Communitarian journalism and the common good: Lessons from the Catholic Worker

Abstract

The US newspaper the Catholic Worker (CW) is an instructive example for developing a key concept in communitarian journalism theory: the common good. The principal question to be examined in this article is: how can communitarian journalists make constructive use of the inherent tension between particular common goods and the common good? To answer this question, I will refer to the experience of the CW in negotiating two particular tensions: the tensions between spiritual/temporal and between Catholic/American. A secondary question to be explored is: how can communitarian journalism move beyond liberal tolerance in responding to difference in pluralistic societies? To answer this question, I will elaborate on the CW’s practices of hospitality, which have allowed staffers to remain faithful to the paper’s particular conception of the common good while actively engaging with, and learning from, their non-Catholic neighbors.

Keywords

common good communitarianism hospitality journalism

In contrast to what we see around us, as well as within ourselves, stands St. Thomas Aquinas’ doctrine of the common good, a vision of a society where the good of each member is bound to the good of the whole in the service to God. (Catholic Worker, 2012)

Introduction

What the Catholic Worker’s (CW) founding editor and publisher Dorothy Day used to call the ‘vision’ continues to describe the newspaper’s outlook. The CW, continuously published in New York City since 1933, owes its longevity to journalistic quality and a loyal readership. But the fact that its pages offer a coherent world view – and that its editors and contributors practice what they preach – also explains its enduring appeal. Day’s newspaper (for it was and remains truly hers in conception and execution) has been studied as an instance of the advocacy press (Roberts, 1984) and as the catalyst for American Catholic radicalism (Zwick and Zwick, 2005). Aside from its advocacy and activism, however, the CW is an instructive example for developing a key concept in communitarian journalism theory: the common good.

The common good is a heuristic concept that captures the particulars of this or that community and its members (‘what we should jointly pursue’) while using a universal reference point for thinking about what is good for communities and persons in general (‘what one should jointly pursue with others’). It is this inherent tension between particular common goods and the common good that promotes engagement with difference. The principal question to be examined in this article is: how can communitarian journalists make constructive use of the inherent tension between particular common goods and the common good? To answer this question, I will refer to the experience of the CW in negotiating two particular tensions: the tensions between spiritual/temporal and between Catholic/American. The common good concept is especially challenging in the context of contemporary liberal democracies such as the United States. A secondary question to be explored is: how can communitarian journalism move beyond liberal tolerance in responding to difference in pluralistic societies? To answer this question, I will elaborate on the CW’s practices of hospitality, which have allowed staffers to remain faithful to the paper’s particular conception of the common good while actively engaging with, and learning from, their non-Catholic neighbors.

The purpose of referring to a specific case is not a detailed application of communitarian journalism to ‘test’ the theory; rather, the goal is conceptual refinement and identification of unexamined opportunities and challenges involved in putting the theory into practice.¹ Theory development informed by real moral actors, practices, institutions and histories is important for communitarian journalism’s viability as a normative media theory. First, media norms have legitimacy insofar as they reflect the existential demands of the present and resonate with the received wisdom of the past (Christians et al., 2009: 82–84). Second, to inspire constructive action, a public philosophy’s commitments must also be capable of translation into concrete social practices (Bretherton, 2006: 147–148). Finally, communitarian journalism theory requires contextual development as a matter of internal consistency. The theory claims that ethical norms are ‘thick’ moral commitments shaped by particular communities rather than ‘thin’ abstractions that can be invoked without reference to specific contexts.

The CW was chosen because it has been consistently and openly communitarian, and not just generically communitarian, but distinctively so, drawing explicitly on the rich intellectual tradition of Catholic social teaching on the common good and related normative concepts.² The CW also has been very successful at community building. The newspaper and its associated movement have inspired both a transnational community of shared interests and at least 218 independent local communities constituted by practices of ‘cult, culture and cultivation’ in 40 US states and nine countries in Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas. We do not have to ‘read into’ the newspaper’s content and policies to find communitarian patterns of thought and practice.

After explaining communitarian journalism theory, I describe the Thomistic conception of the common good upon which Day and her mentor and CW co-founder, Peter Maurin, relied. Next, I illustrate how this outlook has influenced the newspaper in the areas of: editorial content (including news topics, editorial stance and writing style); the paper’s relationship with those it writes about; and its relationship with the state and the Catholic Church. I conclude with a discussion of theoretical issues raised by the CW experience, focusing on hospitality as a central virtue for structuring relations with out-group members.

