Finding family at the Catholic Worker

National Catholic Reporter, March 7, 2003 by Margot Patterson

An essay by Gayle Catinella in Family Life in the Catholic Worker Movement depicts a parent torn between her own pacifist principles and wanting to support her children. In "Nonviolent Football," Catinella describes the hypocrisy she feels in cheering for her eighth-grade son at football games. "It would be simpler to tell Paul that he could not play football. But that in itself would be violent," she writes.

Safety is a common dilemma for Catholic Worker parents torn between their ideals and their responsibilities as parents. Money is another. So are time and energy.

"The number of people coming through means that your attention is dispersed among a lot of people. Sometimes that is difficult because raising children requires a lot of attention and focus. I have four. That in itself is difficult. Then you add maybe four guests. We sometimes number between 12 and 13 people in a house at the same time. It means that your children's conversations are sometimes put on hold," explains Claire Schaeffer-Duffy, who lives in a Catholic Worker house in Worcester, Mass., with her husband and children, another couple and a shifting number of guests who come to the house usually through referrals from social service agencies.

These days what is taking place is that instead of trying to fit family into the model of hospitality practiced by the Catholic Worker of the past, a model exemplified by the New York Catholic Worker, Catholic Worker families are trying to practice hospitality in the context of family, said Schaeffer-Duffy.

"Dorothy's statement that you can't do it with families has clearly been disproven," said Schaeffer-Duffy.

Motherhood and the Catholic Worker

Ironically, while Dorothy Day has frequently been perceived as a mediocre mother, it was the birth of her only child, Tamar, that triggered her conversion to Catholicism and the subsequent end of a happy relationship with Tamar's father.

"I wanted Tamar to have a way of life and instruction. We all crave order, and in the Book of Job, hell is described as a place where no order is. I felt that `belonging' to a church would bring that order into her life which I felt my own had lacked," wrote Dorothy Day in her autobiography The Long Loneliness.

Day's love for and concern about her daughter are evident in her autobiography, yet Tamar was often shuffled off to boarding schools and friends and relatives while growing up.

"Dorothy was a bohemian and she couldn't help being on the go," Tom Cornell said.

Colman McCarthy, a former Washington Post columnist who teaches courses in peace studies, makes the point that many great peacemakers are poor spouses and parents. While saying he didn't know Dorothy Day well enough to comment on her parenting abilities, McCarthy said his observation clearly applies to Albert Einstein, Martin Luther King Jr., Leo Tolstoy and Mohandas K. Gandhi. McCarthy said the oldest son of Gandhi was so angry with his father, he joined the army and later became an alcoholic and prostitute.

McCarthy, who first met Dorothy Day in the early 1960s, recalls her as clear-sighted and having enormous will power.