Bread of the Strong

"Contributing to the ongoing excavation of the spiritual lifeworld of Dorothy Day-"the most significant, interesting, and influential person in the history of American Catholicism"-The Bread of the Strong offers compelling new insight into the history of the Catholic Worker movement, including the cross-pollination between American and Quebecois Catholicism and discourse about Christian antimodernism and radicalism. The considerable perseverance in the heroic Christian maximalism that became the hallmark of the Catholic Worker's personalism owes a great debt to the influence of Lacouturisme, largely under the stewardship of John Hugo, along with Peter Maurin and myriad other critical interventions in Day's spiritual development. Day made the retreat regularly for some thirty-five years and promoted it vigorously both in person and publicly in the pages of The Catholic Worker.^

"The Bread of the Strong investigates the origins, development, and migration of a Roman Catholic retreat movement founded by Onésime Lacouture, SJ. Although suppressed in its original host region of Québec, it migrated to the United States, thanks largely to John Hugo's advocacy, and critically influenced Dorothy Day's spiritual development"--