Over the course of a few years, and under the inspiration of Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin, our Prayer and Breakfast group found ourselves living together in what the Catholic Worker calls a hospitality house for the poor. The setup included about five of us grad student or seminarian types, and four or five of our friends that we had gotten to know from the streets.
I’ll fill in the details of how we got to this point elsewhere, but on this particular day it was almost the end of the month and I didn’t yet have money together for the rent on the home we shared. Mac and Danny were not getting along, and they had just had another loud altercation in the kitchen, one brandishing a fork, the other ready to fire back with a pot of Oodles of Noodles. Later, that was the detail we laughed about, but in the moment it felt as if he was holding a bucket of gasoline in one hand and a lighter in the other.
On top of that, a prominent member of the parish, Chris, was on my case again because, well, frankly, he just didn’t like having the poor around. He was always pressuring the priest about “what we are going to do about them.” This was the moment when Tony, a good friend from the community and a regular at Prayer and Breakfast, asked me how things were going. I didn’t have enough energy to put on a cheerful face, so I just started venting.
“You know, we don’t do any fancy fundraising galas or anything, and we don’t have an endowment. We’ve got a dozen or so donors, but most are as poor as we are. I think sharing the precarity of the poor is good for us, but man, it would be nice not to worry about rent. And you know I’m not gonna kick anybody out—the whole point is living together, after all—but I can’t guarantee the next argument won’t be solved with a fist and a knife instead of a fork and a pot of soup, and that no one is going to sue. And I know Chris just wants his version of what’s best for St. Joe’s, but I’m tired of getting the evil eye. It just wears on me.
“So, I guess that’s how it’s going,” I continued. “There are just too many fires to put out, and it’s worse because you never know if the next one will be the one to burn the whole house down.”
This probably wasn’t the first (and was certainly not the last) time over the years that Tony would hear similar worries from me. While he would empathize, he would also encourage me that, hard as it was, we were on the right path, which kept me going. For my real concern was that we had somehow gotten something in the Gospel wrong and that all these headaches and risks might be for nothing. Should living the Gospel really be so precarious? Was I missing an easier, cushier way? Here’s what I was really saying: “I don’t want to be a firefighter anymore. I want to be something less dangerous.”
And then it struck me: being a Christian should be at least as dangerous as being a firefighter.
There it was, all boiled down to one sentence. It wasn’t the first time I had such a thought—probably some preacher had put it in my head years before. But it only became real for me when I was confronted by a concrete instance of existential vulnerability—and was assured by a good friend that the kingdom could be found within it. I wanted a Christianity that would run smoothly alongside the rest of my life—one that would be safe. Tony pointed out this was like wanting to be a firefighter without facing any fire—without taking on any risk.
There are lots of professions in which people put themselves in harm’s way every day: police, soldiers, medics, and the like. Soldiers and firefighters don’t have jobs—they have lives of profound commitment. They don’t have coworkers—they have brothers and sisters. And they live as part of a fellowship that makes the very real possibility of personal sacrifice not only bearable but a badge of honor. They are always preparing, always training, always vigilant—always in a sort of combat even when they are not in combat, aware that at any point they may be called upon to suffer much, or even give all.
Was I really saying I wanted Christianity to be less than this?
The Call to Holiness
This is a continual question—not only for me, but for the Church today. What does it mean for me to become holy? Is it something anywhere near as involved as being a firefighter? It’s common to note that we are all called to become saints—that’s the universal call to holiness. But what do we mean by that?
Our own answers, and the answers of our parishes, reveal themselves most clearly when we look at the habits on display in our daily lives of faith. I think it’s fair to say, for most devoted Catholics, that we think holiness has a lot in common with that individualistic piety that tends to define parish life. Individual piety is an important expression of faith, but it is also a very safe one.
This individualistic, pious expression of faith tells us to be very serious about our Catholicism, but to fit it in around the rest of our lives. Say your prayers, get to Mass, practice frequent Confession, keep high moral standards (especially about sex), and maybe even do some acts of service now and then.
