By Louise Zwick

The proclamation of this year (2026-2027) as the Jubilee Year of St. Francis of Assisi is perfect timing as we face similar dangers that were present at the time when Francis lived—800 years ago.

In a January 10th letter to the ministers general of the Conference of the Franciscan Family, Pope Leo said St. Francis’ message of peace was needed now more than ever. “In this age, marked by so many seemingly interminable wars, by internal and social divisions that create mistrust and fear, he continues to speak. Not because he offers technical solutions, but because his life points to the authentic source of peace,” the pope wrote.

“That peace,” the pope added, “is not limited to the relations between human beings, but extends to the entire family of Creation. This insight resonates with particular urgency in our time, when our common home is threatened and cries out under exploitation,” he wrote.

“Peace with God, peace among human beings, and with creation are inseparable dimensions of a single call to universal reconciliation.”

Who is St. Francis of Assisi?

The name of St. Francis of Assisi is well known. Many important aspects of his life, however, are not well known. The St. Francis bird baths in people’s yards are often all that some may ever know.

He was a mystic, committed to a life of poverty and peace. Late in his life he received the stigmata. However he was not always so.

Francis was the son of a wealthy merchant. Like other youths that he knew, Francis longed to become a knight, and hoping to do great things, volunteered to fight in a war there in Italy. Many young men he knew were killed. Francis was a prisoner of war for a year under miserable conditions until his father ransomed him.

Francis became very ill and even bedridden after his time in prison. After he had somewhat recovered, Francis was on his way to go back to fight again. God, however, had other plans for him.

The Lord, in a dream, told Francis to go back home that there were other plans for him.

As he waited in Assisi, Francis, discouraged and almost in despair, spent a lot of time in prayer especially in a nearby cave. Later, he was praying before a crucifix in the small abandoned church of San Damiano, when he heard the voice of Jesus speaking from the crucifix speak to him:

“Francis, go repair my church, which as you can see is in ruins.”

Saint Francis first interpreted that call as an invitation to reconstruct the ruins of the small chapel stone by stone, but in later years he came to understand the full meaning of the call. He was called to “to renew,” with a spirit of obedience, the Church itself.

Francis was totally changed by his encounter with the Jesus of the Gospels and in meeting the poor. He renounced his family and riches, the way of war, and lived a life of radical poverty and service.

The world flocked to this Francis.

In the midst of church and state corruption, little brothers and sisters emerged like flowers that rise out of dung heaps, springing up everywhere, crowding out the weeds of power and corruption.

The little brothers and sisters abandoned all seeking of power—Francis relentlessly hunted them down if they didn’t—to become powerful people of their time. They didn’t need guns (in fact, Francis forbade them to be soldiers).

The fire of reform burned so strongly in Francis that people thought the Church would go up in smoke. Brother Leo would caution him, “Put yourself out, Brother Francis. Put yourself out before you burn up the world.”

But Francis wanted to save the Church, not destroy it. He knew that the Church existed to make Saints in order to make the Church present in society.

He changed the face of Europe without firing a single shot. His was a great reformation and like Attila the Hun he decided not to sack Rome to accomplish it.

There are many stories of Francis, including his transformative encounter with the leper and his encounter with the wolf.

Peter Maurin’s Favorite Encyclical on St. Francis

When Peter Maurin first began to speak to Dorothy Day about his ideas for an apostolate for the world, one of the first things he pulled out of his pocket was the encyclical of Pius XI on St. Francis, Rite Expiatis.

Dorothy and Peter and the early workers studied the encyclical of Pope Pius XI, Rite Expiatis. St. Francis was one of the important models for the Catholic Worker because of his radical commitment to the Gospel. The heart of the Worker movement, expressed in love and service of the poor, personalism, voluntary poverty, pacifism, and participation in manual labor had been brought to the world in a dramatic and unique way by St. Francis.

In Rite Expiatis, Pope Pius XI described the world at the time of St. Francis and the way in which he transformed it:

The terrible conditions existing in the times when St. Francis lived are well known. Although the Catholic faith still lived in the hearts of men, the charity of Christ had become so weakened in human society as to appear to be almost extinct. To say nothing of the constant warfare carried on by the partisans of the Empire, on the one hand, and by those of the Church on the other. The cities of Italy were torn by internecine wars.... Horrible massacres, conflagrations, devastation and pillage, exile, confiscation of property and estates were the bitter fruits of these struggles.

Peace-loving people were harassed and oppressed with impunity by the powerful. Those who did not belong to that most unfortunate class of human beings, the proletariat, allowed themselves to be overcome by egotism and greed for possessions and were driven by an insatiable desire for riches. These men paraded their riches in a wild orgy of clothes, banquets, and feasts of every kind. They looked on poverty and the poor as something vile. They abhorred from the depths of their souls the lepers and neglected these outcasts completely in their segregation from society.

What is worse, this greed for wealth and pleasure was not even absent, though many of the clergy are to be commended for the austerity of their lives, from those who should have most scrupulously guarded themselves from such sin.

To bring light to the people of this world which we have described, and to lead them back to the pure ideals of the Gospeles, there appeared, in the Providence of God, St. Francis of Assisi.”

