CATHOLIC WORKER MOVEMENT TIMELINE

1877:  Peter Maurin was born in Oultet, France.

1897:  Dorothy Day was born in Brooklyn, New York.

1926:  Dorothy Day’s daughter, Tamar Teresa, was born.

1927:  Dorothy Day converted to Catholicism.

1932:  Dorothy Day met Peter Maurin in New York City.

1933 (May 1):  Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin began publishing The Catholic Worker newspaper in New York City.

1933:  Day and Maurin started the first “house of hospitality” in New York City, which later became known St. Joseph House (later joined by Maryhouse).

1939-1945:  The Catholic Worker ‘s circulation dropped due to the pacifist stance of Day and the other editors during World War II.

1949:  Peter Maurin’s Easy Essays were published.

1949:  Peter Maurin died at the Catholic Worker farm near Newburgh, New York.

1952:  Dorothy Day’s autobiography, The Long Loneliness, was published.

1980:  Dorothy Day died at Maryhouse Catholic Worker in New York City.

1983:  A proposal for Day’s canonization was put forth by the Claretian Missionaries.

2000:  Pope John Paul II granted Day “Servant of God” status, the first step toward canonization.

2012:  The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops formally endorsed Day’s cause for sainthood.

2014:  Over 225 Catholic Worker communities existed around the world.

FOUNDER/GROUP HISTORY

The Catholic Worker was co-founded by Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin. While Day is the better known of the two, Maurin was the elder. He was born with the name Aristide Pierre Maurin in Oultet, France in 1877, the son of French peasant farmers and one of 24 children. Born into a Catholic family, as a young man he considered religious life, joining the Christian Brothers. A creative yet quiet person inspired by French personalist philosophy, especially the work of Emmanuel Mounier, Maurin sought to live a simple and dignified life of manual labor. In 1909, he migrated to Canada and later to the U.S., working in a variety of jobs as a manual laborer, which eventually brought him to New York City.

Twenty years after Maurin’s birth in France, Dorothy Day was born in Brooklyn, New York. Her father was a journalist, and the family moved to San Francisco and Chicago as he followed the work. Raised nominally Episcopalian, Day later reported having a strong attraction to faith and God as a child despite her parents’ lack of regular religious engagement. As an adult, Day became a journalist herself, writing for socialist and anarchist newspapers in New York City. A strong supporter of workers’ rights and feminist causes, Day rubbed shoulders with radical thinkers, politicians, philosophers, and artists in the bohemian culture of NewYork City in the 1920s, counting playwright Eugene O’Neill as a close friend. During her twenties, she became pregnant and had an abortion. Later, she fell in love with a biologist named Forster Batterham, who became her common-law husband. She spent four happy years with him, during which time she became pregnant. Out of joy and gratitude for her child, she began attending mass at a Catholic church near their home in Staten Island, New York. When she voiced her desire to convert to Catholicism and to have their baby baptized, Forster, an atheist who wanted little to do with religion, urged her not to go through with it. The two ended up separating, an experience that Day later described as one of the most painful decisions of her life: choosing the Church over her love for Forster.

Following her conversion to Catholicism, Day sought a way to bring together her belief in God and her long-standing commitment to social justice. She found a marriage of these two in Catholic social teaching and in the person of Peter Maurin, who she met in New York City in 1932. Together, Maurin and Day decided, in part because of her background in journalism, to start a newspaper focused on issues of workers’ rights from a Catholic perspective. The birth of The Catholic Worker newspaper happened in the midst of the Great Depression in the United States. In addition to publishing pieces relevant to the struggles of workers, Day and Maurin also sought a way to aid poor and unemployed people in material ways, performing what is known in Catholic tradition as the “Works of Mercy:” feeding the sick, giving drink to the thirsty, housing the homeless, welcoming the stranger, visiting the prisoner, clothing the naked, and burying the dead. Their response: the house of hospitality.

Day and Maurin began inviting people in to stay at their apartments in the Lower East Side of New York City, sharing their food and offering a bed (or even a floor) to people in need. Both believed that one of the problems with bureaucratic social service agencies was their impersonalism. In contrast, Maurin was strongly influenced by French personalist philosophers, who saw the key to a “society in which it was easier to be good” as directly tied to people reaching out to each other through personal relationships and helping their brother or sister at a
personal sacrifice. Over time, their efforts grew into a group of volunteers who lived in a Lower East Side building (eventually called “St. Joseph House”) with people seeking shelter from the streets, running a daily soup line that often stretched down the block and publishing pieces in The Catholic Worker newspaper critiquing the social, spiritual, and personal crises underlying problems, such as poverty and racism. Over time, the newspaper (and the Catholic Worker community) became focused on issues of violence and militarism as well, with the group’s pacifist stance and nonviolent civil disobedience becoming more central to its existence during the Spanish Civil War, World War II, the Vietnam War, and into present time.

As the newspaper’s circulation grew and word of the house of hospitality’s work spread, the Catholic Worker community gave birth to what has become known as the Catholic Worker movement. Houses of hospitality, often with their own accompanying newspapers describing their work, began to spring up around the United States. By 1940, over thirty Catholic Worker communities were formed by local groups around the country interested in the kind of work that Day and Maurin described in their newspaper. The movement’s growth was, and has continued to be, decentralized and unorganized. No one’s permission is needed to start a Catholic Worker community, nor do incarnations of Catholic Worker vision and practice need to follow a particular set of rules or models. Indeed, Day’s anarchist past nurtured her commitment to a movement that was informed by those directly involved, which left room for spontaneity and creativity rather than authority and leadership dictating the boundaries for communities. While the de facto leaders of different communities were sometimes familiar with each other, connections between different Catholic Worker communities rarely extended beyond informal friendships.

