384 - Loaves and Fishes: The Story of the Catholic Worker Movement

Loaves and Fishes:
The Story of the Catholic Worker Movement
By Dorothy Day
New York, Harper & Row, 1983. 215 pp. $6.95.

When Dorothy Day, co-founder with Peter Maurin of the Catholic Worker Movement, died at 83 on the eve of Advent 1980, there was a general awareness that the country had lost one of its most remarkable and influential religious personalities. Evidenced by a series of books and a major biography that have appeared since then, there has also developed an interest in the origins and impact of the ideas and social experiments begun by Dorothy Day and her colleagues which appeared to many idealistic and unrealistic at the time (radical religious pacificism and simple living communities), but which now are seen to have been prophetic. Harper and Row have done a great service to this interest by first republishing Dorothy Day's spiritual autobiography, The Long Loneliness (1981) and now by returning to print this lively and highly personal memoir by Dorothy Day which traces the beginnings of the movement in the 1930s through to the early '60s: the establishment of the newspaper, the founding of farms and urban houses of hospitality, the controversial growth of the movement's advocacy for social justice and peace. With a foreword by Robert Coles, and generously illustrated with photographs, this is a thoroughly engrossing, moving, and unvarnished account that presents vividly and unromantically the joys and the daily frustrations of an effort to live out the beatitudes among those whom society has declared unwanted.

John McDargh
Boston College
Boston, Mass.