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I'm sorry this newsletter is a few hours late; there's no excuse, really… unless I want to take the low road and blame the Afghan kids who showed up at my house unexpectedly, looking for someone to play with because “there’s nothing happening at our house.”

Normally, my 18-year-old daughter plays with them (they live down the street), but I had just been “prayer-complaining” earlier about how sick I was of being stuck in front of a computer monitor. What I really want, I told God, is a little more CW-esque community life.

Not an hour later, Rahima showed up at our front door with her siblings. Here you go! God said.

What could I do? I asked; God answered. Besides, it would be supremely ironic to spurn an opportunity to “welcome Christ in disguise” just so a newsletter promoting that very idea could get out on time.

Which is how I ended up in a rope-jumping contest instead of working on this newsletter. Again, my deepest apologies.

In last week's reader poll, I asked you about your connection to the Catholic Worker. Here’s what you said:

Two of you wrote to share your stories. 

I learned about Catholic Worker communities because my brother Russ lived at Unity Acres, near Syracuse, at various times, for periods of months or even up to a year or so, during the 70’s and 80’s. He was schizophrenic, and Father McVey and Kate Stanton were very kind to him. I visited there briefly twice and thought it was wonderful. 

—Dorothy North

I first heard about Catholic Workers when my confessor told me to read The Long Loneliness for my penance.  I am a slow reader but I finished it! 

—Theresa Marie Thompson

Let’s try another reader poll this week; look for it connected to a story below.

Most Catholic Worker communities are pretty attentive to their impact on the environment, but Australia’s Peter Maurin Farm has taken environmental stewardship to an entirely new level, using just 1/20th of the energy of the average Australian through a combination of creative technological adaptations—and a willingness to live more simply.

Jim and Anne Dowling have lived on the farm with their seven children and a series of guests and community members since 2000. From the beginning, they looked for innovative ways to cut down on energy use and reduce their environmental impact.

Rejecting most modern, high-consumption electric appliances is the foundation of their lifestyle: no toasters, air conditioning, or hair dryers.

“We also don’t have a TV ever, absolutely not,” Teresa Dowling, one of Anne and Jim’s children, says. “If you want to be entertained, read a book, play board games, that kind of thing.”

The family does have a small chest freezer that they’ve converted into a refrigerator that uses one-fifth of the energy of a typical fridge. By eschewing high-consumption electric appliances, the family manages to supply all their electricity needs using a small 640-watt solar panel system. They've adapted a discarded satellite dish, too, lining it with mirrors in order to make a powerful solar oven capable of boiling water, cooking food, or even baking bread. They also cook using a gas stove powered by biogas that they generate right on the farm from their own food scraps and toilet waste.

The byproduct of their biogas production goes to fertilize their extensive gardens and fruit orchards. Rainwater is collected from the roof, then pumped by a windmill to a header tank before being fed back to the house by gravity. The family conserves water with a flushless toilet and a water-saving twin-tub washing machine.

The family’s cars run on used cooking oil that is filtered on-site. Since 2002, family members have traveled tens of thousands of kilometers using their biofuel-powered cars.

The technological changes needed to make this way of life possible are the easy part, Jim Dowling says. What is really needed is a change of heart, a willingness to “live more simply, so that others may simply live.”

Read the full story, see pictures, and watch two video tours of the farm here: Peter Maurin Farm Embraces Sustainable Living with Creativity and Joy.

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Reply to this email to share your most creative tips for living sustainably. We’ll share a few of your answers in the next issue.

Ninety years after Dorothy Day and a few companions distributed the first copy of The Catholic Worker newspaper in Union Square, 90% of Catholic Worker houses have their own website and or social media account. You can find Catholic Worker podcasts, YouTube channels, and even (so we hear) a Substack newsletter or two.

And yet, this online presence was by no means a foregone conclusion. When Jim Allaire first proposed establishing an online website to archive the writings of Dorothy Day, he was met with skepticism and stiff resistance, as Roundtable contributing editor Renée Roden writes in a new piece in U.S. Catholic magazine. Catholic Workers attending an annual gathering in Iowa in 1995 objected on many fronts: the environmental impact of e-waste, the military roots of the Internet, the tendency of technology to further the state’s intrusion into people’s lives, the impersonal nature of online communication, and more.

After the Iowa gathering, Allaire sent a circular letter to the communities that had objected to his website project. He drew on the writing of French personalist philosopher Emmanuel Mounier, who argued that technology is morally neutral and can potentially be used for good by well-informed users. Allaire also cited Mounier’s belief that engagement in the world is the “essential imperative of personalism.” The skeptics weren’t necessarily convinced, but the project moved forward:

Ultimately, Catholic Worker philosophy dictated that Allaire’s personal initiative should be respected. “Don’t keep beating on Jim Allaire,” he remembers Catholic Worker Karl Meyer saying. “We’re anarchists, we can do what we want.” Jim Forest and Tom Cornell, former managing editors of the Catholic Worker along with Day, also supported Allaire’s site. And thus, the movement’s digital front porch was created, and CatholicWorker.org was born.

