The Industrial Revolution changed Europe. Most importantly, it changed how we saw ourselves. Between the Middle Ages and the twentieth century, most Western Christians moved from viewing private property as a qualified necessity to a good in itself – a right to be protected by law and doctrine, even in the face of the dire poverty of others. In the present day, Christians seem on the whole to have signed an implicit social contract in which individual freedom reigns supreme. Your job is to pursue your own self-interest vigorously: you’re not expected to prioritize the well-being of others. Across all other divides, we share an impoverished vision of freedom as freedom from the needs of others.

And this carries a heavy cost. We see our lives as separate from, even opposed to, others, and so we struggle to live in community. We calculate how to spend our time, money, and energy according to what serves our interests: we live with blinders on. Without those blinders, we might see that, as Stanley Hauerwas and other thinkers have argued, the way we live runs contrary to following Christ. The politics of Jesus calls us to reject violence, wealth, and power and to seek community and serve each other, especially the poor. One movement responding to the gospel in this way is the Catholic Worker. As someone involved with the Catholic Worker, I’ve seen the fruits of this kind of discipleship. But my involvement has also brought me face-to-face with the limits of what we can achieve in the current social order.

The Catholic Worker was founded in 1933 by the journalist Dorothy Day and an immigrant from France, Peter Maurin, in New York City’s Union Square. It was the height of the Great Depression: unemployment and hunger were never far from a worker’s door. The pair started with a newspaper, addressing their first issue to those “who think that there is no hope for the future, no recognition of their plight.” Both hope and recognition could be found, they thought, in the neglected social teaching of the Catholic Church. The Catholic Worker looked to respond to the demands of the gospel through radical social and political action: to “blow the dynamite” of Christian teaching about poverty, community, hospitality, and peace. By the end of their first year, Day and Maurin were managing an eleven-room house of hospitality for the unemployed and homeless, which doubled as an office for the newspaper. Today Catholic Workers are politically and theologically diverse, but the core of Day’s and Maurin’s ideas endure: to stand in solidarity with the poor and outcast, and to work for peace. To do so, they practice some degree of voluntary poverty, direct action to help their neighbors, and hospitality.

For Maurin, modern times were comparable to the collapse of the Roman Empire, when the Dark Ages threatened human civilization and early Irish missionaries built a social order from the wreckage. Maurin thought the modern church faced a similar challenge. His program emulated the plans of those early monks: study circles for the clarification of thought, houses of hospitality where the poor and more fortunate could meet and work together, and agricultural communes where people could learn the skills of mutual aid and economic sustainability.

Maurin brought the philosophy of personalism into the Catholic Worker movement. As defined by the Catholic Worker’s current “Aims and Means” document, personalism rejects “looking to the state or other institutions to provide impersonal ‘charity.’” It teaches people to take personal responsibility for others’ well-being, rather than relying primarily on institutions or campaigning for political reforms.

This did not mean the Catholic Worker had no political or institutional demands. For example, Maurin called for dioceses to open houses of hospitality. But decentralization went hand-in-hand with the principle of subsidiarity: what can be done at the local level should be handled there. For these reasons, to this day Catholic Workers urge people to consider homesteading, support local small businesses and farms, and form cooperatives. The Catholic Worker movement aims to rehumanize labor and social life in the local sphere, where we can have the most effect.

From the beginning, the Catholic Worker has rested on two pillars: community and poverty. The commitment to both, whether living and working on a farm or in an urban house of hospitality, is radical and all-encompassing. Some volunteers stay for their entire lives, as Day and Maurin did. Many stay for a few years, and some for less. In these communities, housing, chores, and decision-making are shared. They exist not primarily for the sake of the community itself, but to provide spiritual and corporal works of mercy toward the poor. Catholic Workers often take a part-time job to make money. They do not typically pay rent but need to sustain themselves, however austerely, if they are to continue their work with the poor.

This has never been an easy or safe way to live. Relying on part-time income and having no retirement savings can be risky. When Catholic Workers want to start families, or encounter health problems, or discover they’ve aged into difficulties and responsibilities unimaginable in their youth, voluntary poverty can begin to look self-sabotaging, not just self-sacrificial. While some charitable organizations receive funding from churches, the state, or a religious order, Catholic Worker groups have little in the way of institutional backing, and more often than not run on a shoestring budget. So Catholic Workers lack the avenues of support that others receive for lifetime service to a mission. Moreover, many Catholic Workers, like Dorothy Day herself, consider voluntary poverty to be a core principle of their service. The commitment to community and to poverty creates a tension between stability and extending hospitality. Difficult choices have to be made. Houses can struggle to find volunteers, and lifelong commitments are even less common than they were in Day’s time.

Over the nine decades of the Worker’s existence, community life itself has had to navigate new challenges. One problem in creating communities of cooperation today is that the social fabric has decayed. During the Great Depression, many of the unemployed and homeless had maintained themselves and their families for years in proud working-class communities, before they were cast out of work by the economic downturn. Many were trade unionists, already practicing the virtues of cooperation. Now, many of the poor have no real experience of community, and many suffer from addictions and mental illnesses. They are not yet in a position to contribute to the life of a communal farm or house. Living in community is a difficult enough task for those with a home and a stable income, but for those who have been failed time and time again by the people and institutions around them, there are formidable obstacles.

