Catholic Worker Hospitality Houses

St. Joseph’s House in New York is based on systematic unselfishness. It is one of the 50 houses of hospitality which have been generated by the Catholic Worker movement across the continent.

Each day 200 to 300 destitute people from the Bowery area of New York City find at St. Joseph’s House not only a warm meal but an atmosphere of unconditional acceptance.

Since its inception, engaging in these “works of mercy” has been central to the Catholic Worker movement. Serving the hungry, the homeless, and the hopeless provides both the lens for viewing society’s structural oppression and builds what Peter Maurin called “cells of good living,” rooted in the simple truths of the gospel.

The Catholic Worker volunteers believe that the way that one shares and gives is far more important than the actual ladles of soup or slices of bread. “It is not just the giving of things,” one volunteer said, “but of ourselves. That is what we most can give.”

A few blocks from St. Joseph’s House is a municipal shelter run by New York City for feeding and providing beds to destitute men. So the food served at St. Joseph’s House is seldom the difference between eating or not. Most come to this crowded soup kitchen for another reason. It is a place where no questions are asked, no prayers are required, no conversions are eagerly anticipated, where nothing is demanded.

The municipal shelter operates very efficiently, but it is described as a “real jungle.” Its dehumanizing atmosphere is the common result when works of mercy become the duty of governmental bureaucracies. The shelter carries out a necessary function rather than a ministry.

“We want our house to be a home for those who are here and to give in a way that affirms people’s dignity and sanctity,” Robert Ellsberg said of St. Joseph’s House. “It is not meant to be an institution, but a family.”

There is a purity about such intentions which seems almost pretentious, yet the spirit of those who carry the house is candid and humble.

“We are painfully aware of how much we fail,” Ellsberg explained. And Sue Weimer added, “We can end up being swamped and treat people as objects.”

Their limitations constantly frustrate the Workers. Not just physical limits -- the number of meals that can be served and beds that can be provided -- but emotional, psychological, and spiritual ones as well. They arise only because of the depth and quality of giving which the Catholic Worker movement sees as intrinsic to the love of Christ for “the least of these.”

Catholic Worker volunteers are living lives marked by voluntary poverty, receiving no salaries, and extending themselves in vulnerable love and service for the poor. Still they are burdened with the seeming necessity to impose human limits on what they know to be a limitless love. “Sometimes,” one volunteer confessed, “we find ourselves in the position of the rich man who ignores Lazarus.”

Yet the recognition of these limitations only serves to deepen their compassion. “When we sense our own frailty, and learn how poor we are, then we can understand the weaknesses of others and see the beauty beyond such weakness,” explained “Sis” (Sister Patricia Michele), a young woman volunteer.

There are about 25 beds in St. Joseph’s House, providing a temporary place to sleep for some. Others come to stay for a week, but may remain until they die. These men given beds usually become drawn into the life of the house, helping with the meals or doing manual work for The Catholic Worker paper, whose “office” is on the second floor.

The hospitality of Catholic Worker houses and farms is radically vulnerable. There are only two rules at St. Joseph’s House -- no alcohol and no violence. One wonders how much such freedom is flagrantly abused. “Not often, only once in a while,” is the answer.

At the Catholic Worker farm in Tivoli, New York, a two hour drive north of the city, Dorothy Day discussed this hospitality. “People can come here and do nothing,” she said, and then with characteristic empathy added, “but sometimes they’re working out a problem.” The destitute, for whom the word “vacation” is meaningless, also have need of days of uncluttered space.

St. Joseph’s House and the farm at Tivoli are joined by Maryhouse to compose a trinity of Catholic Worker centers in the New York City area. Maryhouse had its recent beginning after Dorothy Day wrote in The Catholic Worker about the plight of homeless “shopping bag women” who slept in doorways, carrying their few earthly belongings with them. In January of 1976, the life of Maryhouse began in a former music school two blocks from St. Joseph’s House. Previously hospitality had been offered to women at St. Joseph’s House, but its constraints severely limited the ministry to homeless women.

At the heart of Maryhouse is the sense of community intentionally fostered by women who have chosen to live and pursue their calling there. They come from different backgrounds. Sister Teresa first heard Dorothy Day speak at her high school in 1935. Others have been members of religious orders, but now find their vocation in the ministry of Maryhouse.

Katharine Temple is the one non-Catholic of the eight; an Episcopalian, she has just finished her doctoral dissertation on Jacques Ellul. Katharine and Kathy Clarkson find time to audit seminary courses; while walking through Maryhouse, Kathy offered a discerning critique of liberation theology in response to a question.

Maryhouse imbibes the expectant joy, liveliness, and love permeating the shared life of these women. Mostly young in age, they are all fresh and open in spirit. Their commitment is to share this sense of family with homeless women, sometimes for a few days and sometimes more permanently. There are about 15 such women presently with them. The number varies, and there is physical space for more, since the house has a total of about 40 beds.

“Our ministry arises out of need,” one of the women of Maryhouse explained. The need they described is a stinging indictment of the city’s indifference to the plight of destitute women.

