Catholic worker to speak in Spiritual Journey series at Bates

Catholic Worker Matt Daloisio will discuss the transformation in his life in a lecture titled Overturning the ‘Filthy, Rotten System’: From Aspiring Accountant to Pacific Anarchist by the Age of 22, at 4:30 p.m. Tuesday, March 11, in Skelton Lounge, Chase Hall, 56 Campus Avenue. The event is part of the Spiritual Journeys: Stories of the Soul 2002-03 series sponsored by the Office of the Chaplain. The public is invited to attend this discussion free of charge.

Several years ago as an undergraduate accounting major, Daloisio discovered the writings of the radical Catholic pacifists who were attempting to uproot the injustices of the world through the practice of nonviolence and voluntary poverty. Pitching the balance sheets, he never looked back.

Now 25, Daloisio has lived with the Catholic Worker communities in New York and Boston for the past four years, dividing his time between offering hospitality to those who have been pushed onto the streets, and opposing the systems that put them there — or, as Dorothy Day, co-founder of the Catholic Worker Movement, once put it — fighting “the filthy rotten system.”

The Catholic Worker Movement, founded by Day and Peter Maurin in 1933, is grounded in a firm belief in the God-given dignity of every person. Today more than 185 Catholic Worker communities remain committed to nonviolence, voluntary poverty, prayer and hospitality for the homeless, exiled, hungry and foresaken. Catholic Workers continue to protest injustice, war, racism and violence of all forms.