I abhor poverty; and I prescribe it

On 92 Years of the Catholic Worker

“Poverty is a strange and elusive thing. I have tried to write about it, its joys and its sorrows, for thirty years now…

We need always to be thinking and writing about it, for if we are not among its victims its reality fades from us. We must talk about poverty because people insulated by their own comfort lose sight of it.”

— Dorothy Day, Loaves and Fishes

Loaves and Fishes, Dorothy Day’s 1962 memoir, covers much of the same ground as the last part of her 1952 The Long Loneliness. It’s a beautiful book, full of Day’s prophetic, clear-eyed commentary, written at what is clearly an extremely difficult time for her in her life.

There’s clearly a new tone in her work. The story of the Worker’s beginnings is strange. There seems to be a sort of wry distance from the proceedings, markedly different than her book of two decades before, The Long Loneliness. And she gets details more wrong: she does not mention Ade Bethune’s contributions to the masthead, and she misrepresents the timeline of its transformation.

But her analysis of the social order as it enters a new reality of post-modernity is eerie. Her description of a woman’s prison, with its casual and systematic human rights abuses, could describe the carceral system today. Day glosses over humiliating strip searches, but other, younger Catholic Workers have described the humiliation of cavity searches during arrest.

These stories remind me of recently witnessing a neighbor groped by a policeman as part of an arrest procedure. When I asked if there was a female officer available to perform a pat down, one of the ten police officers who had arrived to arrest her said that it was not illegal for a male officer to perform a pat down on a female suspect.

Well, it ought to be, I pointed out, because that is wrong. Even the TSA gives you the dignity of an officer corresponding to your presenting gender. Since when is the TSA an aspirational standard?

Day’s portrait of prison in the 1950s is no more civilized than today. Sarah Stillman, in a recent issue of the New Yorker, tells the horrifying stories of fifty persons who have died after starving in American prisons. Remind me how America is the greatest country in the world? I’m struggling to see where exactly our greatness lies. Perhaps the U.S.’ greatest innovation are new ways to abuse the human person in the name of the state.

Day writes about this new world of “prosperity” that seems to define New York City after the Second World War, but the trauma of war pulses underneath the surface: violence breaks out in the city shelters, that were formerly filthy and neglected, but never, she rights, filled with the same threats of violence. One of her friends finds the only solution is to have guns. War, once begun, we see, is never ended, only extended: from Europe, to Korea, to our neighbors who live one door down or sleep in the next cot over.

Our economy, even the innocent jobs, she right, are paid for by the death of millions—the preparation for current and future wars. Our comfort, she writes, is bought at the blood of the poor. She quoted a famous ditty in the fifteenth anniversary letter,

John Smith puts on his hat and
goes to Church on Sunday,
And John Smith goes to hell for
what he does on Monday.

In Loaves and Fishes, Day writes from a place of what feels somewhat like desolation. She remarks on their failure. Despite her bravery in resisting the state, she also seems somewhat helpless in the face of the all-encroaching advance of the state as an inhibitor of communal living, community-building, and the practice of the works of mercy. The inspectors who, in the name of “individual zoning” and “public safety,” force community members to leave their eleven-bedroom, twenty-two-acre Peter Maurin Farm on Staten Island. They have not been able to, she writes, create new institutions that would provide a gentler, more dignified way of life—more equitable, more just, more like the communion of the Mystical Body of Christ:

“Much later, when I had a look at that first issue, I could see more clearly what bothered Peter,” she said. “It must have appeared to him that we were just urging the patching-up of the industrial system instead of trying to rebuild society itself with a philosophy so old it seemed like new.

But, as she writes, Peter would comment on the chaos of the house of hospitality by saying it “arouses the conscience.”

Perhaps all Catholic Workers have experienced such days, where no social wounds are healed, no new initiatives begun, but one’s conscience is certainly discomfited, disquieted, restless, unloosed from a former comfortable logic, sent searching for new and deeper truths.

During hospitality hours, it is easy to see a quarrelsome, gossipy woman who picks fights with the kindest of people as a villain. It is easy, from a position of stability outside, to see that she has more power over a woman who has darker skin than her, who does not speak English as well. But, when you listen to her story, it is its own accumulation of wounds, war, and trauma. It takes a lot of peace to live among the wounds of poverty, the indignities and the callous disregard the poor are subjected to. And peace is a luxury we typically deny the poor.

One of our neighbors who serves a Friday night meal said people ask him whether the folks in the encampment in Harrisburg have it “too easy,” if all the churches that serve food at the tent encampments are enabling the homeless.

This attitude is blatantly unchristian (as John Chrysostom says, the Christian would gripe if Christ had asked his flock to vet and screen each hungry person before feeding them). But it is correct, I think, in that there is a sense that they are not providing a solution to the problem of homelessness, they are providing palliatives. If all the groups that brought food to tent city for the publicity or their own satisfaction provided housing instead, what a different world we might have.

One day, I drove the church soup kitchen van down to the river only to be upstaged by the Harlem Globetrotters the WHO? I said, you know, the basketball team. I know who the Harlem Globetrotters are, I responded, but we are neither near Harlem nor a basketball court, so what are they doing at an encampment by the Susquehanna River? A TV camera was recording the team delivering chicken lunches to the tents, completely upstaging whatever lackluster meal I was shilling in styrofoam clamshells.

One of our neighbors was outside his tent, cursing up a storm, angry at being treated like a photo-op for the Harlem Globetrotters. I would be, too.