An (un)common approach to journalism

Communitarianism is typically described as a corrective to classic liberalism. The contrast between these two political philosophies has become a touchstone in scholarly theorizing about the press and its role in society (Christians et al., 2009: 62–63, 93–95). Classic liberalism has its roots in the Enlightenment and thus focuses on freedom and reason, with a resulting emphasis on individual rights, construed as lack of interference by institutions and other individuals. Citizens may choose to keep up with the news and participate in civic life, as their individual preferences and plans suit them. The American press has deep roots in classic liberalism.

Communitarianism, in contrast, is grounded in ancient Greek philosophy (and subsequent Roman and Christian interpretations). Communitarians question the subordinate status of collective rights and positive rights in liberalism. They argue that the community has moral status, as well as the individual – that we value commitment as well as choice. We can have excellence as individuals and also as members of communities (in fact, we cannot have one without the other). Civic participation is our way of expressing these excellences and of contributing to the common good.

The United States cast its founding documents and major institutions in a liberal mold that continues to shape policy, jurisprudence and everyday practices in the media today. If media differences are rooted in distinct political, economic and cultural histories, we cannot simply force a philosophical shift in journalism culture from liberalism to communitarianism. That being said, it is not an either-or proposition. Christians et al. (2009: x) note that media systems – let alone individual journalists – cannot be pigeon-holed into a single category; rather, each ‘shares more than one intellectual tradition’. For example, Michael Sandel (1989) has argued that early conceptions of American democracy relied on some of communitarianism’s assumptions. And religion, despite its marginalization in the liberal framework, provided much common ground across social statuses in the USA as late as the mid-20th century. This common ground promoted communication networks that spurred antislavery organizing in the 19th century (King and Haveman, 2008) and civil-rights activism in the 1950s and 1960s (Douthat, 2012). The Christian moral outlook has been influential even in the development of American journalism (Underwood, 2002). However, the ties that bind are noticed less and less as Americans have come to conceive of themselves primarily as individuals with separate interests pursuing strictly private preferences.

Despite the fact that moral disagreements run deep in today’s globalized context, there are aspects of Catholic social teaching worth recovering to inform contemporary conversations about the common good (Riordan, 2008: 5–6). Grasso (1995: 2–12) suggested that Catholic social tradition and American political tradition in particular have much to talk about regarding the liberalism-communitarianism debate. For example, the Catholic Church parted ways from classical thinkers in some significant ways. The Church, for example, introduced the distinction between church and state at a time when ‘divine rulers’ embodied both, and it introduced the notion of individuals having worth apart from their social stations by virtue of having a soul. The CW’s distinctly Catholic vision draws upon monastic spirituality and the classical tradition (including Aristotle, given a Catholic makeover by his medieval disciple, natural-law theologian Thomas Aquinas). Maurin liked to say, in fact, that the CW’s vision was ‘so old it looks like new’ (Piehl, 1982: 116). However, the CW did not just recycle church teaching. When the CW wedded Maurin’s personalism to Day’s activism, it managed to anticipate by more than 30 years the ‘Catholic human rights revolution’ (Grasso, 1995: 8) laid out in the Vatican II apostolic constitution Gaudium et Spes (Joy and Hope). This prescient development provided an important point of connection with liberalism.

These affinities with liberalism should not be exaggerated, however. Catholic social thought insists on the mutuality of human relations and certain givens about what it means to be authentically human. It grounds the worth of persons in a divine order preceding any particular conceptions of the good and regardless of human consent (Grasso, 1995: 10). The Catholic tradition continues to be an important resource for communitarians precisely because it is one of the few ones left that still speak the language of mutuality and the common good. However, it is distinctive. Contemporary Catholic teaching on the common good combines the classical understanding of the common good as the good of the whole community and of its parts with the Enlightenment notion of persons as ends in themselves (Stebbins, 2001: 122). ‘From the perspective of the Catholic tradition, human beings are neither the polis animals of classical antiquity nor the autonomous selves of contemporary liberal theory’ (Grasso: 10–11).

