Economy
Michael Appleton / The New York Times / Redux
Theresa Kelly went to Mary House, an aging red brick building on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, 10 years ago, when she was homeless and traumatized by domestic violence. She found temporary shelter there, a place to leave her things while she looked for work. Three years ago, Kelly, in her late 40s, returned to the Catholic Worker, moving into Mary House, this time as a co-worker. “The Catholic Worker saved my life,” she says. “Now everything I have comes from donations —my clothes, everything in my room. I may not have everything I want, but I have everything I need.”
Mary House and its companion, St. Joseph’s House, a few blocks away, are the New York City homes of the Catholic Worker movement, among more than 200 such houses of hospitality in the United States that offer food, water, clean clothes, use of a bathroom or a place to stay to thousands of people in need every year. Started as a newspaper in 1933, the Catholic Worker quickly became a movement of pacifists dedicated to helping the poor. The number of volunteers has dwindled over the past 20 years, but the organization is gaining new attention; in his speech to Congress on Thursday, Francis singled out the Catholic Worker movement for its commitment to social justice and its founder, Dorothy Day, as one of four great Americans.
In 2000 the Vatican opened a cause for the possible sainthood of Day, and she was named a “servant of God” by Pope John Paul II. Day’s granddaughter Martha Hennessy has lived at Mary House since 2010. “I was out of the Catholic Church for most of my life,” she says, because of the church’s support for the U.S. military and nuclear weapons. “Now I see the church becoming kinder, more diversified. I can’t believe that this has happened in my lifetime.”
There are 236 Catholic Worker houses around the world, 208 of them in the U.S. They vary in size from private homes with a few beds or sofas to large farms with room for dozens. Some are dedicated to serving troubled teens, immigrants or the disabled. Some are deeply religious, requiring attendance at Mass and daily prayers. Others are open to people of all faiths. But Catholic Workers have a few things in common: a staunch opposition to war, a willingness to protest injustice of all kinds and a dedication to helping the poor.
There are just two Catholic Worker houses in New York City. Mary House is home to about 30 people, mostly women, and St. Joe’s hosts about two dozen people, mostly men. About a dozen of them live there as co-workers; the rest are people in need of a place to stay. There is some structure to their days. Mary House serves lunch for up to 70 people at noon, four days a week. The meals are prepared in a tiny ground-floor kitchen at St. Joe’s, where co-workers also serve meals to a soup line. Every afternoon, both houses distribute donated clothing. Visitors stop by for a break from the heat or the cold or to grab a blanket for a night on the streets. Big Joe, a former transit worker who is now disabled, stops in every day to fold and label Catholic Worker newspapers, answer phones and find a little company.
Theresa Kelly
resident, Mary House
People come to live at Catholic Worker houses for different reasons. For Carmen Trotta, it was opposition to the Vietnam War in the 1960s. He came from a conservative Catholic family but couldn’t reconcile his pacifist feelings with his upbringing. He found a home at St. Joe’s in 1987. “A lot of my energy comes from the politics that the Catholic Worker embraces,” he says. “The politics of nonviolent dissent.”
Jane Samman, who has lived at Mary House for 25 years, was inspired by the movement’s anti-war stance as well as its commitment to the poor. “People who didn’t just talk about the poor but tried to live that way,” she says.
Both of them are hopeful that Francis represents a true shift in the Catholic Church. “He lived in Argentina through the Dirty War, so he understands what it means to be poor,” Samman says. “Some might ask, ‘Where was he?’ He didn’t speak out then. But I think he’s gone through a major conversion.”
Trotta says he hopes the Catholic Worker movement’s message will gain new currency under Francis, who has been outspoken in his criticism of unrestrained global capitalism. “So we’re all keeping our fingers crossed that maybe he’ll defend us and our decisions.”
The community has gotten smaller, in part because it has become more difficult to attract younger people to the movement. “A lot of us think that is the result of young college kids being so in debt that they have no time to volunteer,” Trotta says. “They have to sit back and think about the cost of their education and where that may lead them.”
Funding, too, is precarious. The New York buildings are owned by the Catholic Worker, purchased by Dorothy Day with donated money — St. Joe’s in 1967, Mary House in 1976. The Catholic Worker relies on donations of cash and food, but the New York houses refuse to accept government help by becoming 501(c)3 charities. That means they get no tax breaks on their properties or donations, and those who donate don’t receive tax exemptions either. They also can’t take advantage of low-cost government food for their soup kitchens. Instead, most of the food they serve comes from the Catholic Worker farm in Marlboro, New York. In emergencies, they will put an appeal in the Catholic Worker newspaper. The paper costs just 25 cents a year, so it brings in only $6,250 a year from its 25,000 subscribers.
“We don’t want to have attachments to the government, because then the government can control us,” Hennessy explains. “Can we speak out against the war in Iraq if we’re taking tax breaks from the government?”
Staying firm to that principle, says Samman, is at the core of every Catholic Worker. “Without that base, we’re just a bunch of nice people who live down the block.”
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