St. Joseph House on East First Street, one of the two Catholic Worker houses located in Manhattan.

Like many of her classmates at the University of Notre Dame, Sarah Brook came to New York soon after graduation, looking for work. But the job she ended up applying for last summer had few of the “perks” that a typical graduate might look for, such as health insurance, retirement benefits, or even a salary. It also had a somewhat unconventional way of interviewing candidates — one involving a mandatory overnight stay at the organization’s downtown office.

Since August, Brook has been living, working, and volunteering at Maryhouse on East Third Street in Manhattan, one of two Catholic Worker houses in Manhattan. The other house, St. Joseph House, is just two blocks away on East First Street. Brook and the other dozen or so volunteers at each house have agreed to live and work at this house, wage- and rent-free. They assist the poor directly by serving meals, giving out clothing, and providing homeless men and women access to showers. The volunteers eat the same food they cook and serve to the destitute. They also wear clothes that have been donated to the group.

But Brook and the other Catholic Workers do not just serve the poor. They live with them. Every day, St. Joseph House and Maryhouse welcome hundreds of New York’s estimated 39,000 homeless into its living quarters. And every day, these individuals — many of whom suffer from mental illness — eat with, talk to, and sleep alongside volunteers from more or less privileged backgrounds.

“The ideal is to be with the poorest people and to do as much as we can to obliterate the distinctions,” says Tom Cornell, a volunteer who lives at a Catholic Worker farming community in upstate New York. Cornell and his wife, Monica, have been volunteers with the movement since the 1950s.

The Catholic Worker movement itself goes back seventy years, when activists Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin started handing out copies of their newspaper, the Catholic Worker, at a May Day communist rally in New York’s Union Square. (To this day, the 80,000-circulation Catholic Worker still sells for a penny a copy.) A year later, Day and Maurin decided they should do more than simply publish articles about social justice. They began establishing houses to serve the poor, the first of which opened in New York in 1934. There are now 185 Catholic Worker houses, serving thousands of poor people in the United States as well as abroad.

Day once said that young people will always want to come to Manhattan — and there will always be poor people in Manhattan. Decades later, residents of the New York houses — both the Catholic Workers and the people they serve — continue to represent a wide range of ages and backgrounds. Brook, who is twenty-two, says that living at Maryhouse is “an ideal way to still be in school. You’re getting your hands dirty, but getting to use your mind.” The Catholic Workers live off donations, she says; they do not take any pay, except for $20 a week in “fun money.”

This lifestyle of self-imposed poverty is precisely what continues to draw people — especially young people — to the movement, nearly two decades after Day’s death. “There is … great freedom in giving up your possessions, in devoting yourself to love of the poor and of fellow members of your community and devotion to social and political justice,” says Jim O’Grady, the author of Dorothy Day: With Love for the Poor. Bill Griffin, a former volunteer who often eats dinner at the Maryhouse, calls the Catholic Worker movement a “school of life.” Most volunteers stay for two or three years, he says; some end up staying indefinitely.

The organization’s name is somewhat misleading: The Catholic Worker has no official relationship with the Roman Catholic Church, and its statement of “aims and means” explicitly states that it has no “religious test.” Peter Maurin and Dorothy Day were both practicing Catholics when they founded the movement, but they wanted the organization to be open to people of all faiths. To this day, most of the organization’s volunteers are practicing Catholics, and religious faith remains a central motivation for their work. (“Our priorities don’t make any sense unless you believe in God,” says Felton Davis, a volunteer at Maryhouse.) That said, in some Catholic Worker houses other faiths have been known to dominate: The volunteers in the Catholic Worker house in Boston, for instance, are mostly Buddhist.

Of the 185 operating Catholic Worker houses, none of them can be rightfully called the movement’s “headquarters.” Informally, however, the New York houses function as the de facto center of the movement, as it was there where the movement began and where Day did her charity work. Today, Maryhouse and St. Joseph House sit inconspicuously alongside chic restaurants and boutiques in Lower Manhattan. When Day and Maurin founded the organization seven decades ago, this area — known as the Bowery or the East Village — was a blighted urban neighborhood. Over the years, however, real estate prices soared and the area’s poor left for other parts. Today, some volunteers question whether the Catholic Worker should move to Brooklyn, Central Harlem, or the South Bronx, since these areas now have the highest concentrations of the city’s poverty and homelessness.

One positive thing about their current location is that it allows the Catholic Workers to directly confront New York’s materialistic culture, says O’Grady. The Catholic Workers rebuke the “disgusting wealth reveling that goes on in Manhattan,” he says. “They sit right in the middle of it, but by going about their daily business, they say to us: ‘What obsesses you doesn’t matter.’”