Since Christians et al. first proposed a communitarian framework for journalism in 1993, a number of scholars have offered critiques and variations. I will be relying on my Aristotelian framework for communitarian journalism (Borden, 2010), which integrates notions of human flourishing, virtue and civic life in a way that is philosophically compatible with Catholic teaching on the common good based on the natural-law tradition.³ In this account, communitarian news is addressed to communities, rather than to audiences who are constructed from demographic market segments. Communities are natural social formations that are not necessarily defined by geographic boundaries. Rather, they have a broad range of activities (a shared life), a comprehensive framework of shared values (a shared horizon of meaning), and a strong claim on members’ identities (a shared sense of self) (Selznick, 1992: 358). The advocacy press and other specialty news outlets – whether it is the abolitionist papers of the 19th century or the environmental sustainability blogs of the 21st century – report on, and sometimes even constitute, particular communities.

I have suggested that communitarian journalists should provide context that helps citizens figure out if, and how, the news bears on their joint pursuit of the common good (Borden, 2010). This can take the form of providing resources for deliberation, including the means to exchange ideas and to clarify values. But the CW provides an even more thorough-going example: it articulates and models a positive conception of the common good in both its content and its operations.

Catholic teaching on the common good

The human good and the common good

Catholic social teaching asserts that ‘human beings flourish only in and through common, shareable, goods’ (Cortright and Pierucci, 2001: 7). Some goods, such as friendship and the rule of law, involve ‘shared understandings of their value’ (Riordan, 2008: 10). Other goods, such as property, are held privately but are not to be used completely selfishly without regard for common use (Zwick and Zwick, 2005: 138). For example, to not share your surplus wealth or provisions with the poor is to covet what rightfully belongs to them (Long, 1997: 355). Goods are ordered; those addressing basic needs are necessary (but not sufficient) for the good life. Solidarity commits us to the common good through mutual, sustained collaboration that focuses its energies where the need is greatest (Stebbins, 2001: 127), giving rise to the so-called ‘preference for the poor’ in Catholic tradition.

Although life in community is good in itself, it is only ‘partially constitutive of the human telos’ (Watkins and McInerny, 1995: 158, emphasis in original). For Catholics, the highest good (transformation by God’s love) is transcendental and, ultimately, personal (Stebbins, 2001: 122–126). This understanding is reflected in the CW’s statement of aims and purposes (quoted at the beginning of this article). Hence, the good of the person is prior to the welfare of the whole community, and human rights belong to us as persons, not as members of communities. The human good of each person is irreducible to the common good of a community and is inherently superior. This is the Catholic inflection on Christians et al.’s (2012) universal protonorm of respect for human sacredness. Community must be ordered for the good of all human persons. There is more to the human good than the common good, but the human good is not possible without the common good. Aristotle himself left the content of the human good open, allowing each of us to specify our human good in the process of cooperating with others to discover and promote the common good (Riordan, 2008: 61).

The common good, likewise, is open ended in two senses. First, it is always incomplete. It serves as a regulative ideal, inspiring us in the present, but always in a state of becoming, rather than ever being fully realized (at least in this life). Second, it cannot be defined in advance. We must deliberate about what is good (not just the means for pursuing common ends, but also the ends themselves). This is why communitarians talk about ‘discovering’ the common good together. As Riordan (2008: 27) put it, the common good is akin to the ‘x’ term in an algebra equation, where we know the properties of ‘x’, but not its value. Following Aristotle, the properties of the common good would rule out any conceptions that ‘systematically exclude any persons or groups from enjoyment of the good’ (although some persons and groups may enjoy the common good more or less than others). Other non-starters are conceptions that ‘reflect a restricted understanding of the human good’ by ‘lacking some genuine aspect of human well-being’ (2008: 28), such as intellect, friendship or citizenship (2008: 21).

Such a way of thinking fits nicely into Catholic beliefs about the Kingdom of God. According to church teaching, the People of God live between two ages: the Kingdom of God that is already here and the Kingdom that is yet to be fully realized. As the saying goes, they are in the world but not of this world. The future is now, and they anticipate an actualized common good that possesses the qualities they have come to expect of the fulfilled Kingdom of God at the end of human history: ‘On this earth that kingdom is already present in mystery. When the Lord returns, it will be brought into full flower’ (Second Vatican Ecumenical Council, 1965: part I, chapter III, article 39). The Worker movement’s vision has been characterized as utopian (Zwick and Zwick, 2005: 2), but, in this light, it would be more accurate to describe it as eschatological. The CW does not wait for ‘someday’ to live out this vision; its editors, writers, volunteers and guests are doing it now. As CW Associate Editor Christopher Cornell (2012: 5) put it, the paper’s philosophy can be boiled down to ‘this wild idea that one can actually live the Sermon on the Mount’. Just as Catholics view the transcendental as ultimately personal (Stebbins, 2001: 122–126), they view care for the whole person as ultimately transcendental.