These are all good things—but this is a vision of holiness that leaves our fragmented, anxious, lonely lives pretty much intact. It keeps our faith safely sealed in the sanctuary. We still have the same jobs and live in the same places with the same safe houses and portfolios and insurance policies and polite friends as everyone else.
Of course, we’re encouraged to talk to our coworkers about Jesus when we get the chance, and to avoid jobs that might be directly linked to abortion or pornography. But it’s rarely suggested that because of our faith we might have to make any substantial change to the way we live. Most of the time (so we are left to believe) our temporal interests and our spiritual lives coexist without conflict. It’s risk-free Christianity. And that’s exactly what I had been telling Tony I wanted.
The universal call to holiness, in this estimation, is mostly a matter of our private lives and what we do in our free time. It’s a holiness that’s invisible to most of the world—not one that throws us into an alternative fellowship that might end up costing us. We have no idea what it could even mean to be part of a Church more dangerous than firefighting.
The Early Church
Tony was reminding me that there was once a time we did know this kind of dangerous faith. The early Church, after all, was born into a world that was often openly hostile to it, as we see when we read the Acts of the Apostles. The fellowship of the early Christians was hated and hunted, largely because in not worshiping the Roman gods they had opted out of much of the social and political life of their society
In Roman culture, just about everything you did involved the pagan gods in one way or another. The Roman equivalent of a Fourth of July parade included prayers to Mars, the god of war, for the success of the army, as well as prayers to the emperor himself, who was considered semi-divine. You couldn’t even have a glass of wine with your friends without making a small offering to the god Dionysus.
So when Christians opted out of these offerings, they started sticking out like sore thumbs—they were mocked as being hopelessly anti-social. And this was dangerous because, to the Romans, opting out of normal community life was a political statement as much as a religious one. Christians were taken as not supporting the emperor—they were even seen as revolutionaries.
All this meant that the Church was a visibly distinct society. They contrasted their fellowship to what they called “the world.” And, as with firefighters, their membership in the faith could, at any moment, test their commitment.
As we see throughout the whole age of the martyrs, becoming a Christian certainly was not safe, and those visible, communal, daily practices of the fellowship could be both a liability and a preparation for what discipleship might cost at any moment. It’s worth remembering that Christians in many places in the world where the Church is persecuted still face these dangers today.
Under these conditions, the universal call to holiness was a matter of simply being a member of the Church. The very nature of being a Christian meant that one was actively involved in the voluntary and sincere practice of one’s faith. Holiness meant, as it does in the scriptures, being set apart.
Of course the early Christians practiced individual devotions and experienced inward transformation and moments of deep personal intimacy with God, but this was part of, rather than in place of, a shared set of visible practices that were the essence of Christian living. The Church came with holiness, as it were, already baked in. There was no reason to be a member if you weren’t convicted that its way of life was worth dying for, because simply being part of the Church meant you were going to live the Gospel, which could very well cost you your life.
The Church as a Peculiar People
This was the vision of Church that Peter Maurin was trying to recover as the only kind of Church capable of effectively engaging the pagan culture of our own time. It was the early Church’s communal and visible holiness—its corporate practice of the Sermon on the Mount—that slowly, over the course of three centuries, converted much of the Roman world to Christianity and remade ancient culture.
And Peter was adamant that only such a Church—not just a bunch of pious individuals, or on the other hand just a religious institution with political power—could engage and transform our own society. “If the Catholic Church,” he says, “is not today the dominant social dynamic force, it is because Catholic scholars have failed to blow the dynamite of the Church. Catholic scholars have taken the dynamite of the Church, have wrapped it up in nice phraseology, placed it in a hermetic container and sat on the lid. It is about time to blow the lid off so the Catholic Church may again become the dominant social dynamic force.” For Peter, what’s missing from the modern world is not traditional values, a sense of the transcendent, religion, or even God, but the social reality of the Church as a distinctive people.
