The rock of contention:

...Pragmatically, I cannot ,see it working any better against the Soviet Union than it would have against Hitler (though a true pacifist would say this is not the point), and in general I think it would make bad public policy...

...like much such work it relies heavily on published sources and available archives rather than on more journalistic probing...

...I was never a pacifist in the full Catholic Worker mode, but at that time I was inclined toward conscientious objection, influenced by the argument that the means used in modern warfare could not be justified in traditional Catholic doctrine...

...and it produced John Cogley, head of the house and editor of the paper, later executive editor of Commonweal, religion editor of the New York Times, and editor of the Center Magazine - probably the outstanding journalist, with the possible exception of Dorothy Day herself, to come out of the movement...

...We need that vision lest we forget how mad it is to put too much trust in bombs and bullets, to base policy on the threat to wipe entire cities off the face of the earth...

...Each house or farm normally had at least a few people to run it and often there were rather sizable Catholic Worker groups...

...To some the agrarian, anti-industrial, back-to-the-land aspect of the movement was of paramount importance...

...Uniformity inside such groups was definitely not the rule...

...I think I was typical when I say that while the whole of my education had been Catholic, I had never heard of the Catholic Worker until I became a member of a Jocist-style Catholic Action group-or cell, as I'm afraid we called them in those days...

...It was not an easy way of life, but I never regretted it...

...Long-time Catholic Worker Gerry Griffin of the New York house, who served in the American Friends' ambulance corps during the war, is mentioned only in passing, and so too are many others of varying viewpoints...

...I am glad that most of the American bishops do not follow it either...

...he is mentioned twice, once inaccurately, he says, and he was not interviewed...

...Nonetheless, despite all that, I think religious pacifism raises points that need to be debated...

...There was indoctrination, agitation, propaganda if you will...

...I know, for example, that Tom at least would take exception to Mr...

...Again I think he is correct in his estimate...

...Perhaps the problem is that Breaking Bread was originally a doctoral dissertation, although a livelier one than usual...

...it published the Chicago Catholic Worker which had a respectable if small circulation and which some people liked better than the New York paper...

...Reagan and Mr...

...Most of us who were drawn to the CW had grown up as Catholics, and the Gospel was hardly foreign to us...

...The non-violence that worked for Gandhi against the British would not work for the Jews against Hitler...

...As members of a movement that prided itself on having no written constitution or rules, individual Catholic Workers tended to differ sharply in outlook and approach from person to person...

...A NON-PACIFIST LOOKS BUCK AT THE CATHOLIC WORKER The rock of contention JAMES O'GARA WILL AN ACCOUNT of the Catholic Worker movement ever be written that satisfies everyone or almost everyone who participated in the movement...

...AS IT turned OUT, after moving into the House of Hospitality, rather than becoming a full-fledged pacifist I went in the other direction, becoming increasingly anti-Hitler and indeed downright interventionist-although I must confess I would still have preferred medical service to what I eventually got...

...Yet that Gospel had always come to us swathed in institutional and highly sanitized forms...

...In short, to fantasize just a bit, while I would not like to see a pacifist in the White House, wouldn't the world be much better off if only both President Reagan and Chairman Andropov had at least a touch of the Catholic Worker spirit...

...At that point, with no one available to take over the house (co-founder Al Reser, by then married and a father, tried but it was impossible) the matter finished unhappily...

...At its peak before World War II the CW had something like forty Houses of Hospitality and farms throughout the country, as well as branches in England and Australia...

...The effect on people like me of convert Dorothy Day's challenge to live in voluntary poverty, to see Christ in the hungry, in the homeless, in the naked, was revolutionary...

...There were roundtable discussions, and reading, much reading, of everyone from Berdyaev to Bloy, from Mounier to Mar-itain...

...Rather it is an effort to describe the impact of Catholic Worker radicalism on the Catholic church in the United States...

...In the summer of 1940, in a move highly unusual in a personalist movement with few central directives, Dorothy Day sent a letter to all the groups, a letter which dealt with the pacifist issue and which many could only interpret as a take-it-or-leave-it ultimatum...

...In general, those who have interviews on file in the CW archives or who wrote for the New York or other CW papers are quoted...

...Wouldn't we all sleep more soundly at night...

...The Catholic Worker was interested in structural change as well as immediate amelioration...

...I shall always be grateful to it, and that gratitude does not exclude the movement's pacifism...

