This past spring, host Mike Jordan Laskey traveled to New York for a Jesuit Media Lab theatre event. He was coordinating the outing with our JML contributor Renee Roden, who lives at a Catholic Worker house in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. The Catholic Worker, of course, is the movement founded in 1933 by Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin, which grew from a newspaper dedicated to Catholic social teaching and pacifism to a network of houses of hospitality in urban areas and farm communes in rural areas.
Renee and Mike had some time before the event that evening, so they visited Maryhouse, a house of hospitality the movement opened in 1975 and where Dorothy Day spent the last five years of her life. It’s a pilgrimage site of American Catholicism. And unlike many other pilgrimage sites, Maryhouse isn’t a museum – it’s still a vibrant and active Catholic Worker house of hospitality to this day.
By a great stroke of luck, Dorothy Day’s granddaughter Martha Hennessy was in town and could give Renee and Mike a tour of the house. Martha was the seventh child born to David Hennessy and Tamar Day Hennessy, who was Dorothy’s only daughter. Martha spends most of the year on a farm in Vermont, but she frequently travels to New York to live and work at Maryhouse. Martha has carried on the Catholic Worker tradition in her own life, including participation in anti-nuclear protests with the Plowshares movement. As Martha showed Renee and Mike around Maryhouse, she spoke of her grandmother with such admiration and love, almost as if Dorothy herself were in the room. Mike invited Martha on the podcast to share stories from her life and reflections on how the Catholic Worker continues its work of mercy and justice today. We know you’ll love getting to know this incredibly special person who has carried on her family legacy with so much devotion and passion.
Lean more about Martha, her connection with the Plowshares movement and the Catholic Worker Movement.
AMDG is a production of the Jesuit Media Lab, which is a project of the Jesuit Conference of Canada and the United States.
