah, yeah—I even put that in the story, something about the influence of the French personalist movement and the Russian anarchists, like Peter Kropotkin and Mikhail Bakunin.”
Me: “Wow, way to do your research, Bob.”
Bob: “I got it off Wikipedia. But listen, getting back to the number question—because we’re kinda coming up on our deadline here—what does Peter Kropotkin have to do with counting Catholic Workers?”
Me: “Well, the principles of decentralization and personalism mean that anyone can start a Catholic Worker community without getting the approval or say-so of anyone else in the movement. There’s no paperwork, no corporate training, no ordination. One day, you’re just sitting around talking; the next, you’re having arguments with community members about the best way to organize the refrigerator to accommodate the twelve gallons of leftover pasta salad some church just donated from a funeral lunch.
Bob: “Really.”
Me: “Uh huh. So, people start a community and they get busy with pasta salad and one thing or another and they never get around to reaching out to list their community in the directory. It’s not exactly the priority of community-oriented personalists, Bob.
“Of course, if we hear about them, we might reach out to them to ask whether they want us to set up a listing, but then, some communities deliberately choose not to be listed.”
Bob: “Hmm, so there are probably more communities out there than you’ve got listed, so why don’t we just say there’s ‘more than 180 communities’ and call it good?”
Me: “Whoa, whoa, whoa, Bob—not so fast. The real number is probably lower than the number listed in the directory because some of the communities on it don’t exist anymore.”
Bob: “Why don’t you take them off the list, then?”
Me: “Because most communities don’t announce when they close. Some do, but more often, the community ‘takes a hiatus’ or sort of slowly fades away, or things end on a bad note. Bottom line, no one’s left to reach out to have their community taken off the list. But when we look over the directory, we see communities that just don’t seem to be active. Their website or Facebook page hasn’t been updated in years, or their website is down and we can’t find a new one. On top of that, we haven’t heard from them or about them at Catholic Worker gatherings or in the global Catholic Worker group email.”
Bob: “Then wouldn’t it be safer to just take them off the list?”
Me: “If we can’t reach them by phone or email or any other means, we might. But just because a Catholic Worker is off the grid doesn’t mean it’s not out there. Catholic Workers are an esoteric lot, Bob.”
Bob: “I see. Well, I’m sure we can just say ‘about 180 communities.’ Theresa—that’s the copy editor—should be good with that.”
Me: “Maybe, maybe not, Bob. What kind of ontologist is Theresa?”
Bob: “I think she’s more of a vegetarian?”
Me: “Because if she’s more of a realist, she’s probably going to ask how many of the communities on the list share the core beliefs, practices, and goals that act as universal properties for belonging to the movement—you know, like the ‘Aims and Means of the Catholic Worker Movement.’ Do you know the ‘Aims and Means,’ Bob?”
Bob: “Er, yes, that’s in my notes here—let’s see, says here they’re an ‘orientation of purpose’ like nonviolence, doing the works of mercy, personalism, manual labor, voluntary poverty, decentralization….”
Me: “That’s the gist of it. Some folks would add some other items to that list, like actively resisting injustice. So, even though this is a decentralized, anarchistic movement and there’s no checklist or test to determine when a Catholic Worker is a Catholic Worker, and even though no community perfectly embodies the essence of the Catholic Worker movement, someone like Theresa who takes a realist approach to her ontological inquiries might cast a critical eye on certain communities in the directory. There have always been Catholic Worker communities that aren’t as fully on board with the principle of nonviolence as Dorothy was, for example. And then there are some organizations in the directory that do some of the works of mercy, but in a very institutional and non-personal way. They say they have roots in the Catholic Worker movement or that they were inspired by Dorothy Day, but if they have paid staff, ‘clients,’ paperwork, tax-exempt status, rainy day funds, and government grants—well, Theresa might not want to include them in the count. They’re just not Catholic Workery enough.”
Bob: “Ha ha, well, speaking of Theresa, she’s waiting for me to give her some kind of answer so she can go home for the day…she says her daughter has a school play tonight and she doesn’t want to be late, so….”
Me: “That’s totally understandable, Bob. Well then, hopefully Teresa is more of a nominalist than a realist so she doesn’t miss her kid’s show. If that’s the case, then she’ll probably want to evaluate the list by looking at the actual interactions, affiliations, and shared practices between the local community and the movement as a whole. You know, does the community self-identify with the movement? Do people in the community have relationships with people in other Catholic Worker communities? Do they do stuff together? That sort of thing. A nominalist is going to say it’s the self-identification that counts.”
