Juan José, a Latin American teenage immigrant being held in the INS Detention Center in Houston, wept as he told his story. For all of his life, he had fulfilled the promise he made to his mother of saying three Hail Mary’s each night for purity, only to lose his virginity to some 49-year-old criminal… continue reading
Poor Teach Hard and Dreadful Love: A Disillusioned Catholic Worker Stays On
November 1, 1998 by
Marion Maendel came to Casa Juan Diego from the Bruderhof. She was baptized into the Catholic Church in March 2000. It’s another suffocating Houston night. Air, warm and thick as smoke, cloaks the city and settles in folds between the buildings on Rose Street. I sit in my second-story room in Casa Juan Diego House… continue reading
“The Mystery of the Poor is This: They are Christ.” (Dorothy Day)
November 1, 1998 by
Alfredo, who spent the summer at Casa Juan Diego’s men’s house, is a seminarian from Colombia with the Scalabrini Fathers, studying theology at the Catholic Theological Union in Chicago. It was six years ago when I first read a copy of the Houston Catholic Worker. I was in my first year of studies with the… continue reading
“Economic Personalism” is a Fraud: The Solution to Capitalism
November 1, 1998 by
You don’t have to be a genius to realize the failure of Marxism. Even before 1989 one could have realized that Marxist regimes were not built on Marxist ideologies and theory, but were built on the rather strange foundation of tens of millions of bodies of the proletariat who disagreed with the regime. The foundation… continue reading
Encyclicals Indict Greed of Companies: Mexicans not Paid Living Wage in U.S. Maquiladoras
October 1, 1998 by
Andrew Wright will soon be married to Blossom Mueller, fellow Catholic Worker. They will begin their family life by making the retreat which Fr. Hugo gave so often to Dorothy Day, as part of their honeymoon. As more immigrants arrive each day with the dusty, greasy clothes on their backs I am reminded of what… continue reading
Baroness calls Dorothy Day a Saint
October 1, 1998 by
Catherine de Hueck Doherty, a refugee of the Russian Revolution, began working with the poor during the Great Depression, opening Catholic Friendship Houses in Toronto, Harlem and later Chicago. She went on to establish the Madonna House Lay Apostolate in 1947, which is based in Combermere, Ontario, Canada. Since her death in 1985, her lay… continue reading
Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin Creative in their Approach to the Labor Movement (Labor & Workers)
August 1, 1998 by
This article, on labor and support for workers, is the fifteenth in our series on the Roots of the Catholic Worker movement, the saints, philosophers and ideas which influenced Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin. When Dorothy Day became Catholic, a priest asked her to write the story of her conversion, telling how the social teaching… continue reading
Many Questions: How Can You Continue the Work of Hospitality?
August 1, 1998 by
Question: You have just talked to 40 to 50 guests at the men’s house. There are 75 to 100 women and children housed in the other centers. You have provided food, clothing, medicine and medical care, dental and eye care to hundreds of others of Casa Juan Diego neighborhoods. Aren’t you and the other workers… continue reading
Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace. For a Greater Distribution of Land. The Challenge of Agrarian Reform (Excerpts)
June 1, 1998 by
The social teaching of the Church is very clear … that agrarian reform is one of the most urgent reforms and cannot be delayed,” the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace said in a document it made public Jan. 13, 1998. The council said that “in situations of injustice and poverty, agrarian reform is not… continue reading
