Martha Hennessy: Rooted in a Legacy of Catholic Worker Values (CCW Ep 27)

In this episode of the Coffee with Catholic Workers podcast, co-hosts Theo Kayser and Lydia Wong interview Martha Hennessy, granddaughter of Dorothy Day. Martha shares insights into her unique upbringing, her personal journey away from and back to the Catholic Worker movement, and her reflections on the intersection of faith and activism today.

Hennessy grew up as one of nine children, deeply immersed in the Catholic Worker environment. After Dorothy Day’s death in 1980, she distanced herself from both the movement and the Catholic Church, focusing on raising her family and working as an occupational therapist. However, in 2004, she reconnected with the Catholic Worker, eventually returning to volunteer and live part-time at Maryhouse in New York City.

In their conversation, Hennessy reflected on her childhood, describing how visiting her grandmother Dorothy Day at Tivoli Farm and Maryhouse profoundly influenced her understanding of community and social justice. Despite not living full-time at the Catholic Worker, her family life embodied its values, especially hospitality.

Play the episode or read the transcript below.

Episode transcript

The following episode transcript was autogenerated from the audio transcript and subsequently reviewed and lightly edited for accuracy and clarity. Filler words (ah, um, like, etc.) and false starts have been removed to improve readability.

Theo Kayser: Welcome to Coffee with Catholic Workers, a podcast made by and for Catholic Workers. I’m Theo.

Lydia Wong: And I’m Lydia. We’ve both been part of the Catholic Worker for the last decade, and we’re excited to bring you conversations with different Catholic Workers around the world.

Theo Kayser: On this episode, we’re talking to Martha Hennessey, who shares some of her experiences of being the granddaughter of Dorothy Day, finding her way back to the Catholic Worker, and some of the ways she continues to live out the values she first encountered as a child.

Lydia Wong: Now, here’s Martha.

Theo Kayser: Martha, welcome to Coffee with Catholic Workers. Thanks for giving us some of your time today. We generally start the show with, how did you find your way to the Catholic Worker movement?

It’s often our first question to guests, and they’re all very different stories of how people get there, and I think yours is going to be quite different than anyone else before. So, could you tell us about how did you get introduced to the Catholic Worker?

Martha Hennessy: Oh, I guess you could call it an accident of birth. Yeah, well, so Dorothy had one child, Tamar, and Tamar is my mother. And Tamar had nine kids.

I’m number seven of nine kids, and we’re just part of the Catholic Worker family. I must say that both Tamar and Dorothy were very good at expanding the definition of family beyond biological. So, you know, it’s the beloved community.

You know, many families have been involved, and I’m just very, very grateful that it’s all turned out the way it has. Just, you know, God works in amazing ways.

Theo Kayser: So, what does your involvement in the movement look like nowadays?

Martha Hennessy: Oh, okay, yes. Well, I mean, when we were kids, we would spend the summers at the Tivoli Farm, and we would visit Dorothy, we called her Granny, at St. Joseph’s House. And so, Maryhouse was purchased in the mid-70s.

So, my last few visits with Granny were at Maryhouse. And she died in 1980 when I was 25 years old. I had a two-year-old child by then.

My last visit with her was with my son. She was pretty exhausted at that point with hyperactive great-grandchildren. And then I didn’t set foot in the house for 24 years after she died.

You know, I was very busy raising my own family, working. I worked as an occupational therapist for many years. And then in 2004, I went back to the house, grossed out by all the cigarette smoke.

And then I started volunteering there part-time, taking a room there, a bed, in 2010. And I don’t know, it’s an odd story for sure about how or why I re-engaged, you know, as a middle-aged woman. But I was out of the Catholic Church.

When we were teenagers, we left the church. It was heartbreaking for Granny, of course. So, I spent a good part of my adulthood trying to figure out Dorothy’s amazing conversion experience and Tamar’s leaving the church.

So, I had to find my way between those two, I wouldn’t call them goalposts, but experiences. And perhaps my engagement with the Catholic Church helped me to just re-examine what it meant to be a baptized Catholic and what it meant to be part of the Catholic Worker story. You know, it wasn’t easy for us.

Dorothy was, she belonged to the world. She had a lot of work to do. She did an amazing job of being a family member, staying in touch, helping out.