Roden also interviews Liam Myers, a member of the New York Catholic Worker who created that community’s Instagram account, and Theo Kayser, the longtime Catholic Worker behind the Coffee with Catholic Workers podcast, a Facebook group, and other CW-related online initiatives. Read the entire article: How the Catholic Worker movement stays grassroots online.

St. Chrysostom, the fourth century Archbishop of Constantinople and doctor of the Church, thundered away at his congregation one Sunday morning.

There had been a recent influx of immigrants to the city, and the municipal authorities were setting up homeless shelters for them. But, surprisingly, the saint’s exhortation was not that his congregation should join the work, but rather that they should stay away from it.

Why? What could possibly be wrong with that? Wasn’t it just the obvious Christian thing to do?

Well, yes and no. For St. Chrysostom told them what the even more Christian thing would be to do: Take the refugees into their own homes — into what was then called their “Christ rooms.” This was a room in each household set apart to receive Christ in the poor. St. Chrysostom was concerned that if they started “outsourcing” the homeless to the shelters, they would lose the habit of Christian hospitality.

In the latest article in his ongoing series on the ideas underpinning the Catholic Worker Movement, Colin Miller (Maurin House Catholic Worker, Columbia Heights, Minnesota) tackles personalism. For Peter Maurin, personalism “is taking the initiative to simply start living the Gospel right now, without waiting for a blueprint or permission,” Miller writes.

Miller is publishing the series in the Catholic Spirit, the newspaper of the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis, but we’ve reprinted it on CatholicWorker.org. 

The Iowa City Catholic Worker is circulating a petition to supporters as it steps up its opposition to legislation being proposed by Iowa lawmakers making it a felony to “encourage or induce a person to enter or remain” in Iowa in violation of federal immigration law. The legislation empowers local officials to cooperate with federal agencies to deport undocumented migrants.

Republicans say the measure targets smugglers engaging in human trafficking; organizations working with immigrants, including the Iowa City Catholic Worker, fear that the legislation will be used to shut them down in the same way that Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton used similar legislation against organizations working with immigrants.

The issue was covered in a recent article in the Cedar Rapids Gazette:

“This is what is at stake in Iowa if lawmakers pass anti-immigrant legislation here,” according to an “action alert” email and online petition sent Thursday to 2,000 Catholic Worker House supporters. “Not only will essential workers with a precarious immigration status be put at even more risk, faith-based groups that serve and organize immigrant workers like Escucha Mi Voz and the Iowa City Catholic Worker will also be targeted.”

Get an in-depth look at the issue, with photos from the Iowa City Catholic Worker, at the Cedar Rapids Gazette: Texas AG moves to shut down Catholic migrant shelter. Could the same happen in Iowa?

The Dorothy Day Guild has been tracking people who have asked Dorothy Day to intercede for them in prayer, but so far, the miracle that is needed to advance her cause on the path to canonization hasn’t materialized, according to Jodee Fink, an Ignatian Volunteer Corps volunteer working with the Guild.

“A lot of people have very profound experiences after they prayed for her, but we haven’t really found anything yet that fits all the criteria for a miracle that we can send to the people in Rome,” Fink told The Quadrangle, the student newspaper of Manhattan College.

But those encounters with Day in prayer can still profoundly affect people, Deirdre Cornell, co-chair of the Guild, said:

Cornell explained to The Quadrangle that during the COVID-19 pandemic, while working with her husband to help undocumented people and farmers she felt called to revisit the original vision of Day: to be direct and personal to those who need help.

Cornell also recalled how after praying to Day during the height of the pandemic, she was reminded of how Day also lived through a pandemic as a nurse during the Spanish flu. 

“[The Spanish flu] was so similar to COVID, and [Day] was looking for her vocation, looking for what to do, looking for how to help,” Cornell said. “I see her not only as this older woman who really had it all put together, but I also thought a lot about her days of struggle and trying to figure out ‘what does God want me to do?’. I identified with that during COVID, but from more of a contemplative prayer side… we need her witness in a special way now.”

Read Mary Haley’s story in The Quadrangle for more quotes and insights from Martha Hennessy, Mark Colville, Cardinal Timothy Dolan, and others.

Reading 33 letters between Dorothy Day and Thomas Merton reveals something about what it means to be a true friend, Sister Judith Best, SSND, writes in Global Sisters Report: True friends know our flaws and shortcomings but love us anyway—enough to challenge us with hard truths.

That kind of friendship is what evolved in the correspondence between Day and Merton, Best says, perhaps because they could relate to one another: “Their respective Bohemian backgrounds, including the joys and challenges of unbridled sexuality, intellectual arrogance, living with few boundaries, and basically faithlessness, led them to understand one another in a deep way.”

I need this Merton. He shows me a cleric reaching out to a woman, seeking her advice on possible moves to a simpler place such as living  "with the Indians — and Negroes, etc…" He knew of his need to reaffirm his vow of stability, accepting its gifts and limitations, staying where he was.

