76 years of the Catholic Worker newspaper
The Catholic Worker newspaper appeared in May 1933 with 2,500 copies distributed by hand. Circulation grew to 190,000 by 1938, and dropped to 50,000 during World War II, largely because of the paper’s pacifist stand. (Today’s circulation is over 80,000.)
Factoids about Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker only hint at the struggle that this courageous woman faced when she turned Catholicism on its ear in the 1930s.
On May 1, 1933, she published a newspaper that sold for a penny. Seventy-six years later, it still sells for a penny. The debut of a paper on a day that was significant to the labor movement caused grief for some conservative elements within the Catholic Church that insisted on labeling the Catholic Worker –and Dorothy Day– as a Communist. (May 1 is really International Workers Day, which was first celebrated in the United States, not in the Soviet Union, as propaganda would have us believe. It began as a protest for the eight-hour workday.)
The Catholic Worker’s newspaper did grow throughout the 1930s, but its readership shrank during World War II. Day’s staunch pacifism during a time when the vox pop called for fighting Hitler, Franco, Mussolini and Tojo further painted the movement as outside the mainstream.
We receive the papers from the New York, Los Angeles and Houston Catholic Worker houses. They are not affiliated and operate independently because Dorothy Day’s movement was not about top-down leadership. (It was about bottom-up charity toward all. ) These three papers vary in their approach and their scope. The one from Los Angeles is called the Agitator.
New York’s is still the closest to the paper that Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin started. It has news from its houses, articles from the archives and very good social justice articles. Los Angeles has longer, more polemical articles and news about protests.
I have a soft spot in my heart for Houston’s paper, which is bilingual because the house serves Latino migrants. The paper has two front pages–one in each language. Half the paper is printed in one language going one way; turn it over and you can read it in the other language. The writings of the Zwick family and its contributors at Casa Juan Diego are always very readable.
If Dorothy Day were alive today, she would still be prodding the church to serve the poor and preach the Gospel. She would be challenging us to speak out against injustice and to have the guts to take unpopular stands in the face of opposition. She would be publishing a newspaper in a time when newspapers are dying. If she were with us, Dorothy Day would be burning with a love of God, just as she was until her death in 1980, and she would be asking us why we are not, too.
Contact any or all of these Catholic Worker newspapers and get a subscription to support the movement and to keep her spirit alive.
