Catholic Worker Celebrates 80 Years of Gentle Personalism

[rug]

Dorothy Day in 1934

Animated by the same Christian vision as Pope Francis, co-founders Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin and their followers have striven to live in solidarity with the socially marginalized.

by PETER JESSERER SMITH05/02/2013

NEW YORK — Eighty years old and still going strong, the Catholic Worker movement and its followers continue to face the challenge of building a new society on what its co-founder Peter Maurin called “the gentle personalism of traditional Catholicism.”

French immigrant Maurin and Servant of God Dorothy Day founded the Catholic Worker movement in the midst of the Great Depression.

They launched The Catholic Worker newspaper on May 1, 1933. The movement then expanded to houses of hospitality and farming communes following a model of Catholic economics called “distributism.”

Today, the Catholic Worker movement has 224 autonomous communities established in the United States and overseas that promote urban and rural communal ways of life emphasizing corporal and spiritual works of mercy.

http://www.ncregister.com/daily-news/catholic-worker-celebrates-80-years-of-gentle-personalism/



April 1936 edition.

[IrishAyes]

1. Perhaps you can help me with something, dear rug

I was very fortunate to slide into a reasonably secure if very modest retirement, having bought a true fixer-upper big Victorian home that might well have been unsalvageable if left to rot only a few more years. Anyway, I got it for a song and have worked on restoring it to some modest version of its former comfort. There's still a long way to go since funds are so short, but I'm sure it will be finished when it's supposed to be.

Anyway, having worked in retirement homes at one point and having a well founded terror of ever winding up in one, plus not having close living relatives any more, I've long thought about someday finding a legitimate Catholic Worker group to leave the place to for a hospitality house so if my powers of independence start to fade before the rest of me does, maybe they could mind me when I needed it and take over completely when I don't. Human nature being what it sometimes is, I might need help and direction in accomplishing this goal in a responsible manner.

So far at 68 I'm a wonder to my doctor and expect to live longer and stronger than most seniors. But I'm constantly aware of how things can turn on a dime, too.
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PS: I forgot to tell you something that won't make a difference in how things proceed but it does add to the spiritual ambience of the place. The main house was built in 1915 around an original slave cabin built of logs in 1847. I didn't know that when I bought it, but it interests me as a student of history and also because I always knew something felt 'different' here. No one can know for sure how much earlier occupants from the great beyond know about what's still happening in this world; yet I like to think perhaps they'd be pleased to see this eventually become a Catholic Worker hospitality center.