In the encyclical, Pope Pius XI described the experience of St. Francis:

On a journey to Puglia on a military mission, Francis felt himself commanded by God in unmistakable terms to return to Assisi and learn there what he must do. After much wavering and many doubts, through divine inspiration and through having heard at solemn Mass that passage from the Gospels which speaks of the apostolic life, he understood at last that he, too, must live and serve Christ according to the very words of the Holy Gospels. From that time on he undertook to unite himself to Christ alone and to make himself like unto Him in all things.

Let us now see with what exercise of perfect virtue Francis prepared himself to follow the counsels of divine mercy and to make himself a capable instrument for the reformation of society.

It is not hard to imagine the love of evangelical poverty which burned within him. Everyone knows how he loved to befriend the poor, and how he was so filled with kindness that being ‘no mere hearer of the Gospel’ he had decided never to deny help to the poor.

On one occasion he was with a party of young men, singing in the streets after a banquet, when he stopped suddenly and, as if lifted outside himself by a wonderful vision, turned to his companions who had asked him if he was thinking of getting married and quickly replied, with some warmth, that they had guessed rightly because he proposed to take a spouse, and no one more noble, more rich, more beautiful than she could possibly be found, meaning by these words Poverty or the religious state which is founded on the profession of poverty. In fact, he had learned from Our Lord Jesus Christ Who, “although he was rich made Himself poor for us” (Il Corinthians 8:9) that we, too, should become rich by His poverty, which is, in truth, divine wisdom. For Christ has said: “Blessed are the poor in spirit; if thou wilt be perfect, go, sell what thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come follow me.” (Matt. 5:3 and Matt. 19:21)

Poverty, which consists in the voluntary renunciation of every possession for reasons of love and through divine inspiration and which is quite the opposite of that forced and unlovable poverty preached by some ancient philosophers, was embraced by Francis with so much affection that he called her in loving accents, Lady, Mother, Spouse.

Did St. Francis have PTSD?

Recent studies have brought to our awareness the ways in which St. Francis suffered during and years after his time in jail as a prisoner of war. Some Franciscan military chaplains have shared the struggles of St. Francis to help them cope with PTSD after traumatic experiences in war.

Even though Francis’ father eventually ransomed him, some accounts show that he had contracted a grave illness from the inhumane treatment he received. Francis, who loved the earth and the sky, all of God’s creation, was unable to appreciate its beauty in his despair during his time of recovery after war and imprisonment.

Fr. Conrad Targonski, one of the Franciscans who shares with veterans about the sufferings of St. Francis, wrote in an article in St. Anthony Messenger:

“Francis carried mental wounds from the trauma of war and imprisonment.” “He had the memories, he had the dreams, he had the flashbacks.” In spite of this, Francis was able to do great things united with the Lord.

Message and Prayer from Pope Leo XIV for the Jubilee Year of St. Francis

IN THIS YEAR OF GRACE, I WISH TO OFFER YOU A PRAYER THAT SAINT FRANCIS OF ASSISI MAY CONTINUE TO INSTILL IN ALL OF US PERFECT JOY AND HARMONY:

Saint Francis, our brother, you who eight hundred years ago

went to meet Sister Death as a man at peace, intercede for us before the Lord.

You recognized true peace in the Crucifix of San Damiano, teach us to seek in Him the source of all reconciliation

that breaks down every wall.

You who, unarmed, crossed the lines of war and misunderstanding,

give us the courage to build bridges where the world raises up boundaries.

In this time afflicted by conflict and division, intercede for us

so that we may become peacemakers: unarmed and disarming witnesses of the peace that comes from Christ.

Amen.

War is Hell (Pie in the Sky)

By Peter Maurin

Bourgeois capitalists

don’t want their pie in the sky when they die.

They want their pie here and now.

To get their pie here and now

bourgeois capitalists

give us better and bigger commercial wars

for the sake of markets and raw materials.

But as Sherman says,

“War is hell.”

So we get hell here and now

because bourgeois capitalists

don’t want their pie in the sky when they die,

but want their pie here and now.

Bolshevist Socialists,

like bourgeois capitalists,

don’t want their pie in the sky when they die.

They want their pie here and now.

To get their pie here and now,

Bolshevik Socialists

give us better and bigger class wars

for the sake of capturing the control

of the means of production and distribution,

But war is hell,

whether it is a commercial war or a class war.

So we get hell here and now

because Bolshevist Socialists

don’t want their pie in the sky when they die,

but want their pie here and now.

Bolshevist Socialists

as well as bourgeois capitalists

give us hell here and now

without leaving us the hope

of getting our pie in the sky when we die.

We just get hell.

Catholic Communism

leaves us the hope

of getting our pie in the sky when we die

without giving us hell here and now.

St. Francis of Assisi

By Peter Maurin

According to Johannes Jorgensen,

a Danish convert living in Assisi,

St. Francis desired

that men should give up

superfluous possessions.

St. Francis desired

that men should work with their hands.

St. Francis desired

that men should offer their their services

as a gift.

St. Francis desired

that men should ask other people for help

when work failed them.

St. Francis desired

that men should live as free as birds.

St. Francis desired

that men should go through life

giving thanks to God for His gifts.

We Seem to Think

By Peter Maurin

St. Francis thought

that to choose to be poor

is just as good

as if one should marry

the most beautiful girl in the world.

We seem to think

that poor people

are social nuisances

and not the Ambassadors of God.

We seem to think

that Lady Poverty

is an ugly girl

and not the beautiful girl

that St. Francis of Assisi

says she is.