As of 2014, over 225 Catholic Worker houses and farms exist in the United States and around the world. Some observers thought the movement would disappear following Day’s death in 1980 given her centrality as a symbolic figure for the movement as a whole. And while the movement has evolved over time, including after Day’s death, it continues to thrive in many ways. Catholic Workers in the U.S., Ireland, Germany, Mexico, and other countries serve food to the hungry and house the homeless, publish newspapers critiquing social policy and reflecting on spiritual issues, and are arrested for protesting war and militarism worldwide.

DOCTRINES/BELIEFS

Because it is a decentralized movement, beliefs vary from Catholic Worker community to community and within communities as well. Still, many groups throughout the movement do share similar principles, the most common of which are stated in “The Aims and Means of the Catholic Worker,” published annually in The Catholic Worker newspaper. These aims and means focus on creating a society, as founder Peter Maurin said, “where it is easier for people to be good” centered in the “justice and charity of Jesus Christ.” They advocate for personalism (a focus on taking personal responsibility for changing conditions rather than reliance on the state for “impersonal charity”) as well as decentralization of societal institutions and a “green revolution” that cultivates agricultural and craft skills for self-sufficiency and meaningful labor. While these principles underlie the culture of many Catholic Worker communities, their actions tend to focus on the four practices listed in the Aims and Means: nonviolence, the works of mercy, manual labor, and voluntary poverty.

The Catholic Worker’s commitment to nonviolence has grown over the years. Dorothy Day’s pacifism took root before World War II, but it was strengthened during that period, when many people left the Worker or cancelled their subscriptions to the newspaper because of Day’s outspoken opposition to the war. These beliefs were rooted in an understanding of Jesus’ teachingand behavior in the gospels as being nonviolent (e.g., turn the other cheek) while also disrupting the status quo (e.g., when Jesus overturned the tables of the temple money lenders). During the Vietnam War, Catholic priests Philip and Daniel Berrigan (friends of the Catholic Worker) staged draft card burnings inspired by their Catholic faith. The Worker’s support of the Berrigans and similar anti-war activists solidified its reputation as a major force of nonviolent activism, opposition to war, and Catholic peace activism during a period when many young people had become disillusioned by war and violence. Increasingly, Catholic Worker communities around the country began to attract war resisters looking for communities where their views would be supported, especially if they were Catholics, since the Catholic Church’s official teachings were much more open to war and violence in certain circumstances.

The Works of Mercy (held by most in Catholic Worker tradition to be feeding the hungry, giving drink to the thirsty, clothing the naked, sheltering the homeless, caring for the sick, visiting those in prison, and burying the dead) are in some ways more central to the Catholic Worker’s beliefs, since the first house of hospitality was started in order to allow for their practice. In Christian tradition, especially Catholic tradition, the works of mercy are seen as central to the Christian life. In the twenty-fifth chapter of the gospel of Matthew, Jesus is reported as telling his followers that in order to enter the kingdom of heaven, they had to do these things for their brothers and sisters in need just as they would have done them for Jesus himself. Catholic Worker communities not only perform works of mercy, but also in encourage others to engage in similar practices. Also, these central Catholic Worker beliefs about what it means to be Christian are proclaimed in various works of art, which are often displayed in the houses as reminders of the importance of the works of mercy to Catholic Worker life.

Many Catholic Workers also believe in the importance of manual labor and voluntary poverty, though these beliefs are less central in that not all community members share these commitments. Still, most Catholic Worker communities place a premium on simplicity, living in small rooms with simple beds, eating donated food out of donated dishes, wearing donated clothes, and doing much of the work of the houses (washing dishes, mopping floors, repairing walls) themselves, regardless of whether full-time volunteers have college degrees or come from wealthy backgrounds. Most houses of hospitality are set up as places where people can work with their hands and where often well-educated, middle-class volunteers live in the same conditions as people from the street who have been invited to live in the house as guests. Belief in the importance of manual labor is rooted in the conviction that many of contemporary society’s ills are due to an alienation from the products of one’s labor as well as the belief that manual labor is good for both the body and the mind. Voluntary poverty is seen as important because it separates one from the rampant consumerism in modern capitalist societies as well as helping one to live in solidarity with the poor.

RITUALS/PRACTICES

Catholic Worker rituals are centered in the works of mercy and nonviolent protest against militarism, homelessness, and other issues facing many contemporary societies. Many communities also participate in traditional Catholic rituals, such as the mass and praying the liturgy of the hours (typically, vespers). Rituals also include intellectual endeavors such as reporting and writing as part of communities’ publication of newspapers and newsletters. Many of these rituals involve, whether intentionally or not, the act of distancing the Catholic Worker from other groups, such as the Roman Catholic Church and social service agencies (Yukich 2010).

Though each community is different, most Catholic Worker communities engage regularly in the works of mercy. Many have soup kitchens, food pantries, and/or clothing closets. Several books and articles have been written chronicling the work of the original Catholic Worker community in New York City. Many of these include details on the daily rituals of the community, which provide a sense of what Catholic Worker ritual entails. At St. Joseph House in New York City, there is a soupline Monday through Friday. Each morning, there is a volunteer assigned to make the huge pot of soup. Other volunteers show up later to butter bread and to brew pitchers of hot tea. Before the soupline begins, the volunteers all join hands and pray for God’s blessing on the community and all who will eat there that day. Then people began to file in the front door, sitting down at tables where they are served a bowl of soup by one of the volunteers. Volunteers also bring around tea and bread, serving the guests as one might be served at a restaurant. Often volunteers take a moment to sit and talk with one of the guests, especially if they see someone they know.

