We were asked yesterday, as a house, as a community, if we would be perceived as C/catholic were someone to visit. The answer is of course hideously complex and gorgeously simple. This Catholic Worker community, like many others, is a mix of Catholics and non-Catholics, believers and unbelievers. And despite our varying views on doctrine and dogma, we are all united in our striving (and our failing!) at what it means to be a Catholic Worker. And what it means to be a Catholic Worker is
catholic indeed.
As with Islam, Buddhism, Judaism, and Christianity, there are foundational values of the Catholic Worker movement, and each Catholic Worker house, whatever its specific focus, attempts to incarnate these ideals, nearly all of which are consonant with the pillars of the major spiritual movements. In all of the largest faith traditions, each believer is called upon to minister to the weakest, the poorest, the most vulnerable, and the most deeply suffering: the hungry, the homeless, the exiled - the forgotten. Catholic Worker houses are communities of lay people trying to go deeper into the heart of the message of the Gospels (or, if you diverge from Christianity, into the heart of
all love,
all compassion,
all unity, and into abandoned, reckless, dangerous
caritas), and commit not just the thought, the hour or the day but, through the grace of God, the work, the soul and the life, to the least fortunate among us. A Catholic Worker house, ideally, takes up where organized - and organizable – religion meet up with the messiness of life, politics, activism, relationships, and true need in this greedy, unjust, and violent world.
One can never extricate the values of Catholic Worker communities from their origins in Jesus' life and words and the teachings of Catholic social doctrine, but in their essence, the Works of Mercy*, a life dedicated to compassion, nonviolence, unity, gentle personalism, and service to the needy and the suffering is every bit as catholic as it is Catholic. Fritz Eichenberg, a Quaker who came to do scores of masterful woodcuts for the early Catholic Worker, expressed his initial attraction and long subsequent relationship with the Catholic Worker thus:
'Through Dorothy (Day), a period of my life began in which I was able to contribute to the work of a movement that gives an example of the spirit of poverty and unconditional love and nonviolence. These are the things Quakers aspire to but the Catholic Worker practices. Also I was drawn to the Christ-centeredness of the Catholic Worker, the way they saw Christ in everyone. If you see Christ in every living being, how can you kill? It's impossible. The Catholic Worker, for me, is not only a way of seeing but of listening so carefully that the person you listen to may be changed for the better, even a very violent person.'
*The Works of Mercy
Corporal Works of Mercy
-To feed the hungry
-To give drink to the thirsty
-To clothe the naked
-To visit and ransom the captives and prisoners
-To shelter the homeless
-To visit the sick
-To bury the dead
Spiritual Works of Mercy
-To counsel the wayward
-To instruct the ignorant
-To reassure the doubtful
-To comfort the sorrowful
-To bear wrongs patiently
-To forgive all injuries
-To pray for the living and the dead
