How We Came to the Catholic Worker: Anne and Jim Dowling

In August of 2021, Anne Dowling began creating a series of videos called To Be Better People, a reference to Peter Maurin’s “A Case for Utopia” easy essay. In this episode, Anne and husband Jim Dowling briefly recount what brought them to the Catholic Worker Movement. For Anne, it was one of the fruits of her search for joy and peace. Jim, for his part, joined a community started by an old acquaintance.

Here’s the video, with a lightly edited transcript provided below.

Anne Dowling

So, I’m going to start this video, which is about our personal journeys into the Catholic Worker, as requested. But I’m going to start by just reading out Peter Maurin’s famous Easy Essay (the co-founder of the Catholic Worker). It’s called “A Case for Utopia” so if you want to look it up, use that title. But I’m just going to read it because I’m not tech savvy, so I can’t put it up for you.

The world would be better off
if people tried to become better,
and people would be better
if they stopped trying to become better off.
For when everyone tries to become better off,
nobody is better off.
But when everyone tries to become better
everyone is better off.
Everyone would be rich
if nobody tried to become richer,
and nobody would be poor
if everyone tried to be the poorest.
And everybody would be what he ought to be
if everybody tried to be
what they want the other fellow to be.

So, this is what I’m basing our series of YouTube videos on, that poem by Peter Maurin, or Easy Essay, by Peter Maurin.

But my journey into the Catholic Worker is basically the story of my journey with God, and at different points in my life choosing to go with God. And that is really the story of my search for joy. I think happiness and joy are sort of different, and that joy is something that’s a deeper sense of living the life you’re meant to live despite its hardships, is what I term ‘joy.’ Like having a deep peace and happiness despite what is happening around you. I haven’t always been perfectly at peace, so don’t get that idea, but my starting journey into the eventual Catholic Worker I think probably began when I was very little, noticing that, although I was a daydreamy child, when the nuns who taught me started talking about God, our heavenly Father who loves us, it just got my attention and it was something that I was interested in. I wanted to know more about it. I believed I had a heavenly Father who loved me and I wanted to be with that God and help that God.

So as I grew older, my interest in my soul’s journey kept on going. And as a 15-year-old, I started meditating and that meditation practice started, basically, sitting and being with God was my aim. I’d turn off the lights, put on quiet music, and just try and be still and be with God. And I noticed that my values started changing. There wasn’t anything around me that would encourage me to become less materialistic, but I started feeling less interested in those worldly aims.

And I remember an experience when—suddenly feeling overwhelmingly sad that everyone was behind locked doors, and we weren’t rejoicing in each other more in our neighborhood. As I grew older, I started to feel like the Catholic cocoon that I had been living in wasn’t enough to get me into contact with God and that somehow, I needed to become more involved with the pain in the world.

I started volunteering at a youth emergency shelter for homeless youth on the weekends. They needed people to sort of stay overnight so I started doing that and that developed into an idea that we were probably some of the first adults in these young people’s lives that were consistent and grounded, not abusive, listened to them calmly, as best we could. And yet we were all transient. None of us had any sense of ongoing friendship with these young people. And I thought, “Well, no wonder they go back to their dysfunctional pasts, because they are the people that are consistent in their lives, often.” So, I felt like I needed to be more involved in an ongoing way with people who were struggling.

But I went ahead and became a teacher and continued searching. And then I came across the idea of lay Christian community and sharing everything in common. And those ideas that the early Christians lived this way just made sense to me. If I wanted people to not be poor, it meant sharing everything with people so that we were all on the same level. And that the church, I didn’t think, should be full of people who were wealthier than a lot of other people who came to church together. I didn’t like that idea. So, I took a couple of years away from Australia, traveled overseas, visited other communities. I stayed in a kibbutz in Israel, explored the Simon community in England, I just kind of looked at ways in which people were engaging with homelessness or people on the margins. And I developed this kind of idea with God that if I were to go with Him and do what I was meant to do with my life, it would involve three things. It would involve living in a community that shared everything in common, that prayed together, that offered hospitality to people who were struggling. And those three things were what was really important to find. So, when I came back to Australia, I went back to teaching but at the same time started looking around to see what was available. And I did feel like this offering hospitality meant living with people. And I just couldn’t find, although there had been some people in my hometown of Brisbane in the past who had been doing that, no one was doing it at this time, which was about 1985 when I came back to Australia.

So, I had heard of the Catholic Worker. I had been aware when Dorothy Day died; it was the first time I’d ever heard of her, even though I’d gone 12 years in Catholic schools. She just wasn’t well known at all in Catholic circles. But I was really impressed and inspired by her. I was sort of looking for the Catholic Worker [in Australia] and I couldn’t find them, but they had actually broken up. However, there were still remnants in Brisbane, and they ran a shop called ‘Justice Products’ that sold fair trade goods to people as a sort of gift shop. They also had homeless people hanging around, with a couple of people living there. When I found that, I just felt like I was home, and that I belonged. It was the place for me, back in my home city. I was prepared to live anywhere in the world. If I’d come across the Catholic Worker in New York, I would have stayed there, probably, but God had other plans. And I ended up back in Brisbane. The first Catholic Worker I met ended up becoming my husband, Jim, and he’s going to tell his story as well.

Jim Dowling

Hi, my name’s Jim Dowling. I’ve been involved in the Catholic Worker Movement for a long time. From when I was very young, I felt strongly that we should not be living an affluent life when lots of people are starving. As a young boy, it hit me when I’d see photos of kids starving on TV. Why did they have no food while we had more than enough? This sort of idea stuck with me, and when I left school, I just traveled around for many years, living as simply as possible, bumming around for about seven years.

At the end of that time, I thought, maybe I should do something with my life that God wants me to do with my life. Purely by accident, I ran into Ciaron O’Reilly at the post office. We were both sorting mail over the Christmas break as a part-time job. I’d met Kieran a number of years before when we both were arrested in a civil rights march in Brisbane. Kieran linked arms with me, purely coincidentally, and he was then assaulted by the police quite brutally. As was routine in that period in Queensland, he was then charged with assault himself, even though he did nothing, and he asked me to appear in court.

So, when we met up again, Kieran had started a house of hospitality. It wasn’t called the Catholic Worker at that time, in West End, Brisbane. I was very impressed, I knew nothing about the Catholic Worker at the time, but I was very impressed by the fact that they had a consistent life ethic—they were pro-life against abortion and against war. That’s what attracted me to them initially. Eventually, I moved in. In 1983, we started calling ourselves a Catholic Worker community, and I’ve been involved ever since in the Catholic Worker movement here in Brisbane and in Dayboro, an hour’s drive outside of Brisbane, where we have Peter Maurin Farm.

The cover photo of Jim Dowling and daughter Teresa is a still image from their video “Low-Energy Living Is Possible.”