On Pilgrimage (July 1955)

Peter Maurin Farm, Staten Island

Dorothy Day writes shortly after the birth of her seventh grandchild, Martha.

During the two months since the last issue of the Catholic Worker came out, the great move from Newburgh, Maryfarm, to Peter Maurin Farm, Staten Island, has been accomplished and all the men have been housed and settled, and the furniture is still being sorted out and spread around. Fr. Faley is in his own quarters, with his own furniture, and with the additional comfort of windows facing north and south, so that he has had a little breeze these torrid days of July. Philip is in the dormitory. Joe Roche and Jim the carpenter have a room next to Fr. Faley’s, then there is Hans’s ship’s cabin, and next to him a room at one end of the carpenter shed for John Fillinger who in this month has made hay, milked the cows, tended the vegetables and built a shed for the hay and machinery in back of the other farm buildings. It is all on a small scale, compared to Maryfarm, but we are all together and we are near the heart of the work, which is Chrystie street. Joe Cotter has his private room in a converted chicken coop down behind the stone tool house, a little room which was occupied in the past by Emily Scarborough one summer, and Hector Black (who is now with the Society of Brothers) for a two week’s retreat a few summers ago. Chickens and rabbits have also lived there since. Bill and Mike have a room in back of the chapel, and the dormitory on either end of the barn accommodates the others. All in the house are women except Stanley who has himself and his press in a cubby hole of a room, with a low ceiling which makes it hot in summer, and with no connection with the furnace, which makes it cold in winter. Stanley saved us from being burnt up one night last month, when one of the women smelled smoke and called him and he went downstairs to find the couch in flames. No more overstuffed furniture in the dining-room-library where cigarettes can fall between the cushions and smolder. Three bookcases now take the place of the couch, and are far more useful.

Great News

After the jail, after the moving, after we had all settled down getting straightened out, Tamar quietly proceeded to have her seventh baby, with neatness and dispatch as she usually does. I had gone over to her home, a mile away to spend the night for the first time, now that the last of six truck loads had come down from Maryfarm and the moving was all but done. Fr. Faley had said his first Sunday Mass that morning, the heat had been broken that afternoon by a great thunder and lightning storm during which Prasse’s barn next door was struck by lightning. John and the men rushed over to help save the herd of pedigreed goats from the blazing barn, and the Hennessy children and Paul Yamamoto and the Scarpuli’s who were spending the afternoon at the farm all stood by in fascinated horror. When I took the Hennessys home that night Dave had to go to work on the graveyard shift, from eleven until seven the next morning. “You’d better stay,” Tamar told me.

It was a little after midnight that she called me, and with Vicenza Baglioni coming over from Peter Maurin farm to stay with the rest of the children, we got down to the little hospital in Princess Bay just in time. Martha was born at one thirty Monday morning, July 11th and is being baptized on the feast of St. Martha.

It has been a happy time these past two weeks, staying with the children. Tamar felt so well she was able to come home on Thursday morning after three days in the hospital. It was hard to keep her down but by applying herself to making a hooked rug she was able to keep quiet for a week.

In the two months since the paper came out last there has been Fr. Casey’s annual retreat, the picketing and the arrest and the experience of three police courts and two detention houses, the move from Maryfarm and the birth not only of my grandchild, but also of two other babies at Peter Maurin farm, and finally the death and burial at Calvary, of our old friend Fr. John Cordes. May he rest in peace. He had been sick for years, but confined to the hospital for the last year, and his death came as a result of a heart attack and was a surprise to us all. We ask the prayers of our readers for him.

Martha Hennessy Interview

Martha Hennessy is a prominent US peace activist, Catholic Worker and granddaughter of Dorothy Day. Here she talks to Tom Dennehy-Caddick ahead of a 90th anniversary Catholic Worker talk late last year.

So, 90 years on from its founding, what is the message that the Catholic Worker movement has for today?

I believe the message remains the same. We work with the Catholic social teachings, providing the works of mercy, houses of hospitality. Also, the parts of Peter's programme. You know, agronomic universities, where scholars can come to work and workers can become scholars and study. A method of breaking down the class structure of the United States. So, I think that the mission is always the same. The gospel teachings of Christ. How do we work as disciples of Christ in the 21st century.

Dorothy Day and Martha Hennessy

Immense technological changes have occurred, especially since the 1930s, but Dorothy and Peter spoke to the immediate needs of the person in front of you. Dorothy was very practical. Peter had the theoretical underpinnings and the Gospel teachings. You know what I always remind myself of? To keep it very simple: to love God with all your mind, heart and soul, and to love your neighbour as yourself. That's the basic Christian teaching. And so, we do hope that the Catholic Worker continues to display and further that message in the movement.

