"The greatest challenge of the day is: how to bring about a revolution of the heart, a revolution which has to start with each one of us."-- Dororthy Day

May 3rd is the 75th anniversary of the Catholic Worker Movement. This movement was started by Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin. Dorothy Day was an artsy bohemian from Greenwich Village who became a convert to Catholicism.The deeper she got into her faith, the more work she began doing to help the hungry. It was 1933. Homeless and unemployed workers were everywhere. Dorothy Day started this movement by creating a newspaper -- The Catholic Worker(still in print) that then expanded into housing and feeding the poor.

According to the Catholic Worker site:

On May 1, 1933, in the depths of the Great Depression, The Catholic Worker newspaper made its debut with a first issue of twenty-five hundred copies. Dorothy Day and a few others hawked the paper in Union Square for a penny a copy (still the price) to passersby.

The Catholic Worker Movement is grounded in a firm belief in the God-given dignity of every human person.

Today over 185 Catholic Worker communities remain committed to nonviolence, voluntary poverty, prayer, and hospitality for the homeless, exiled, hungry, and foresaken. Catholic Workers continue to protest injustice, war, racism, and violence of all forms.

Listen to these words of Dorothy Day -- they bring a surprising resonance to today's reality.

The greatest problem of the day is unemployment and the greatest threat of the day is war. To solve the one there is needed the study and the building up of a new social order and the practice of the Works of Mercy, through Houses of Hospitality. To solve the other (which the cynical say would take care of the unemployed problem) there is love and prayer, two great spiritual forces that go hand in hand.

A collection of her writings can be found by clicking here

THW at Nourish Blogine says :

Today is International Workers Day- a day to remember,celebrate, and work for rights of the worker worldwide. I also heard that it is the National Day of Prayer.

So all day long my mind played with this idea of prayer and the worker. The call to work for those who are often neglected and oppressed, crushed in the wheels of the capitalist machine. And the call to prayer, to trust, to worship, to pleading, to rejoicing. This interplay between Christianity and the marketplace. Personal piety and holiness and social good and equality.

So, of course, all day long, I had Dorothy Day on my mind. Because this woman embodies a love for God and a commitment to the worker.

Sister Susan Rose Francois CSJP of Act Justlycomments on the recently released diaries of Dorothy DayThe Duty of Delight

Like most holy people, she often fell short of her ideals. We know this because she herself calls attention to her faults - her impatience, her capacity for anger and self-righteousness. "Thinking gloomily of the sins and shortcomings of others," she writes, "it suddenly came to me to remember my own offences, just as heinous as those of others. If I concern myself with my own sins and lament them, if I remember my own failures and lapses, I will not be resentful of others. This was most cheering and lifted the load of gloom from my mind. It makes one unhappy to judge people and happy to love them."

Stepwise points out:

At 75 she was arrested on the picket line with the United Farm Workers. After her death, her case was put forward for canonization, and she is now formally acknowledged as a "Servant of God". Some among her acquaintance say she would hate being canonized, as it might lead the rest of us to think she was somehow set apart and thus that we are off the hook. Right.

I always liked the story of Dorothy Day. She was feisty, brave, and passionate. She was a single and unwed mother who took on the Catholic Church and the City of New York in the 1930's and beyond, demanding that they take more responsibility for the care of th poor. She was a dedicated pacifist, opposing all wars from the Spanish Civil War through Vietnam. She died in 1980.