But I think perhaps one event that sort of shook my world up, I was hiding out in Vermont, you know, in the bosom of my family, just living my life. I mean, I kept up with the Worker and the paper and all of the events and issues and concerns all those years. But, you know, I just, I couldn’t engage.

I was just busy doing other things. And in 2002, she was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame. And I ended up going down there to Seneca Falls, New York, in 2002, October of 2002, to receive this award.

And I gave a three-minute speech. And, you know, in that speech, I mentioned this imminent invasion of Iraq. And I, essentially, what I said was, if you want to honor Dorothy Day, pay attention to what she was saying about war.

So that sort of really got me in involved in a way that I really wasn’t prepared for. You know, I tell this story about how Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Rosalind Carter came up to me after the induction ceremony.

Ginsburg didn’t say a word to me. She just simply grabbed my hand. And then Rosalind Carter said, thanks for what you said. Thank you for what you said.

So, you know, that was kind of really the beginning of my world being shaken. I understood, you know, the legacy, but I just couldn’t accept the platform that I was given, I suppose. So that was one thing.

And then I would say in 2004, I started correspondence with Dan Berrigan, and he really helped me to reenter the Church. And then in 2007, I got involved with Witness Against Torture that came out of Maryhouse. You know, my first and only arrest was 1979, protesting Seabrook nuclear power plant in New Hampshire.

And so in 2007, I joined Witness Against Torture and went down to D.C. and had another arrest, a real icebreaker, as Frank Cadaro called it. And then, you know, I did a Father Hugo retreat in 2008. I stayed at the London Catholic Worker Farm for a couple of months.

My mother had died in 2008, and there was something about her passing that perhaps freed me up to really explore what this family story meant. So, like I said, 2010, I started hanging out there more and more, and it’s been great. Well, actually, I call it the agony and the ecstasy of participating in community.

And, you know, the New York Worker has an especially, perhaps, difficult legacy of, you know, that’s where Dorothy lived and died. And so the people there were especially impacted and influenced. And after her death, we really had to figure out how to carry on.

So it’s been complicated. It’s been difficult, but it’s been beautiful. So I think that kind of sums up my history of how I ended up re-engaging.

Lydia Wong: What are some of those pieces of beauty that you see that keeps drawing you back in and keeps you involved in all of it?

Martha Hennessy: Oh, jeez, you know, Maryhouse and St. Joe’s are pretty special places, I suppose. You know, I think her spirit is still there in a certain sense. And the work, the Works of Mercy are absolutely amazing.

You know, the houses, the hospitality in New York are the real thing. I mean, they do the work. They live with the poor.

They have really brought to life what was meant by, you know, Peter’s program. So we have the two houses in the city and Peter Maurin Farm in Marlborough, which was purchased right after Tivoli. So there’s the beauty of place, the geography of place.

There’s the beauty of the beloved community, you know, meeting people that I kind of knew as a teenager and then seeing them again in their old age. So there’s a certain amount of continuity there. And, you know, I love the chapel.

I love the Friday night meetings. I love the masses that we have there. They’re the best masses in the world. The ones at St. Joe’s Kitchen are really stunning.

And, you know, I’m a cook. I’m a cleaner. I’m a wife. I’m a mother. You know, I love doing what we call in the world of occupational therapy, “activities of daily living.”

And, you know, the therapeutic use of self. So it’s not like I had to learn any new skills, so to speak. But, you know, maybe the agony that I mentioned is related to my own shortcomings, you know, coming up against oneself.

I talk about this a lot. Coming face to face with our own internal imperialistic urges, where when you’re doing this kind of work, you really do have to face up to who you are, what your motives are, what your disposition is. But anyhow, I found myself just fitting in very easily and doing the work with joy.

So those are some of the things that I can recall right now most immediately.

Theo Kayser: You lived all those years not at the Catholic Worker, but do you think that its influence affected the way you were living your life or the way you saw the world?

Martha Hennessy: Totally. You know, you don’t get away from living with women like Tamar and Dorothy without having significant impact.

So, my parents moved to Vermont when I was two. I was born on Staten Island. And, you know, they had this dream of life on the land, which was certainly Peter Maurin’s vision. So my connection to gardening and nature—very, very strong.