After the soupline ends, many of the volunteers head to their homes and jobs. Live-in volunteers then make lunch for all of the people who live in the house. The afternoon is typically a quieter time. Some volunteers accompany residents to doctor’s appointments, while someone else makes dinner for the community, which always begins at 5 PM. Someone from Maryhouse, the other New York City house of hospitality located two blocks away, comes with a grocery cart to pick up their portion of the dinner. After everyone is finished eating, the dishes must be done, tables cleaned, and floors mopped. On Tuesday nights, these rituals are followed by a Catholic mass: a priest comes to the house each week just for the occasion. On Friday nights, they are followed by open-to-the-public “Friday night meetings” on topics varying from the spirituality of St. Teresa of Avila to the prison at Guantanamo Bay.

In addition to the everyday rituals of the community, in which the works of mercy are central, many Catholic Workers are also regularly involved in acts of civil disobedience protesting war and other forms of violence. One of the most common locations for these protests is the armed forces recruiting center in Times Square. In a typical protest, activists from the Catholic Worker and similarly-minded groups take signs to the recruiting center, stand outside with the signs, and block the entrance to prohibit anyone from entering. After a certain period of time, police officers come and arrest those blocking the entrance. Usually a few activists stay behind to collect the posters and take them back to the house. After spending a short time in jail, the protestors are typically released, though they later have to appear in court. Most use the court appearances as an opportunity to share their views about the immorality and illegality of war and violence.

While these are some of the rituals common in the New York City community, since each Catholic Worker community is different, each community’s rituals differ as well. Some do not hold regular masses at their houses of hospitality. Some are not regularly involved in civil disobedience. However, most have some form of a meal shared with the homeless and other impoverished populations: if there is any ritual common to most communities, it would be this type of activity. The rituals of shared meals, shared time in jail, shared celebration of mass, and others not only enable Catholic Workers to live out their beliefs but also serve to bind them together, creating close-knit communities.

ORGANIZATION/LEADERSHIP

As of 2014, there are over 225 Catholic Worker houses and farms around the world. Most of these are located in the United States, particularly in the Northeast, Midwest, and West, where a higher percentage of the general population is Catholic than in the South. Approximately twenty five communities are located in other countries, most in Western Europe though a few are in places like Central America, New Zealand, and Africa. Communities vary in size, and because of the decentralized and informal character of the movement, there is no membership list. As an example, in the New York City community, around fifteen people are full-time volunteers living in or near the houses of hospitality. Another thirty people live in the houses as guests, some long-term and some short-term, staying there until they get back on their feet. The larger local community of “friends of the house” (around fifty people at any one time) includes regular volunteers as well as people who attend Friday Night Meetings, house masses, or other community activities. In terms of wider interest and support, the community’s newspaper, The Catholic Worker, has over 20,000 subscribers around the country. The community is financed entirely through private donations from individual supporters, who might loosely be considered part of the movement due to their support of its ongoing work.

In smaller Catholic Worker communities, often a couple will start a house of hospitality, running it in their home with one or two other full-time volunteers and inviting three or four guests to stay with them. In terms of size, most communities lie somewhere in the range between the New York City community and the small, family-run community, with communities in urban areas often larger in size than those in more rural areas, where most of the Catholic Worker farms are located. Catholic Worker farms often provide rest for volunteers from urban areas as well as a place to engage in manual labor, to connect with the land, and to grow food that can be served in urban soup kitchens.

The Catholic Worker is better characterized as a movement than an organization. Catholic Workers seek to differentiate themselves from mainstream society; they also seek to challenge it through providing what they see as a better way to live. The movement is decentralized and relatively unorganized and has no official leader. While Dorothy Day was long considered the unofficial leader of the movement, since her death no single figure has arisen to fill that role. However, certain communities are often seen as particularly important or as role models for other communities. As the original community, the New York City community is often looked to as the standard-bearer by communities elsewhere. Still, some other communities consider it to be too influenced by Day’s legacy and too slow to adapt to current times, demonstrating the diversity of views regarding the Catholic Worker vision within the movement. Authority rests primarily within the local community, and each of these communities organizes that authority differently. In the New York City community, theoretically a designated person “on the house” is in charge for a fixed amount of time, after which someone else is in charge. But in practice, much authority rests on the full-time volunteers who take the majority of those house shifts, particularly volunteers who have lived in the community for a long period of time. In other communities, particularly nonprofit organizations, there is a board of directors or full-time staff members who are in charge of the community.

The Catholic Church is authoritative in the Catholic Worker movement only insofar as most of the communities see themselves as Catholic and wish to engage with the church rather than to ignore it. However, many communities openly disagree with certain Church teachings and practices, claiming that the teaching of the “primacy of conscience” gives them the right (even the duty) to dissent from teachings they believe are against the will of God. Some communities do not identify as Catholic at all, such as Haley House in Boston. Though certain communities adhere more closely to Church teachings and practices than others, the variation in the degree of adherence at times creates conflict within the movement, with some wishing to impose greater uniformity and conformity on communities in the movement.

Most Catholic Worker communities refuse 501(c)3 status and government funding because they do not want to cooperate with what they see as a corrupt, violent system. Instead, their work is supported entirely by private donations. These include cash donations from supporters as well as donations of food and clothing from local businesses and community members. As a result, communities are in theory beholden to the donors who support them. While the degree to which this is actually the case certainly varies by community, in many communities the donors in fact have little impact on decision-making. Because Catholic Workers are attracted to the community based on a commitment to shared principles, they are unlikely to shift those principles simply to makedonors happy. There is a history of this refusal to compromise within the movement. As mentioned earlier, during World War II, Dorothy Day wrote in The Catholic Worker newspaper about her unwillingness to compromise her pacifist stance on the war. Her views were very unpopular, and the paper lost thousands of subscribers (and donors) as a result. Still, Day was convinced that she was right and that God would provide for the community in other ways, and the community survived that period and other rough periods in its history.

Catholic Workers see donations as gifts from God and affirmations of their work rather than as justification for donors to influence the movement. Indeed, most people who donate to the Worker do so precisely because they want to support an anti-authoritarian group that is not beholden to any particular set of interests. In line with their personalist philosophy, community members seek to maintain good relationships with their donors, caring about them as people and showing gratitude to them for their gifts. These relationships form the basis for continuing donations, not just adherence to the same ideas and principles.

