Two new Catholic Worker memoirs

by Colman McCarthy | Nov. 23, 2016

Dorothy Day, as usual, had it just about right: "No matter how corrupt the Church may become, it carries within it the seeds of its own regeneration."

"As a convert," she wrote, "I never expected much from the bishops. In all history popes and bishops and father abbots seem to have been blind and power loving and greedy. I never expected leadership from them. It is the saints that keep appearing all thru history who keep things going."

Two of the current keepers are Brendan Walsh and Scott Schaeffer-Duffy, though, like Dorothy Day, they would resist being labeled saints.

Both founded and run Catholic Worker houses of hospitality: Walsh founded Viva House in 1968 in scarred southwest Baltimore; Schaeffer-Duffy in 1982 founded the Sts. Francis and Thérèse Catholic Worker House in Worcester, Mass. Both studied at Jesuit colleges: Walsh at Le Moyne, Schaeffer-Duffy at Holy Cross. They are former seminarians. Both married up: Walsh to Willa Bickham, a gifted artist, and Schaeffer-Duffy to Claire Schaeffer-Duffy, a University of Virginia graduate who majored in political and social thought and whose reporting has long graced the pages of NCR. Both are pacifists who have worked on one barricade or another to jam the gears of the American war machine.

https://www.ncronline.org/books/2016/11/two-new-catholic-worker-memoirs-inspire-us