I grew up with that. Tamar was an amazing gardener. My father was all thumbs. All he could do was break all the hoes, killing the snakes. That’s how the family story goes. Irish Catholic.

So, you know, the way we lived, yeah, was directly related to the Catholic Worker life. You know, I was always aware of current events. My mother and grandmother paid attention to the news, paid attention to what was going on in the world.

And that sort of entered into my psyche as a child, very young child, coming to understand and be willing to understand and see the suffering of others. That came to me at a very young age. I clearly remember, you know, hearing about Biafra starving.

And then, of course, the Vietnam War. My brother was sent off to war. This was no, this was no theory.

This was like real life practice, the pacifism, anti-war stance. So all of those things were part of my life. You know, when we were in New York, we were protesting in the streets against the Vietnam War while our brother was over there fighting.

So our life in Vermont was beautiful, was idyllic. But Tamar was amazing. You know, she ended up raising a lot more than nine kids. Often, we would have kids come home with us at the end of the summer from the Tivoli farm, kids whose families couldn’t take care of them. They would finish growing up with us in Vermont. So Dorothy did say to Tamar, you truly are running a house of hospitality.

And of course, we always had visitors coming and going, you know, through the house in Vermont from the Catholic Worker extended community. So I would say, and also, you know, we were ostracized in the neighborhood. You know, the people in Vermont considered Dorothy to be a communist.

You know, she was shouted down when she tried to speak in Chester, Vermont in the 1960s. So, you know, we grew up with the ostracization of the family because of the work she was doing that was so radical. And I think that probably every major decision that I made in my life, you know, especially in regards to vocation, you know, choosing the profession of occupational therapy was certainly influenced by my mother and grandmother’s values. You know, I didn’t want to work with machines. I didn’t want to work with papers. I wanted to work with people.

So I would say the influence is very deep, very pervasive, and very constant. And as my sister Kate said, you know, you spend the rest of your life figuring out what hit you, having known Dorothy Day. So of course, you know, our relationship with her is very different, obviously.

You know, even at a, you know, absorbing her spirituality at a cellular level. It’s hard to explain.

Lydia Wong: One of the things that has come up a couple different times in different conversations with people on the show is sometimes the, both like the joys and the struggles of children in the Catholic Worker, and this idea of trying to live radical lives, and where do kids fit into all of that? Both not wanting to sort of push people away from what’s happening, but also, it’s a different life. Hopefully not everybody is ostracized like your family, but it’s definitely not sort of a typical childhood.

Martha Hennessy: Yeah, certainly not typical. Well, Peter Maurin said the family is the first unit of society. And so, you know, the Catholic Worker is a family. Tamar grew up in it. She loved it. Fond, fond memories. Never a dull moment. Very exciting things happening. So many interesting people coming through.

And for us kids, it was grand, but you know, we didn’t live there full time. Spending the summers there, it was just an amazing way to grow up. You know, the Tivoli Farm had these two huge houses. One was like a hotel and the other was an old Dutch mansion. My sister lived there. Her youngest was born there in the mansion. So my sister raised her kids a little bit in the Catholic Worker. She also experimented with community through the Summertime Farm, Stephen and Ina May Gaskin, my sister Susie. And then they lived very close to the Peter Maurin Farm in Marlborough when she died of cancer.

So there have always been families in the community. The Gorbins all grew up there at Tivoli Farm. And of course, there’s an upside and a downside to that.

And I know that folks have had not good experiences having young children in the houses with the homeless and mentally ill. So that is a risk that we have to be honest about. And there are stories about those risks.

But generally speaking, there was just no way I would live with my kids in community. I mean, the fathers of my kids would have no interest anyhow.

And on the other hand, you know, I did grow up in poverty. You know, I was on welfare. My dad left the family when I was six. And I was raised on welfare from the ages of six to 18.

You know, single mother with nine children, it was pretty inevitable. You know, I finally got dental care and medical care by the age of six, because of getting on welfare.

And you know, Dorothy had the whole concern of mother state providing where, you know, family and community should be providing. So we grew up with a contradiction. We grew up with having to simultaneously hold contradictions that, you know, idiosyncrasies, being raised by the state, being raised by the Catholic Worker.

