2013 marks the 80th anniversary of the founding of the Catholic Worker Movement in New York City. The following is from the soon-to-be-published (on CD) high school history book, Lands of Hope and Promise: A History of North America.
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| Dorothy Day, founder of Catholic Worker |
Catholic Anarchists
It is ironic that it took a communist and free-love radical to understand the sense of the Catholic bishops’ 1919 message that “charity is also social virtue.” Dorothy Day, the daughter of a journalist father in Chicago, had from her teen years felt a deep concern for the lot of the poor. She had read such books as Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables and Charles Dickens’ Bleak House and Little Dorritt, which had inspired her with a keen sense of the injustice of the world. But it was Sinclair Lewis’ The Jungle, which detailed the filth and degradation of the meat-packing industry in her own Chicago, that stirred her to her depths. Walking the streets in working class neighborhoods, she learned to see beauty in the lives of the poor. “From that time on,” she later wrote, “my life was to be linked to theirs, their interests would be mine: I had received a call, a vocation, a direction in life.”
Read the rest here.
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