ISSUES/CHALLENGES

The Catholic Worker movement has faced several challenges over time, some common to the movement as a whole and some specific to particular communities. On a broad scale, Dorothy Day’s death in 1980 left the movement a bit rudderless. Her charismatic personality and leadership had been central not only for the New York City communities but also for the Catholic Worker vision in general. Still, the movement’s decentralized and unorganized character allowed it to adjust, survive, and thrive even after the death of its co-founder and central figure. No individual has arisen to take Day’s place as an overarching inspiration for the movement as a whole, though it is not clear that this is necessarily a challenge for the movement and its future other than making it less prominent in the mainstream media.

This may become more of a problem as the Catholic Church moves forward in efforts to make Dorothy Day a saint. Because of her strong association with the Catholic Worker movement, she remains the public face of the movement and all it stands for. But as the Church moves Day toward sainthood, it has systematically downplayed certain aspect’s of Day’s life and thought while emphasizing others that were far less central to her daily work but are more in line with the Church hierarchy’s teachings. For instance, while Church discussions of Day’s life often gloss over her anarchism and pacifism, they often emphasize her regret for her abortion and her orthodox beliefs about sexuality.

Catholic Workers disagree about many things. Some believe all Catholic Worker communities should be Catholic (and, further, some think they should agree with all of the Church’s teachings), while others do not believe in these restrictions. Some maintain strict rules about the use of technology, following Day’s and Maurin’s positions on the ways in which technology was harmful in general and in particular to the poor, while others have slick websites and/or Facebook pages. Some communities refuse to apply for nonprofit (501(c)3) status, arguing that communities should practice noncooperation with the state and should avoid bureaucratization, while others see nonprofit status as a way to perform the works of mercy more effectively. These disagreements are important, but because the movement is decentralized, they rarely threaten the movement’s existence because groups are independent and often have little concrete interaction with each other, freeing each to operate as it wishes.

The movement’s largest challenges emerge not from conflicts between communities but from demographic changes within them. Many local communities were started by a single family or even one couple. While they typically grow to include larger numbers of people, those people are often more transient, with the founders remaining the glue holding the community together. As those founders age, sometimes it is difficult to know who, if anyone, will be able to run the community in the future.

The question of who will keep local communities running is important in larger and more established houses as well. As long-time community members and leaders age, they sometimes worry that not enough new people are becoming involved in the Catholic Worker to keep the houses, and the movement itself, going. In the New York City community, for instance, there are still people in the house who knew Dorothy Day when she was alive, but most of them are in their sixties or seventies or have passed away in recent years. It is possible that the Catholic Worker remained strong after Day’s death because some of her contemporaries were alive to keep her vision going. The real test may be whether these communities will survive once that era is decisively over.

The lack of young people in particular is a pressing concern in some Catholic Worker communities. In many communities, people in their twenties and thirties volunteer once or twice a week or even for several months at a time. However, some communities have difficulty finding young people committed to joining the movement for the long haul. This makes it difficult to predict what the trajectory of communities will be and whether they will have stable leadership in the future. The Catholic Worker’s strong critiques of consumerism and technology are especially challenging for young people in an age in which both are integral parts of daily life. Demographic shifts in the Catholic Church may also present a challenge to continued longevity: increasingly, committed young American Catholics come from more “traditional” Catholic families, with children of more “liberal” Catholics (and most young Catholics in general) increasingly just leaving the Church altogether (Smith et al. 2014). The pool of likely Catholic Workers may be shrinking, at least in the U.S.

In spite of these challenges, new Catholic Worker communities continue to emerge. Recently, the first Catholic Worker community in Africa started in Uganda. Perhaps more established communities will eventually close, while communities in other places, including outside of the U.S., will grow. While they may find it sad to imagine the decline of their own communities, many Catholic Workers would also acknowledge that the ebb and flow of communities is in line with the Catholic Worker vision. Dorothy Day liked to say that the Catholic Worker was like a school where students came to learn and then went away to incorporate the works of mercy into other endeavors (Riegle 2014). She believed that the movement would continue to exist as long as there was a need for it. Today, poverty, militarism, consumerism, and excesses of technology remain central issues in American society. The question is whether they are still seen as problems and whether a specifically Catholic approach to these issues still has resonance on a broad scale. As long as the answer to both of these questions is yes, the Catholic Worker movement is likely to stay vibrant, offering its simple yet prophetic response to the world’s suffering: “the only solution is love” (Day 1952:285).

REFERENCES

Aronica, Michele Teresa. 1987. Beyond Charismatic Leadership: The New York Catholic Worker Movement. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books.

Cornell, Tom. 2014. “A Brief Introduction to the Catholic Worker Movement.” The Catholic Worker website. Accessed from http://www.catholicworker.org/historytext.cfm?Number=4 on 4 November 2014.

Coy, Patrick G. 2001. “An Experiment in Personalist Politics: The Catholic Worker Movement and Nonviolent Action.” Peace & Change 26:78–94.

Day, Dorothy. 1952. The Long Loneliness. San Francisco, CA: Harper & Row.

Forest, Jim. 2014. “Peter Maurin: Co-Founder of the Catholic Worker movement.” The Catholic Worker website. Accessed from http://www.catholicworker.org/roundtable/pmbiography.cfm on 4 November 2014.

McKanan, Dan. 2008. The Catholic Worker after Dorothy: Practicing the Works of Mercy in a New Generation. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press.

Murray, Harry. 1990. Do Not Neglect Hospitality: The Catholic Worker and the Homeless. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.

Riegle, Rosalie G. 2014. “The Catholic Worker Movement in 2014: An Appreciation.” The Montré al Review, August 2014. Accessed from http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Catholic-Worker-Movement.php on 4 November 2014.

