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Bring the Catholic Worker Back To The Picket Line

In 1936, following the encouragement of the Archbishop of Detroit, Dorothy Day traveled to Flint, Michigan to cover the famous sit-down strikes at the General Motors factories for the Catholic Worker newspaper. It was a time of historic, militant worker rebellion in the United States; many of the massive strikes of the mid 30s took on a revolutionary character resulting in mass violence and shuttered cities. The workers in Detroit had physically occupied the factories to halt production so Day had to climb into one of the buildings through a barricaded window to interview them. Explaining why she was allowed in, Day writes, “The Catholic Worker is generally recognized as a labor paper, as well as a religious one. Many of the men were familiar with the paper, so it was easy to get permission to go into the plant.” Day went on to write passionately about the strikers plight: “It was the speedup [of the assembly line] which bothered the men most. The workers packed tightly around the cars

"The Worker as Co-Creator With God": The Theology of Dorothy Day's Unionism

Faithful, Not Effective: A Loving Critique of Catholic Worker Activism

It was a cold and snowy Ash Wednesday in St. Paul Minnesota. We pulled up to the Archdiocese’s cathedral in a mini-van. I was with a group of fellow Catholic Workers and a few other friends. We waited nervously in the car, hoping to time our direct action to coincide with the end of Ash Wednesday mass. When the time was right we flung open the van doors, pulled out ladders, candles, and a banner from the trunk and rushed toward the cathedral doors. Two in our group quickly used the ladders to climb up the massive marble pillars on either side of the cathedral entrance and hung a banner that read “Speaking up for unborn lives more than black or brown lives is white supremacy”. After our banner was up we assembled candles on the cathedral stairs and knelt in silent prayer. Our action was on March 1st 2017, two months after Donald Trump had been inaugurated as the 45th president of the United States. We hoped to call out the complicity of specifically white Catholics in the rise of Tru