But I understand that there are lots of communities around the country that do have kids in the houses. And that’s wonderful. So people have to figure it out themselves, how they’re going to do it. You know, the Worcester CW, Claire and Scott, they raised kids the whole time they had the community going.

So each community and each member of the community gets to figure out what works for them. So I love that flexibility and whatever works in an anarchistic movement, Christian anarchist movement. People can do what works for them.

Lydia Wong: And there’s a piece where I think that the development of people finding what works for them is what ultimately leads to some longevity for people, that people try to force themselves or communities force into a certain way of being. It just, it doesn’t work. What are, for you, thinking sort of in that vein, what are some of the things that you think have led to sort of your dedication of the values over a lifetime of both engaging as a kid and summers in New York and on the farms, and also now in this phase of your life, being involved in activism, being involved at different houses from time to time?

What has contributed to that? What’s helped with the longevity of your work more than it turning into something like a phase?

Martha Hennessy: Yeah. Well, the will of God, I suppose. I mean, it’s my life. It’s my family. It’s my history. How could I get away from it? It is what it is.

Well, on the other hand, I do have to point out that none of my siblings went back to the Catholic Church or feel comfortable living in CW community.

Some of them think I’m nuts. They could be right. I don’t know. I mean, I just got born with the disposition that I got born with.

We’re all born with our different strengths and weaknesses. I don’t know. A lot of those principles and morals and ideas and visions stuck with me, resonated with me.

But as Dorothy would say, we can’t take credit. We just get pushed into these things. We’re unworthy servants.

So, I don’t know how to explain myself, and I don’t know how to explain the differences between family members who have engaged or participated.

Theo Kayser: One thing I’m wondering about is you mentioned in your youth being kind of ostracized for being Dorothy’s family, that she was considered by many folks a radical and someone to be kept at arm’s length or even shouted down. But then all of a sudden, you’re getting this award on her behalf, you know? Like, she’s being celebrated in these big ways.

And also feeling that you have to remind people, like, yeah, if Dorothy was here today, she’d be speaking about this award, you know? What do you think about that shift?

Martha Hennessy: I don’t know if the shift has happened. We’re still, you know, it’s a fickle, schizophrenic culture we live in. You know, she was glorified, and she was demonized.

That’s in the Diagnostic Statistical Manual of, you know, personality disorder, when a whole group of people or a person either demonizes or heroizes another person, you know? So, I’ve grown up with that, you know, with the response of, you know, either, who was Dorothy Day? Or, oh my god, you’re related to her? Two pretty extreme responses.

And this question of her being ostracized in the 1960s. Vermont was Republican, you know? Vermont was very conservative, rural, typical, and not very Catholic up here. So, those things probably played a role in how we were received up here. And, you know, Tamar lived here for nearly 50 years, and I don’t know that she ever felt at home.

So, this whole question of what she was doing, what Dorothy was doing, you know, as a Catholic convert, embedded in U.S. history, you know, how the Church treated her in her lifetime. So, she persevered, you know, that mother and daughter, they were incredibly strong. They had to be, to, you know, stand up as women in a world that’s culturally violent and racist.

So, thank God for them. Thank God for people throughout history who have been gifted with this incredible grace to love, to share, to lead, to set examples. And, yeah, we get ostracized for multiple reasons, but we’re also privileged.

You know, I’m incredibly grateful for the life that I’ve been able to live. And, you know, as a privileged white person, I have to stay aware of the leg up that I’ve had in so many ways, just for the nature of the color of my skin, my gene pool.

So, it’s always good to put yourself in a position of suffering. Remind yourself of, you know, if we want to be disciples of Christ, yeah, we have to suffer. And, love itself, and motherhood itself, call for suffering. To, you know, to give birth is one of the most powerful things in life. And, you know, we see that in Dorothy’s story of having given birth after having had trauma and uncertainty about whether she could give birth. Jesus was marginalized. Today, I mean, some of our best leaders were murdered, for God’s sake.

So, I think we have to be prepared to pay the costs of standing up to the status quo. I mean, what we’re seeing now on these U.S. campuses, the students, you know, are being brutalized, saying that this genocide must stop. I mean, that’s a very clear example of what the state requires.