Day and Maurin opened St. Joseph’s, the Worker movement’s first ‘hospitality house’ in New York City, after the CW’s early success (the other hospitality house is Maryhouse, located nearby in a former music school). Hospitality houses put into practice the command for Christians to take care of the least of their brothers and sisters – what the Catholic Church calls the works of mercy (including feeding the hungry, visiting the sick and sheltering the homeless). Worker communities, however, do not just serve the poor; they provide a place to sleep and meals for anyone who shows up: ‘young people looking for direction, homeless, religious enjoying a sabbatical, refugees, pilgrims, people looking for orientation or a purpose in their life’ (Ter Kuile, 2012: 5).

The common good of the political community

As a practice concerned with civic participation, journalism has a clear political role: to help ‘citizens to discover the common good as intellectually responsible participants in a diverse political community’ (Borden, 2010: 54).⁴ In Aristotelian philosophy, the political community is the larger, higher-order community that integrates the common goods of smaller groups into the common good essential for all humans to pursue the good life. The political community is a normative concept and, as such, does not necessarily correspond to the municipalities, state governments and nation-states that journalists like to cover. But it gives us a richer way to think of journalism’s civic purpose.

The natural aim of the political community, according to Aristotle, is the good life for humans; this is the common good. It integrates the ends of joint actions pursued together in subsidiary communities, such as practices, households and cities. Just as goods are ordered in any community, Aristotle thought there was a hierarchy among the common goods of different communities. For him, the political community’s common good ranked higher than the rest because it encompassed the common goods found at the lower levels of the hierarchy. For Aquinas, on the other hand, the political community’s common good was ‘a restricted domain of human good’ (Riordan, 2008: 170). In other words, for Aristotle it embodied the human good; for Aquinas it was a subset of the human good.

The Catholic Church has followed Aquinas’ lead and holds that the political community’s common good is necessary, but not sufficient, to attain the human good. Its common good consists of peace, security and justice; i.e. those conditions that enable the pursuit of the human good (i.e. the good life). The state and the market can contribute to the common good by enabling these conditions, but they also can subvert the common good by undermining them. For example, the CW historically has taken the position that the market in a capitalist system promotes gross inequalities that means many are without while a few have more than they need. This belief further illustrates the existence of inherent tensions within the concept of the common good.

Indeed, trust is always part of the political community’s common good, for deliberation about its elements usually involves conflict. And, although we do not want to reduce the common good to mere procedure, the common good entails means for achieving common ends; these include deliberation and fair procedures for resolving disputes (Remele, 2004: 3–4), as well as other patterns of cooperation that ‘succeed in meeting the needs of many people on an ongoing basis’ (Stebbins, 2001: 125). However, we cannot find the political community’s common good⁵ by aggregating human goods (Osborne, 2008: 76). Although such an aggregation is often called the ‘public interest’, such a calculus is a ‘fruitless attempt to find a public interest by first looking at “individual” or ”group” interests and then trying to discern what they all have in common or what composite would include them all’ (Diggs, 1973: 293). The common good of the political community is more complicated than that. Thus, public opinion polls and even election results, while newsworthy, do not exhaust journalists’ responsibility to help citizens know what they need to know to jointly discover the common good of the larger political community to which they belong.

For the advocacy press, the challenge is to put forward particular conceptions of the common good and to motivate others to participate in them. The CW has never been shy about framing its coverage and business practices in terms of its vision for a better world:

Peter Maurin used to quote Lenin as saying, ‘There can be no revolution without a theory of revolution’. He said this in order to emphasize the need for study and discussion so that we would know where we were going. We need to make more of a heaven here – at least a few oases in these recurrent crises at present and a long range view of a new social order wherein justice dwelleth, which is neither capitalist nor communist nor totalitarian in any way. How to accomplish this goal by non-violence and not by warfare? (Day, 1969: para. 19)

Being in, but not of, this world means that Christians live shoulder-to-shoulder with non-Christian neighbors whose ways of life are similar in some respects to the Christian way of life and dissimilar in other respects (Bretherton, 2006: 109). The church historically has understood itself as being selectively engaged in the world, providing a foretaste of the fully realized Kingdom of God. To completely withdraw into a narrow sectarian community would be to deprive the world of a faithful witness to Christ and to deny human interdependence (McClendon, 1997: 106). The CW, in this spirit, has ever espoused the task of trying to ‘make more of a heaven here’ by living out its particular conception of the common good in all aspects of its content and operations: from the topics contributors write about and the sources they cite, to the newspaper’s business practices and its public activism. To better understand how communitarian theory relates to the CW, I describe in more detail the newspaper’s history, scope and community building. I focus in particular on ways in which the paper has negotiated the tensions between the spiritual and the temporal and between its Catholic and its American identities in its interactions with the larger political community.