While New York provides 1,100 beds for homeless men albeit in grimly impersonal surroundings, there are only 47 beds provided by the city for homeless women. Further, these are only temporary; various tests and other bureaucratic procedures are required to accept or reject a woman. No one under 21 is accepted -- meaning that there is no place provided by the city for a homeless woman between 18 and 21. Pregnant women are refused.

As Meg Bordhead said of Maryhouse’s ministry, “It is a feminist thing to do.”

In their first year, Maryhouse’s women have been trying to discover the proper balance between their ministry and the need to nurture the undergirding spiritual resources for building community. In this respect Maryhouse differs from St. Joseph’s House, where the sense of community is far more diffuse, and not intentionally structured among the volunteers. The permanent volunteers who carry the ministry of St. Joseph’s do not usually live there, due to its small size and its intense activity.

The life emerging at Maryhouse ranges from art and sculpture classes and play readings to daily vespers services, corporate scripture study, and a discussion group on Ellul. Then there is the meal preparation, as well as the continual individual ministry providing medical help, clothing, counsel, or just the openness to listen to those whose lives have been crushed.

The Catholic Worker volunteers from both houses find spiritual support from the Mass which several attend daily at the nearby Catholic church, as well as from the celebration of the Eucharist each Monday evening at St. Joseph’s soup kitchen. As one volunteer at Maryhouse put it, “Without the spiritual emphasis to sustain the life, nothing would hold it together.”

It becomes clear after just a short time with the Catholic Workers that there is no structured, hierarchical authority to fall back on to hold the life together. In fact, an operational anarchy purposely pervades.

As Katharine Temple explained, in a notable understatement, “It’s not an authority that you can put on a chart.” Graffiti thumbtacked on a wall at St. Joseph’s House put it another way: “God so loved the world that he didn’t send a committee.”

This loose, nearly nonexistent sense of structural authority has long been a part of the Catholic Worker movement, growing out of Peter Maurin’s notion of “personalism.” Maurin believed that each person has an intrinsic sanctity more to be valued than any organization’s. The opposite of a Horatio Alger individualism or Ayn Rand’s selfism, this personalism resists every attempt of government, institution, or structure to treat persons as objects.

“What makes us one,” Robert Ellsberg explained, “is not any constitution, not any ideology, but a common spirit -- participation in the body of Christ. We get along together not because of organization or codes and regulations, but because we remove such artificial bonds and establish our lives on the basis of a single spirit.”

All this flows from what Ellsberg called a “rather eccentric” understanding of the mystical body of Christ. The intent is to cultivate a genuine authority, not to impose a false one. Volunteers may have distinct areas of responsibility, but they are not huddled under a hierarchical umbrella. Their decisions may be made individually or in informal cooperation with others; they respect one another’s choices.

Their outward mission as well as their corporate life reflects a rebellious spirit defying any form of sterile institutionalism or penchant for conformity. “In the long run, that’s what seems to last better,” observed Deane Mowrer, a poet and writer whose column still runs in The Catholic Worker despite the blindness which has come in her later years. Catholic Workers share with those in their church’s religious orders the commitments to poverty and chastity. But when it comes to obedience, that’s another matter.

Nevertheless, the loyalty of these spiritual anarchists to the Catholic church is indefatigable. One volunteer told me that Dorothy Day had once said, “The church may be a whore, but she’s still my mother” -- a comment most attributed originally to Martin Luther, but sentiments which are shared by the Catholic Workers.

For decades now the Catholic Worker movement has spoken to the church, continually raising the gospel’s call to the poor, to nonviolence, and to the self-giving love of Christ. The vision was first expressed in The Catholic Worker newspaper, started during the Depression in 1933. Its price today is the same as then -- one cent per copy.

The Catholic Worker’s circulation is now slightly under 90,000. Probably no American publication its size is produced quite the same way; it is almost a model of a labor-intensive cottage industry. Aside from the printing, practically the only mechanization used is an old stencil machine which prints names and addresses onto labels. The labels are then stuck on the papers, and the papers are all folded by hand. Everyone participates in such work, and it provides useful activity for many who come to receive the hospitality of the Catholic Worker houses.

Robert Ellsberg is the new managing editor of The Catholic Worker. He originally left Harvard University to go to India and study further the thought and life of Gandhi. But the dictatorial rule now reigning in that country frustrated his plans.

Having one’s path disrupted by the repressive actions of political regimes is foreign neither to the paper’s founder, Peter Maurin -- he fled France rather than fight in World War I -- nor to Dorothy Day, nor to Robert’s own family. His father is Dan Ellsberg. Robert has found his home in the work and writing that has always been central to the Catholic Worker vision.

Published nine times a year, The Catholic Worker contains articles on nonviolence campaigns, the struggles of the poor, life at St. Joseph’s House, the economic insights of Gandhi, Dorothy Day’s regular column “On Pilgrimage,” Deane Mowrer’s “Tivoli: a Farm with a View,” editorials, and other pieces.