The state, the health of the state is the war machine, as Dorothy wrote about. And, of course, we’re now coming to a place in human history where this model really sucks, and really is not working, and really is unsustainable. The planet itself, Mother Nature herself, won’t have it, can’t sustain it with climate collapse.

We can’t sustain this model, this economic, social, political model that’s based on the worst inclinations of human nature. It’s like the opposite of Christianity, what Christianity calls for. So, yeah, we have to pay attention.

One of the things that my mother always said was, pay attention. And, you know, the older I get, I’m 68 now, the older I get, the more I understand what the two of them were about. But it’s beautiful. It’s all so beautiful. Life is beautiful. I mean, we’re seeing these images coming out of Gaza, and God, how can we continue to exist with ourselves? I mean, how can we stomach the human race? But we’re called, we’re called to care, and to love, and to stand up against injustice and hatred. So, it’s beautiful work. It’s incredible work. It’s painful work. But thank God for the Catholic Worker.

Yesterday was our 91st anniversary, May Day, Feast of St. Joseph the Worker, IWW labor. And now we’re seeing labor joining hands with the students. And this is where the revolution comes from. This is where it has to happen. So, as dark and fearful as things are looking between climate collapse, nuclear holocaust, AI taking over human consciousness, you know, we’re called, as Catholics, we’re called to retain faith, hope, and love. So, in the face of what looks pretty horrific and impossible, we still have to carry on.

And the joy, the joy of carrying on, and the joy of resisting. Let’s not, you know, lose our sense of joy and understanding with this work. So, I don’t know. I think the Catholic Worker model is just totally ingenious and has all the solutions to everything.

Lydia Wong: It sounds like a bit of a theme sort of throughout the conversation of this idea of joy and suffering being together. And that there’s this effort, this hard work, and this pain at the same time, that’s also what helps create the beauty. And they’re kind of paired together.

Martha Hennessy: Yeah, thank you.

Theo Kayser: You mentioned the university protests going on. And just this morning or last night or whatever, Fordham University, you know, cleared an encampment, arrested students as a Catholic university. And I was out at St. Louis University yesterday too, and another Catholic university invested in Boeing. And there’s all these cries to try and get Catholics and Catholic institutions pay attention to what’s going on, and where’s the money going, and all this stuff. I was feeling like it’s difficult to feel like we’re really reaching them sometimes. And I was interviewed by one of the news stations last night, and he asked, what would you say to Catholics? It seems like most of them are not on your side of this issue. And I wonder if you’ve been doing this peace stuff for years, and you’re somebody who came back to the Church, what do you try and say to Catholics about this stuff?

Martha Hennessy: Yeah, well, just imagine how Jesus felt. Huh. Yeah, the U.S. Supreme Court has a lot of Catholics. We currently have only the second Catholic as a U.S. president. 25% of the U.S. military is Catholic, I think I heard. Yeah, the ROTC on campus.

I was in a situation where one of the colleges had three buildings named after Mother Teresa, Dorothy Day, and Pope Paul II, John Paul II. And ROTC was located in the Dorothy Day building. So, I had fun going out there and seeing the place, and they did take it out. They did close it down after our little visit. Brother Dennis from Su Casa in Chicago took me out there. Romero College, I think it was.

Yeah, so we live with idiosyncrasies. We live with contradictions. We have to carry these contradictions.

What does it mean to be a Catholic in the face of U.S. empire? Dorothy certainly lived with that every decade of her life. We’re complicit. We’re all complicit just by the nature of our benefiting from this standard of living at the cost of the rest of the world and of the climate.

I don’t know. It’s really scary these days looking at Christian Zionism, looking at Christian nationalism. We have not necessarily Catholic factions, you know, working hand in glove with empire and war machine. And we recently had this leader from EWTN go have a party at Mar-a-Lago, and not one U.S. bishop, you know, spoke in outrage about that event, which occurred a couple of months ago. So, yeah, how do we justify ourselves?

And again, I would just refer back to our Church, our Mother Church, our Holy Mother Church. I think at one point she was called a harlot. I would say she’s more like a rape victim. You know, how to hold true to the teachings. I mean, you know, I was out of the church a good part of my adulthood. I was angry about the hierarchy, the male hierarchy dictating to the women and children how to live.

