"The time to rise has been engaged"

1 May is International Workers' Day. For Roman Catholics, at least since 1955, 1 May is the Feast of St Joseph the Worker. It was in 1955 that Bl Pius XII instituted this feast that helps us to keep from disconnecting Jesus from every day life. Like St Joseph, our Lord was a carpenter, in Greek, a tekton, that is, a worker.

1 May (1933) is also when Servant of God Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin founded the Catholic Worker Movement, which has persisted, as much as existed, ever since. It is a Catholic movement that needs to be better known and its principles, which are the principles of the Church's social magisterium, more fully embraced and lived out by Catholics, especially in the United States.

Servant of God Dorothy Day, pray for us

What we would like to do is change the world--make it a little simpler for people to feed, clothe, and shelter themselves as God intended them to do. And, by fighting for better conditions, by crying out unceasingly for the rights of the workers, the poor, of the destitute--the rights of the worthy and the unworthy poor, in other words--we can, to a certain extent, change the world; we can work for the oasis, the little cell of joy and peace in a harried world. We can throw our pebble in the pond and be confident that its ever widening circle will reach around the world. We repeat, there is nothing we can do but love, and, dear God, please enlarge our hearts to love each other, to love our neighbor, to love our enemy as our friend- Dorothy Day

In honor of today, our Friday traditio is REM's "Finest Work Song," which was the first song on their outstanding Document album:

The time to rise has been engaged
You'd better best to rearrange
I'm talking here to me alone
I listen to the finest worksong

St Joseph the Worker, pray for us