Saints and Steelworkers: Building a Catholic Worker Church in a Depression Mill Town, 1935–1939

Abstract Designed by unemployed steelworkers and dedicated on Labor Day in 1937, St. Paulinus Church, in the mill town of Clairton, Pennsylvania, forged a radical vision of Catholic working-class identity during the Great Depression. Led by two idealistic reformers—Rev. Joseph Lonergan, a veteran of labor strife, and the young Catholic Worker artist Ade Bethune—parishioners eschewed the Gothic grandeur and costly mortgages characteristic of Catholic church building, instead engaging in communal labor, salvaging local materials, and venerating new images of working-class saints. During the Depression, progressive Catholic reformers, often laywomen such as Bethune and Dorothy Day, advocated for social and spiritual renewal by connecting labor and liturgical reform. Across the Steel Belt, the proliferation of the Catholic Worker movement’s striking visual vocabulary, which emphasized class in the life of Christ and the saints, and a robust network of prolabor priests strengthened the cross-ethnic labor coalition that enabled the success of the Steel Workers Organizing Committee.