So, coming to grips with understanding what the Church truly was, is, is meant to be, versus what it looks like when we go and listen to these, some of these horrific homilies, and how we translate. You know, Peter said the Catholic social teaching was the dynamite of the church, and clergy was sitting on the box, the lid of the box, not letting it out.

So, our jobs as laity, we’re empowered as laity, let’s not forget that. 90% of the church is laity, and we are given the freedom to live the example of what the church should be. When we have church embedded with state, which we have had throughout the history of our country, you can see it in Russia, my God, you know, the combination of Church and state working together with the war machine. We have it in Russia, we have it here, certainly in England, you know, going to those Protestant churches, I never once saw the body of Christ hanging.

It was, you know, an empty cross. And a lot of the decorations of these churches were like swords, and weapons, and shields, and you know, so what is Christianity? We have to do our Lectio, we have to do our Bible study together, we have to pray, study together, so that we can understand how to act together, be prepared to act.

And there’s plenty of examples of bad religious practice in all of the major religions. And we’re certainly seeing a lot of that in the 21st century. But it’s been there, it’s been there ever since the Doctrine of Discovery, I suppose.

So, our job is to rejuvenate, refresh, revisit, reform, and you know, Dorothy becoming a saint, I think, is critically important for the U.S. Catholic Church. You know, upon her death, it was said by David O’Brien of Sacred Heart University in Worcester, I believe, that, you know, she was the most interesting and unique Catholic. She helped to save the Catholic Church within U.S. Empire. That’s pretty amazing praise now, isn’t it? So, our jobs are to study that, and to understand what he meant by that, and to hold our faith community accountable.

You know, the message is very simple. It’s just the practice of the message. I like G.K. Chesterton’s quote about Christianity has not been found impossible, but found difficult. You know, we’re found wanting in our practice of it. You know, it’s very simple, love God with all your heart, mind, and soul, and love your neighbor as yourself. What’s so hard about that? And yet, oh, we come up against it every minute of every day in our own lives and in our social constructs.

Yeah, so I mean, I think we’re also living in a time, well, you know, Dorothy, her job as a saint is to reform the church and to bring people back into the church. But, you know, we’re also living in a time where everything is being questioned. Every aspect of our culture, of our institutions. I mean, it’s all coming to such a head. When empire crumbles, things can get pretty scary. And, you know, United States, since 9-11, has very much set the example of trashing out international law.

And so, Gaza is just an extension of World War II, Korean War, Vietnam War, you can name any of these wars, and it’s all this progression towards what we’ve got now. And, you know, it becomes a free-for-all. If we can’t abide by what rules we attempted to put in place after World War II, after the Holocaust, after using the atomic bomb, you know, if we can’t abide by UN Human Rights, UN Charter on Human Rights, it becomes a lawless world. But probably, we could honestly say that most of our Western history has been kind of lawless from the beginning.

Theo Kayser: Well, unless Lydia has any more questions, do you have any final thoughts for us, Martha, as we wrap up this conversation?

Martha Hennessy: Well, as Peter instructed us, we’re here to announce, not denounce. And we’re here to build the new world within the shell of the old. We’re here to create a world in which it’s easier to be good.

So, we need to keep our eyes on those principles and not get dragged into the darkness. I mean, we are in very critical times, but I suppose critical times have occurred in every generation’s lifetime. So, that’s nothing new.

We don’t hold a monopoly on living in interesting or difficult times. I guess the things that are different now are the technology. You know, we’re changing our own central nervous systems with our technology. AI is taking the place of human consciousness. They’re using AI both on the campuses now to target people, and in Gaza to target whole families. So, here I go again, denouncing.

So, the message, you know, is to stay on the hope. And there’s a ton of hope. There’s so much hope in the world today. There are so many good people doing so much good work. And love will have the last word in all of this, I firmly believe. So, thank you.

Lydia Wong: Thanks, Martha. You’ve given us so much to think about. I feel like there’s a lot packed in there that, yeah, I’m sure everyone will be thinking about for a while to come.

Martha Hennessy: Yes, thank you.

Lydia Wong: So, we want to thank Martha for giving us the time to interview her and come speak with us. It’s definitely quite a, it’s always quite the treat to be able to speak with people who both have had a lifetime of exposure to the Catholic Worker, but then especially to be able to speak with her and having a very unique perspective on the Catholic Worker.

