Happy 75th Birthday Catholic Worker!

 

“Don’t call me a saint. I don’t want to be dismissed that easily.” - Dorothy Day

 

 Today is International Workers Day- a day to remember,celebrate, and work for rights of the worker worldwide.  I also heard that it is the National Day of Prayer.

So all day long my mind played with this idea of prayer and the worker. The call to work for those who are often neglected and oppressed, crushed in the wheels of the capitalist machine.  And the call to prayer, to trust, to worship, to pleading, to rejoicing.  This interplay between Christianity and the marketplace.  Personal piety and holiness and social good and equality.

So, of course, all day long, I had Dorothy Day on my mind.  Because this woman embodies a love for God and a commitment to the worker. 

And after feeling like I was walking around with Dorothy Day all day long, I found out that today was also the birth of the Catholic Worker. (A surprising non-coincidence). Today the movement celebrates 75 years. 

So our challenge on this day is to pray and to pray for the worker and to thank God for Dorothy Day. We celebrate the legacy of Dorothy Day and all the thousands of folks who have been part of the Catholic Worker by continuing the work she and Peter Maurin began to make a society where it is “easier for men to be good”- to love God with all that we are and get our hands dirty loving our neighbor. She loved the Church.  She loved Jesus. And she loved the worker. She believed that work should have dignity and that the teachings of Jesus challenged the hegemony of the free market.  I am no where near the woman Dorothy Day was and I hope to be more like her, but I want to say thank you to her and the Catholic Worker, God has used her and it to help challenge and shape me. 

My favorite book in the world is the Long Loneliness, Dorothy Day’s auto-biography.  And if you never have read it, I highly recommend you do so. I wanted to share a quote with you from it, but it is impossible.  It is the story of Day’s life and to take any one passage out of the rest would just not represent how rich a meal this book is. 

But as an appetizer…

Here is a great little article by Jim Forest, who knew Day and was part of a Catholic worker house.

Tags: Christianity, Jesus, Dorothy Day, Catholic Worker, Worker, Labor