> There are a lot of hard-core progressive Catholics, nuns and priests who
> make a career of getting arrested blockading weapons plants and the like.
> There was and to some extent is a Marxian-influenced Catholic tendency
> called Catholic Worker
>
Since my introduction to the American left was through the Catholic left and the Catholic Worker movement (Irish Catholic working class boys from Brooklyn were not likely to have a red diaper background), this is an area about which I know a great deal. Although Dorothy Day was originally a Socialist and part of the New York City bohemian left, by the time she converted to Catholicism and started the Catholic Worker movement, she had left Marxist influences behind. The ideology of the Catholic Worker was and is pacifist-anarchist, with the pacifist part of the equation being by far the greater element. Moreover, the anarchism was of an individualist strain, described as 'personalism,' with the emphasis on individual responsibility and individual acts. For the Catholic Worker movement, the 'propaganda of the deed' consisted of establishing 'house of hospitality' which provided the homeless and jobless with a meal and a place to sleep. The strongest adherents to the movement live(d) in those houses in lives of 'voluntary poverty.' They were, however, always pro-union. BTW, Dorothy Day combined this pacifism and anarchism with a quite rigorous and conservative fealty to the Church on all theological matters, which is probably what saved her and her movement from Church condemnation during the 1950s. There is a website for the Catholic Worker movement [www.catholicworker.org], on which one can find some books which provide a history of the movement, and a monthly newspaper, which still sells for a $1.
The broader Catholic Left which emerged in the 1960s [Catholic Peace Fellowship, Pax Christi, the Berrigans] was deeply indebted to the Catholic Worker movement which had emerged some thirty to forty years earlier, but was not quite as theologically conservative as Dorothy Day. [It was in this movement that I got my start, working for the defense committee for the Harrisburg defendants during the early 70s.]
Leo Casey United Federation of Teachers 260 Park Avenue South New York, New York 10010-7272 (212-598-6869)
Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has, and it never will. If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its waters. -- Frederick Douglass --
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