The CW’s communitarian journalism

The CW’s circulation peaked just before the Second World War and still exceeds 100,000. The paper is usually eight pages and is published seven times a year. Its loyal readers are made up of intellectuals, working people and charitable givers who support the movement’s works of mercy. The content includes casual accounts of the mundane, including news from Worker communities outside New York and chatty updates from both New York hospitality houses and the communal farm in Marlboro. The paper also features lengthy (by newspaper standards) scholarly discussions of literary and philosophical works to illuminate the paper’s positions on meaningful labor, pacifism, environmental stewardship and economic justice. ‘(O)ur newspaper is paradoxically timely and timeless at the same time’, wrote contributor Ric Rhetor (2012: 6).

Editorial content: News topics, editorial stance and writing style

Day was born into a newspaper family and became interested in writing at an early age. After briefly studying to be a nurse, she started freelancing for religious publications. She was a single mother in her early 30s when she met Maurin. He had the theological background to give her interest in social justice an intellectual architecture, and she had the journalistic skills to communicate Maurin’s philosophy to others. They would prove to be a well-suited pair (Roberts, 1984).

As a journalist herself, Day paid attention to technique. She used telling details and astute characterization to bring people to life in a way that made them real, rather than caricatures. Her tone was often ironic. For example, she told readers of the death of a particularly difficult St. Joseph Hospitality House guest. His final words: ‘I have only one possession left in the world – my cane. I want you to have it. Take it – take it and wrap it around the necks of these bastards around here.’ She finished the account: ‘Then he turned on us a beatific smile. In his weak voice he whispered, “God has been good to me.” And smiling, he died’ (as cited in Roberts, 1984: 75).

Later in her career, Day wrote more analytical pieces, including the kinds of long-form articles offering historical perspective on current events (such as the Vietnam War) that the mainstream press so rarely produces. She also wrote spiritual commentaries and reviews of theological and literary works. Her most famous contributions (aside from her appeals for financial support) were her columns. ‘(S)he had the sensitivities of the successful novelist – the sensory sensitivity, the scene-setting and storytelling skills, the ear for authentic speech, and a well-developed sense of the comic’ (Roberts, 1984: 75). Contributors today continue Day’s approach, writing literary pieces full of telling details informed by their contact with the marginalized here and abroad (as human-rights activists e.g.) and with their reading of classic and contemporary sources.

Editorial consistency during Day’s lifetime resulted from her tight oversight and from the consensus that existed about the ideas that defined the movement; that consensus continues to provide consistency today. Besides editorial content, Day also paid attention to the newspaper’s design and what we might call today its branding. She commissioned artwork by the late artist Ade Bethune, whose prints and woodcuts have a classic look and reflect the newspaper’s commitment to the dignity of manual labor. Bethune’s masthead depicting Jesus Christ on the cross embracing two workers (a man of color and a woman with babe in tow) continue to grace the paper. Day and Maurin also continue to be referenced regularly in the pages of the newspaper as its acknowledged founders and visionaries. The May 2012 issue, for example, featured a reprint of one of Day’s columns, a reprint of an interview with Maurin (complete with suggested books to read), and one of his short and pithy ‘easy essays’.

Good journalism to Maurin and Day was advocating the movement’s point of view, using eyewitness reporting (not aggregating the reports of others). Rather than just noticing gaps in the coverage of the mainstream press or enumerating grievances, the CW proposes solutions and reforms. In addition to workers’ rights, the paper has been deeply committed over the years to pacifism, racial justice and sustainability. Recent topics include US drone strikes, the Arab Spring, prison abuse and neighborhood gentrification. In short, the CW has consistently identified with the marginalized, performing another function of communitarian news: avoiding social injustice. ‘Excellent news is common knowledge that is inclusive and empowering, rather than coercive and subordinating’ (Borden, 2010: 63).

