RITE AND REASON: Members of the Catholic Worker Movement have been to the fore in recent protests. Who are these people? Dr Mary Condren explains.
Relatively new to Ireland, the Catholic Worker is a radical pacifist movement. Some of its central aims, often still misunderstood even in the US, the land of its genesis, are to respect the sacredness of conscience and of life and to address hunger, illness, homelessness, rejection and grief, thus attempting to conform our lives to "the folly of the cross".
The Catholic Worker maintains that Jesus had nothing to do with "just wars" or killing, but ordered followers to renounce the sword.
The dynamic partnership of Dorothy Day, a left-wing journalist and Catholic convert, and Peter Maurin, a French philosopher and manual labourer, sparked the movement in New York in 1933. The Catholic Worker newspaper espoused the budding movement's belief in personalism, voluntary poverty and pacifism.
They established many houses of hospitality for the poor during the Depression era. Living in public tenements in solidarity with the exploited and dispossessed, Day and Maurin's philosophy was that of "living simply so that others can simply live".
Day was deeply influenced by Maurin's long-term vision of ownership by workers of the means of production, decentralisation of workplaces and the revival of skilled work such as crafts to replace the assembly line. The movement's long-term social vision has always had an agrarian emphasis.
Day often noted the disparity between the life of Christ and the institutional Church, which at first regarded the movement as a harmless embarrassment, denouncing its pacifism but admiring its houses of hospitality. But Day noted that "For Christ Himself, housed in the tabernacles in the Church, no magnificence is too great; but for the priest who serves Christ, and for the priesthood of the laity, no such magnificence, in the face of the hunger and homelessness of the world, can be understood."
An unwed mother and college dropout, Day claimed that she was just an ordinary woman touched by an extraordinary grace freely available to all.
Intrinsic to her understanding of Catholicism was the willingness to be jailed for acts of civil disobedience/divine obedience (anti-war protests and workers' rights demonstrations), embracing voluntary poverty (embodying the Church's preferential option for the poor), and continuously highlighting the injustices wrought by private and state capitalism.
Many important figures - Thomas Merton, Daniel Berrigan S.J. and his brother, the late Phillip Berrigan - were influenced by Catholic Worker philosophy and praxis, taking part in and supporting the draft-card burnings of the 1960s. The contention that human life is sacred was central to their thinking.
To highlight the criminality of warfare and of nuclear arms, the Berrigans started the Ploughshares movement in 1980, breaking into a General Electric plant in Pennsylvania and disarming warheads. Their aim was to embody the prophecy of Isaiah to "beat swords into ploughshares".
Catholic Worker philosophy regards poverty and militarism as symptoms of the same deeply flawed system, so hospitality and resistance in the context of community are equally important.
Some 140 Catholic Worker communities now exist around the world, the majority in the US.
Some are hospitality-oriented, while others hold hospitality to the poor and resistance-oriented activities in a balanced tension.
Perhaps their ethos is perhaps best captured in Day's description of the genesis of the movement: "We were just sitting there talking when Peter Maurin came in . . . lines of people began to form saying 'We need bread.' We could not say 'Go, be thou filled'.
"If there were six small loaves and a few fishes, we had to divide them. There was always bread. . . Heaven is a banquet and life is a banquet, too, even with a crust, where there is companionship."
Day defined the spiritual works of mercy thus: "enlightening the ignorant, rebuking the sinner, consoling the afflicted as well as bearing wrongs patiently, and we have always classed picket lines and the distribution of literature among these works."
The movement considers Christian non-violence to be actively resistant, rather than submissive. At the time of the Spanish Civil War in 1937, Day wrote that "We must stand opposed to the use of force We are not talking of passive resistance. Love and prayer are not passive, but a most active, glowing force."
But jail, resistance, poverty, and marginalisation all take their toll, what Day described in her autobiography as "the long loneliness". But their hidden weapon was community, an essential ingredient to living the dissenting life with a joyful spirit.
Ironically, Day's canonisation is now under way. Traditional Catholics have difficulty with aspects of her politics and life history: radical Catholics believe that canonisation would sanitise the true radicalism of Day's vision. She will have the last word herself: "Don't call me a saint, I don't want to be dismissed that easily."
Dr Mary Condren is a theologian, director of the Institute for Feminism and Religion, and author of The Serpent and the Goddess.