Dorothy Day Inc.?
When offered the choice between a ‘Catholic Worker House Incorporated’ and a Catholic Worker that is homeless, penniless and its leaders in prison, Dorothy chose the latter.
In the May 1972 issue of The Catholic Worker, Dorothy Day announced that the New York CW had “received a letter from the Internal Revenue Service stating that we owe them $296,359 in fines and penalties and unpaid income tax for the tax years, 1966 through 1970.”
In the paper’s next issue, she reported that “I will have to appear before a Federal Judge on July 3 to explain why the CW refuses to pay taxes, or to ‘structure itself’ so as to be exempt from taxes.”
Dorothy’s response to this “crisis,” as she called it, was unequivocal, “We are afraid of that word ‘structure,’” she said. “We refuse to become a ‘corporation.’”
“Rumblings first came from the Internal Revenue Service,” Dorothy wrote, “after many on the CW staff, together with other peace groups, demonstrated against war in the Fifties and Sixties and were jailed for Civil Disobedience.” What really caught the attention of IRS might have been the repeated suggestion from Dorothy and the other editors to the readers of The Catholic Worker that they should resist the taxes that supported the war on Vietnam: “Wars will cease when men refuse to pay for them,” they reasoned.
“We repeat–we do not intend to ‘incorporate’ the Catholic Worker movement. We intend to continue our emphasis on personal responsibility, an emphasis which we were taught from the beginning by Peter Maurin,” said Dorothy. “Peter was our teacher, and being a Frenchman, a peasant, he emphasized decentralization, manual labor, voluntary poverty.”
On July 13 of that year, after editorials in support of the CW appeared in several major newspapers, the IRS gave in, but not before it threatened to seize the CW’s house in New York City and the farm at Tivoli. “An application for tax exempt status,” Dorothy told The New York Times, “would mean an endorsement of the Federal Government’s military spending and continuation of the war.”
The U.S. war against Vietnam was not the only reason she had for her suspicions in 1972. Other events at the time indicated that corporate structures could not assure real accountability.
“Perhaps,” Dorothy asked, “it is structure which makes for such a scandal as the story which appeared in the press all over the country, of a famous charity for children which had millions of dollars in reserve, money which could have been used either for expansions in the work, or in working to bring about conditions in housing and education which would make so much ‘charity’ unnecessary. Charity becomes a word which sticks in the gullet and makes one cry out for justice.”
There is no party line in the Catholic Worker, it is said, and from the beginning, there were CW houses that sought incorporation for various reasons. In past years, these corporations were mostly legal fictions, paper platforms allowing communities to own houses, land, and automobiles, to maintain checking accounts, all the while living and working practically as anarchist collectives.
For seven years beginning in 1979, I lived at the Catholic Worker House in Davenport, Iowa. The house was held by a non-profit Davenport Catholic Worker Inc, but we never used it to avoid local taxes, which we paid, and we never filed reports to the IRS. We never advertised our status to raise funds and when donations did come with a request for a receipt for tax purposes, they were returned to the donor with an explanation and our thanks.
As a corporation chartered by the state of Iowa, we were required to file with the state each year the names of our board of directors and slate of officers, president, vice president, etc. One year I remember we elected the dogs and cats of the neighborhood to these positions of responsibility and authority. Another year, after several community members were starting families, we decided that no one over three years old could qualify as director or officer in the Davenport Catholic Worker Inc.
It is quite understandable that in recent years, dictated in part by an ever more vicious economy and an all-encroaching state, more communities identifying with the Catholic Worker Movement have gone corporate than before. A quick search on guidestar.org, a site that tracks non-profits, brings up more than a dozen corporations named for Dorothy Day in the United States. My favorite is the Dorothy Day Capital Corporation in Minnesota listing more than $38 million in assets.
There are about another 20 corporations using the name “Catholic Worker” in their title and three, I found, using Peter Maurin’s name. One Peter Maurin House Inc. in New York State lists $1,405,059 in assets and $715,971 in gross receipts, not bad for a man who died penniless and was buried in a second-hand suit!