Smith, Christian, Kyle Longest, Jonathan Hill, and Kari Christoffersen. 2014. Young Catholic America: Emerging Adults In, Out of, and Gone from the Church. New York: Oxford University Press.

Spickard, James V. 2005. “Ritual, Symbol, and Experience: Understanding Catholic Worker House Masses.” Sociology of Religion 66:337-57.

Thorn, William J., Phillip M. Runkel, and Susan Mountin, eds. 2001. Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker: Centenary Essays. Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press.

Yukich, Grace. 2010. “Boundary Work in Inclusive Religious Communities: Constructing Identity at the New York Catholic Worker.” Sociology of Religion 71:172-96.

Zwick, Mark, and Louise Zwick. 2005. The Catholic Worker Movement: Intellectual and Spiritual Origins. Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press.

Post Date:
9 November 2014

CATHOLIC WORKER MOVEMENT VIDEO CONNECTIONS

CHRISTIAN SCIENCE TIMELINE

1821:  Christian Science founder, Mary Morse Baker, was born in Bow, New Hampshire.

1843:  Mary Morse Baker married George Washington Glover who died six months later.

1853:  Mary Baker married dentist Daniel Patterson.

1856:  Mary Baker Glover Patterson suffered debilitating illness for the next several years and tried a variety of popular alternative remedies.

1862:  Mary Baker Glover Patterson visited healer Phineas Parkhurst Quimby and was temporarily healed.

1866:  Mary Patterson fell on the ice and was seriously injured; three days later she was healed.

1870:  Mary Patterson maintained a healing practice and began teaching classes on spiritual healing.

1873:  Mary Patterson divorced her husband on grounds of desertion.

1875:  Mary Patterson p ublished the first edition of Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures , which became the mainstay of Christian Science theology and practice.

1877:  Mary Patterson married Asa Gilbert Eddy.

1879:  Mary Baker Eddy and her students formed a church, Church of Christ (Scientist); Eddy was its ordained its pastor.

1881:  Eddy founded the Massachusetts Metaphysical College to teach spiritual healing.

1881–1891:  Eddy began a period of intense publication, including books and journals.

1889:  Eddy closed the Metaphysical College, dissolved the church and moved from the Boston area to Concord, New Hampshire.

1892:  Church of Christ (Scientist) was re-instituted as The First Church of Christ, Scientist.

1893:  Construction of the Mother Church in Boston began.

1894:  Eddy abolished the positions of pastors of branch churches and ordained Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures as pastor of first the Mother Church and later of all the branch churches.

1895:  Eddy produced the Manual of the Mother Church , which continues to be the sole authority for the organization, publications and practices of Christian Science.

1906:  The Mother Church Extension, with a capacity for 3,000, was completed.

1908:  At the age of eighty seven, Eddy established The Christian Science Monitor .

1910:  Mary Baker Eddy died.

FOUNDER/GROUP HISTORY

Christian Science founder, Mary Baker Eddy (1821-1910) was born to Mark and Abigail Baker in Bow, New Hampshire. The Bakers were active Congregationalists. Though Mary’s father, Mark, held fast to the Calvinist notion of predestination, she indicates that even at the age of twelve she disagreed and had heated theological disputes with him. According to Eddy, she joined the Congregational Church her family was attending when she came of age, but only after informing the pastor that she did not subscribe to the doctrines of either the fall or predestination (Eddy 1892).

Illness plagued Mary Baker, first in childhood and later during her adult years. In her autobiographical writing, Eddy notes that her father was taught that her illnesses and frailty arose from her brain being “too big for her body” (Eddy 1892). These constant illnesses precluded her attending school, and so her brother Albert tutored her at home.

In December, 1843, Baker married contractor, George Washington Glover. Two weeks later the Glover’s moved to his job sites, first in Charleston, South Carolina and soon after in Wilmington, North Carolina. George Glover died from yellow fever in June of 1844. Alone and carrying her first and only child, Mary Glover returned to her parents New Hampshire home.

In 1849, Mary’s mother, Abigail died. Within a year Mary’s father remarried. A strained relationship with her new step-mother led Mary to move in with her sister, but Mary’s son, named George Washington Glover for his father, was sent to live with another family. Mary Glover married again in 1853 to dentist and homeopath Daniel Patterson and the newlyweds relocated to be near Mary’s son. In 1856, the family raising George moved to Minnesota; Mary Glover Patterson would not see her son again for more than twenty years.

For the next six years, Mary Patterson suffered a variety of illnesses. Like many other white, middle and upper class nineteenth century women, she suffered from ailments that were, at times, debilitating (Ehrenreich 1978). Seeking a cure, she tried many of the alternative medicine treatments popular at the time, including hydropathy (water cure) and Sylvester Graham’s nutritional system. In 1862, she heard of healer Phineas Parkhurst Quimby and traveled to his practice in Maine. Quimby had studied mesmerism and developed his own system for healing, sometimes called, Mind Cure. The cure rested on the idea that since illness arose in the mind, freeing the mind of diseased thought would lead to healing.

Mary Patterson found relief through Quimby’s methods as she spent time discussing metaphysical healing with him. Though a variety of sources cite Quimby, not Eddy, as the source of the healing system that became Christian Science, Gillian Gill’s thoroughly researched biography of Eddy soundly puts that idea to rest (Gill 1998).

In 1863, Mary Patterson left Maine and rejoined her husband in Lynn, Massachusetts where her illnesses reappeared. Like other Quimby patients, she needed to be in close proximity to Quimby to sustain the healing. Life in Lynn was difficult for Mary Patterson. Her son, George, had been wounded fighting for the Union, husband Daniel was struggling to establish himself in a new location, she was often on the verge of homelessness, her marriage was faltering, and she was ill.