And because we think so,

we refuse to feed the poor

with our superfluous goods

and let the politicians

feed the poor

by going around

like pickpockets,

robbing Peter

to pay Paul,

and feeding the poor

by soaking the rich.

By Brendan Walsh

It was just before sunrise. Another July day was exerting itself in Baltimore. So, hazy, hot, and humid were taking hold. I was standing on the front steps of Viva House, and a well-used pick-up truck heading north stopped. The driver stuck his head out the window and shouted, “You still doing it? You still doing food?” “Absolutely,” I responded. He parked and jumped out of the truck. “I used to come here. Years ago. I had nothing. No bread. This place fed me many days. I’m doing better now. No jail. 2 kids. Good work too.” He was in a hurry. We shook hands and he slapped a $20 bill in my hand.

“Bread,” he said, “for the next one who needs it.”

For 57 years we have shared bread with many of those “next persons.” I recognized him, vaguely, His name is Troy. He must have eaten here more than 20 years ago. I will always associate Troy with Bread. I meditated on our meeting the rest of the day and many days thereafter:

BREAD...it’s the poetry and music of all food.

BREAD...it’s the foundation of unity and community.

BREAD...it tastes best when shared.

BREAD...it’s the kindest and the warmest of all words.

BREAD...it’s the bed rock of hospitality.

BREAD...it’s the taste of truth when needed and kneaded.

BREAD...It’s a source of strength for the sorrowful.

For the last 3 months I have been baking and breaking our home-made Irish soda bread. It is a simple task. You can easily spell and savor all the ingredients. And you only need 5: flour, baking soda, honey, eggs and buttermilk. You bake it for about 45 minutes, and you can clean bowls and utensils while it’s baking. It really is quite a miracle. Gandhi reflected:

“There are people in the world so hungry that God cannot appear to them except in the form of bread.” Dorothy Day believed that “we cannot love God unless we love each other, And to love we must know each other. We know God in the breaking of bread, and we know each other in the breaking of bread, and we are not alone anymore.”

Today, in Gaza, bread is something hoped for, and it is not readily available. Bread is not broken. Bodies are. Indeed, people seeking the “staff of life” are gunned down by Israeli soldiers. At least 70% of Gaza structures have been destroyed or damaged. We (yes, USA) have financed the destruction, and we have helped make Gaza a complete desert. The Trumpian goal is the creation of a new Mediterranean Riviera.

The death toll is extreme. At least 60,000 have been butchered and this includes at least 17,000 children. This figure is considered extremely low and probably unrelated to the actual truth. Our bombs and weaponry support the genocide and we’re not done yet. C.S.

Lewis reflected that the greatest evil is not done in ‘dens of crime’ that Dickens painfully painted. “No, the greatest evil has been conceived and ordered in clean, carpeted, well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and clean-shaven cheeks, who do not need to raise their voices.” Hence, naturally enough,Lewis’ symbol of hell is something like a police state, or a MAGA rally, or Alligator Alcatraz, or the glossy offices of big shot weapons/bombs producers.

Bodies are broken. Bread is trampled. If he were living today, our friend and thoughtful resister, the late Bill O’Connor, would describe the actions of the MAGA conspiracy thusly: to get what they wanted they “would attempt to sell the empty eye socket of a dead rat to a blind man, convincing him that it was a wedding ring.”

We live in a country intoxicated by death and convinced that bread need not be shared, and bombs are always the answer. When Dan Berrigan, S.J. taught me at Le Moyne College (1962-63) he talked about bread as food and symbol. Years later (1968) he devoted an entire chapter to BREAD. It appears in his book, LOVE, LOVE AT THE END. Some excerpts should be broken like bread and shared:

“When I hear bread breaking, I see something else. It seems almost as though, God never meant us to do anything else. So beautiful a sound, the crust breaks up like manna and falls all over everything, and then we EAT; bread gets inside humans. It turns into what the experts call ‘the formal glory of God’ ...But don’t let that worry you. […]

“Sometime in your life, hope that you might see one starved neighbor, the look on her or his face when the bread finally arrives. Hope you might have baked it or bought it - or even needed it yourself. For that look on your neighbor’s face, for your hands meeting across a piece of bread, you might be willing to lose a lot or suffer a lot --- or die a little even.” ...’Formal glory’; well yes.”I don’t think they understand---or every theologian would be working part time in a bread line. Who knows who might greet her or him there or how the meeting might change afterward---like stones into bread? […]

”Most theologians have never broken bread for anyone in their lives. Do you know I think they think Christ is as well fed as His statues.”

The Third Coming

Brendan Walsh

(with apologies to William Butler Yeats, The Second Coming)

Spinning and twisting wildly

Our unhinged citizens wander aimlessly.

The country: falling apart! The constitution: in shreds.

The cry of the poor stifled.

Jail, deportations and stupidity are the laws of the land.

Authoritarians have trampled free speech.

Bitter greedy waves overwhelm our shores.

Everywhere the innocent are iced by masked thugs.

And sadly, even many of the best lack all conviction, While the worst are filled with hateful intensity.

Surely, somewhere, somehow, light will peek through.

Surely, the nightmare and darkness will cease.

Surely, resistance and truth- doing will be our strength.

Surely, justice and hope will be our morning prayer.