...When I was with the Catholic Worker, war production had not yet put an end to the Great Depression, and guests in the house and in the line tended to be from the temporarily unemployed, many of them young men who had come to Chicago from smaller towns in search of work...

...To many, probably most, the Catholic Worker was primarily a means to carry out the corporal works of mercy, to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, shelter the homeless...

...Probably not...

...I think something else needs to be stated...

...This was, I suspect, the major impact the Catholic Worker had on those who joined its ranks, if one can use a term like that for such a non-organized movement...

...A word is in order about the nature of that pacifism...

...Both the House of Hospitality and the paper closed down not long after John and I were drafted, I late in 1941, a couple of months before Pearl Harbor, and John early in 1942...

...The fact is that the Catholic Worker, like the elephant, looks different to every beholder, and I am not even sure how many of the participants over the years accepted the whole CW THE CATHOLIC the Chicago Catholic Worker and a non-pacifist, ran the New York house for ten years after his wartime service in the Air Corps and knew Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin very well...

...radical social outlook and its conservative Catholic religiosity," Piehl writes, "Dorothy Day's Catholic Worker movement is historically significant as the first major expression of radical social criticism in American Catholicism...

...Consider the kind of world we live in, with total destruction of our civilization a very real possibility...

...WITH THAT SAID, though, I found Breaking Bread a very interesting, perceptive, and highly readable book...

...Citing the Catholic Worker's "seeming paradox of...

...Piehl's book-something Mr...

...The crucial issue in that period was pacifism...

...And in the process it conveys some idea of the variety to be found inside the movement...

...Tom Sullivan, originally of leaves holes in the final outcome...

...and any historian trying to trace the details of the movement would have his work cut out for him...

...For all the evils we see around us, I cannot believe that the world would be a better place today if we had let Hitler have his way...

...To illustrate this tension between pacifist and non-pacifist, Piehl chose to devote a section of his book to the Chicago branch of the movement...

...At least one group on the West Coast refused to distribute the New York paper...

...But I think the picture of the time-span with which I am familiar is roughly accurate...

...After I arrived John Cogley decided to stay on at the house, and we were there together until we both went into the armed forces...

...Even within this restricted purpose, the author of Breaking Bread can be faulted for not talking to more people, people not too hard to find...

...By coincidence, it is now fifty years since Hitler came to power and since the Catholic Worker was founded in May of 1933...

...This may be understandable given the limitations of a Ph.D...

...view a representative group of such Catholic Workers from all those houses and farms, and that effort would require a generous foundation grant or a whopping advance from a major publisher...

...Others never felt better than when they were carrying a strike sign on a union picket line...

...Piehl also suggests that there were other and equally fundamental differences between Chicago and New York...

...His reasons are clear...

...Yet with that said, and said very strongly (can you imagine Hitler with nuclear weapons at his command...

...Yet I think Piehl is quite right in saying that the pacifist issue was never confronted head-on in the pages of the Chicago Catholic Worker, nor was it really argued out at the 1940 annual CW retreat, to which people came from all over the country...

...Yet there was more, much more, to the Catholic Worker than the simple works of mercy carried out in the CW Houses of Hospitality...

...As for those on "our" side who were responsible for World War II's obliteration bombing from Dresden to Hiroshima, what a tragedy that they learned nothing from the witness of religious groups like the Catholic Worker before they so badly stained the moral character of the war against Hitler and fascism...

...others are not...

...It called on its followers to open their eyes to the sins and injustice of the current social order...

...That spirit was an amalgam of disillusionment with World War I, combined with a hefty dose of the Oxbridge pledge of "won't fight for king or country," mixed with a big helping of repugnance for capitalist war profiteers, and all this salted with a strong sprinkling of isolationism...

...Piehl talks of this, but I have always been struck by the vast differences that seem to exist in the clientele of Houses of Hospitality from era to era and perhaps even from city to city...

...That was true before World War II, and it is even more true today, when nuclear pacifism at least has to be a live option for many...

...No such luck, I am sorry to say...

...Pacifism was thus the CW rock of contention on which some of us foundered...

...I cannot speak for the CW history in Chicago before my time-Piehl talked to Ed Marciniak, which was good, but he should have got the perspectives of people like Tom Sullivan, Al and Catherine Reser, John Doebele, Marty Paul, and others...

...Certainly many who knew and loved Peter Maurin will feel Piehl badly underestimated Peter's role as co-founder with Dorothy Day of the Catholic Worker movement...

