A Story of Two Cathedrals – Catholic Worker Movement

This spring I travelled from my home in Iowa to join Catholic Workers and friends from around the country in New York to celebrate the anniversary of the founding of our movement there on May 1, 1933. An added incentive for this journey was to join with activists from around the globe in witnesses for nuclear abolition on the occasion of the United Nations’ Non-Proliferation Treaty review conference that began on Monday, May 3. It was at the May Day festivities that the word was passed that the archbishop of Nagasaki, Japan, who was in town to address the U.N. conference, would be celebrating the 10:15 Mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral the next day and several of us decided we would attend. As Martha Hennessy, visiting from Vermont, and I came out of the subway to walk the final few blocks to the cathedral, we were struck by the number of Japanese pilgrims of all ages on the streets of Midtown, greeting New Yorkers and tourists with gifts of origami cranes, gathering petition signatures,…