If your grandmother, Dorothy Day, and her co-founder, Peter Maurin, were to see the movement today, what do you think would strike them? What would make them be joyous? What would they want to call us back to?

I think they would be very grateful to see the soup lines. You know, feeding the people who can't fit into the houses. The soup lines, I think are very important. And also the hospitality that is provided in the houses, you know, to the best of everyone's abilities. I mean, they would recognise the scene in the kitchen of cooking a big pot of soup to be distributed. So, I think that that hospitality aspect is still quite obvious and intact.

I think they might wonder what's going on with some of the houses that may not be doing in-house hospitality and speaking truth to power. Though there are houses and communities who definitely hold on to that message. And, you know, we have to evolve. Things change over the decades and over the generations.

You have spoken before about how your peace work with Kings Bay Ploughshares - being imprisoned for entering a US nuclear military base - differed from Dorothy's more restricted view of direct action. Is there something about today which you think requires us to act differently?

She recognised the horror of the bomb. She witnessed it in her lifetime, unlike us. But I think the two principles that she had concerns about with her dear friends, Phil and Dan Berrigan, were the question of secrecy and destruction of property. So, I had to discern in my own heart and mind what that meant. This question of the nuclear weapons being right in front of us, hidden in plain sight. The secrecy behind the whole programme just was unbearable to me. And Dan Berrigan spoke to the question of property. What is proper to the common good? Nuclear weapons are not proper to the common good. So, that answered my question of the so-called destruction of property. And, you know, for our situation with the US military, you're not going to get onto those bases if you announce that you want to go onto those bases. So that was it. What will resistance to nuclear weapons require? It may look different in my grandchildren's time. We're praying to God that they'll be abolished within my lifetime.

Catholic Worker communities are very beautiful but also very challenging places to be. What was it like to grow up within the Catholic Worker movement?

The Catholic Worker movement is not an NGO. It's not an agency. It's a family. And I certainly grew up with the definition of family being beyond biological. So, I think it's very important to keep that spirit within the houses of making people feel comfortable and welcomed and that you're willing to share, you know, all that you have with them, including yourself, and your time, and your space.

A real challenge is growing up in a large city. Tamar, my mother, loved the countryside. And so her first two children were born at the Eastern Catholic Worker Farm, and the next two were born on their own farm. And then my sister was born on the Peter Maurin farm. So we had a variety of experiences of being a family unit within the community, but also having our own space. But, you know, there are issues. There's a lot of mental illness in the Catholic Worker houses due to the situation of those who are left behind, who fall through the cracks. But my mother had wonderful memories of her childhood. Just the warmth, the camaraderie, the family style that Dorothy managed to evoke, for everyone. Now, how beautiful is that compared to state institutional approaches.

When you grew up, you moved away for a time from both the Catholic faith and the Worker movement. How did you find yourself journeying back to faith and back to the Catholic Worker movement?

It's hard to explain conversions. Conversions are mysterious things. My father left the family when I was six. My mother kind of left the church. She had all kinds of questions of how the Church treated women and children. My grandmother was heartbroken to see us just drift away from the Church. But later I just found myself returning. I really can't explain it. Dorothy was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in 2002, and I had to give a little acceptance speech, and my life changed drastically after that. I was just hit over the head. I was living in Vermont, working as an occupational therapist, raising my children, getting them through college, living a normal life, paying my war taxes. And then I had to give this little speech, and I realised what this legacy meant... the kind of soapbox I was given and how I should start using it. So that was kind of the beginning.

Later, I struck up a correspondence with Daniel Berrigan, and he really did help me in very mysterious ways to return to fundamental questions. What does your baptism mean to you? What are you going to do with this? The answer was: you're a Catholic, and you're within the Catholic Worker. Still, I was totally terrified of going back to Maryhouse. I hadn't set foot in the house for 24 years after Granny's funeral, but now I can see that all of these little seeds were planted to bring me back somehow.

This article was published by Independent Catholic News, 15/12/23, and featured in the Easter 2024 London Catholic Worker newsletter.

Poverty Is the Pearl of Great Price

Jacques Maritain, speaking at a Catholic Worker meeting a few years ago, urged us to read the Gospels. Therese of Lisieux, the little saint of our day, carried it next to her heart. Even if we read only the Gospel for Sunday, several times, God sends us a special message for our need.