In fact, the Catholic Worker movement seems to take pride in rejecting many mainstream cultural values, especially competition and materialism. “You’re not supposed to reject competition. That’s a rejection of the American way of life,” Davis tells me on one of my visits to Maryhouse. In Davis’ view, some people are in need and some people have too much; the Catholic Worker simply helps facilitate this redistribution of wealth. “If we weren’t here, how would people who have more than they need hand over to those who don’t?” he asks.

As we’re talking, a young woman stops by the house to drop off a bag of clothing. “People come to give and come to receive,” Davis says. “We’re living at that point where give meets take.”

Sarah Brook, a Catholic Worker volunteer, takes a break from her duties at the Maryhouse shelter in Manhattan.

One family

At Maryhouse, there is no formal training for new volunteers. And that, Brook says, was perhaps the most difficult part of getting started as a Catholic Worker. Brook had never before lived among the mentally ill. She often felt confused when her mostly female charges would act happy and talkative and then, moments later, begin screaming at her. Other volunteers were supportive, she says, and Brook felt comfortable asking them questions. Still, no one took her aside to point out which house residents had which types of problems.

It is precisely this lack of structure that defines the Catholic Worker movement and makes it so different from other social service organizations. As one volunteer puts it, the Catholic Worker is “a family.” It strives to create a relaxed, accepting environment in its houses. Many people who come to the house for food feel comfortable wandering through its pantries. “We try to offer someone not just a plate of food but a home or something that can be their home,” says Brook.

Meals at St. Joseph House or Maryhouse are a cross between a Thanksgiving family dinner and summer camp. One Friday night I walk into a macaroni and cheese dinner prepared by volunteer Jim Regan. The Catholic Workers sit right beside the people who come seeking meals. Smoke fills the air of the dining hall. Alcohol and drugs are not permitted in any of the houses — many of the residents are recovering from drug or alcohol addiction — but cigarettes seem to be the accepted indulgence. Some of the men and women yell or talk in disjointed sentences, while the volunteers doggedly try to engage them in conversation.

Griffin describes the Catholic Worker as the place where the “voluntary” poor and the “involuntary” poor come together. For a casual observer like myself, the two categories blended together so discreetly that it was often difficult to distinguish between those who served as volunteers and those who came seeking food. I initially thought a woman named Stacey was one of the volunteers. When I spoke to other people who ate or lived at the Catholic Worker, it was immediately clear that they suffered from a mental illness. Not Stacey. As she explained to me her problems with the city shelter system, she came across as strikingly intelligent and aware. Stacey said she was thirty-five, though she appeared much younger, and had been homeless for two years. She knew few details about the Catholic Worker organization, but she had been coming regularly to St. Joseph House and Maryhouse for clothes, food, a shower, and sometimes even a nap.

Stacey is one of hundreds of people who pass through the two Catholic Worker houses in Manhattan on a daily basis. Many of these people complain of problems they’ve had with the New York City shelter system. What makes the Catholic Worker houses stand apart from the other shelters, they say, is the unique attitude among the staff — the direct personal engagement that Catholic Workers bring to their work. For the past seventy years, this particular approach toward public service has been an explicit part of the movement’s mission, encapsulated in a philosophy known as “personalism,” which Catholic Worker co-founder Peter Maurin studied in the writings of the French philosopher Emmanuel Mounier.

At the time of the Catholic Worker’s founding, the world was beginning to be split between two warring political ideologies. The conflict between the classical liberals who favored capitalism and the Marxists who favored socialism would dominate the history of most of the twentieth century. Mounier’s philosophy of personalism advocated a middle ground between the liberals’ glorification of the individual and the Marxists’ glorification of the collective, both of which (according to Mounier) failed to put sufficient emphasis on personal responsibility.

In a 1955 issue of the Catholic Worker, Dorothy Day explained how Peter Maurin adapted the principles of personalism to the work of social justice: “His whole message was that everything began with one’s self … If every man became poor there would not be any destitute, he said. If everyone became better, everyone would be better off. He wanted us all ‘to quit passing the buck.’” In their daily work, the Catholic Workers live out the personalist philosophy by both choosing poverty and working to help those who have to live in poverty. As Griffin points out, “The way you help is as important as the money you give to help.”

The Maryhouse on East Third Street.

Act locally, act globally

It’s noon on Saturday in Manhattan’s Union Square, and nearly a dozen people are gathered around the statue at the northern edge of the square. The Catholic Workers and other activists have been holding a weekly vigil here for years. Now it’s about Iraq, but they’ve always had reasons to protest: Before the September 11 terrorist attacks, the group protested the presence of U.S. troops in Colombia.

