Last night's California Desert Chorale concert was well-received by a nearly-packed house. We sang Broadway hits (from Lion King, Sunset Boulevard, etc.), Spirituals ("Open the Window Noah"), some old favorites ("Shenandoah") and some goofy songs from Monte Python's Spamalot.
Today I drive to L.A. for the second Seder of my trip out west, this one hosted by the Los Angeles Catholic Worker. The LACW runs a soup kitchen on Skid Row, serving one or two thousand lunches three days a week, and over the nearly 40 years of its existence has also served breakfast and/or dinner on other days of the week. The LACW also publishes a newspaper, The Catholic Agitator. That was the name co-founder Peter Maurin preferred during the Great Depression, when he and Dorothy Day founded the Catholic Worker in New York in 1933. Day, a former socialist, chose to name the newspaper as a response to the Communist Party's newspaper, The Daily Worker, founded in 1924. Maurin said that the Catholic Worker movement was "not a revolution to the left, it is a revolution to the right." It was and is, however, a revolution that transcends the misleading "left-right" dichotomy.
I first connected with the LACW sometime around 1985. I visited an LACW sister house, Isaiah House, in Santa Ana in 1987. The house was founded by Jonathan Parfrey and his family, and I became a member of the community in 1988, working there about 7 years, when Dwight and Leia Smith took over the House.
The Catholic Worker is a pacifist movement, opposing violence, and is therefore an anarchist movement, since the State is the institutionalization of violence.
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