Brendan Walsh is the co-founder of Viva House in Baltimore, Maryland.

By Maria Bergh

For most of my life, there have been two deep-rooted dreams in my heart. One, from childhood, is to live in New York’s Finger Lakes region in a house on hill with a big garden. The other is to work for justice as a Catholic Worker.

The first dream is older, golden, sunny. It was born in the context of annual family vacations, watching the sun rise over Keuka Lake, picking blackberries in roadside ditches, making s’mores, gazing at farms, vineyards, and orchards that stretched across valleys and hills along every road we drove, and being amazed at the creativity and skill of the craftspeople and farmers who lived here year-round.

The second arose sometime in my early teens in response to realizing that we all share responsibility for the evils and oppression of the world. In this dream, I shout and march, take buses and trains, make protest art, and serve food to an unending line of faceless neighbors.

When the second dream came into my life, I labeled the earlier dream utopian, a desire to have my heaven on earth. What was the use of making art and puttering in the garden in a world like ours? the teenaged me reasoned, Who does it help if I live in a beautiful place? With a little regret and a lot of devotion, I set about learning how to become the kind of person who would live the second dream.

So I moved into the Catholic Worker through Mustard Seed Community Farm first (after visiting nearly a dozen urban houses), before relocating to Su Casa Catholic Worker on the South Side of Chicago. And then, again, a surprise that I went to the Lake City Catholic Worker Farm before returning to Chicago.

Sometime around my return, I began to wonder if my two dreams were not actually so dissimilar. After all, a house on a hill with a garden could describe many a Catholic Worker farm. But every time I left Chicago, I missed the critical mass conspiring for justice that protests and leads nationwide movements, like police abolition and immigrant rights. And it was also true that as meaningful as this work is, I struggled.

Parker Palmer shares in his book Let Your Life Speak a Quaker concept of discernment in which Christ opens The Way before us. He recounts a time he confessed to a female elder that he was not feeling Way opening anywhere. Her reply was decisive, “I have never experienced Way opening ahead of me, but I have often felt it close behind me.” This echoed in me in Chicago. I did not see a way ahead, but I knew I had run out of The Way that brought me there. The second dream had taken me as far as I could go. It was time to try the first dream.

From this vantage point, I wonder if my early encounter with social justice and the Catholic Worker was similar to the energy that Dorothy Day received from the infamous retreat. This annual event, commissioned by Dorothy and apparently dreaded by most others, espoused renunciation and asceticism.

Kate Hennessy’s lovely book, The World Will Be Saved by Beauty, tells us that one of Dorothy’s responses to the priest’s message was to put away her flowery dresses. I had not realized how much I had put myself away until, in a restorative justice training, I was instructed to make a nametag that my 6-year-old self would get excited about. It was silly and fun, but the fuchsia paper covered in sparkly puff paint, plastic heart-shaped gems, and sequins made me painfully aware of the distance between my young self and my practical, neutral, workwear-filled wardrobe.

Moving to New York to start a Catholic Worker farm felt a bit like putting on that pink sparkly heart-bedecked nametag. It meant admitting I was not, at my core, the person who (apparently) fearlessly dug rats out of our illegal compost and held the line at protests. I justified moving to New York by getting a job with a social justice farm, rather than setting out on my own. That job fell through, but another arose. In the midst of this I trained for, ran, (and won) a long trail race – another frivolous thing that social-justice city-house me would never have done. That race won me two things: confidence I’d denied myself for decades, and connection to a family looking for someone to fix up and live in an old farm house with a field on a hill a stone’s throw from town. I stumbled into my childhood dream.

So, when the farmer I was to work for last spring apologized that he wouldn’t be able to pay me, I couldn’t help but see The Way opening ahead. If there was ever a moment when it seems meaningful to unite rural neighbors to feed each other and work for solidarity and community, this is it. The little girl who loved glitter is delighted and intimidated, the woman I became in the Worker is brave enough.

So began Naples Valley Community Farm in 2025. May this journey help others own the wholeness of their own dreams.

Maria Bergh is an activist, grower, writer, and architect based in the Great Lakes and the Catholic Worker movement. Readers can learn more about Naples Valley Community Farm here. Interested readers can support Naples Valley Community Farm by donating a CSA share or “community card” at bio.site/NaplesValleyFarm.

About us. Roundtable covers the Catholic Worker Movement. This week’s Roundtable was produced by Renée Roden and Jerry Windley-Daoust. Roundtable is an independent publication not associated with the New York Catholic Worker or The Catholic Worker newspaper. Send inquiries to roundtable@catholicworker.org.

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Christopher J. Duçot

My friend Sedrick returned to prison three days before Thanksgiving. He may be in for a year. Around a decade ago Sedrick spent a year in prison. I honestly don’t remember what for. I do remember no one was hurt and he did not have a weapon. His year long sentence was not the product of a heinous act on his part but of his repeated encounters with law enforcement for petty b.s. With every arrest Sed plead guilty by accepting a plea deal. Overtime people in Sedrick’s shoes find that deals offer less community service and probation and more prison time, a portion of which is suspended, followed by more probation. If one is pinched again, or misses a probation meeting, the suspended portion of your sentence is triggered.