A woman with a bedazzled Trump pin on her coat spoke at the memorial service of a woman who died in the tents. The woman with the bedazzled Trump pin on her coat spoke of the importance of kindness. Kindness, I assumed, would mean not abducting legal residents of the country illegally. Kindness, I thought, also means creating a world where your neighbor has good housing in a good neighborhood. Kindness, I thought, means creating a world where these tents are not a reality. I wonder if she would be so kind if these tents were in her suburban neighborhood park? Would she be so quick to feed the hungry if the hungry were in her neighborhood, rather than shuffled off to the margins?

The encampment hurts my heart—it hurts that it is so far away. The poor are always swept to the side in “city clean-ups,” removed from our field of vision and concern, erased from our public space and imaginary, so we can forget our thriving is bound up in theirs.

The National Alliance to End Homelessness found in a 2024 study that 68% of Americans have never volunteered with the homeless. I asume this is safe to assume that it also means that they also do not know a homeless person. This is troubling and indicative of the problem: the homeless are invisible. Americans may purchase food at a grocery store or clothes at a department store and they may not know that the cashier is homeless. I would not either. Except, one day at the grocery store, my friend who had lived in the women’s shelter nearby knew many of the cashiers.

Although 68% of Americans have never volunteered with the homeless (I assume this means 68% also have never offered their couch or driven a family member to a shelter—that’s volunteering), 86% did not believe increased law enforcement, preventing the homeless from sleeping outside, would solve the issue. The Supreme Court’s decision in Grants Pass vs. Johnson overturned a previous court of appeals decision in the Ninth Circuit (the Court of Appeals in the Pacific Northwest) that determined fines and jail time for being homeless was “cruel and unusual punishment.”

No, the Supreme Court said, fining a penniless man for being penniless is not cruel and unusual punishment. A 30-day jail sentence (ignoring the fact that at least one in four Americans who are jailed will be arrested again in a calendar year and that the formerly incarcerated are the most likely to be homeless) for having nowhere else to sleep is not cruel, and there is nothing unusual about that.

How, the Catholic Worker asks, do we arouse our neighbors’ consciences, so they do not sleepwalk, without eyes to see the blood of the poor marking the lintel of each economic and social institution we pass through?

I have done a lot of reporting since I wrote an article on new Catholic Worker communities for The Nation two years ago.

In those two years, more Catholic Worker communities have started (and closed) since then. While the title is an imperfect capsulation of its point of view—that I might have honed even more were I to write it today—I think that Catholic Worker communities who have started recently are also getting to the roots, are responding to the signs of the times, the changes in history, and are not just trying to patch-up this industrial war machine that is our economy, but trying to create a new society—to create and live out solutions we can turn to once we are ready to convert from exploitation and violence. To create institutions that put our kindness into action, not just dole out palliatives, as Dorothy Day would say.

Those institutions begin with our own commitment to being better, not just better off—a revolution of the heart—as Dorothy writes in Loaves and Fishes. They begin with our own personal commitment to convert that acquisitive part of our heart that demands more, more, more, hoard, hoard, hoard. It’s a scared, traumatized, meagre part of ourselves that is hard to liberate.

In Loaves and Fishes, Dorothy quotes the following Peter Maurin Easy Essay in full, noting it was “especially pertinent” in the acquisitive society of the American midcentury.

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

What does it mean to “be the poorest?”

Dorothy Day writes that Peter Maurin’s answer was a challenge to many of the guests at the Catholic Worker. “Fire the bosses,” as Day said Peter would often say, “work without wages,” as he often encouraged, were unwelcome solutions whose usefulness was not immediately obvious. These provocative statements indicate a different mode of looking at working entirely — a metanoia.

Peter’s advice was the advice of the saints. Peter, she said, lived with the simplicity of an Alyosha, the Christ figure in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. “What an inspired attitude Peter took in his painful and patient indoctrination,” Day wrote, “and what a small part of it we accepted.”

To begin to make a new world, we can practice the Little Way of Thérèse, which Dorothy loved so much. Take small actions with great hope: cancel Amazon Prime, stop living on credit and debt, as Dorothy Day writes, keep backyard chickens, “shorten the supply chain” between us and what we make and what we eat, host a community meal—especially if our friends who live in tents are invited, refuse to use exploitative delivery apps, take public transit or bike (get a cargo e-bike, as some friends have, rather than a second car) rather than take our cars, bank with a credit union rather than a bank—all time belongs to God, even 1%, as a Catholic Worker wrote in protest of usury and interest—or at least a local bank rather than a national conglomerate, help a neighbor with a light bill or rent. Give away our excess clothes, trade our old ones for new ones, make our own. Give up our air conditioning, in solidarity with the many humans who live in the worst heat and have none to give up.

These are not world-shattering actions on an individual level. Accounting for all we have offered to solve the world’s wounds, we have just five loaves and only two fish. The Christian does not believe the solution comes in scaling up the loaf production—as Jerry writes over at Roundtable today, the number of Catholic Worker communities isn’t the point—rather, somehow, God multiples what small contributions of good we offer.

The Gospel—blessed are you poor, the last shall be first—is all one big hard saying. To accept it means to perhaps accept, most days, our failure to live it perfectly. Better that than to warp it into a word of false comfort. Better to hear its challenge clearly, and trust that somehow, this truth will actually set us free. What an inspired attitude, as Dorothy wrote, and how little of it we accepted.

The Little Way promises results, but not immediately. “We know that one impulse of grace is of infinitely more power than a cobalt bomb,” Day wrote. War does not have the last word, she believed. Fear and greed are brittle forces: love disperses them, sun burning off stormclouds. Love grows like a tree underneath the sidewalk, slowly breaking through, rewilding even a concrete city. If given enough time, a forest returns.