Bob: “That’s quite the philosophical analysis, there.”
Me: “Thanks. I got it off Wikipedia.”
Bob: “And which way does your ontology lean at CatholicWorker.org?”
Me: “Probably in more of a nominalist direction. If a group wants to be listed and says it’s a Catholic Worker, we tend to keep it on the list. But don’t think we are too loosey-goosey, Bob! We do have limits. We don’t list hair salons, car dealerships, personal injury law firms, or cleaning services, regardless of whether they lay claim to the Catholic Worker tradition.”4
Bob: “Well, this has been fascinating, but—”
Me: “I know, Theresa’s kid needs to make her curtain call. Well, how about this. What if you didn’t Include any number at all? I mean, why does it actually matter?”
Bob: “Err…well, I guess it just shows how successful and relevant this quirky little movement is, even after all these years.”
Me: “Ah, yes—success and relevance. Well, that’s thoughtful of you, Bob, but as the last sentences of the Aims and Means say: ‘Success, as the world determines it, is not the final criterion for judgments. The most important thing is the love of Jesus Christ and how to live his truth.’”
A long silence from Bob, then:
Bob: “Wow, what a different perspective. I feel like I’ve framed this story all wrong, like instead of viewing the Catholic Worker through the upside-down logic of the Gospel, I’ve looked at it through the lens of, er, I don’t know—”
Me: “The idol of late-stage capitalism?”
Bob: “Yeah, maybe?”
Me: “In the future, then, when you tell others about the Catholic Worker movement, be sure to tell them that we don’t count franchise numbers, or the number of clients served, or the number of card-carrying members. We’re not primarily worried about ‘success’ because we know, at the end of the day, we’re not going to remake the world on our own. That’s God’s job. We’re just called to cooperate, to do our part. And if we do that, then maybe at the end of the day we might look back and see that we helped make something beautiful, something bigger and more wonderful than we could have ever imagined on our own. Maybe we’ll see that, together with other people of good will, we did something to help make the world a place in which it is easier to be good, as Peter would have said.”
Bob: “…”
Me: “Bob?”
Bob: “Yeah…I just need to sit with that.”
Me: “No time for sitting around, Bob. You’re a man with a deadline to meet.”
Bob: “But now I feel like I need to rewrite the whole story!”
Me: “Or you could re-run a feature on spring—‘Nine Tips for Home Garden Success’ or something. Save this article for next year, when you have time to do it right.”
Bob: “Or maybe I’ll quit this journalism gig, sell everything I own, and start a Catholic Worker community!”
Me: “Baby steps, Bob. Baby steps.”
Again, I provide this rough transcript as an approximation of how our conversation unfolded. I do so in the hope, however remote, that next April I might be spared spending half an hour on the phone with every journalist who comes looking for “the actual number” of Catholic Worker communities.
In the meantime, I have a directory to update.
Notes
“…start fielding frantic phone calls from journalists writing articles about the upcoming anniversary of the founding of the Catholic Worker movement…” As you may have guessed, this is not quite true. I don’t actually receive calls from journalists. Once upon a time, a long time ago (like, the late 1990s), students used to send email to CatholicWorker.org asking the website’s creator, Jim Allaire, a bunch of questions about the movement for the paper that they were writing and which was due on Monday and this was Saturday night. Since I took over running the website in 2022, I haven’t received many inquiries like that at all; these days, enterprising students get everything they need from Google or an AI chatbot.
‘Today, there are more than 200 Catholic worker communities around the world.’” This sentence or a variation of it appears in most introductions to the Catholic Worker in all types of media. Usually, these articles list “more than 200 communities,” which may have been true at one point but is difficult to imagine now.
“Regardless of whether I have updated it recently or not…” I have not. In fact, I am almost always behind in updating the directory.
“We don’t list hair salons, though, or car dealerships, or cleaning services.” Yes, this actually happens. Because anyone can submit a listing to the directory, we get a lot of submissions like these from businesses hoping to boost their visibility. And don’t get me started on the emails we get from investment firms and church cleaning services…but that rant will have to wait until next year.
What the Catholic Worker Believes
“Aims and Means (1943)”
by Dorothy Day, from the May 1943 (Tenth Anniversary) Issue of The Catholic Worker. In her tenth anniversary message, Dorothy Day reflects on love as the basis, source, and end of their work at the Catholic Worker. She reflects on the economy that exploits, the racism that kills—literally—and the need for communal penance for these social sins and creation of new institutions to create a more just social order.