What’s more, the individualist, consumerist ethic of our society also fails to equip the better-off to make the sacrifices – in time, money, and ego – necessary to live in community. Mortgages, credit card bills, and college debt make the cost of commitment that much higher, for the better-off, than it was in the 1930s. Many of the people who would have once been supportive neighbors to Catholic Worker groups now live in suburbs far away from the nearest house of hospitality – if they even know it exists. Suburbanization has also insulated individuals from the sense of codependency once inculcated by urban living – and even from people who live in the same neighborhood. Communal living has never been easy – as Dorothy Day said, “Communities are made up of the unlovable as well as the lovable.” Nowadays, for many people it’s not a question of whether they’re willing to live in community – but whether they’re even capable of thinking and acting in those terms.

Peter Maurin wanted to equip people to live in full community: his solution was communal farms. In Maurin’s time, the farms initially floundered under the impact of the Great Depression, but recently the idea has made a comeback – more and more Catholic Worker communities operate farms or incorporate farming into their other projects. Yet even these communal farms, which do provide many people with locally grown food, have struggled to accomplish Maurin’s goal of transforming lives.

Life involves choices, and the Catholic Worker is no exception. Catholic Workers, like many other charities helping to feed the hungry, often rely on donated packaged commercial food rather than locally grown, organic food – it is simply cheaper and more plentiful. Catholic Worker houses depend on the contributions of those living in the existing economy and political order. This order requires money-making if one wants to live with any degree of security. It encourages the growth of industries that generate useless or even destructive overproduction, at the expense of people employed in low-wage, dehumanizing, and precarious work. It is an order supported by government policies that promote a globalized corporate economy and the consolidation of land and property into fewer and fewer hands, a system fueled by the myth of infinite growth. The excess and waste in food and personal items that our economy churns out either goes to landfills or spills over to charitable operations – like the Catholic Worker – as the means of maintaining our poor.  

Without donations of money, food, and clothing, many houses of hospitality would not be able to open their doors to the poor. But these donations are predicated on an economy of excess which nevertheless creates abject poverty. They depend on others not living as Catholic Workers do. From the beginning, the Catholic Worker movement has been conscious that, if its primary task is offering hospitality to those in need, it cannot upend the system it opposes.

This is one reason Catholic Worker groups also take political action. These actions often target the government and take the form of nonviolent civil disobedience. When the US government instituted “Operation Alert” in 1954, Americans nationwide took cover for fifteen minutes at the sound of sirens: a public rehearsal of preparedness for nuclear war with the USSR. When the sirens sounded in 1955, Dorothy Day and twenty-six others protested outside as most New Yorkers hid under their desks. Noncompliance carried a year’s imprisonment and a fine of $500 (equivalent to $4,500 today). Day carried on protesting for a decade, resisting the conditioning of American citizens to accept the catastrophe of nuclear war – in the event of a strike, even occupants of fallout shelters, as Life magazine noted at the time, “might be barbecued.” By 1961, twenty-seven protestors had grown to 2,500. Operation Alert was scrapped.

But underlying causes of the injustices confronted by the Catholic Worker – poverty, homelessness, and the neglect of human values implicit in our acceptance of capitalism – have endured. In some ways they’ve become amorphous: it’s easy to turn a blind eye to issues when they don’t seem to directly affect you. Protestors today find themselves up against a two-party system where both parties support war and an economic system that maintains poverty. And they appeal to a public far more habituated to a violent and atomized society, and so inclined to remain indifferent.

Taking the history of the Catholic Worker as a test case, we can conclude that, for the moment, extracting ourselves entirely from the capitalist context is impossible. Yet a movement devoted to serving the poor in communal houses of hospitality and farms is nevertheless possible, even if it operates within and relies upon a capitalist economy.

These observations are not criticisms of the movement which I have come to know and deeply admire. Quite the contrary, they are statements about what I’ve concluded is reasonably possible, because if Catholic Workers cannot escape the limitations of capitalism, one has to wonder if anyone can. In the short term, a clean break with charity models seems inadvisable. To not take advantage of the largesse of capitalism to address the needs of the poor, such as donated food and clothing, would be irresponsible. But it should be possible to distinguish between dependence on the charity of the rich, and using these resources to build up communal organization and resiliency for the long run. For example, should corporate donations be favored because there is so much to be had, or should relationships with local businesses and farms be pursued instead, in the hopes of building up a more sustainable economy for everyone in that area?

There’s also some irony in the fact that Catholic Workers, who put a heavy emphasis on direct action, spend time protesting for changes in government policy. Apparently even anarchists can’t totally circumvent the authority of the state. Compromise may be in order here too. Instead of rejecting political protests as futile resistance to the existing political order, perhaps Catholic Workers should distinguish between purely symbolic protest and actions that seek to achieve an aim within the present system. The Vietnam War protests and the civil rights movement in America had concrete goals and worked to achieve them; a contemporary equivalent many Catholic Workers today support might be protesting arms sales to Israel or Ukraine.

The Catholic Worker movement seems to have more staying power than many movements that have emerged in opposition to capitalism. Even in a world that has changed dramatically since the 1930s, Catholic Worker groups have adapted to new challenges and in response to new needs time and again. The attraction of radical commitment, voluntary poverty, and putting Catholic social teaching into practice is real. Day’s and Maurin’s analysis of our society, and the best way to transform it, may not be perfect, but the survival of their movement against the odds suggests that they got some important things right.

Going forward, perhaps the Catholic Worker movement should look not just to carry on its founders’ methods, but to search for new ones. Traditional houses of hospitality and communal farms will continue to inspire people to make a whole-life commitment to the movement, but there might be new forms suited to the world we live in today. 

This article is adapted from The Gap in God’s Country: A Longer View on Our Culture Wars (Wipf and Stock, 2024) with the help of Plough editors. Content from this book is used by permission of Wipf and Stock Publishers.