A Different Intersection of Church and Politics
On May 1, 1933, Dorothy Day and a handful of like-minded Catholics fanned out in New York City’s Union Square to sell the first edition of The Catholic Worker. Marking this 79th anniversary, The New York Times’ Ginia Bellafante profiles a few of Day’s spiritual descendants who, during the Great Recession, continue to live by the Catholic Worker’s ethos of creating “‘a new society in the shell of the old’—peace, less disparity of wealth, an end to economic exploitation, violence, racism.” Day’s newspaper, which is still sold on the streets of New York City, “delivered the message of compassion and justice at the cost of one penny; the price has never gone up.”