Sedrick was born deeply impoverished and mildly/moderately developmentally disabled. He has received disability benefits his entire life; for most of his life I have been responsible for managing these meager benefits. Two years ago, Sedrick forgot about a probation meeting. I honestly believe that he forgot- there are very many things Sedrick has told me over the years that I most definitely don’t believe! Sedrick knew that missing this meeting would end up with a court date since he had already missed a couple of previous meetings. His probation meetings were in New Britain, a three bus and hour plus long commute from the north end. At least one of his “missed” meetings was actually a late arrival.

A court date was set. Fearful of a year, or more, in prison Sedrick skipped court- much to the chagrin of my college friend Andrea who was present to represent him pro-bono. A warrant was issued for his arrest. For two years he played cat and mouse with Hartford P.D.- though they weren’t playing too hard, before he turned himself in. Despite Andrea’s representation, a pleading letter from Jackie, and a decade of not committing any crime Sedrick was sent away. He lost his apartment and furnishings. His SSI disability benefits are suspended while he is incarcerated. They may be terminated before he is released since the Social Security Administration is again re-reviewing whether Sedrick is still disabled. This happens every other year or so. Sedrick was born disabled. His disability, which impairs his judgement, is never going to be cured. The biannual reviews with their multiple doctor’s appointments are really a passive aggressive way of terminating benefits for people like Sedrick. Meanwhile years of probation and the spectre of a suspended sentence become in practice a life sentence for petty, misdemeanor crimes if the defendant is impoverished- mores so if they are also mentally disabled.

And so Sedrick is now in the custody of the Department of Corrections. Humpf. We tell ourselves that our prison system is meant to rehabilitate offenders while protecting society. Sedrick was never a threat to society- most especially so for the last decade. Meanwhile there is no correcting the source of his poor judgement. So why is he in prison? What needs correcting is our dreadfully inadequate public transportation system that makes it so hard for Sedrick to get to probation on time. We need to correct our system of mental health care! By some accounts prisons are the largest “provider” of mental health care in the U.S. is the real threat to public safety. We need to correct our social safety net. If the trawlers out of New Bedford had nets with similar holes we’d not be eating much fish I’ll tell ya. So for the sake of honesty and transparency I hereby rename the department depriving Sedrick of his freedom the Department of Punishment, also to be known colloquially as the Department to Hide the Poor and Mentally Ill.

Here’s another Orwellian misnamed government bureau- the Department of Homeland Security. Good grief that’s a rich one. How does hunting down immigrants, and gunning down citizens secure the homeland? Not all Americans are as angelic and innocent as Sedrick. In fact, American citizens are more likely to commit crime than are immigrants. Indeed, when immigration rates rise, crime rates fall! For real, for real, as Sedrick would say. Moreover, according to the Department of Justice (don’t bet me started on what an honest moniker would be for this crew.) immigrants here without legal status are even more law abiding!! Welcoming the stranger would actually make our homeland more secure.

So why scapegoat immigrants and folks like Sedrick for the very real ills of our society? Stagnant wages, housing shortages, the high cost of utilities and food, the loss of well paying, high status unionized jobs- and with them pensions and health insurance, are not the fault of hard-working immigrants or disabled and impoverished citizens. Life has gotten harder for more and more everyday Americans of all races because life has gotten easier and easier for corporations and the ultra-wealthy.

Millions of Americans are rightly outraged by the rising cost of living, the kidnapping of a foreign head of state, the bombing of boaters, the rounding up of moms, dads, and students by masked cowards playing cowboy, and the state murders of Alex Pretti, Renee Nicole Good and others. Millions of other Americans are being whipped into a frenzy of fear of Black and Brown people: American and immigrant. With our outraged attention affixed on each other, and on injustices real or perceived, we remain divided and thus disempowered while this administration and its cabinet of billionaires consolidate their oligarchy. Distrust and antipathy of the government, is deserved but it is also orchestrated in order to facilitate public support for gutting the EPA at the expense of the environment, the CPFB at the expense of American consumers, the IRS for the protection of the wealthy, and on and on. These initiatives, along with other policies targeting unions, are just a few of the reasons why most Americans are struggling despite Wall St. booming. The evil genius of all this is that those who are responsible for, and who benefit from, the hard times most Americans now experience are able to hide in plain sight while we shout and chant at each other.

Trump didn’t start this. He may be singular among recent presidents with his crass and unapologetic misogyny and white supremacy, but this dividing and conquering of the American people, while demonizing and dismantling the apparatus allegedly built to proffer the common good, has been the gameplan of corporate America since at least 1971’s corporate sponsored Powell Memo. Project 2025 is merely their action plan to bring about a complete oligarchy with a side of authoritarianism. The godfather of community organizing, Saul Alinsky, succinctly identified organization, organized money and/or organized people, as the source of all political power; an insight acknowledged by the Powell Memo. The Godfathers running our country know the surest way for a small minority to remain in power is to deploy this ancient practice of divide and conquer. The American people have divided and now we are being conquered- not by immigrants and poor Americans but by a handful of billionaires who have as much wealth as half the country.

For the homeland to actually be secure we need a Department of Mercy and Understanding to divert harmless people from prison; a Department for the Protection of the Common Good to impose a maximum wage, radically increase capital gains taxes, and build dignified housing for every resident of our land with these funds; a Department of Compassion for the Vulnerable that guarantees quality health care, including mental health care and addiction treatment, for everyone, as well as access to healthy food to boot; a Department for the Celebration of our Elders that facilitates older Americans in pursuit of their bucket lists- fishing trips to Alaska, weekends with their grandkids, sunsets on the beach, or whatever brings joy without causing harm, rather than toiling ‘til death to afford a bus pass to get to the local food pantry!

