Blessed Are the Poor

When I first went down to the Catholic Worker, I was struck by the utter poverty in which these people worked and lived, for it was one of the principles of the movement that the Christian must not only alleviate, but also share the poverty of the poor — there in the heart of the slum on Mott Street, just below the Bowery — Chinatown was on one side and the poorest of the Italian immigrant families on the other. A few blocks away the Third Avenue El groaned and screeched.

When I went inside the "office," the plainness of bare walls seemed to me ugly, and so did the beaten old furniture to which some paint still clung despairingly. I was used to the immaculate orderliness of a hospital and was somewhat repelled by the disorderly appearance of the room — papers all over the place, boxes of clothes just received and not yet sorted cluttering the tables, sponges thrown haphazardly over the table. I thought "Somebody ought to clean this up." The workers and the poor who came to them for aid looked just alike, except that the former were a little cleaner, and busy.

A pretty red-haired girl came to meet me at the door, smiling. "Hello, I'm Irene Naughton," she said.

I told her my name, adding, "Father Meenan asked me to come."

She seemed to think very highly of Father Meenan and she said she was glad I knew him. She told me a lot about the Catholic Worker, about the women's house upstairs and the men's house in the back, where they lived with the really destitute, men and women who had nothing and perhaps, having suffered so long, now wanted nothing but what it takes to keep them breathing and moving. She told me about the breadline and clothes room. She gave me some copies of the paper with its cut of a black man and a white one standing together with our Lord, each with a symbol of work in his hand.

After a while I forgot her plain clothes, and the poor, disordered room, with all its signs of poverty. Or rather those things became the logical background for her and what she said.

Father Meenan came soon and we all had dinner together. There were murals on the walls of the dining room, showing Christ, The Worker. He looked thin and spent and poor like these people, as if someone had told Him, too, "You can't change the world," and He was still trying.

I didn't stay long that day, but I came again and again after that. Soon, in fact, almost all me time off duty, except when I was in Church or asleep, was spent there.

I met Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin— though Peter was sick even then, and I couldn't talk to him— who started the movement for love of God and their brothers in Him. I met gentle Jack English, who took care of the kitchen and cooking and (I always thought) did a lot to hold hot tempers checked. I met Dave Mason, who is big and jolly and always made me think of Santa Claus, but who can think and write so clearly about the evils of a society which has grown away from God and our need to go back to Him. And Tom Sullivan, who has an Irish temper but knows how to feel the tragedy of Mott Street in the people who live there and yet sees the beauty of another kind of poverty for love of God. And Bob Ludlow, who wrote of pacifism, and who, I was sure, only God could have made a pacifist, for he seemed more like one of those revolutionaries who sacrifice everything for the Ideal, at last even the Ideal itself, and leave their footprints in the sands of time in blood.

At first, though, I was not sure I even liked the Catholic Worker, especially after I started going down there every day. The people, the place, the ideal were so very different from anything that I had ever known. They said that the world's chaos was born when Christians forgot the implications of the teachings of Christ, forgot that "Christian" meant "follower of Christ," when Catholics forgot the spiritual and social doctrines of the Church. They said the world was sick, and they claimed they had the remedy and lived as if they had. Yet they were neither smug nor complacent. There seemed in each of them a great compassion and in most a great humility. It was this, I think, that I couldn't understand— how they could be so sure and yet stay humble. But then, my ideas on humility had to undergo a great change too.

I didn't understand how they could take the abuse and curses of those men and women who benefited from their hospitality, who ate their food and wore their clothes and slept in their beds and gave nothing in return, not even "thank you." I didn't understand how they could be so enthused over homemade bread and beef stew when dinner time came. I didn't understand how they could get up in the morning, wash in cold water or a cold room, dress in somebody's hand-me-down clothes, and rush off to Mass and tell God thanks, in all sincerity, for that. I didn't understand the violence and bitterness they inspired in some others, including some of my Catholic friends. What were they doing after all, and who were they? A group of poor people, living among the poor, speaking and writing of the love of God in Himself and in each other. What was there so special about this way of life that one must either follow it or fight it, that one must either love or despise? Why could one not remain indifferent?

Then there were times when I did not think some of them were humble in some things, particularly in regard to art and books. There seemed to be intolerance here that bordered on intellectual pride. There seemed too great a readiness to laugh at something one didn't like.

Part of this may have been due to my own injured pride. I remember one day in particular when I was in the back office working on the files. Bob was sitting behind me at his desk, talking to someone (I don't remember who). Earlier I had been showing Dorothy some poems I had written (I fancied myself a poet in those days), and she had read them and put them on his desk. He picked one up and read it, then another. He put both down on the desk.

"That's horrible," he said. "Who wrote this stuff? It sounds like something from Edgar Guest!"

I was very still, and hoped that my name was not on it. I had no desire to defend my work (which was probably just as well).

After I knew them better I learned that the thing that made these people so special, and their way of life so strange and compelling— or repulsive, depending on which group you were in, that of friend or that of enemy— was the fact that here were very ordinary people who had found a great truth and were trying to live according to it. Their discovery had revolutionized their own lives, as well as the lives of a lot of other people, and aimed at revolutionizing the whole of society, but it had not taken from them any of their own humanity. It had not made them angels. They were trying to be saints, but in their own human bodies, with their own human wills, subject to imperfections. Which is as it should be. But it meant that they were subject to failure, like others. It meant that not every action would seem that of a saint. That didn't take away, however, from the worth of the truth they had found.

I think it was these things that so many of their critics, such as my Catholic friends before mentioned, did not understand.

After a while, I understood that these people had felt the emptiness and hunger that were a part of me life now, and learned the secret of filling it. I went to them to learn the secret. In all their poverty they were richer than I— and I knew I wanted to be poor— as they were poor.