ByAnthony Lanzillo
In the latest chapter of Anthony Lanzillo’s Catholic Worker climate activist “origin story,” he organizes a public forum with less than 14 days to pull everything together. Lanzillo is a member of the Loaves and Fishes Catholic Worker in Duluth, Minnesota.
ByColin Miller
When Fredrick Taylor pioneered the science of workflow management, he could never have imagined how fully his ideas would take over the workplace. Today, work is quantified, analyzed, evaluated and then manipulated to maximize profitability. In the process, Colin Miller says, we’ve lost touch with the personally satisfying nature of creative work.
ByCatholicWorker.org
Martha Hennessy, one of the grandchildren of Dorothy Day, addressed the 10th National Eucharistic Congress in Indianapolis, Indiana, on Friday, July 19, before a crowd of approximately 5,000 people at the Indiana Convention Center. Here is a video of the speech, along with a transcript and the prepared text.
ByColin Miller
Work used to be personal, local, and communal…but all of that changed with the Industrial Revolution. Colin Miller begins a new series looking at Church teaching and the Catholic Worker’s critique of society in light of those changes.
ByCatholicWorker.org
“Children have become a consumer decision,” writes Lydia’s House (Cincinnati, Ohio) co-director Mary Ellen Mitchell, “a luxury item not unlike an expensive mortgage or a Tesla: good for you if you can afford them, but don’t ask for help with that. The result is a collective lack of willingness to sacrifice for children that are not our own.” But her lived experience at Lydia’s House—along with the parenting practices of the Mbendjele people—suggests that there’s a way to celebrate the birth of every child and to support every mother.
ByAnthony Lanzillo
Anthony Lanzillo, of Loaves and Fishes Community in Duluth, MN, shares the first part of his journey of coming to…
ByScarlett Rose Ford
Although they were born more than 4,200 miles apart, Dorothy Day and Mother Maria Skobstova shared much in common: both were writers and intellectuals, both became involved in the radical and revolutionary movements of the day, both lost children and husbands…and both would ultimately be honored by their respective religious communities.
ByJeff Dietrich
After refusing induction into the army, a 24-year-old Jeff Dietrich hit the road, traveling to Europe, then back across the United States, in search of an “alternate American dream.” With the Jesus Prayer constantly on his lips, he finally found what he was looking for when he met a band of Catholic Workers on their way to a peace conference. What follows is the text of the talk Dietrich gave at De Paul University after receiving the Fourth Annual Berrigan – McAlister Award for the Practice of Christian Nonviolence on behalf of the Los Angeles Catholic Worker. The talk was given on May 13, 2024 and has been lightly edited.
ByCatholicWorker.org
Tyler Hambley writes about how his encounter with a Catholic Worker community led to personal transformation and a deeper, richer understanding of community–and his faith. This essay is reprinted from the April issue of The Catholic Citizen, a ministry of the Church of the Assumption in St. Paul, Minnesota.
ByLiam Myers
As long ago as 1983, the New York Catholic Worker was wrestling with the implications of new digital technologies. In this essay for The Catholic Worker newspaper, Liam Myers reflects on how Catholic Workers might “reimagine a right relationship to technology” in light of how deeply intertwined it is with our lives, for both good and ill.
ByCatholicWorker.org
Cassandra Dixon, the Wisconsin Catholic Worker who has been visiting Palestine for 15 years, describes the deteriorating situation for her friends in Masafer Yatta, a region in the southern West Bank, where communities face forced removal, violent settler attacks, arbitrary arrests, theft, and the restriction of their movement.
ByBrian Terrell
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.
ByCatholicWorker.org
Archbishop John Wester of Santa Fe, New Mexico, addressed the immorality of nuclear weapons and the moral imperative to abolish them in his sermon at the Mass for the Abolition of Nuclear Weapons, sponsored by the Dorothy Day Guild, at Our Savior Church in New York City. The event was held on November 29, 2023—the anniversary of Day’s death—and Wester cited Day’s early witness against nuclear weapons. Wester called on faith leaders, and Catholics in particular, to step up efforts to abolish nuclear weapons.
ByTheo Kayser
Theo Kayser recounts his early days in the Catholic Worker and reflects on the growing prevalence of homeless encampments in the U.S. Now, he and a few others are working to bring the Catholic Worker back to St. Louis.
ByMatt Harper
We can all identify the ways the Spirit has helped us “see the light,” helping transform us from who we were then to who we are now, Matt Harper writes in this essay from the Catholic Agitator. But how often do we move with the recognition that the Spirit is never done weaving through our lives? How often do we live with an openness to whatever shifts She has planned next for us?
ByColin Miller
The Catholic Worker was never meant to be an alternative to the Church, but to create new cells of vibrant Catholic community living a Gospel-centered way of life.
ByBrian Terrell
Celebrating Christmas in a way that truly honors the incarnation of love requires more than works of charity; as Dorothy Day insisted in 1941, it requires an ongoing commitment to justice, too.
ByBrian Terrell
In the July/August 2023 issue of The Regenerative Reader, Spencer Hess writes of “Maurin-ite” and “Hennacy-ite” Catholic Workers—those who farm and those who agitate. But does that distinction really make sense? For many Catholic Worker farmers, the work of the land and the work of resistance go hand-in-hand.
ByBrian Terrell
Two bishops, two cathedrals, and two very different responses to the devastation American atomic bombs wrought on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This essay appeared in the August 2010 issue of THE CATHOLIC WORKER and is reprinted here with permission from the author.
ByCatholicWorker.org
All I was asking for was a little retreat and reprieve from all the sufferings of my heavy heart. Instead, Brian and Betsy and a menagerie of goats put me to work.