Dorothy and Peter applied this call to holiness to themselves first. We will absolutely and certainly misunderstand what they were about if we fail to see that, for them, the Church is simply meant to be the heart of life. The Church is God’s intervention into a world gone mad—it is a fellowship that pulls us out of the world and transforms the world precisely by being a place in which people could live differently now.
And for all its warts, the Church, the Catholic Worker is convinced, is filled with divine power. The Catholic Worker is entirely dependent upon the grace and truth of the Catholic faith, and, though it takes the name of a “movement,” it is really nothing more than the Church at work. So it’s impossible to understand Peter or Dorothy without seeing that they were simply Catholics who took on the Church’s way of life hook, line, and sinker.
But rather than picturing the Church as an institution, or as a collection of doctrines, or as a place individuals go to pray—without denying any of these aspects—the Catholic Worker sees the Church as people set apart. Scripture calls the Church a divine “city” (Mt 5:14), a “nation,” or a “priesthood” (1 Pet 2:9). It is a people with its own customs, practices, language, ethics, and even material culture—it’s God’s new way of life. In other words, it’s a kingdom that the gates of hell will not prevail against (see Matthew 16:18–19).
In this way you might say that the Church doesn’t so much have a politics (conservative or liberal or whatever) as it is a politics—it’s an alternative way of being human. And the main thing the city of God does—what makes it the city of God—is to worship the true God truly. From this worship its whole way of life flows, which makes it different from other tribes of the world. We are strangers and pilgrims in a land that is not our own.
As a peculiar people, the Church’s task is to be faithful to its divine way of life—not to worry about being effective in changing the world. Or rather, the way it is effective in changing the world is by being faithful. This is exactly what Peter Maurin had in mind in talking about blowing the dynamite of the Church.
Despite their popular portrayal, Dorothy and Peter were not activists or reformers in the normal meaning of those words. They were simply Catholics who saw that being faithful to the Church’s long tradition committed them to certain forms of life, which also meant refusing other forms of life. We will see below that the Catholic Worker is known for caring about everything, from the poor to technology to voluntary poverty to working on the land. And it cares about those things because the Church cares about those things, as we see in the way their newspaper continuously cited official Church sources.
This emphasis on faithfulness rather than effectiveness takes a lot of pressure off: We don’t have to fix the whole world—that’s God’s job. We can just go about being the Church in all the small ways that make up the fabric of our lives
Blowing the Dynamite
This faithfulness to the Gospel is the dynamite that Peter was talking about—this is the universal call to holiness in action. But what has happened, in various ways, is that Christians have not asked what the Gospel requires. Instead we ask questions of a lower order: How can I be financially secure? What’s best for the economy? What’s the best way to succeed? How can I be comfortable and avoid suffering? What should I do to be safe? How can we manage the future?
It’s not just that these questions are merely allowed or tolerated in the Church today as a concession to our weakness—that would be understandable. Rather, with rare exceptions, implicitly and even explicitly, these are the only questions our parishes encourage us to ask at all.
Notice that these are the questions that become natural when you’re trying to make the best of the status quo. They became natural in the Church because for the longest time it was in charge of the status quo—the Church was an imperial power. These are the questions of those in control, and the answers are predictable enough: Protect your country and your interests. Be as rich as you can. Get as much as you can for as little as you can. Demand your rights. Never stop working. Take care of your own. Build up your military.
The problem, of course, is that these are not Christian answers. For those you have to turn to the words of Jesus Christ: Turn the other cheek. Blessed are the poor. Not only do not kill, but do not even be angry. Give to all who beg. Sell what you have and give to the poor. Blessed are the peacemakers. Blessed are those who mourn. Do not worry about tomorrow. Receive the homeless into your home. In other words, deny yourself, take up your cross, and follow me (see Matthew 16:24).
But here is the absolutely essential paradox: this logic of the Cross is also the logic of the Resurrection. True life only comes out of faithfulness, which usually looks like foolishness and failure. Even in our daily lives it is only these sacrificial practices that bring life and joy. Only to the extent that they are consistently put into practice do they also bring a complete revolution of life and priorities. And they bring it to the homes and communities and cities and lands that practice them.