The Pearl of Great Price, John Everett Millais, 1864

I thought of that a few Sundays ago as I read the parable about the lost sheep. Certainly the men around the Bowery are lost sheep. They are our brothers in Jesus; He died for each of them. What respect we should feel for them!

When we began the Catholic Worker, we first thought of it as a headquarters for the paper, a place for round-table discussions, for learning crafts, for studying ways of building up a new social order. But God has made it much more than all this. He has made it a place for the poor. They come early in the morning from their beds in cheap flophouses, from the benches in the park across the street, from the holes and corners of the city. They are the most destitute, the most abandoned.

It is easy for people to see Jesus in the children of the slums, and institutions and schools are built to help them. That is a vocation in itself. But these abandoned men are looked upon as hopeless. “No good will come of it.” We are contributing to laziness. We are feeding people who won’t work. These are the accusations made. God help us, we give them so little: bread and coffee in the morning, soup and bread at noon. Two scant meals.

We are a family of forty or fifty at the Catholic Worker. We keep emphasizing that. But we are also a House of Hospitality. So many come that it is impossible to give personal attention to each one; we can only give what we have, in the name of Jesus. Thank God for directing our vocation. We did not choose this work. He sent it to us. We will always, please God, be clambering around the rocks and briars, the barrenness, the fruitlessness of city life, in search of lost sheep.

We are told to put on Christ and we think of Him in His private life, His life of work, His public life, His teaching and His suffering life. But we do not think enough of His life as a little child, as a baby. His helplessness. His powerlessness. We have to be content to be in that state too. Not to be able to do anything, to accomplish anything.

One thing children certainly accomplish, and that is that they love and wonder at the people and the universe around them. They live in the midst of squalor and confusion and see it not. They see people at the moment and love them and admire them. They forgive and they go on loving. They may look on the most vicious person, and if he is at that moment good and kind and doing something which they can be interested in or admire, there they are, pouring out their hearts to him.

Oh yes, I can write with authority. I have my own little grandchildren with me right now, and they see only the beauty and the joy of the Catholic Worker and its activities. There is no criticism in their minds and hearts of others around them.

My daughter, too, was raised among the poor and the most abandoned of human beings. She was only seven when the Catholic Worker started, and now she has a daughter of seven and four others besides.

It is good to be able to write with authority about the family, about poverty in our day – the involuntary poverty which all families must endure – about insecurity and unemployment. A few years ago, visiting my daughter, I was lying awake at 2 a.m., worrying because David had just lost his job and Tamar was about to have her fifth child. The former boss, who also owned the house they lived in, had come bearing oranges for the children and to tell them to move at once. What a strange juxtaposition of gestures! And I was torn between wrath and the necessity to train oneself in loving one’s enemies, hating the sin but loving the sinner.

But then I though, “Thank God I have this suffering of joblessness and insecurity and homelessness together with others. This day, for the sake of the family, there are so many compromises. But we must learn to accept the hardest of all sufferings, the suffering of those nearest and dearest to us. Thank God for this training in suffering.” Accepting this made it easier at the time to go back to sleep. Since then there has been more of the same. Thank God for everything.

The fundamental means of the Catholic Worker are voluntary poverty and manual labor, a spirit of detachment from all things, a sense of the primacy of the spiritual, which makes the rest easy. “His praise should be ever in our mouth.”

The reason for our existence is to praise God, to love Him and serve Him, and we can do this only by loving our brothers. “All men are brothers.” This is the great truth that makes us realize God. Great crimes, it is true, have been committed in the name of human brotherhood; that may serve to obscure the truth, but we must keep on saying it. We must keep on saying it because Love is the reason for our existence. It is what we all live for, whether we are a hanger-on in Times Square or the most pious member of a community. We are seeking what we think to be the good for us. If we don’t know any better, often it is because radio, newspapers, press and pulpit have neglected so to inform us. We love what is presented to us to love, and God is not much presented. It is as hard to see Jesus in the respectable Christian today as in the man on the Bowery. And so “the masses have been lost to the Church.”

We who live in this country cannot be as poor as those who go out to other countries. This is so rich a country that luxury has developed at the expense of necessities, and even the destitute partake of the luxury. We are the rich country of the world, like Dives at the feast. We must try hard, we must study to be poor like Lazarus at the gate, who was taken into Abraham’s bosom. The Gospel doesn’t tell us anything about Lazarus’ virtues. He just sat there and let the dogs lick his sores. He would be classed by any social worker of today as a mental case. But again, poverty, and in this case destitution, like hospitality, is so esteemed by God, it is something to be sought after, worked for, the pearl of great price.