Founded by Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin on May Day 1933, during the height of the Great Depression, the Catholic Worker began as a radical newspaper and grew into a wider movement of hospitality and social activism. It now includes nearly 200 communities in the United States and eight other countries.
It remains committed to a "firm belief in the God-given dignity of every human person” and to the ideals of "nonviolence, voluntary poverty (and) prayer,” protesting "injustice, war, racism and violence of all forms.”
Day was a one-time radical Greenwich Village bohemian who underwent a conversion experience and became renowned as a Catholic writer and social activist.
Another constant for those involved in the Catholic Worker Movement is its cornerstone newspaper, the Catholic Worker, which still remains a penny a copy (excluding mailing costs) and has resisted going online.