Theo Kayser: Yeah, I almost feel bad a little bit because so much, I feel like, when folks talk to Martha, it focuses on her grandmother, which is, I guess, inevitable because it is that such a unique perspective. But, you know, Martha lives a very exciting and interesting Catholic Worker life of her own, too. And I just wish we had all the time in the world to talk to our guests sometimes about all the different things going on in their life.

Lydia Wong: Sure, yeah. And we barely even touched on any of the activism that she’s gotten involved in. It is, yeah, it is a, it must be a very interesting sort of dynamic to be in, to have all that focus and yet at the same time being the part of the thing in living out her own values.

Theo Kayser: Yeah, but I’m super grateful that she found her way back to the movement. It’s good to have somebody who’s close to Dorothy in that way among the Catholic Workers and talking with us and us talking with them and stuff like that. So it’s good to have Martha on the team.

Lydia Wong: For sure. There is this interesting piece in thinking about, I think we touched on it briefly in the conversation of how values are sort of absorbed. And, you know, it’s sometimes hard to say of, like, who is touched by something or is moved by something.

And I suppose some of that is simply the work of the Spirit of, like, what is the process of radicalization for people in their encounters with the Catholic Worker, of the things that draw people in. That’s some of the fun part about this podcast is hearing the different ways that people are drawn into the Worker and some through relatives and others through sort of their own searching and others kind of just fall into it.

Theo Kayser: Yeah. And one of the things I’ve been thinking about from Martha’s story is that that seed was planted, you know, growing up. And then there were decades where she wasn’t involved in the movement either before eventually like coming back and getting involved later in her life.

I have been talking to some high school students the past couple of days, and one of the things I got asked was, how long do you think you’re going to do this Catholic Worker thing? And that comes up from time to time. People say like, oh, are you in it for life or something like that?

And I’m never really sure how to answer that question. But I was thinking about Martha’s story. And it’s like, well, even if maybe I just did it for a few more years, I don’t know, maybe I could leave and come back years later and still be a great and integral part of the movement, just like Martha just spent decades away from the movement and then came back and is an important part of our movement today.

Lydia Wong: Yeah. And I think there’s definitely ways to live out many of the values outside of living in a community. I think, you know, the wider we can have our spheres of community of both live-in communities and maybe people who live adjacent.

But then when we think of the Catholic Worker and its origins of a newspaper, right, that’s really the large community, like the biggest realm of community. And thinking about what are the ways we can expand that and expand the connection for people to engage in these values, even if maybe at that point in life, it’s just not right to be sort of there on the ground.

Theo Kayser: Totally. And I mean, that’s a big part of the vision of it, is not that there are like, quote unquote, professional Catholic Workers out there, people running the houses, but that it’s just all of us who are trying to follow Jesus, or all of us really in goodwill should just be trying to take care of our neighbor and trying to reimagine our economy and social realities. And really, I feel like part of Martha’s story too, was, you know, she definitely grew up around the movement, she said, but her own household was not a quote unquote, Catholic Worker house, you know, it was just their family.

But she talked about how it was just inevitable that hospitality was baked into just how their family operated, even if they weren’t officially a Catholic Worker house.

Lydia Wong: Yeah, yeah, that’s a really good point to note, that they were already sort of living out what it is to be a Catholic Worker, regardless of whether or not it was officially a Catholic Worker.

Theo Kayser: Yeah, I think we need more folks trying to do that too.

Lydia Wong: Well, that wraps up another episode of Coffee with Catholic Workers. If you want to reach out to us with any comments, suggestions, clarification of thought, you can email us at coffeewithcatholicworkers@gmail.com. We want to thank Chris from the Bloomington Catholic Worker for editing our audio, David Ayes for our music, and Becky McIntyre for our graphics.

Theo Kayser: Thanks for joining us once again for some clarification of thought. We hope today’s conversation has been enlightening, and maybe even that you’re encouraged to go out and help build a world where it’s easier to be good.

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Coffee with Catholic Workers is a podcast by and about Catholic Workers. Every two weeks, join Lydia Wong and Theo Kayser for a conversation with some of their favorite Catholic Worker folk. Special thanks to sound engineer Chris of Bloomington, IN.