In 1866, not long after Quimby died, Mary Patterson suffered a fall on the ice in Swampscott, Massachusetts. Her later writings indicate that her injuries were life threatening, but that she was completely healed by reading her Bible. She would come to see this moment as the key to her discovery of the principles of Christian healing. She began healing others, writing, teaching her ideas, and formulating what would become the basis for Christian Science.

In 1875, she published the first edition of Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, which, together with the King James Version of the Bible , constitutes the core of Christian Science theology and practice. Over the years, Eddy produced over four hundred editions of what she called the Christian Science textbook.

In 1879, she married Asa Gilbert Eddy, a former student who she had healed and who had become a Christian Science practitioner under her tutelage. In that same year, Mary Baker Eddy and a small group of students formed the Church of Christ (Scientist). Soon after, Mary Baker Eddy was ordained its first pastor. In 1881, she founded the Massachusetts Metaphysical College with a curriculum that included courses such as “The Principle and Practice of Christian Science or Mind Healing” and “Mental and Physical Obstetrics.” Mary Baker Eddy was a master of marketing and had a valuable product to offer. Americans had little trust in allopathic medicine and were turning to alternative forms of healing. In 1883, she published the monthly Journal of Christian Science that included articles on Christian Science Theology and testimonies of healing making her ideas available beyond the Boston area. The success of Mary Baker Eddy’s healing practice and her Metaphysical College solved the financial problems that had followed her since her first marriage.

From the time she began teaching her healing system to the end of her life, there were attempts to wrest control of Christian Science away from her. In response, she carefully orchestrated the process of institutionalization. In 1889, she abruptly closed the Metaphysical College, dissolved her church and moved from Boston to Concord, Massachusetts. In 1892, she re-organized the church as the First Church of Christ Scientist. A year later, Eddy ordered the construction of a church building in Boston to be called the Mother Church, with a seating capacity of 1,000.

In 1894, Eddy ordained Science and Health, as Pastor of the Mother Church in Boston. A year later she replaced all the men and women pastors of the branch churches with this text and the Bible. She continued developing the church organization and produced the first edition of the Manual of the Mother Church in 1895. A comprehensive text, it contains rules determining all functions of the organization from the order of worship in services to the election of the Board of Directors. The material in the 1908 Manual (the last version) cannot be changed without the permission of Mary Baker Eddy.

DOCTRINES/BELIEFS

Christian Science is known as a healing tradition, and indeed it is that, but it is quite distinct in its understanding of the nature of God, the nature of man (this is the term Science and Health and contemporary Christian Scientists use to discuss what others might call human individuals), sin, sickness and atonement. Christian science differentiates itself from most other forms of Christianity by insisting that the body, sin and sickness do not exist.

Examining Mary Baker Eddy’s interpretation of the opening chapters of the book of Genesis as she presents them in Science and Health provides a basis for understanding fundamental Christian Science doctrine. For Eddy, the first chapter of Genesis represents Truth and the second and third chapters exemplify error.

Genesis 1:26 begins with the statement: “ And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. . .” ( King James Version). And it continues in 1:27: “ So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.” Eddy explains that these verses mean, first, that humans are created through Divine Mind in the exact image of God, second, that God is Father-Mother, and third, that the entire creation including “man” is like God, spiritual, not material.

For Christian Scientists, humans are the reflection of the Father–Mother God. In Science and Health, Eddy uses the metaphor of a mirror to explain what she means.

Your mirrored reflection is your own image or likeness. If you lift a weight, your reflection does this also. If you speak, the lips of this likeness move in accord with yours. Now compare man before the mirror to his divine Principle, God. Call the mirror Divine Science, and call man its reflection. Then note how true, according to Christian Science, is the reflection to its original. As the reflection of yourself appears in the mirror, so you, being spiritual, are the reflection of God. The substance, Life, intelligence, Truth, and Love, which constitute Deity, are reflected by His creation; and when we subordinate the false testimony of the corporeal senses to the facts of Science, we shall see this true likeness and reflection everywhere.

Since the all-loving Father – Mother God created “man” as God’s image and reflection, “man” is not material, and consequently is not subject to sickness, sin, or death since these are not part of God’s creation and hence are not real. To realize that the creation is spiritual, not material, is to exist in the reflection of God and to be well. To be sure, people can feel ill, but this is an error of the material sense.

The second chapter of Genesis describes the creation of Adam from the dust and Eve from Adam’s rib. In Science and Health , Eddy asserts that this account is an example of error because it “ portrays Spirit as supposedly cooperating with matter in constructing the universe, is based on some hypothesis of error, for the Scripture just preceding declares God’s work to be finished. Does Life, Truth, and Love produce death, error, and hatred? Does the creator condemn His own creation? Does the unerring Principle of divine law change or repent? It cannot be so” (Eddy 1906).

God did not, in her view, create Adam from matter, perform a surgical procedure to make Eve, or create sin, sickness, and death. Eddy sees the Adam and Eve story as an allegory that explains how the concept of material entered the world. For Eddy, the “deep sleep” Adam experiences as his rib is removed represents the entrance of the erroneous idea that the creation is material into the world. It is a mental thought, an “Adam-belief,” and “Adam dream” that has held sway over humanity.

According to Christian Science, Jesus came to awaken the world from the error of the Adam-belief by revealing the true nature of God, creation and “man.” In his life, Jesus healed the sick and raised the dead by overcoming material error. His resurrection shows the eternality of “man,” the triumph of spirit over matter, and an awakening from material error to spiritual truth. Jesus, for Eddy, is the way-shower of the truth that “man is never born or dying” but is “coexistent with the Creator” (Gottshalk 2006).

By diligently praying and reading Science and Health and the Bible, individuals can come to know their true nature and ultimately realize their perfect being. Christian Scientists do not believe illness to be real because the loving Father – Mother God would not create it. When someone suffers illness, it is because he or she is participating in the error of the material senses. Seeking medical treatment for an illness, though not prohibited by the church, is discouraged because participation in the belief in the materiality of illness through medical, rather than spiritual, treatment would accentuate the erroneous belief and actually lead away from true healing.

