ByCatholicWorker.org
Here’s the July 2023 issue of via pacis, the newsletter of the Des Moines Catholic Worker.
Via Pacis is the newsletter of the Des Moines Catholic Worker in Des Moines, Iowa.
The mission of CatholicWorker.org is to document the Catholic Worker movement in all its diverse expressions around the world. The website includes a searchable archive of all of Dorothy Day's writings in THE CATHOLIC WORKER newspaper, a directory of all known Catholic Worker communities, information about the aims and means of the movement, and news from Catholic Worker communities around the world. See the About CW.org page for more information.
ByCatholicWorker.org
Japheth Obare, founder of Christian Friends of the Mentally Ill (CFOMI), a Catholic Worker community in Kenya that primarily serves those with mental health needs, spoke to attendees about CFOMI’s vital work, the unique challenges they face under the current government, and the hope they have to forge ahead.
ByCatholicWorker.org
After the opening Mass for the San Antonio National Catholic Worker Gathering, attendees introduced themselves to the group. Those in attendance represented a wide diversity in the Catholic Worker movement, with folks joining in 2025 and others having been in the movement for longer than the San Antonio Catholic Worker’s existence. Catholic Workers came from Texas, California, Vermont, Missouri, Alabama, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Iowa, New York, Kentucky, Minnesota and Arizona.
ByCatholicWorker.org
Photographer Mauro Heck shares some of the videos he took at the Midwest Catholic Worker Gathering at the Sugar Creek Retreat Center in Iowa (Sept. 12 – 14, 2025).
ByCatholicWorker.org
“With the passing years, I have come to see our work of hospitality at the Catholic Worker – this doing the works of mercy – as an ever-available antidote to despair, a practical pushback against the mercilessness of the day. A welcoming cup of coffee and pot of soup are tools for defying the trench mentality that sets in when belief in goodness wanes.” Claire Schaeffer-Duffy, a member of SS. Francis and Therese Catholic Worker in Worcester, Massachusetts, reflects on the Works of Mercy in a talk she gave at the 2022 Catholic Worker Gathering.
ByCatholicWorker.org
You may have missed the National Catholic Worker Gathering in Chicago earlier this month, but we’re pulling together summaries of some the roundtables. Here’s what people were talking about.
ByRosalie Riegle
What golden thread connects Dorothy Day’s radical vision to the Catholic Worker houses still serving the poor today? In this 1986 interview conducted by Rosalie Riegle, Nina Polcyn Moore—one of the movement’s pioneering voices—traces that “golden cord” of providence through five decades of Catholic Worker history.
Moore offers firsthand accounts of the movement’s Depression-era struggles, the daily realities of running houses of hospitality in Milwaukee and Chicago, and her remarkable 1970 journey to Russia alongside Dorothy Day herself. But she also confronts the movement’s tensions: Can families truly flourish in houses of hospitality? How has women’s leadership evolved in a movement founded by a laywoman? And what does authentic lay leadership look like when living out the radical works of mercy?