One last thought: as all New Englanders know, salt melts ice. In this vein let’s resolve to be salty, nonviolent dogs when ICE comes to town- I’m thinking of Mother Jones, Ella Baker, and local hero Al Dornan.

As for ICE… it’s just the English pronunciation of Gestapo.

Christopher J. Doucot is the cofounder of the Hartford Catholic Worker community in Hartford, Connecticut. This essay was originally published in the Lent-Easter 2026 Issue of the Hartford Catholic Worker—read more online.

Bethany Hobbs and Duncan Hilton got married on Zoom in 2020. They were both committed Christians and interested in putting their faith into action.

Duncan grew up in a mainline Protestant family. His search for alternative Christian community began after college when he lived and worked with people with disabilities at a Camphill community in Ireland. Camphill had been started decades earlier by refugees to the UK fleeing persecution in Nazi Germany who were committed to a communal and spiritual approach to caring with people with disabilities, inspired by the teachings of Rudolf Steiner.

Afterward, while at Harvard Divinity School, Duncan studied engaged Buddhism and lived at a nearby Zen Monastery. His first deep encounter with Catholicism happened in Phoenix in 2010 as a community organizer with a Latino voter registration campaign based out of a former convent. “I loved the convent, the chapel, the crucifix and the ‘abuelita theology,’” Duncan said in a Zoom call with Roundtable.

He recalled another pivotal moment at the Maryknoll Language Institute in Bolivia several years later. He was a Spanish-language student and attended a prison Mass with one of the Maryknoll Fathers. As they arrived, the inmates were praying the Stations of the Cross. After years of formation and study, and only months away from being ordained as an Episcopal priest, he remembers returning from the prison and praying, “God, please don’t make me Catholic.” The answer he got back was, “You’re called to religious life.”

After talking with a spiritual director, he believed that he could answer that call as an Episcopal priest as long as he remained tethered to a life of working with the poor, practicing devotion, and caring for land.

Duncan was ordained as a priest in the Episcopal church in 2018 at St. Michael’s Episcopal Church in Brattleboro, Vermont, and met his future wife, Bethany, shortly afterward. Often, they get asked if they met online or at church. The answer is neither. “We met the old-fashioned way: at a bar.”

Bethany had always had a passion for Jesus and justice, she said. “I grew up in Kentucky in a conservative, evangelical southern Baptist church. Loving people makes sense to me, but I didn’t see people living Jesus’ radical example,” she added.

In a Zoom call with Roundtable, Bethany described their love story as “radical educator, single lady with a dog meets Episcopal priest,” and that they found that there were “a lot of places where our hearts overlapped,” Bethany said.

After a degree in applied linguistics, Bethany had spent time working in Nicaragua at a child protection center. The ethos of the center was working on family reunification through family education and support. She was teaching English and coordinating “these cool trips for the parents to spend time with their kids on the weekend.”

She described the approach as less proscriptive or punitive and actually “helping people get what they’re seeking: a pathway to have their family remain together.” Bethany returned to the United States to study for a master’s degree in social justice at the School for International Training’s graduate institute in Brattleboro, Vermont.

Soon after their pandemic virtual wedding, Duncan led the St. John’s Episcopal Church in Walpole, New Hampshire as a priest-in-charge for two years. The couple felt a call to create some kind of retreat center and hospitality ministry in their home in Southern Vermont, but circumstances led them to making their home in New Hampshire. Meanwhile, their family grew with the arrival of first one—and then another—son. Bethany left the classroom after 14 years of teaching, and Duncan stepped back from parish ministry to be a father and prison chaplain.

It might seem inevitable that two justice-seeking Christians would eventually bump into the Catholic Worker.

“Dorothy Day started appearing everywhere,” Duncan said, “in the friendships we were making—there was even a bust of her in an Episcopal church,” he added.

In the podcast project he began in the fall of 2023, The Religious Life, Duncan interviewed Dennis Appel and Tensie Hernandez, who run Beatitude House, in Guadalupe, California. Through that podcast interview, Bethany and Duncan began a relationship with the couple who had met at the Los Angeles Catholic Worker, and then founded Beatitude House in 1996 and ran the house while raising their family.

Their road to La Sagrada Familia Catholic Worker was, however, neither short nor straightforward.

Assessing Need, Serving the Migrant

“It all started as we were sitting there talking,” Dorothy Day said in the epilogue of The Long Loneliness, when describing the genesis of the Catholic Worker, its farms, and its newspaper. Bethany and Duncan echo a similar sentiment of holy serendipity.

“It went from being like — where are we going to build a house and what are we going to do with a retreat center space, to things happened when they needed to happen,” Bethany said to Roundtable.

As they got to know Dennis and Tensie, they found themselves called to do something similar in New Hampshire. When they thought about their previous aspirations to work together to host retreats, the component of working with immigrants had not been central.

But Bethany said that slowly migrants came into view. “I started seeing migrants everywhere,” she said, “everywhere I went as a mom, I was meeting moms who are Spanish-speaking.”

