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My New Book!

Thursday, August 29, 2024

August 29, 2024: American Catholics: The Catholic Worker

[250 years ago this week, Elizabeth Ann Seton was born in New York City. The first US-born Saint, Seton is one of the most famous individual examples of an American Catholic, so this week I’ll analyze her and other American Catholic histories!]

Three telling details about Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin’s groundbreaking newspaper.

1)      The Origins: Day and Maurin published the first issue of The Catholic Worker on May Day 1933, launching not just this new periodical but really the whole of their Catholic Worker Movement in the process. Apparently Maurin preferred the name The Catholic Radical, but Day, rooted in both her prior experiences with Communism and her overall sense of solidarity with all who labor in any way, successfully advocated for calling it The Catholic Worker. Clearly that chosen title and the newspaper’s contents (largely written by Day, both in that initial issue and for most of them thereafter) did resonate with readers, perhaps especially in that Depression-era moment, and after an initial print run of 2500 copies (which Day sold in New York’s Union Square, calling out “Arise, ye prisoners of starvation” while she did so) the circulation numbers exploded to 20,000 in September 1933 and 150,000 by 1936.

2)      The Tides of History: The Great Depression was only the first of many significant historical events with which The Catholic Worker engaged forthrightly and controversially. The next such controversy did significantly affect the paper’s circulation numbers—Day was committed to an unpopular pacifist stance during World War II, and as a result circulation decreased by 75% during the war, from a high of nearly 200,000 to 50,000. But this trend in no way affected Day and the paper’s dedication to taking principled stances on unfolding histories, as illustrated just five years after the war: in the July 1, 1950 issue the paper published a letter from the African American nurse, educator, and Catholic activist Helen Caldwell Day Riley that represented an early and powerful argument for wedding the Catholic Worker Movement to the nascent Civil Rights Movement.

3)      The Price!: I’m not sure I’ll ever write a more striking sentence in a blog post than this one: the price for each issue of The Catholic Worker has remained steady at 1 cent (that’s one pretty penny) from that first May 1933 issue up to the present moment. If you want an annual subscription (which gets you the paper’s seven issues a year by mail), however, you do have to be willing to shell out 25 cents (that’s one shiny quarter). I genuinely can’t imagine a more impressive way to put philosophy and ideology into practice than that, and I’m apparently not alone; according to this 2023 The Nation article, the paper still has more than 25,000 subscribers. Amen to that!

Last CatholicAmericanStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Catholic histories or contexts you’d highlight?

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