The paper’s commitment to the poor is manifest in its rock-bottom price. As it was in the beginning, the cost today is a penny a copy – a quarter for a year-long subscription. Workers will give out the paper for free at churches and elsewhere to get it in the right hands. Printing and mailing costs far exceed the subscription price, but the paper’s only other income besides subscriptions comes from donations to its annual appeal (Zwick and Zwick, 2005: 25).

In a proposal to use empty buildings to provide sanctuary for the homeless reprinted in the CW, Catholic Worker Karl Meyer of Chicago expressed the plight of the poor in ways that continue to resonate today:

If a man has the money to own an automobile, he gains the right, all over Chicago, to as much as a hundred square feet of public street, wherever he can find it, to park his car. On the other hand, if a man does not have the price of a room for the night, he does not even have the right to lie down on the concrete pavement and claim six square feet of parking space. To do so would be to commit the crime of loitering or vagrancy. The foxes have their holes, the birds have their nests, the autos have their parking spaces, but the son of man has nowhere to lay his head. (Day, 1969: para. 6)

Indeed, a key way in which Workers demonstrate solidarity with the poor is voluntary poverty (as opposed to involuntary destitution). Workers self-define as being outside the establishment; they are marginal by choice (though not hermits). That means that the paper’s agenda is not partisan or even purposely political. This is one area in which the CW has had to manage the tension between the spiritual and the temporal. Despite the movement’s interest in promoting the common good in the larger political community, Workers have not historically seen themselves acting politically (Piehl, 1982: 142). This fits in with the views of Christian ethicist Stanley Hauerwas, who argues that deciding policy questions is not the main task of Christians, rather it is ‘responding in a manner consonant with Christian identity’ (Kallenberg, 1997: 221). Day (1940: 7) herself asked, ‘And why must we see results? Our work is to sow. Another generation will be reaping the harvest.’

Building community, not just an audience

The paper’s consistency also flows from the lived experience of the editors, who work for room and board and pitch in around the hospitality houses: ‘The editors have always doled out soup, swept the floor, and put out the paper simultaneously’ (Roberts, 1984: 50). The designation of ‘hospitality house’ was not accidental: It positions ‘strangers’ as ‘guests’ who are welcomed to the premises as equals of the ‘hosts’ (Piehl, 1982: 102). Bretherton (2006: 5) has argued that practices of hospitality have a long history in Christian tradition as a way of expressing love for one’s neighbor in a way that witnesses to the new order of the Kingdom of God while encouraging relations with those who are different. To do justice to the Christian performance of hospitality, ‘strangers’ (i.e. the vulnerable, the marginalized) must be accommodated at some sacrifice, not merely entertained: ‘To be a recipient of Christian hospitality one does not have to do or be anything; one’s status as a guest is received as a freely given gift from Christ’ (Bretherton, 2006: 149).

The performance of hospitality encourages CW editors and contributors to identify with the guests and encourages the guests to see themselves as part of the newspaper operation. Guests of the St. Joseph Hospitality House have always helped to fold and address the newspapers for mailing, for example, and Day often encouraged letter writers to expand their ideas and contribute articles. Unlike other journalists, in short, the staff of the CW is in constant contact with the people they write for, engaged in relations that concretely engage difference and discourage various ways of crudely characterizing the ‘audience’. They go well beyond ‘covering’ communities; they build and sustain them.

Besides attending to the poor and other guests at St. Joseph’s and Maryhouse, the paper’s staff has also participated in demonstrations and picketing in support of workers’ rights and other causes. Most recently, Workers have participated and written about the various Occupy movements protesting income inequality in the United States. Here is another area in which the paper courts tension between the spiritual and the temporal, however. The CW has historically supported the labor movement (even before unions were legal) because of the paper’s concern for the exploitation of workers. However, its critique goes well beyond traditional labor concerns to argue for an economic order that is more beneficial and meaningful for both owners and workers (Zwick and Zwick: 148–155).

Relations with church and state

Throughout its history, the paper has featured bibliographies about Catholic social teaching and related topics, and quotes from Scripture, the saints, church documents and doctors of the church (such as Augustine and Aquinas). This intellectual tradition has given the paper prestige and purpose, situating it as part of a larger historical landscape (Piehl, 1982: 69). In practice, the paper models the integration of ideas from different perspectives, eras and institutions. It is as apt to write approvingly of the Occupy movement as it is to welcome back the ‘100-year-old voice’ of Bavarian anarchist Gustav Landauer upon a new translation of his writing (Anglada, 2012: 1).

