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342 ˜ Afterword
weaving of influences shaping the Open Door has the common thread of the
Catholic Worker.
Thus, after reading this collection of articles from Hospitality, a useful way
to summarize and to gain a perspective on the Open Door Community is to see
how it expresses central themes and practices within the Catholic Worker movement.
In a helpful essay published as an introduction to a new edition of
Dorothy Day’s book On Pilgrimage, Mark and Louise Zwick, themselves
Catholic Workers, discuss what might be called ten essential characteristics of
the Catholic Worker movement. 1
The first of those characteristics, a deep connection with yet critical stance toward
the church, is especially evident in the lives of Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin,
and continues as an important aspect of the Catholic Worker movement. As
the Zwicks state, “Dorothy Day was not an isolated Catholic, sitting on the edge
or margin of mainline Catholicism, or [as] part of a sectarian group that lives
content in the discovery of its own little truths that it keeps under a bushel. ...
Her radicalism, her commitment to the poor, to a just social order, to peace—
all were rooted in her Catholicism.” 2 At the same time, Day and the Catholic
Worker movement have been very critical of the institutional church on certain
points. At one point in her life, Day wrote, “I loved the Church for Christ made
visible. Not for itself, because it was often a scandal to me. Romano Guardini
said that the Church is the Cross on which Christ was crucified; one could not
separate Christ from his Cross, and one must live in a state of permanent dissatisfaction
with the Church.” 3
This tension between love for and criticism of the church is clearly present
in the Open Door. Those who began the community were driven by a shared
intensity of faith that first helped to reinvigorate a small Presbyterian congregation,
and that then led to starting a night shelter. Yet that same intensity of faith
eventually led to the formation of a type of Christian community seemingly not
possible within the confines of a traditional congregation. The very existence of
a community such as the Open Door thus has come to stand as a critical alternative
to mainstream Christian life. In the Open Door, and in other intentional
Christian communities, members’ lives are organized around a community seeking
to live faithfully to the gospel. Rival institutional and personal demands such
as family, work, education, and politics are minimized. In mainstream Christian
lives, the temptation is more easily indulged to put personal and institutional
loyalties before faithful response to the gospel as nurtured within Christian community
and offered in witness to the world. Even more, mainstream Christianity
can come to justify accommodation with the dominant institutional struc-
1. See Mark and Louise Zwick, “Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker Movement,”
in Dorothy Day, On Pilgrimage (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1999).
2. Ibid., 18.
3. Ibid., 14.