The Earth Abides Catholic Worker Farm in Calaveras County, CA is part of an 81-year-old movement which began in New York on May 1st (MayDay), 1933. On that crucial MayDay Peter Maurin, Dorothy Day and other friends began publishing a newspaper called The Catholic Worker, which promoted Catholic Social Teaching including respect for life and the greatness of the working-class. The Movement is founded upon direct service to poor folks, voluntary poverty (not to be confused with destitution), communal living and nonviolent resistance to oppression, war and injustice, with a focus on the connectedness of people with their environment. The Catholic Worker is one of the earliest back-to-the-land movements in the U.S.A. amidst the rise of the American Empire. There are many Catholic Worker houses and a few farms in the US, but no organizational ties to the Roman Catholic hierarchy. The autonomous Catholic Worker (CW) communities almost never depend on the Roman Catholic Church system for support. Many CW communities include Catholics, and each CW community is run solely by the anarchists and others who comprise it.
California’s Catholic Worker Farm is situated on 80 acres in the Ponderosa Pine belt of the western slope of the Sierra Nevada at about 3,200 feet elevation. Feel free to write to us or phone us prior to using these directions for visiting us. The weather is generally mild but can be somewhat unpredictable. It usually snows at least once every winter. One winter we had 3 feet of snow in one dose, but it melted in under 2 weeks. In winter, the roads are muddy and slick. In summer, they are dry and dusty. We are extremely remote if you are used to suburbia or city-living. Temperatures vary from 10F/-11C at night in the winter to a little over 100F/39C at day in the summer, but the ground never completely freezes in the winter and nights tend to be below 70F/21C in the summer. The weather is generally mild with a week or two of extremes when one least expects it.