How do U.S. policies in far-off lands connect to the movement’s mission of helping the poor? Art Laffin, a volunteer at the Catholic Worker house in Washington, says that the poor person on the street and the people in Baghdad are both “victims of our society.”

“We’re trying to live an alternative, a nonviolent alternative,” Laffins says. “We choose to not cooperate with a consumer society and a system that sanctions killing.” For Catholic Workers like Laffin, protests and vigils are as much a part of their day-to-day work as feeding the poor. Every Monday for the past sixteen years, Laffin and about fifteen other volunteers have held a vigil in front of the Pentagon. Every Friday for the past six years, they have demonstrated in front of the White House. Laffin was arrested last August for participating in a vigil at the Pentagon commemorating the Hiroshima nuclear bombing; the police said he had entered an off-limits area. “Dorothy Day said we have to fill the jails,” Laffin points out.

Besides taking part in protests, Catholic Worker volunteers also go to war zones to bring food and other supplies to victims. Laffin visited Iraq in 1998, Central America twice during the 1980s, and the occupied territories of Palestine three times between 1996 and 1998. “You see firsthand the immeasurable suffering of people,” he says.

Over the years, many notable pacifists have joined forces with the Catholic Worker. Daniel Berrigan regularly attends the Union Square vigil. Berrigan and his brother Phillip, who passed away last year, were known for their creative acts of civil disobedience in the 1960s, when they were both Catholic priests protesting the Vietnam War. The duo made the cover of Newsweek, and Paul Simon mentioned them in a song, “Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard.”

Of course, not everyone can fill the jails at the same time. When certain volunteers are in jail, others must be around to help feed the poor, says volunteer Matt Daloisio: “No one of those things is more important than any other, but they’re all connected.” Daloisio says that no one in the organization pressures the volunteers to get arrested. “It’s more pressure that we put on ourselves,” he says.

On one hand, being part of the Catholic Worker clearly makes it easier for these volunteers to practice the pacifism that they preach: Davis, the Maryhouse volunteer, points out that people who work in full-time jobs can’t risk going to jail because that might jeopardize their jobs. On the other hand, when Catholic Workers do go to court, they often have to defend themselves. The organization does not use lawyers, Laffin says, because “courts are complicit” in the injustices that the volunteers are protesting.

The Catholic Workers’ radical denunciation of war also puts them somewhat at odds with the Catholic leadership in Rome. At many points in its history, the Roman Catholic Church has accepted the idea of a “just war” — that is, a war that can be justified on moral grounds. Earlier this year, for example, the Church did not come out against the U.S.-led war on Iraq.

While the Catholic Worker has no affiliation with the Catholic Church, most volunteers say they would like the Church to actively advance a pacifist agenda. The group has held meetings with Catholic bishops all over the country to ask them to take stronger public stances against war. Many Catholic Worker volunteers also work with other Catholic groups, like Pax Christi, that are part of the international Catholic peace movement. “We would like to see the Catholic Church become a peace church,” Laffin says.

“If the Catholic Workers, by speaking to their pacifism, unsettle us in our war-making for a just cause, well then that’s a good thing,” says O’Grady, the biographer. “Because it’s terrible if we’re blithe or smug about going to war.”

As with all radical politics, however, it’s difficult to be optimistic about the Catholic Worker’s ability to achieve the social and political transformation it seeks — at least in the near future. For all its devoted volunteers and relentless crusading, the Catholic Worker has all the “political impact of a grain of sand falling from the sky,” O’Grady notes. Nevertheless, he adds, even if there are few immediate results to speak of, in the long term the influence of a popular movement like the Catholic Worker can manifest itself in “mysterious and subterranean” ways.

It’s unclear what changes we’ll see in another seven decades, but there’s a good chance that the Catholic Workers will still be toiling then, still building the society that Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin envisioned so many years ago — a society “where it is easier for people to be good.”

STORY INDEX

ORGANIZATIONS >

The Catholic Worker Movement
URL: http://www.catholicworker.org

Pax Christi USA
The national Catholic peace movement that “strives to create a world that reflects the Peace of Christ by exploring, articulating, and witnessing to the call of Christian nonviolence.”
URL: http://www.paxchristiusa.org

Plowshares Movement
An organization working toward nuclear disarmament in the United States and abroad.
URL: http://www.plowsharesactions.org

Voices in the Wilderness
A Chicago-based organization working to end economic and military warfare against the Iraqi people.
URL: http://www.nonviolence.org/vitw/

PEOPLE > DAY, DOROTHY >

Biography
Co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement.
URL: http://www.catholicworker.org/dorothyday/ddbiography.cfm

PEOPLE > MAURIN, PETER >

Biography
Co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement.
URL: http://www.catholicworker.org/roundtable/pmbiography.cfm

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maureenfarrell