In my last column, I began introducing the Catholic Worker Movement, founded in 1933 by Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin. The movement is best known for its Houses of Hospitality, which, in widely various forms, offer food and shelter to the poor.
Peter Maurin — co-founder of the Catholic Worker Movement along with the more widely known Dorothy Day — used to say that the Church’s mission should be to announce, not to denounce.
At the Easter Vigil we celebrate the great story of salvation. But it is not just religious people that have salvation stories. Every culture (even the most secular) has them, and they provide the basic logic for our morality and ideas.
When we think about social justice — or, often, our world’s lack of it — we usually think of solutions in terms of lobbying, activism, community organizing, ethical consumerism, protests or voting. We do not usually think of the Church itself as having much to do with our society’s struggles, except maybe as a resource base for those other activities.
Catholics love to disagree about all sorts of things. But when it comes to the Church’s engagement with the poor, we all seem to agree on one thing: the little word “for.”
I am a convert to Catholicism. Prior to entering the Church in 2016, I served for some years as an ordained minister in the Episcopal Church, a Protestant denomination.
