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THE MASS IS OUR LIFE AND WORK:
THE CATHOLIC WORKER MOVEMENT and LITURGY

Excerpt from Introduction by Mark and Louise Zwick to
 Dorothy Day‘s journal On Pilgrimage
(Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans, 1999)

“In Christ’s human life, there were always a few who made up for the neglect of the crowd. The shepherds did it; their hurrying to the crib atoned for the people who would flee from Christ. The wise men did it; their journey across the world made up for those who refused to stir one hand’s breadth from the routine of their lives to go to Christ. Even the gifts the wise men brought have in themselves an obscure recompense and atonement for what would follow later in this Child’s life. For they brought gold, the king’s emblem, to make up for the crown of thorns that He would wear; they offered incense, the symbol of praise, to make up for the mockery and the spitting; they gave Him myrrh, to heal and soothe, and He was wounded from head to foot, and no one bathed His wounds. The women at the foot of the Cross did it too, making up for the crowd who stood by and sneered.

We can do it too, exactly as they did. We are not born too late. We do it by seeing Christ and serving Christ in friends and strangers, in everyone we come in contact with.

All this can be proved, if proof is needed, by the doctrines of the Church. We can talk about Christ’s Mystical Body, about the vine and the branches, about the Communion of Saints. But Christ Himself has proved it for us, and no one has to go further than that. For He said that a glass of water given to a beggar was given to Him. He made heaven hinge on the way we act toward Him in disguise of commonplace, frail, ordinary humanity.

Did you give me food when I was hungry?
Did you give me drink when I was thirsty?
Did you give me clothes when my own were all rags?
Did you come to see Me when I was sick, or in prison, or in trouble?

And to those who say, aghast, that they never had a chance to do such a thing, that they lived two thousand years too late, He will say again what they had the chance of knowing all their lives, that if these things were done for the very least of His brethren, they were done to Him.”

Very Early on [in the Catholic Worker movement], the Benedictines at St. John’s Abbey responded to an appeal from the Catholic Worker with donations and also with shared ideas, materials, and friendship. They were friends who shared the commitment to Catholic social teaching and to Matthew 25, believing that the guest who receives hospitality is Christ.

Father Virgil Michel, O.S.B., of St, John’s Abbey, a great leader in the liturgical movement in the United States, became a friend of both Dorothy and Peter, as well as others in the CW movement. They worked to bring together the social teaching of the Church, the liturgy, and a profound understanding of the Mystical Body of Christ. Benedictine spirituality had a natural connection with the catholic Worker, where hospitality and the Mass were emphasized. Father Michel had the inimitable skill of connecting social consciousness with the social nature of worship, especially the liturgy of the Eucharist. He believed that our responsibility for our neighbor, believer or not, flowed from the fact that we were connected to one another in the Body of Christ and the Eucharist. The liturgical movement, before the Second Vatican Council, went back to the sources of the early Church and the scriptures to understand the heart of the liturgy as the worship of the Body of Christ, inextricably linked with the Church’s teaching on service to the poor and social justice for the suffering members of the Body of Christ.

Father Michel’s writings were published in The Catholic Worker, and Dorothy wrote in Orate Fratres edited by Father Michel. In his book Wings of the Dawn, Stanley Vishnewski wrote about the connection between the Catholic Worker movement and the Benedictines, suggesting that much of the movement was related to Benedictine spirituality.

The centrality of the Mass was crucial to Dorothy, and she considered it the greatest work of the day. In the early 1940’s, when she addressed a group of “would-be Catholic Workers ,” she admonished them that “the Mass is the Work”! All their activities were first to be offered and then united frequently with the sacrifice of Christ on the Cross and on the altar, because Dorothy felt that “ all life flowed from worship; only thus would their work be a success, irrespective of its external attainment”.

She never lost her faith in the Eucharist, in the liturgy. The liturgical movement, with its emphasis on the Body of Christ, brought a wholeness to Dorothy’s faith and worship. She was in the forefront of those who wanted to bring the liturgy to the people and have them participate in it. She mentions participating in dialogue Masses in the 1930’s. She rejoiced in the document on the liturgy that came out of the Second Vatican Council, but she became uncomfortable with some expressions later in the 1960’s that undercut the profundity of worship by emphasizing the meal aspect {exclusively}; she knew that was very important but some of the aspect of the sacrifice was lost. She was also uncomfortable with what she described as elitist, special liturgies that made people abandon their parish liturgies; this took them away from the masses, the ordinary people, what she called the “ancient lowly”. For Dorothy, the Mass was the celebration of the Incarnation, bringing together all the material and spiritual aspects of our lives in the Incarnate God. (Dorothy often quoted Peter Maurin, who said that living the Mass was the way to bring the material and the spiritual together. ) (TCR Note: emphasis ours)

…Dorothy [wrote in the May 1967 Catholic Worker]”

[This] leads me into reflections on the new Masses, the intimate Masses, the colloquial Masses, the folk-song Masses, and so-on. By the intimate I mean those where everyone gathers close around the altar inside the sanctuary, as close to the priest as possible. Even the young ones have a hard time standing, shifting from one leg to the other, the girls with high heels (“If I’d known it would be like this I’d have worn my sneakers,” one said), the older rheumatic ones with ever-increasing pain. By the intimate I also mean those offered in small apartments before a small group. I understand that permission for this has been granted in Harlem for some time now, and priests offering the Mass in the poorest homes block by block in their parishes during the week---bringing Christ most literally to the people. This is wonderful.

But there is also the attempt made by some young priests to reach the young, to make the Mass meaningful to the young (the bourgeois, educated, middle-class young), where novelty is supposed to attract the attention but which, as far as I can see, has led to drawing these same young ones completely away from the “people of God,” “the masses” and worship in the parish church. There is the suggestion of contempt here for the people and for the faith of the inarticulate ones of the earth….I do love the guitar Masses, and the Masses where the recorder and flute are played, and sometimes the glorious and triumphant trumpet. But I do not want them every day, any more than we wanted the Gregorian Requiem Masses everyday. They are for the occasion. They are joyful and happy Masses indeed and supposed to attract the young. But the beginning of faith is something different. “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. Fear in the sense of awe.”