In the early Church, this dynamite brought much of the Roman world into the Christian fold. But over the course of time, the Church, with some good and some not-so-good motivations, got distracted ruling the world rather than converting and serving it. If you want to rule on the world’s terms, then obviously the answers we find in the words of Jesus are going to seem silly.
This is what Peter Maurin meant about scholars wrapping the dynamite of the Church up in nice phraseology: the Church had made the radical message of the Gospel compatible with maintaining a worldwide empire. We made accommodations and said that the really radical parts of the Gospel were only meant for some Christians, but not for families or businessmen or soldiers. Or maybe Jesus’s words were meant for all, but only in the private parts of our lives, not in public areas such as politics or economics.
A Revolution of the Heart
Part of Peter Maurin’s genius was to be on the front lines of a movement in the Church—a return to the scriptures and the Fathers—that refused these fine distinctions: there are not two ways that humans should act, one in private and one in public; one for the ordained and another for the laity. Christ gave one set of principles, and he said to go and teach all nations to follow him. This means that, at the end of the day, Maurin’s vision for bringing the social order to Christ is the same as that of the early Christians: not a tweak of the Roman bureaucracy here and there, not an attempt to make the empire a little more just, but a thoroughgoing conversion of every individual.
Real social change can only happen, as Dorothy said, by a revolution of the heart, and that means each heart. The Catholic Worker has no other vision for society than simply for Catholics to be Catholics, to invite others to be Catholics, and so to create a Catholic social order. Its vision for society is for it to be the Church.
But this, as we’ll see, had nothing to do with a top-down, state-enforced religion. No one was to be compelled against their will. Rather, also like the early Church, this was to be a nonviolent revolution from below: small pockets of faithful Catholics who simply lived the Gospel and attracted others by the beauty of their lives—or rather the beauty of the One to whom their lives witnessed.
Peter’s crazy idea was that this little way of the Church had the most radical social and political significance. Yet it is sometimes suggested that this view of the Church as faithful rather than effective is too insular, that it advocates abandoning the world and encourages Christians to escape and guard their purity.
But this is a puzzling worry because over and over again we find among Catholic Workers not withdrawal from society but people thinking and acting in deeply relevant ways. They engage not just with the poor but with all sorts of non-Christians who are committing to agrarian movements; fighting for peace (including establishing camps for conscientious objectors); harboring political refugees; advocating for the rights of laborers (Dorothy marched with Cesar Chavez); upholding the rights of migrants; protesting against both abortion and the death penalty; and engaging about as many other “secular” causes as you can imagine. These Catholic Worker communities tend to be filled with minorities as well as non-Catholics, and they often become the center of their neighborhoods. It is anything but a retreat.
Firefighter Christianity
Peter thought that the modern world had gone wrong because this kind of Church had disappeared. Yet he did not nostalgically long for a return to a time—say the Middle Ages—when Christians had more cultural hegemony and the Church could be the great institution guarding “traditional values.” Neither, on the other hand, did he want a Church content with being a private club for religious individuals, invisible and separate from the social and political world.
For Peter, what the world was missing—what the Church was missing—was a fellowship of saints, living unapologetically and self-sacrificially the radical message of Jesus. This is not a Church that has a social ethic, opinions on economics, or political views; it is a Church that is a social ethic, an economics, and a politics. In short, it is not concerned primarily with how it might contribute to society—instead, it is concerned simply with being God’s new society and inviting everyone to join.
Of course this kind of Church isn’t safe! Of course it’s dangerous! You might die. But so what—do we not believe this is the way to find the fullness of life (see John 10:10)? The universal call to holiness is firefighter Christianity. That’s the dynamite of the Church.
EDITORIAL NOTE: This article is excerpted from We Are Only Saved Together: Living the Revolutionary Vision of Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker Movement (Ave Maria Press, 2024). All rights reserved.