Roberts (1984) described the CW as a ‘political chimera’ of anarchy and traditional Catholicism. Day had this dance with the New York Chancery and other sites of Catholic officialdom: she avowed her loyalty to the clergy while staying outside the church just enough to avoid tight control. Before Vatican II came along, urging a greater role for the Catholic laity, Day was asserting her right as a laywoman to take her church’s doctrines to the street – leaving transcendental matters to the priests while she and other soldiers for Christ exercised their freedom to interpret church teachings in temporal matters (Roberts, 1984). Day never embraced the council’s liturgical changes, however, and was famously traditional when it came to the church’s teachings on sexual morality, ordination and other contentious matters. Nevertheless, she did not hesitate to criticize the church. In a 1967 column bemoaning a US cardinal’s call for ‘total victory’ in the Vietnam War, she wrote a scathing comment that nevertheless demonstrated her ultimate personal and doctrinal loyalty to the larger moral community of the church: ‘As to the church, where else shall we go, except to the Bride of Christ, one flesh with Christ? Though she is a harlot at times, she is our Mother’ (Day, 2012[1967]: 7). In short, she acted very much like an independent-minded American.

Besides being thoroughly American, Day’s instincts were molded during her time as a radical and an anarchist. Even after her conversion to Catholicism, she retained her suspicion of institutional structures that inhibited choice and made one complicit in structural injustice (Zwick and Zwick, 2005: 180–189). An example of this theology of pure means to good ends is the paper’s anti-capitalist stance. It has never accepted advertising or even foundation money (which, by Day’s reckoning, had been obtained unjustly by exploiting workers). Neither has it ever accepted government aid, stocks, bonds or even bank interest. As a critique of technology’s role in eliminating productive labor, facilitating war and encouraging consumerism, the CW continues to use a percentage wheel for sizing art and to employ ‘paper and marker and rubber cement’ (Walker, 2012: 2). Only recently has it acquiesced to scanning the paper into a computer program to satisfy its printer.

By being Catholic, meanwhile, the CW also confronted Americans with an alternative view of the place of religion in society, becoming ‘an important meeting place of European and American Catholic thought’ where religion as a strictly private affair came face to face with the notion of religion as a serious player in public life (Piehl, 1982: 246–247). The CW has pressed for points of commonality between American and Catholic identities, such as the respective promise of each tradition to take care of the poorest (Zwick and Zwick, 2005: 317).

Implications of the Catholic Worker experience for communitarian journalism theory

The CW has succeeded by showing the world its conception of the common good, not just telling the world about it. By doing so, it asserts a concrete presence in the public sphere that makes its moral claims visible (and potentially appealing) to others who do not necessarily share its normative commitments. By jointly pursuing common goods within the Worker communities (including justice, personal dignity, meaningful work, sustainability, self-sufficiency and mutuality), the CW seeks to promote the common good for all persons. In short, the CW’s approach has been at once Catholic and catholic (Piehl, 1982: 243).

The CW’s conception of the common good has provided the newspaper with enduring and dependable guidance for what to write about and how, for whom, and why. It provides insights into communitarian journalism’s capacity for community building and the kinds of relationships that are possible with community members and with outsiders. It models ways to integrate a particular community’s goods with the common good of the larger political community while maintaining the integrity of their separate ends. It uses journalistic techniques to entice readers to join in the quest of building a social order in which all persons can live authentically human lives. True to communitarian theory, it has been ‘active rather than passive, dialogic rather than monologic, and systemic rather than individual’ (Christians et al., 2012: xx).

The CW takes its place in a long Christian tradition of witnessing to the Gospel through practices of hospitality; these include monasteries, medieval hospitals and present-day hospice care facilities. Hospitality is a ‘specifically Christian’ move for confronting deep moral disagreements (Bretherton, 2006: 126). It is not a way of solving disputes, but a way of relating to those with whom one disagrees and of bringing them into the sphere of mutual moral obligations:

The church is to invite the world to participate in generative patterns of thought and action, and bear witness in its life together to the possibility of such patterns. Thus the church, through the social practice of hospitality, is to host the world even as it journeys as a stranger through the midst of the world, thereby bearing witness to the world’s own eschatological possibilities. (2006: 138)

The hospitality move is an interesting one for communitarian journalism theorists to ponder. A number of communitarians have invoked solidarity as the virtue that should characterize communal bonds, rather than tolerance. However, solidarity is easier to muster for those who are like us. A major challenge for communitarian journalism in pluralistic democracies is dealing with difference. The liberal solution has been the virtue of tolerance. But, in the liberal framework, tolerance amounts to peaceful co-existence so that all of us can get on with the business of pursuing whatever we desire. In comparison with hospitality, tolerance is calculated and restricted. It effectively cuts off relations because it requires only non-interference, rather than positive actions of engaging in dialogue, solving problems, and ‘making a place for’ those with whom we disagree (Bretherton, 2006: 149). Hospitality avoids the argumentative mode of discourse that Christians et al. (2012) warn against while recognizing how difficult it can be to cross deep moral divides.