Christian Science offers its own version of professionalized healers. Called “Christian Science Practitioners,” these individuals are trained through a twelve session course, The Primary Class, that was designed by Mary Baker Eddy and is offered by church approved teachers. According to one of the church’s websites, Healing Unlimited, authorized practitioners are considered professionals by the church and charge for their services, which focus on the prayerful resolution of problems that include “the whole spectrum of human fears, griefs, wants, sins, and ills. Practitioners are called upon to give Christian Science treatment not only in cases of physical disease and emotional disturbance, but in family and financial difficulties, business problems, questions of employment, schooling, professional advancement, theological confusion, and so forth” (Healing Unlimited 2012). Practitioners work with individuals seeking Christian Science healing by praying with and for them and guiding them to appropriate passages in Science and Health and the Bible.

The six tenets that appear in Science and Health and The Manual of the Mother church express Christian Science beliefs. The format is reminiscent of the Apostles’ Creed but the content is distinctively Christian Scientist.

1. As adherents of Truth, we take the inspired Word of the Bible as our sufficient guide to eternal Life.

2. We acknowledge and adore one supreme and infinite God. We acknowledge His Son, one Christ; the Holy Ghost or divine Comforter; and man in God’s image and likeness.

3. We acknowledge God’s forgiveness of sin in the destruction of sin and the spiritual understanding that casts out evil as unreal. But the belief in sin is punished so long as the belief lasts.

4. We acknowledge Jesus’ atonement as the evidence of divine, efficacious Love, unfolding man’s unity with God through Christ Jesus the Way-shower; and we acknowledge that man is saved through Christ, through Truth, Life, and Love as demonstrated by the Galilean Prophet in healing the sick and overcoming sin and death.

5. We acknowledge that the crucifixion of Jesus and his resurrection served to uplift faith to understand eternal Life, even the allness of Soul, Spirit, and the nothingness of matter.

6. And we solemnly promise to watch, and pray for that Mind to be in us which was also in Christ Jesus; to do unto others as we would have them do unto us; and to be merciful, just, and pure.

RITUALS/PRACTICES

Christian Science services, worldwide, follow the format set out by Mary Baker Eddy in The Manual of the Mother Church. There are two weekly services, the Sunday Morning Worship and the Wednesday evening Healing Testimony Meeting. There is a Thanksgiving service on a date corresponding with the United States holiday. In addition, branch churches hold a Communion Service twice yearly. The order of worship for services is prescribed by the Manual. Sunday services open and close with organ music; other music includes a performance by a paid soloist and hymns from the Christian Science Hymnal. There are no clergy in Christian Science; instead the service is led by a First and Second Reader who are elected for a three year term. The First Reader, always a female, opens the service with a brief statement and reads from Science and Health. The Second reader, a male, reads from the King James Version of the Bible. The passages are prescribed by an anonymous committee in Boston. The Bible Lesson, used in all churches, is read by the First and Second Readers. Through the Christian Science Quarterly, congregants have access to the weekly Bible and Science and Health passages along with the Bible Lesson in advance and can study them prior to attending the Sunday service.

The Wednesday evening Testimony Meeting includes prayer, hymns, and readings from the Bible and Science and Health. The testimonies of the people present are the focus of this meeting and include a variety of topics. People recount healings, solutions to difficult problems, and/or finding something lost. Those testifying at these meetings are not pre-screened; the forum is an open one.

Although Christian Science speaks of the believer’s baptism and holds two communion services a year at the branch churches, they use neither water at baptism nor bread and wine at communion since they see these rituals as purely spiritual. Shirley Paulson (2013) writes, “Rather than a one-time ceremony with water, baptism is a conscious submergence in Spirit. Baptism in Christian Science is a frequent, holy, sincere purification alone with Christ. Ritual baptism with water is neither practiced nor required.” The Communion Service resembles the Sunday order of worship but includes an invitation by the first reader for the congregation to kneel in silent communion.

ORGANIZATION/LEADERSHIP

Mary Baker Eddy developed the organizational structure of Christian Science and presented it in the Manual of the Mother Churchwhich states that “ The Church officers shall consist of the Pastor Emeritus, a Board of Directors, a President, a Clerk, a Treasurer, and two Readers” (Eddy 1910). Mary Baker Eddy is the Pastor Emeritus; she abolished the role of pastor completely in 1894 so there are no Christian Science clergy. Baker Eddy included several committees in her institutionalization of the church. These include the Board of Education and the Board of Lectureship. The Committee on Publication was tasked by Eddy with directly addressing any misinformation appearing about Christian Science. Branch churches are administered by their local members who must abide by the Manual. No emendations to the Manual (or the by-laws) can occur without the written permission of Mary Baker Eddy.

There is an annual meeting held at the Boston church (and broadcast online) in early June. Members are not required to attend, but occasionally turn out in numbers large enough to require the meetings to be held in the 3,000 seat Church Extension. In 1899, Eddy established Christian Science ReadingRooms where material approved by the Board of Directors would be available to the public to read free of charge. Staffed by Christian Scientist volunteers, the Reading Rooms also distribute copies of Christian Science materials.

ISSUES/CHALLENGES

Many new religious movements and their founders have encountered opposition as they proffer their theology to the world. Mary Baker Eddy and her tradition, Christian Science, have not been exceptions to this.

A woman presenting a new theology that challenged both the dominant Protestant religion of the nineteenth century and allopathic medicine encountered the wrath of both the religious and medical establishments of the day. Without meeting or examining Eddy, the Journal of the American Medical Association diagnosed her as suffering from “neural instability, obsessions, phobias, imperative ideas, catalepsies and well-poised megalomania” (“Editorial” 1907). In 1898, the Massachusetts State Legislature attempted to outlaw spiritual healing. Noted psychologist of religion, William James voluntarily testified in opposition to the bill.