While many people in the community support immigrants and even volunteer with organizations that have developed programs to support newcomers, the needs are great and Duncan and Bethany wanted to prioritize radical hospitality. Bethany described sitting down with a woman who came from Peru to the United States, a single mother raising her son, who fell in love with someone in New Hampshire. Bethany said of meeting and working with the mothers in her area, “Moms feel isolated and miss a cultural component of large family and friendship circles caring for all children,” she said. “It’s harder in the context of New Hampshire.”

Although New Hampshire is one of the whitest states in the union, with close to 90% of the population identifying as white, the state is home to a large population of migrant farm workers—close to 90,000 immigrants live and work in the state, according to a report from FWD. Even before the Trump administration began targeting immigrant communities in 2025, New Hampshire, as Bethany and Duncan described it, was home to communities vulnerable to ICE and harsh anti-immigration policies.

Discernment Period

Bethany and Duncan both experienced a period of discernment as new Catholic Workers-in-the-making. They knew that they wanted to learn from people who had been doing the work of hospitality for a long time.

They reached out to Ruben Garcia at Annunciation House, a shelter on the border in El Paso, which had been providing hospitality to folks crossing the border since the 1970’s. Duncan recalled, “I remember thinking that we were crazy to write Ruben and say we felt a call to do migrant hospitality in New Hampshire of all places. But then Ruben wrote back and said, “We’d love to have you. We’ve actually been advocating for more migrant hospitality in the interior of the country, especially the Northeast.’ I remember bursting into tears when I read Ruben’s email to Bethany.”

They arrived in Annunciation House in August 2024. They spent that autumn integrated in the community as a volunteer family, serving folks arriving at the border in the shelter. With the November 2024 election, Duncan said there were big changes for the ministry. Over that winter, they lived in an apartment across the street from an Annunciation House shelter and continued to volunteer.

Discernment means an openness, flexibility, and adjustment of direction according to the needs of the moment. Thus, as the family’s situation changed with the closure of the U.S. border with Mexico in January of 2025, the living situation and work changed. In February 2025, the family needed money to survive, so Duncan took a position with the Maryknoll Lay Missioners’ office in El Paso, and Bethany began working for the Diocese of El Paso’s Hope Border Institute.

After entering the Catholic Church on Easter 2026, Duncan and Bethany had a blessing of their marriage, and finally got an in-person wedding celebration in a 2025 ceremony at the Holy Family migrant shelter with their families, friends, and remaining guests at Annunciation House.

With a third child on the way, the family decided to return to New Hampshire on November 1, 2025.

During those 15 months in El Paso, they said they had learned more about hospitality and accompaniment and had felt launched into their Catholic Worker mission in New Hampshire.

Mentor Relationships

Throughout their time discerning the Catholic Worker, Bethany and Duncan have found valuable mentor relationships in Catholic Workers. During their time further west, they attended the Pacific Life Community Retreat on Ash Wednesday of 2025, where the community held a vigil in front of Raytheon’s plant in Tucson. They got to meet their Beatitude House friends, Dennis and Tensie, in person.

They also met Fumi of Dandelion House (Portland, Oregon), who had introduced them to Dennis and Tensie, and who offered them advice on how to begin. Fumi continues to support them, and the Dandelion House Catholic Worker co-hosted their first virtual Clarification of Thought on wealth, in which Ched Meyers talked about his book Healing Affluenza and Resisting Plutocracy. Duncan and Bethany also spent Labor Day weekend of 2025 with Glen at the Trinity House Catholic Worker (Albuquerque, New Mexico).

As they prepared to return East, Duncan and Bethany were introduced to many other workers online and visited with Claire and Scott Schaeffer-Duffy at the Saints Francis and Therese Catholic Worker in Worcester shortly after they returned to New England. Through mentor relationships, Catholic Workers learn that there are many varieties of Catholic Worker homes, that not one style of community fits all situations.

“We must be crazy,” Bethany remembers thinking about their desire to be Catholic Workers. After relationship-building and networking with other communities, she concluded, “but if we are, then others are too.”

Today, the relationships continue. They hosted Dennis and Tensie’s daughter Rozella and her partner, Robert, for two weeks while on a Catholic Worker pilgrimage. Rozella helped Bethany plan summer programs with the migrant mothers in their area for their children.

La Sagrada Familia

“We were able to get a house from St. Joseph,” Bethany said. Duncan and Bethany had made an offer on a house in Keene, but their bid was not accepted. They wrote to the owner about their vision for the house, asking him to please let them know if someone else made an offer, as they would try their best to fundraise and make a counteroffer.

As they packed their bags for El Paso, they kept praying. They even took advice to bury a statue of St. Joseph upside down in the yard of the house they had imagined as the site of the Catholic Worker. With an unexpected price drop on the asking price and a clear plan for transformative service in El Paso, the couple sent out a request for additional money to friends and family. As is the way of St. Joseph’s intercession, the couple recalled, the money appeared and their offer was accepted. They closed on the house from Texas in September of 2024.

It was during their time in El Paso that they received the name for their house.

Bethany was in the waiting room of a hospital with an elderly guest at Annunciation House, sitting and reading magazines while waiting with her. The woman turned to her, after hearing of their plans to move back to New Hampshire and continue offering hospitality to migrants, said to her in Spanish, “You should call the house La Sagrada Familia.”

