Day, Maurin and the Catholic Worker Movement

In previous columns, I’ve mentioned the influence that Peter Maurin, Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker movement have had on me.

Though sometimes today the movement is known for being only marginally Catholic, its founders — Day and Maurin — were staunchly loyal to the Church and its teachings and saw their movement as simply putting the faith into practice. They were probably the biggest influence in my decision to become Catholic in 2016. In this and subsequent columns, I’d like to introduce their thoughts and explain why their ideas are even more relevant for the Church today than they were in their own time.

Beginning in 1933, the movement sought to bring the social teachings of the Church to the poor and oppressed as well as the average Catholic in the pews. Amid the Great Depression, it was a time of great civil unrest and agitation, with competing social philosophies, ideologies and ways of life coming into increasingly open conflict with each other.

I have prayed it daily since.

I often teach this chaplet to groups when I travel to speak and without fail, people are drawn to it — or rather, drawn into it. After one retreat, however, a woman approached me and said, “But how do you do that? How do you place your wounds into the wounds of Christ?” I stammered in my reply. I had a sense of what that meant to me, but it was so personal, so deep, there really weren’t words to explain it.

But just recently, a holy woman of deep prayer gave me a compendium of Carthusian devotions to the Sacred Heart (“Ancient Devotions to the Sacred Heart of Jesus by Carthusian Monks of the 14-17th Centuries,” Gracewing Publishing, 2018). To answer this woman’s question, these ancient voices have provided far better images than I might have conjured on my own. To “read the wounds of Christ,” that is, to understand them more fully, these holy monks drew upon the vivid themes of the Canticles: “The Holy Spirit says to us in the Canticle, ‘Come, O, my dove, into the clefts of the rock.’” They equated this hiding place with the holy wounds of Jesus. It’s worth resting a moment in this idea, especially in this month when we celebrated the feast of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus.

“The soul,” recommends one monk, “should fly away as a timid dove, and take refuge in the clefts of the Rock, namely in the Wounds of Jesus Christ, and above all in the deep hollow place ... in the Wound of the Side of Jesus and in His Heart. There she has nothing more to dread. If she builds her nest in the Heart of Jesus, if she there deposits her good works, there finds shelter, there rests and takes her sleep, the evil spirits will never attempt to set their snares for her; they dare not approach the Wounds and the Heart of Jesus.” Amen.

What wound would you hide in the cleft of the

It was a time of obvious inequality; hordes of those experiencing homelessness wandered the streets and many who could find employment were bound to mindless and lowpaying grunt work. It was an increasingly polarized time and people gravitated to the comfort and stability of well-worn social and political “camps.”

It was also a time that saw the rise of revolutionary new positions, such as communism, socialism and anarchism. And there were growing numbers who refused to engage in argument at all, cynically rejecting all reasoning about the “issues” as a waste of time. Politics, many thought, had become simply about power — and amounted to no more than a battle to get more than the other guy. So, political differences had begun to become absolute differences, with liberals and conservatives demonizing one another. Sound familiar? Today, everyone, it seems — including the poor, oppressed and even the growing number of homeless — is searching for someplace solid to stand. Catholics themselves, often precisely because of their faith, feel increasingly compelled to give their allegiance to this or that party.

The Catholic Worker had a message and a program for its time, as well as ours: the Catholic Church, too, has a vision of society and a well-developed philosophy of life that is deeply relevant to the pressing debates of the day. It is a philosophy rooted in the teachings of Jesus, the Fathers of the Church, and the message of the popes. It stands for solidarity with the poor, harmony between classes, justice for the oppressed, the sanctity of all life, the just distribution of wealth and power, simplicity of life, the goodness of labor, limits to government, peace and even pacifism, small and local

On the crucifix and first three beads:

O JESUS, Divine Redeemer, be merciful to us and to the whole world. Amen.

STRONG God, holy God, immortal God, have mercy on us and on the whole world. Amen.

GRACE and mercy, O my Jesus, during present dangers; cover us with Your Precious Blood. Amen.

ETERNAL Father, grant us mercy through the Blood of Jesus Christ, Your only Son; grant us mercy, we beseech You. Amen, Amen, Amen.

The following prayers, composed by Our Lord, are to be said using the rosary beads.

On the large (middle) beads: rock of his sacred heart? An illness, a betrayal, a disappointment? Let’s borrow this ancient wisdom, purified and fashioned through lives of asceticism, and take refuge in the sacred heart of Jesus.

Eternal Father, I offer You the Wounds of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Response: To heal the wounds of our souls.

On the small (decade) beads: My Jesus, pardon and mercy.

Response: Through the merits of Your Holy Wounds.

Stanchina is the author of 12 books, including “A Place Called Golgotha.” Find the Rosary to the Holy Wounds prayer card on her website or in her book, “The Rosary: A Path into Prayer” at lizk org economies, and humane technology. The Catholic Worker program, outlined by Maurin, had and has three main aspects:

1. A newspaper, “The Catholic Worker,” and “roundtable” discussion to provoke conversation about, and awareness of, the Church’s social teaching;

2. Hospitality houses at which those experiencing homelessness could be fed and housed and at which Christians could meet Christ in the poor;

3. Farming cooperatives or “agronomic universities” (as Maurin called them) at which rich and poor alike could rediscover good work and re-establish a natural connection with the land.

Perhaps most relevantly, then as now, Day and Maurin hold out a comprehensive, wholistic vision of Catholic life. It is a vision through which everything in life is seen in the light of the Gospel, and where every part of our lives, from what we eat for lunch to who we eat lunch with — and not just what we do on Sunday morning — are capable of being taken up into the mystery of Christ. The Catholic Worker holds not just a set of abstract social teachings, line items to take with you to the polls and then go back to life as usual, but a set of thoroughly Catholic practices to help reimagine daily life.

In the coming month, I’ll unpack this in more detail.

Miller is director of pastoral care and outreach at Assumption in St. Paul. He has a Ph.D. in theology from Duke University, and lives with his family at the Maurin House Catholic Worker community in Columbia Heights. You can reach him at colin miller1@protonmail com