During Eddy’s life, newspaper coverage of her and her church were sometimes quite negative. Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World featured poorly researched articles about Eddy. A scathing fourteen-installment series by Willa Cather and Georgine Milmine appeared in McClure’s Magazine between 1906 and 1908. In response to what she believed were unfair press reports, Eddy founded the Christian Science Monitor in 1908 in order to print the news fairly and thoroughly. Ironically, the Monitor has gone on to win several Pulitzer Prizes.

During her life there were internal issues as well. From time to time, Eddy’s students attempted to usurp her authority. She filed lawsuits against people she felt had wronged her, and she was the defendant in suits brought against her. The church by-laws she crafted were aimed to address these threats and by and large have succeeded. However, these regulations currently represent a challenge, since changes to the church structure are proscribed by the Manual without the written permission of Eddy.

At the end of the twentieth century there were several, high-profile cases of parents whose children died while being treated with religious based healing; a few involved Christian Scientists. In response to these deaths, state legislatures began weighing the thorny issue of protecting both religious freedom and children’s health; several states overturned the protections their laws had afforded parents who turned to religious healing methods. Currently, thirty-one states legally protect parents from prosecution when their children die from causes attributed to spiritually or religiously-based healing. Of those, sixteen allow a judge to mandate medical treatment in life threatening situations. (Child Welfare Information Gateway 2014) State laws are amended frequently and can be interpreted in a variety of ways (Abbott 2009).

In the 1990’s, a difficult issue emerged within the group; it began with the purchase of a television station by the Board of Directors in order to communicate Christian Science ideas more broadly. This expensive and unsuccessful venture into new media seriously strained church finances. In 1992, the possibility of receiving a substantial influx of money from the estate of the relativesof Bliss Knapp emerged. Knapp had been a devoted follower of Eddy and had written a book in 1947, The Destiny of the Mother Church , which proclaimed Eddy to be the Second Coming of Christ (Knapp 1991). In light of the large amount of funding this would bring to the recently diminished church coffers, the Board of Directors agreed to publish the book. Many Christian Scientists took issue with this decision and several protesting groups coalesced. This was not the first time the issue of who exactly Eddy was had presented itself, and Eddy herself had prohibited what she called “deification of personality” when she felt some followers where aligning her too closely with Jesus (Eddy 1894). The protestors saw Eddy’s prohibition of “deification” as clearly precluding publication of the Knapp text. The Board excommunicated several vocal protesters, a move that was rare but not unprecedented. Several key staff resigned, and the Board found themselves in a very contentious Annual Meeting in 1993. Ultimately, the Board left the decision of whether or not to carry and/or sell the Knapp book up to the local Christian Science Reading Rooms, and published a wide range of other biographies of Eddy. By the time the Mary Baker Eddy Library and archives opened in 2002, the protests were subsiding.

In the twenty-first century the primary challenge to Christian Science is shrinking membership. Although Christian Science does not publish membership figures, the sale, relocation, and merger of hundreds of Christian Science churches in the United States and abroad and the declining number of Christian Science practitioners worldwide indicate a significant drop in membership. Reproductive rates that fall below what is needed to replace members who die (Stark 1998), coupled with the prohibition against proselytizing, make it difficult for Christian Science to maintain its membership. Competition from New Age healing techniques and fascination with Indian practices, especially yoga, also contribute to the substantial membership decline.

REFERENCES

Abbott, Kevin. 2009. Law and Medicine: Pediatric Faith Healing.” Americn Medical Association Journal of Ethics 11:778-82.

Cather, Willa and Milmine, Georgine. 1906-1908. “Mary Baker G. Eddy.” McClure’s Magazine, December 1906 – June 1908 .

Child Welfare Information Gateway. 2014. “Definitions of Child Abuse and Neglect” Accessed from https://www.childwelfare.gov/pubpdfs/define.pdf on 23 June 2015.

Eddy, Mary Baker G. 1910. Manual of The Mother Church, Eighty-eighth edition. Boston, MA: Allison V. Stewart.

Eddy, Mary Baker G. 1894. “Deification of Personality.“ Miscellaneous Writings 1883-1896. Boston: Christian Science Board of Directors.

Eddy, Mary Baker G. 1892. Retrospection and Introspection. Boston: Christian Science Board of Directors.

“Editorial.” 1907. “Mrs. Mary Baker Eddy’s Case of Hysteria.” Journal of the American Medical Association 7:614-15.

Ehrenreich, Barbara and English, Deidre. 1978. For Her Own Good: Two Centuries of the Experts’ Advice to Women. New York: Anchor Press.

Gill, Gillian. 1998. Mary Baker Eddy. Cambridge, MA: Perseus Books.

Gottschalk, Stephen. 2006. Rolling Away the Stone: Mary Baker Eddy’s Challenge to Materialism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Knapp, Bliss. 1991. The Destiny of the Mother Church. Boston: The Christian Science Publishing Society.

Healing Unlimited. n.a. “What is a Christian Science Practitioner?” Accessed from http://christianscience.org/index.php/whats-new/368-what-is-a-christian-science-practitioner on 23 June 2015.

Paulson, Shirley. 2013. “A Self-Understanding of Christian Science.” Boston: n.p.

Stark, Rodney. 1998. “The Rise and Fall of Christian Science.” Journal of Contemporary Religion 13:189-214.

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

Peel, Robert. 1977 Mary Baker Eddy: The Years of Authority . New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

Peel, Robert. 1971. Mary Baker Eddy: The Years of Trial. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

Peel, Robert. 1966. Mary Baker Eddy: The Years of Discovery. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

Peters, Shawn Francis. 2008. When Prayer fails: Faith Healing, Children and the Law. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Post Date:
26 June 2015

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