...Andropov are, I fear, unlikely to do.opov are, I fear, unlikely to do...

...In that sense, I think those of us who ultimately rejected the Catholic Worker's pacifism were right...

...Further, the composition of such groups naturally changed regularly as people married, died, or just went off to other interests...

...Piehl's characterization of early Catholic Worker John Bowers as eccentric...

...IN THE MONTHS after Hitler invaded Poland, tensions developed inside the Catholic Worker between the majority pacifists and the minority non-pacifists...

...In Chicago it was taken that way: Tom Sullivan left the house over the issue, and John Cogley talked about leaving...

...Quiet dissent and disagreement were one thing-within the family, so to speak- but an out-and-out public break was something else...

...Within a broad context of American history, it raises questions that have never been discussed before, like why the CW arose inside Catholicism rather than Protestantism...

...But critics of both authors have to admit the difficulties that face anyone writing about the Catholic Worker...

...In such a world we need the vision of a great religious leader, perhaps some day a canonized saint, like Dorothy Day...

...The Chicago Catholic Workers, he says, were by and large less anti-industrial, less Utopian, less uncritically anti-capitalist, less convinced that the economic system needed to be scrapped rather than reformed...

...Some of the more senior Chicago CWs would probably not agree with this, but I am inclined to believe there is something in what he says...

...During 1940 and 1941, for a period of only a little over a year, I was a member of the Chicago Catholic Worker group, sharing in the running of the House of Hospitality and in editing the paper...

...As for me, I was twenty-two years old and on the fringes of the movement, visiting the house regularly, attending lectures there, getting to know people who became lifelong friends...

...Pacifism-for some of us that is what ended our ties with the movement...

...thesis, but it still necessarily WORKER outlook without reservation...

...But for the rest of us, consideration of the problem of war and peace is also necessary, and a good way to begin on that and on Catholic radicalism in general would be by a reading of Mr...

...And whether we who ultimately rejected it were happy about the fact or not, there was the pacifism that was always a strong theme in the movement's credo-although some still deny that Peter Maurin was a pacifist...

...As William D. Miller documents in his A Harsh and Dreadful Love, early CW writing against war echoed a good bit of the secular anti-war spirit of the 1930s...

...indeed, it may have been true elsewhere as well, and I regret that some of these issues were not more fully debated...

...This diffidence on the part of the non-pacifists was probably a mistake...

...Mel Piehl, Temple University Press, $19.95, 296 pp...

...Breaking Bread does not purport to be such a history, although it necessarily contains a certain amount of it...

...It added up to a mood whose spread all over the western world had much to do with the failure to stop Hitler before world war became inevitable...

...I know that the Catholic Worker movement was one of the great shaping forces in my life, as it was for many...

...I don't remember that Mr...

...To still others the fight against racism and all its associated evils was the central concern-many Houses of Hospitality were pioneering interracial centers before there was a civil rights movement...

...In the end it became much more exclusively an authentic religious pacifism, an opposition to violence and war rooted in Christian tradition and solidly Gospel-oriented...

...Nina Polcyn Moore, an early Catholic Worker from Milwaukee and a dear friend and traveling companion of Dorothy Day's, is not even mentioned...

...Let me be clear...

...Today my impression is that alcoholics and the disturbed dumped out of mental hospitals are more numerous-which makes the need just as urgent but the task far harder for the staff...

...Chicago had a long-established CW...

...For a really complete history, one would need to search out and interBreaking Bread: The Catholic Worker and the Origin of Catholic Radicalism in America...

...Mel Piehl's Breaking Bread* is likely to do the same, if for different reasons...

...After first wrestling with it in 1940 and steadily ever since, I still cannot accept the theory of pacifism...

...its House of Hospitality was sizable and well supported, providing something like a thousand meals a day...

...William D. Miller's two books, A Harsh and Dreadful Love and Dorothy Day: A Biography provoked strong criticism from some former and present-day Catholic Workers...

...As time went by, however, and the situation in Europe became more critical, the Catholic Worker's and-war stance went through a gradual evolution...

...Perhaps that book will never be written...

...When the dispute over the pacifist issue made it seem that there would be no one left to keep the house open and operating, 1 moved in...

...A thorough history of the movement would be a mammoth undertaking...

...For some reason I am not quite able to identify, there was a reluctance to make a sharp break in print or to engage in direct argumentation with what was seen as a fundamental tenet of the movement-a movement in which non-pacifists were very much in the minority, as far as I could judge...