The Catholic Worker newspaper is not online. Subscription or copy requests must be sent by regular mail to The Catholic Worker, 36 East First Street, New York, NY 10003, United States. Phone: 212-777-9617. The newspaper was started by Dorothy Day herself in New York City in the 1930s. The price has been and will remain a penny a copy, excluding mailing costs. It is issued seven times per year and a year’s subscription is available for 25 cents (30 cents for foreign subscriptions), though all donations in excess of that amount go to the hospitality houses associated with the paper, Maryhouse and St. Joseph House.

Back issues of the paper are available online at The Catholic News Archive.

Donations and gifts to the Catholic Worker can be sent to any Catholic Worker community. All have more needs than the resources to meet them. Perhaps you could go to http://www.catholicworker.org/communities/directory-picker.html and locate a house or community near you or one whose description matches your concerns. If necessary, you will have to check if a community is tax-exempt or not, some are but most are not.

Since each house or community is independent of all the others, there is no central way for a gift to one community to be shared with the others.

If your intent was to give a gift to the New York community that publishes The Catholic Worker newspaper, their address is: The Catholic Worker, 36 East First Street, New York, NY 10003, Phone: 212-777-9617.

Thank you for thinking of the needs of the Catholic Worker movement!

Dorothy Day is buried in Resurrection Cemetery on Staten Island, New York. Her grave, near the office, has a symbol of loaves and fishes and reads “Dorothy Day, November 8, 1897 – November 29, 1980, DEO GRATIAS”. A map to the cemetery can be found on map websites using the address: 361 Sharrott Ave, Staten Island, NY. It is near Tottenville, Staten Island.

Entertaining Angels: The Dorothy Day Story (Paulist Pictures, 1996, 112 min.) is available on video in some video rental stores. The movie, featuring Moira Kelly as Dorothy and Martin Sheen as Peter Maurin, covers Dorothy Day’s early life and the founding of the Catholic Worker movement to about 1938. The movie only hints at the profound works for peace and justice that would follow in the next 40 years. But well worth watching.

A new documentary by Claudia Larson titled Dorothy Day: Don’t Call Me a Saint is available on Youtube.

Begin by browsing our directory of Catholic Worker communities, as well as our listings of Catholic Worker volunteer opportunities. Many volunteer opportunities are not advertised; contact individual communities to learn more.

Anyone can start a Catholic Worker house and there are many ways to do it. You do not need permission to call yourself a Catholic Worker. Before you do so, however, you would probably want to make sure that your philosophy and activities are generally in accord with The Aims and Means of the Catholic Worker.

Our general advice is:

  1. Do an informal needs assessment of your community. Where are the unmet needs? What services does your house want to provide? Talk about whether you will be doing hospitality, resistance, or some combination of the two. Many factors will go into this consideration: your temperaments and inclination, the location you are in, the amount of support you can gather, etc.
  2. Start small. You can always expand when you get more resources and people. Beware believing you can solve all the problems of your guests and the temptation to get big or become an “organization.” Dorothy believed in staying small and nonincorporated.
  3. Visit and live in an existing Catholic Worker for a while to make sure that this is really a lifestyle for you. Alternately, request their publications, or go to regional gatherings (there are periodic East coast and Midwest gatherings every September).
  4. Check out the zoning, occupancy, and public health laws of your community. Whether or not you choose to comply with them is up to you but it’s good to know them in case you run into difficulties.
  5. Build a network of people, religious institutions, and charitable organizations who can support you. You can start a Catholic Worker house by yourself but working in community is a whole lot easier and most houses don’t last very long without outside help.
  6. Learn to beg. You will be amazed what people and businesses will give you if you beg. Dorothy was a master at making appeals. The early Worker used to “picket St. Joseph”, i.e., pray a lot for what they needed. You will receive all that you need.
  7. Know the laws and requirements governing tax exemption and charitable solicitation in your community. The Catholic Worker has traditionally refused tax exemption but some houses have departed from this philosophy for fundraising purposes. Again, whether or not you choose to comply with these laws is up to you.
  8. Start a newsletter and mailing list. Having a newsletter/newspaper helps with receiving donations and is a way of spreading the “good news” to the wider community. You will also get volunteers that way.
  9. Pray, pray, pray. Many houses have regular community prayer and Eucharist.

When you have started a Catholic Worker house, please send information about your new house to The Catholic Worker newspaper, the online Directory of Catholic Worker Communities, and the Catholic Worker Archives.

The photo was taken by the celebrated photographer Bob Fitch in 1973. The archive of all Bob Fitch images has been acquired by the Stanford University Libraries and may be downloaded from their website. Credit for all reproduction or display must now read: Bob Fitch Photography Archive,
© Department of Special Collections, Stanford University.

There is no fee for non-commercial image downloading and use. Commercial use requires permission from the Department of Special Collections and University Archives prior to publishing or rebroadcasting any item or work, in whole or in part, held by the Department. More information can be found on the Standford Library permissions page [http://library.stanford.edu/spc/using-collections/permission-publish].

  1. Fritz Eichenberg used to make his art work available free to any Catholic Worker publication when he was alive. Since he has passed on, his artistic estate is being managed by an intellectual property firm named VAGA: Visual Artists and Galleries Association, Inc. They do not share Eichenberg’s philosophy and will charge you an arm and a leg to reproduce his work if you decide to contact them — even for nonprofit, non-commercial use. It’s sad, really, and we would hope that some generous benefactor would buy the rights to Eichenberg’s Catholic Worker pieces and donate them to the Catholic Worker Archives so that they might be publicly and freely available for non-commercial use as he had intended. Most CW newspapers with limited circulation don’t know or don’t care about this and continue to use Eichenberg’s work as before. Contact:

    VAGA, Inc.
    350 Fifth Avenue,
    Suite 6305
    New York, NY 10018
    Tel: 212-736-6666, 212-736-6767 (fax)

    A collection of Eichenberg prints is available in an 8 1/2 by 11 inch book titled Fritz Eichenberg: Works of Mercy published by Orbis Books.
  1. Ade Bethune makes any of her Catholic Worker art available for nonprofit, non-commercial use. She does ask that a donation, scaled to profit or non-profit use, be given to the St. Catherine University library for maintenance of her archives, the Ade Bethune Collection, which is a conduit for these requests.
  2. For other Catholic Worker artists, we have no information and suggest you contact The Catholic Worker newspaper or the Archives for assistance.

Send all notes about changes and corrections to info@catholicworker.org. We’ll get to it as soon as we can.

The exact number is impossible to know because the Catholic Worker Movement has no central headquarters, nor is there a single, authoritative list of communities. New communities are created every year, while other communities close. In addition, there is no agreed-upon definition of what constitutes a Catholic Worker community, although many people would cite some intentional connection to the vision of Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin, as well as the Aims and Means, as a good standard.

To get a ballpark number, you can visit the Catholic Worker Community Directory. The current number of communities listed in the directory will be displayed there.