As we celebrate the Catholic Worker movement’s 90th birthday it's sometimes asked what the secret to our longevity is. When Dorothy Day passed in 1980 some wondered if this ragtag group of spiritual misfits would be able to survive the loss of such an illustrious founder. Many amongst the movement will say one key to our lastingness is actually baked into the philosophy that Dorothy and her co-founder Peter Maurin handed down to us; a belief in decentralization.
Practically, there is no CW headquarters deciding who is or isn’t a Catholic Worker. Instead it's more of a philosophy or way of living our lives. If we find ourselves sufficiently aligned with the Catholic Worker movement we can call ourselves CWs and just begin the work, no credential or experience necessary.
In day to day life this value of decentralization means that the work and life of each Catholic Worker community looks different everywhere you go. There is no cookie cutter way of doing it, no pre planned schema, just a desire to see justice done. This decentralization means the movement is beautifully adaptable.
For the past year I’ve been lucky enough to travel to different Catholic Worker communities around the country to see how it is they do the work in their context, how it is they mold their CW life to fill the needs of their place and time.
Often this is on a very practical level. When Eric and Jodi first started the Cherith Brook CW in Kansas City they noticed there were few sanitary shower options in their area, so they started offering showers. When an organic farm near Half Moon Bay, CA wanted help distributing their produce to those in need of fresh healthy food the CW project there set up a free grocery distribution to feed insecure farmworker families. According to CW lore, the Las Vegas CW began its manifestation by simply going out with cool water to those on the hot summer streets.
When folks find out I’ve been going around and seeing all these wonderful projects I’m often asked which is my favorite and I’m being truthful when I say that there isn’t one Catholic Worker that I like most. There is so much beautiful work going on! I really enjoyed sitting outside the Clark County jail and handing out snacks and cigarettes with Hope from Emmaus House in Chicago. I loved learning to milk a cow with Brenna when I visited St. Isidore CW farm. I thought the Mustard Seed Farm’s project of distributing their wonderful produce at the low income health clinic was a brilliant idea. The comradery of prepping four hundred meals at the LA Catholic Worker soup kitchen is addictive.
There’s also the work of resisting unjust systems (a central tenet of the Catholic Worker movement) which is just as adapted to place and time by CWs as the works of mercy. While the Catholic Workers of Winona, MN protest silicon sand mining for use in fracking and the Guadalup, CA CWs protest ICBM nuclear weapons testing near their home, the LA Catholic Worker lead workshops to correct their archdiocese’s laudatory remembrance of the California mission system and the Worcester CWs lead an exorcism of a union busting Catholic hospital.
In truth, the vision growing from Peter and Dorothy’s foundation for a new society in the shell of the old is so all encompassing it's hard to live every element of the Catholic Worker. In the real world this looks like a variety of spectrums that CWs will fall onto. In prayer there are communities that spend hours a day together and others that spend 15 minutes a week and everything in between. Living Peter Maurin’s vision of increased agricultural self and community reliance manifests itself into huge farms for some CWs, a modest patch of salad greens for others, and may be totally absent from the CW experience for the rest. There are so many other CW values on which you’ll find CWs moving up and down these spectrums: anarchism, simple living, time spent protesting, active community building, just to name a few.
The great thing about this model the CW offers us is that we can all start in our own way, little by little. We don’t need to live at a big or official CW house, we can just do it wherever we are in life. We can share from our excess. The extra coat in your closet belongs to the one who has none, advocated Dorothy Day and John the Baptist. We can start building alternatives to the troubled structures of the world, plant a seed whether literal or metaphorical. We can begin clarification of thought to begin understanding where we are, how we got here, and where we need to be going.
The Catholic Worker offers a revolution that will take all of us and lets us know that now is always the right time to begin taking steps, “by little and by little” as Dorothy Day would often quote.
Theo Kayser has been a part of the Catholic Worker movement since 2010 in communities including the Los Angeles CW and Karen House among others. He is now part of the St. Louis CW. You can find his Catholic Worker travel blog at catholicworkertheo.blogspot.com or find his Coffee with Catholic Workers podcast on most podcast platforms.
This article was originally published in the first issue of The Shell of The Old.