A May, 1972, editorial decrying the escalation of the Vietnam War typified the simple clarity of the newspaper:

“Since May 1, 1933, the Catholic Worker movement has stood in writing, in action, and in the lives we attempt to lead for the truth we find in the Gospel: we must lay down our arms and love one another, for in every person we meet, we meet Christ.”

Shortly after beginning to write about their ideas in The Catholic Worker, Peter Maurin and Dorothy Day decided that they should begin implementing them. Works of mercy were for Maurin the most vital form of direct action. “The way to start a classless society,” Maurin wrote, “is to begin it.” And that was the deeper intention when the first Catholic Worker soup lines queued up during the Depression.

Part of the remarkable faith of both Maurin and Dorothy Day was the hope that the parish church would take up the cause of the poor, the oppressed, the hungry, and the homeless. That hope was natural, because the principles of the Catholic Worker movement -- the Sermon on the Mount, the writings of St. Paul, the mystical body of Christ, Matthew 25 (“unto the least of these”), and performing works of mercy -- comprise no specialized calling, but are central to the Christian life.

So this movement itself has seen itself as most relevant for the laity, embodying a ministry which should be common, in some form, to all Christians.

Peter Maurin’s strategy began with the houses of hospitality. His next priority was called the “clarification of thought” -- discussions and study to better understand the underlying reasons for unemployment and oppression.

Such study revealed that the industrialized system could not offer real hope to the masses of poor and unemployed. The answer was a return to smaller communities in rural areas. “There is no unemployment on the land,” Maurin would say, and Dorothy Day still repeats it today. In rural areas, more cooperative efforts could emerge, like the guilds and trusts. Principles of mutual aid, self-reliance, and decentralization would guide such ventures.

Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin’s purpose when they began the Catholic Worker was not to reform existing institutions; their hope went deeper than just having unions get a larger piece of the pie. Rejecting the system, they set forth alternative values embodied in small, emerging models which could be the groundwork for recreating society.

Today, however, the Catholic Worker movement is characterized primarily by houses of hospitality for the outcast in the major urban centers of America; there are only about a dozen Catholic Worker farms. Yet, when the book Small is Beautiful is being discussed by volunteers, when Gandhi’s thoughts of decentralized economies are being explored in The Catholic Worker, and even when Jacques Ellul is being studied, there are resonances with Peter Maurin’s thought.

The alternatives envisioned by Maurin and the Catholic Worker are seen as possible for all society. Partly because the mystical body of Christ is seen as boundless, there is no distinction between an ethic normative for professing Christians and one which would apply to society in general. The movement is true, in that respect, to the theological tradition of the Catholic church and its stress on natural grace.

The Catholic tradition of the movement also is apparent in the attitude toward singleness and family life. Every volunteer at St. Joseph’s House and Maryhouse is unmarried. When asked, most echoed in various ways the traditional Catholic teaching that the call to celibacy enables a specialized form of sacrificial ministry which the call to family seems to exclude. That clashes somewhat with their belief that the Catholic Workers’ ministry should have a national relevance for all believers.

Here we are beckoned toward a deeper exploration of how community relates to mission, a search that Maryhouse in particular has begun. There should be ways in which both those called to celibacy and those called to marriage can fully share in the ministry so firmly rooted in the gospel.

The life of the Catholic Worker movement is a rebuke to both church and society. “When we are seen as just a Band-Aid,” Ellsberg said, “ we are not communicating our message.”

The hospitality given the outcast by the Catholic Worker is strikingly different from that in most evangelical missions on Skid Row. There is a whole critique of society and a rejection of the values and structures which have created the suffering being served. Its life stands all the more clearly as a witness for the gospel of Christ because it stands so forthrightly against the selfishness, greed, and violence of the culture. The Catholic Worker movement asks a sinful society, rather than the helpless and hungry ones who come to its doors, to repent.

Those in the Catholic Worker movement explain that they are simply trying to live out, as faithfully as they can, the direct teachings of Christ. From that intention emerges the natural confluence between spiritual witness and political action which seems intrinsic to the gospel but is so foreign to the church.

The movement’s hope has never rested in reforming political power from the top. Instead, by assuming a stance of powerlessness where they are, and then founding the footings of a new order, they would hope to make that power superfluous. “The future will be different,” Peter Maurin wrote, “if we make the present different.”

Such hopes, however, remain grounded in faith rather than visible evidence. “You don’t believe because you see,” the Catholic Workers explain, “you see because you believe.” And they add that when their movement seems successful on the world’s terms, it is a sign that they are failing to sufficiently challenge society.

Maurin used to talk about “taking the dynamite of the church and exploding it.” For thousands the Catholic Worker has served as a school, teaching what it looks like when the power of the gospel is released, showing what happens when love is poured out for the brutalized victims of society -- whose suffering Christ identified with his own.

There is a foolishness about the Catholic movement. It is the foolishness of the cross, which, as St. Paul wrote, is wiser than the world’s wisdom and stronger than the world’s strength.

Wes Michaelson was on the editorial staff at Sojourners when this article appeared.