Day needed Merton's passion for pursuing an inner depth that attracted and evaded her grasp. Amidst the chaos and charm of living in a Catholic Worker community, she tried to model for newer members a lifestyle that both she and Merton struggled to live with integrity.

They both saw the church as woefully out of touch with what Merton called "real people" and needed to speak and write to call companions to a deeper following of Christ, especially the poor Christ. They wrestled with tough questions, such as the self-immolation of Roger LaPorte, to protest U.S. involvement in Vietnam, considering whether to remain a monk or leave to lead the peace movement or other groups, etc.

What helped them both persevere was the witness of others in a centuries-old commitment to follow the poor man of Nazareth and meet the poor of the world on their own turf and in their own words.

Read the full essay here: What I learned from my friend Thomas Merton.

Catholics have a moral responsibility to contribute to the dismantling and prohibition of nuclear weapons in light of the Church’s teaching that it is immoral to use or even possess them. That’s the gist of an analysis piece in Catholic Review, a publication of OSV News. Author Kimberly Heatherington provides an overview of Church teaching on the issue as well as the multi-national effort to prohibit nuclear weapons, interviewing such figures as Archbishop John Wester of Santa Fe, New Mexico, and Msgr. Stuart Swetland, a moral theologian and president of Donnelly College in Kansas City, Kansas, who is a U.S Naval Academy physics graduate. Catholic Workers are mentioned among those working on the issue. Read more: Analysis: Can Catholics stop the tick tock of the Doomsday Clock? 

Aaron Bushnell’s act of self-immolation in protest of the situation in Gaza has been the topic of some debate over on the Catholic Worker Facebook group, where some commenters referenced a similar act by New York Catholic Worker Roger LaPorte in 1965 in protest of the Vietnam War. Writing on the Anti-War Blog, Greg Mitchell also mentions LaPorte and others who protested the Vietnam War in this way: Setting Yourself on Fire to Protest a War, And Sally Dugman argues in Countercurrents that Bushnell would have served humanity better by “by interacting with those of our ilk—war resisters like many of my Quaker and Catholic Worker F/friends.”

Should Catholic worker communities apply for tax exempt status? Dorothy Day was adamantly opposed to the idea, writes Brian Terrell in an opinion piece for CatholicWorker.org. When the Internal Revenue Service demanded the New York Catholic Worker pay more than $200,000 in back taxes, Day showed up in court and refused to do so. (The IRS eventually backed down.) Today, though, many Catholic Worker communities have tax-exempt status—and sometimes, large cash reserves. But should they? Read his piece here: Dorothy Day Inc.?

March 3 | Virtual event sponsored by the Dorothy Day Guild
Dorothy Day Guild Book Study

March 7 | Virtual event sponsored by the Simone Weil Catholic Worker
Agronomic University Online

March 12 | Virtual event sponsored by Maurin Academy
Growing, Fermenting, Canning & Why

March 13 - March 24 | Scotland
Martha Hennessy Events in Scotland

March 18 | Various locations
Christians Against Genocide Day of Action

March 23 - March 29 | Nevada
Sacred Peace Walk (Nevada Desert Experience)

April 12 - April 15 | Kansas City, Missouri
Midwest Catholic Worker Faith & Resistance Retreat

by Dorothy Day, in The Catholic Worker, November 1965

Roger La Porte was giving himself to the poor and the destitute, serving tables, serving the sick, as St. Ignatius of Loyola did when he laid down his arms and gave up worldly combat. Roger wanted to continue working to support himself, and he was looking for an apartment so that he could take in others and by living poor afford to help others more.

And now he is dead – dead by his own hand, everyone will say, a suicide. But after all, there is tradition in the Church of what are called “victim souls.” I myself knew several of them and would not speak of them now if it were not for the fact that I want to try to make others understand what Roger must have been thinking of when he set fire to himself in front of the United Nations early Tuesday morning. There had been the self-immolation of the Buddhist monks; and of a woman in Detroit, of a Quaker in Washington – all trying to show their willingness to give their lives for others, to endure the sufferings that we as a nation were inflicting upon a small country and its people by our scorched-earth policy, by our flamethrowers, our napalm. One priest we knew in the Midwest offered his life for his parish and when he said this he spoke of some child suicides, whether in his own or a neighboring parish I do not know. He offered his life, and God took him a year later. He died after a six months’ illness with tumor on the brain. Another priest was stricken with paralysis and dies daily in a long illness. Our own Father Pacifique Roy, whom I visited when he was confined to a hospital in Montreal, said, “We say many things we do not mean to God and He takes us at our word. You make an offering. He accepts it. But he always gives strength to accept the suffering.” All these priests knew that only in the Cross is there redemption.

Read the entire essay here: Suicide or Sacrifice?

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Thanks to Renee Roden (see her Substack, Sweet Unrest), Zak Sather, and Rosalie Riegle for their help with this week’s newsletter. Thanks also to the National Catholic Worker E-mail List team, whose work provides the leads for many of our items.

And a special thanks to our paid subscribers, who make this newsletter possible; special shout out this week to Founding subscribers James R., Frank C., and Michael D.

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