For communitarians, it may make sense to embrace solidarity as the virtue that should define community member relations and to embrace hospitality as the virtue that should define relations with non-members. By moving beyond abstractions and showing what particular conceptions of mutuality, justice and so on look like in practices of hospitality, particular moral communities can be faithful to their traditions while making room for outsiders to participate in their moral responses (Bretherton, 2006: 187). Outsiders may agree on the best response to a moral issue without necessarily sharing the same theoretical premises (Boeyink and Borden, 2010: 127). In short, hospitality is more morally demanding than tolerance, but more constructive because there is ‘ad hoc commensurability at the level of … social practices’ (Bretherton, 2006: 95) that allows for joint participation in the common good.

Because the CW has articulated a conception of the common good that corresponds to a coherent tradition and that has manifested itself historically in a wealth of concrete practices, it has a standard for testing different ways of being. This testing may find these other alternatives wanting, but it also may find that they bear more faithful witness to the movement’s vision. In such cases, the CW may find that it needs to amend its vision. In other words, the paper’s eschatological standpoint makes it more apt to both engage difference and learn from it. To truly welcome the other, one must truly accommodate – as in make room for – the practices, dispositions and beliefs of others. Hospitality requires that communitarian journalists abstain from engaging in one-sided propaganda even if they work for advocacy media. Indeed, it may be useful for communitarian journalists to accept hospitality as well as to provide it. Accepting hospitality, after all, also involves ‘making room’ for difference and gives us a chance to appreciate what others value. Hospitality construed reciprocally might inspire activities such as hosting (and attending) town-hall meetings or participating in joint reporting projects. It may even be that adopting the role of ‘guest’ may be a way for general-interest communitarian media to integrate the goods of particular communities without necessarily being an advocate for them. The CW is guided by particular aims and means laid out explicitly in its pages over the years; these guide its editorial choices, including the resources that writers recommend to readers for further deliberation. But is this the only responsible option? Or can communitarian journalists be less directive, providing resources for open-ended deliberation about the common good (no matter where it may lead)? What kinds of resources are relevant and appropriate in such circumstances?

Aside from the advocacy question, there are a number of issues regarding the kinds of relationships that are appropriate for communitarian journalists. For example, what should the relationship be between communitarian news media and institutions that might be supportive of their conceptions of the common good? Should communitarian journalists partner with such institutions? Aside from the matter of journalistic independence generally, we must consider the degree to which the institutional context inhibits or promotes journalism itself as a kind of practice with specific goods shared by its members (Borden, 2010). There also is the question of how communitarian journalists should relate to the communities they form and inform. Should they write for community members, with them, or both? Should they join community members as activists? Lead them? These questions should be explored in the context of other real-world examples, perhaps inspiring future experiments in communitarian journalism. The Catholic Worker is instructive because of the way it has answered these questions in practice and because its Catholic conception of the common good contains within itself the intellectual resources needed for bridging the liberal-communitarian divide: It makes peace with modern beliefs about human rights while urging us to recover lost concepts of social development that can help us all to flourish (Grasso, 1995: 11).

Footnotes

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Notes

Author biography

Sandra L Borden is a Professor in the School of Communication at Western Michigan University, where she also co-directs the Center for the Study of Ethics in Society. Her most recent work uses a comparative approach to refine the communitarian framework for journalism ethics developed in her award-winning book, Journalism as Practice: MacIntyre, Virtue Ethics and the Press (Ashgate, 2007). Her other books are Ethics and Entertainment: Essays on Media Culture and Media Morality (co-edited with Howard Good, McFarland, 2010) and Making Hard Choices in Journalism Ethics (with David Boeyink, Routledge, 2010). She is a contributor to several scholarly books and journals, including The Handbook of Mass Media Ethics, the Journal of Mass Media Ethics and Communication Monographs.

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