“Let us therefore love God because God hath first loved us. If any man say, I love God, and hateth his brother, he is a liar. For he that loveth not his brother whom he seeth, how can he love God whom he seeth not?”–St. John
It is because of this invitation that we are engaged in the work of getting out the Catholic Worker. “Love is an exchange of gifts,” St. Ignatius said. And we want to show our love for our brother, so that we can show our love for God; and the best way we can do it is to try to give him what we’ve got, in the way of food, clothing and shelter; to give him what talents we possess by writing, drawing pictures, reminding each other of the love of God and the love of man. There is too little love in this world, too little tenderness.
Love Fulfills the Law
How can we love God and kill our brother? How can we love our brother and kill him? How can we fulfill the Gospel precept to be perfect as our heavenly father is perfect; how can we follow the precept to love God when we kill our fellow man? How can war be compatible with such love?
To kill, to destroy, to starve, to inflict all these sufferings with love–that is sadism of the most hideous kind. That is perversity. It has long been said that religion is the opiate of the people. Pope Pius XI said that the workers of the world are lost to the church. If that is true, if the poor of the world are turned from the Bride of Christ, it is because there is no relation between the spiritual and material. We are not trying to put into effect our Christianity, our Christian principles. They are not animating our lives.
Why do we write about cooperatives, credit unions, mutual aid? Because when we see what Christianity is, when we see the beauty of our faith–when we have gone through something analogous to a conversion, we see all things new, as St. Paul says. We look upon our work, our lives, and we say, “How do these things square with Christian teaching? Can we go on making money at the expense of our brother? Can we be profiteers, can we work on Wall Street? Can we go in for advertising which sets up false standards, which perverts the people, which fills their minds with meretricious desires, making the good sweet life of the Christian unpalatable?” If we wish to follow Christ, we will be workers like Jesus, like St. Joseph, like St. Paul. We will think of the dignity of labor, we will respect the worker, will bear our share of responsibility toward making that new social order wherein justice dwelleth, where people will have that certain amount of goods which St. Thomas says is necessary to lead a good life.
Why do we talk about houses of hospitality, bread lines, and farming communes and the necessity of taking care of our poorer brother? Because the greatest hypocrisy is this, to say to our brother in need, “Go, be now filled,” and give him no bread.
How can we show our love for God except through our love for our brothers?
How can we cease to cry out against injustice and human misery?
The first Sunday in May, I went visiting through Paterson and Passaic with Sr. Peter Claver, and saw some of her Negro students and heard some of their stories. There was one elderly woman caring for grandchildren, two little boys, working at hard days’ work, living in a cold house. During the depths of the winter she had no stove. At one time she was so poor she sold her bed and slept on a board between two chairs.
There is always work, people will say. Yes, but what if your children are sick, or if you are too ill yourself to work?
This poor woman had supplied the bouquet of flowers that Low Sunday morning for the altar of the little Negro Chapel in Paterson. They were the only flowers there, and it was the month of May.
She had one of her grandchildren in her arms all during the mass and it cooed like a little pigeon.
Oh, the suffering, the poverty, of these poor of Christ, and the indifference of Christians!
On my recent visit South I heard of a white man who had killed seven Negroes, one for not getting out of his bed, one for marrying a mulatto of whom he was enamored. And in speaking of these things to one of the brothers of the order I had visited he said to me:
“But that is not the worst. When I was down south as a brother, I saw a young man with his arms and legs grotesquely crippled. He had offended a white man at the age of 12 or so and the man had laid hold of him and a broken both his arms and legs like matchsticks. They were never set properly and he was crippled for life.”
Are not these sins crying to heaven for vengeance? And how can we do anything but howl over the sins in which we share? They are our sins. Just as we believe in the communion of saints–that we share in the merits of the saints, so we must believe that we share in the guilt of such cruelty and injustice.
We cannot talk of the love of God, the love of our neighbor without recognizing the dire need for penance. In a world in which such cruelty exists, in which men are so possessed, such a spirit cannot be cast out but by prayer and fasting. Our Lord Himself said so.
About us. Roundtable is a publication of catholicworker.org that covers the Catholic Worker Movement.
Roundtable is independent of the New York Catholic Worker or The Catholic Worker newspaper. This week’s Roundtable was produced by Renée Roden and Jerry Windley-Daoust. Send inquiries to roundtable@catholicworker.org.
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Great stuff!
Well done!!!!