A few of these listings seem to be appropriations of the names of Peter and Dorothy and the movement they founded, but most are honest and genuine expressions of a diverse and wild movement. Some of these, most of them I hope, are corporations in name only. Some, though, have embraced and celebrated their corporate identity. In the websites and newsletters of some CW projects, “we are a 501c(3) non-profit corporation” is the first item of their mission statements. It is apparent that some have boards of directors that are not simply informal gatherings of helpful friends and advisors, but the formal legal decision-making bodies their titles suggest. Some CW boards of directors hire employees paid to do their bidding. There is a Dorothy Day House of Hospitality Inc. in Tennessee that had a $356,051 payroll and paid its Executive Director $44,552 in 2022.
In Dorothy’s June 1972 column, she offered a different business model, explaining that “voluntary poverty meant that everyone at the CW worked without salary, and contributions came from them, and from our readers, which kept the work going.”
I fear that some CW communities accept incorporating as a given, an automatic fallback, without an appreciation for the potential pitfalls and contradictions. After carefully weighing the pros and cons, incorporating might be the prudent choice for some communities, but such deliberation does not always happen. In the years since Dorothy died, there are many who talk about her or who even speak for her in her name who explain away, ignore, or even vehemently deny her radicalism, the pacifism and anarchism at the heart of the movement that she and Peter Maurin founded. That there are so many corporations named after Dorothy Day today is a testimony to the success of these revisionists.
There is a website now that offers “Free Consulting for Catholic Workers Interested in Nonprofit Development” as though the benefits of “Nonprofit Development” were self-apparent. “Why? So that all Dorothy Day Houses of Hospitality flourish,” as though flourishing, in itself, is not often fraught with peril. “If we lose the vision,” Dorothy warned, “we become merely philanthropists, doling out palliatives,” however successful we may be at “Nonprofit Development”.
In one of his Easy Essays, Peter Maurin said:
To be our brother’s keeper
is what God wants us to do.
To feed the hungry
at a personal sacrifice
is what God wants us to do.
To clothe the naked
at a personal sacrifice
is what God wants us to do.
To shelter the homeless
at a personal sacrifice
is what God wants us to do.
One CW house in Iowa on the contrary, appeals to self-interest as it places fund raising appeals in the diocesan newspaper asking: “Do you have an upcoming Required Minimum Distribution from your IRA? Do you have a donor advised fund?”
There are some among us in the CW movement who in the words of one of these, are “trying to resurrect Dorothy’s vision….trying to implement, once again, a Catholic Worker movement that is very true to her vision of bringing together orthodox Catholicism and the social justice teachings of the church,” and who are ready to scold and berate their contemporaries in the movement for our impurities. It is hard not to notice that often these are also the ones who most proudly celebrate and advertise their corporate 501c(3) non-profit corporate status to the world, as if it were proof of their authenticity.
I do not intend, nor do I believe that Dorothy and Peter intended, to make the rejection of corporate status a way of proving one’s purity as a Catholic Worker or worth as a person. We are all tainted to some degree by filthy lucre, living in this culture, even as much as we live by our labor or by alms. “Why not be a beggar?” Peter Maurin asked, and Ammon Hennacy, whom Dorothy regarded a prophet for the movement and who supported Joe Hill House of Hospitality doing odd jobs into his seventies, once said: “To talk about the dignity of labor, of life on the land… and then to mooch for a living gives a lie to all conversation.” Until the Kingdom of God’s justice is established on earth, or until we “overthrow this rotten, decadent, putrid industrial capitalist system” as Dorothy bade us to do (two ways of saying the same thing, maybe?) we are all implicated, even in the CW. The choices we make, though, do matter.
I wonder if those in the CW who seek “Nonprofit Development” might be doing as Jesus suggested, “making friends by means of the mammon of unrighteousness” (Luke 16:9). Even if so, confusing mammon with God’s Providence, as some CWs who revel in their corporate identities seem to do, can be a dangerous deceit. Fruitfulness is a gift from God, but profitability often emanates from other Sources.
The word “institution” can be used to describe a formal organization such as a corporation, or to define a significant cultural practice or pattern of relationships. It was this second definition of the word, I believe, that Peter Maurin intended in another essay:
Institutions are founded
to foster the welfare
of the masses.
Corporations are organized
to promote wealth
for the few.
So let us found
smaller and better
institutions
and not promote
bigger and better
corporations.