After leaving the waiting room, the guest gifted the couple with a Triptych of the Holy Family. Thus, La Sagrada Familia became the name for their home.

Far from having plans set in stone, Bethany and Duncan described their communal style as open and porous, catalyzed by sitting down and talking, meeting with others. “People call us or we call them, and we’ll ask to meet with someone, and they’ll have a better idea than what we were thinking,” Duncan said.

In this nebulous time, they have continued with familiar ministries. Duncan has continued to connect with the prison ministry at the local county jail; they attend Bible Studies, and Bethany organizes puppet shows and fun activities for children whenever the Hispanic community of their local parish gathers for a celebration.

“The waiting feels long, but I’m hoping that anything offered to God will be used in ways better than I ever could have expected,” Bethany wrote in their Easter newsletter.

Despite the waiting, despite being only five months into their community’s life, they have remained remarkably busy. They hosted a celebration on the Feast of the Holy Family for friends in their Spanish-speaking community; they have been keeping Wednesday Vigils with Catholics In Communion for the Season of Faithful Witness, in protest of the Trump administration’s deportation and detention policies. They are beginning a farm on their land, embracing the season by embarking on a spring cleaning project of clearing out their old barn. In the shell of the old, they built a sign of new life: a brooder box for chicks.

They have continued with Duncan’s podcast, The Religious Life, and recently released the third issue of their community newsletter with an Easter Edition. They are hosting Robert Ellsberg virtually tonight, at 7:30 p.m. Eastern, for a discussion about his newest book, the second volume of his books on the saints, “Blessed Among Us.”

You can join the webinar here or get in touch with the community at lasagradafamilianh@gmail.com.

By John Barwick

Hello, Catholic Workers! I am twenty-two years old from Clinton, North Carolina, and I lived at St. Joseph’s House this past October through November. I slept on the second floor in a small cubicle separated by a plywood divider from the larger bedroom belonging to my two roommates.

Sparsely decorated but always cozy, the walls of my room held a sign that read “God Bless Our Home,” an icon of St. Damien of Moloka’i, and a window overlooking East 1st Street. My roommates were incredibly kind and welcoming, and I cannot thank them enough for showing me so much hospitality during my stay. My bed was comfortable and warm. The bedbugs were present but manageable. There was delicious soup for breakfast, and every morning I had the opportunity to work the soupline with some truly incredible people.

The folks at St. Joe’s showed me love from the moment I got there. They told a lot of stories. They yelled at me sometimes. They made good soup. They gave me a place to stay, and an education on what it means to be a Catholic Worker. Peter Maurin said it well in an Easy Essay:

“Unemployed college graduates cannot be indoctrinated without first being fed, as well as clothed, as well as sheltered. Houses of Hospitality for unemployed college graduates are a pressing need.”

Am I indoctrinated? Well, who’s to say? I went to St. Joe’s to learn about the Catholic Worker lifestyle, not to stay there forever. My two-month stint flew by without my ever feeling like I scratched the surface of what it means to dedicate one’s life to voluntary poverty and performing the Corporal Works of Mercy. Life at St. Joe’s takes some time for an outsider to adjust to.

My first few days there were frustrating and uncomfortable, and I seriously considered buying a train ticket back to Carolina before the week was over. After a few mornings of waking up with bedbug bites all over and working the souline, I felt like I had seen enough. “These guys don’t need my help,” I thought.

Bud, Jim, Gerry and Carmen had been living and working at St. Joe’s for decades, and Hideko was always there to keep them in line. There were plenty of outside volunteers to help with the grunt work, and plenty of young people doing the same thing as me, trying to serve the greater good and learn from the people who had been around the block a time or two. With all the help around, I couldn’t help but feel like I wasn’t being very useful. I felt like I was subjecting myself to unhealthy living conditions just for the fun of it. And my initial impression of life at St. Joe’s was that it was not very fun. There were arguments, bugs, mold, no fire alarm system....What was I doing here again?

Now that I am back in North Carolina, what did I do there again? I am still piecing together my answers, and I will be for a long time. But unanswered questions are not a bad problem to have. They offer a space for reflection beyond the constraints of anything that can be known for absolute certain.

However, I definitely showed up at St. Joe’s looking for some straightforward answers. How does this whole anarchist thing work? What will the Christian pacifist revolution look like? What would Dorothy say about this? There was so much I wanted to find out during my time at the Catholic Worker because I knew the folks at St. Joe’s and Maryhouse were long-time veterans of the long march to peace. I was around true believers in the cause. It didn’t matter if I didn’t believe the exact same thing. These folks were living, breathing examples of radicals in action, and I was looking for some advice: How do you imagine building a better future when everything around you seems to be falling apart?

Hope is hard to come by these days. The powerful interests operating the world do not seem interested at all in making the world a better place. We’ve long gone nuclear. We are married to oil and artificial intelligence and bombs. Being party to genocide is politically correct. Many politicians are greedy liars and stupid. Our economy is a death machine locked in a death spiral, and it seems like the world is on the precipice of a new era none of us are prepared for.

So, what does it take to stand up in the name of hope against an ever-present onslaught of systematized, digitized, capitalized annihilation? The answer seems to be finding other people to do it with. That’s not going to stop you from driving yourself crazy thinking about all the messed-up stuff that happens in the world. But having friends who listen to you, who talk to you, this is the most vital tool we have when confronting the powerful evil we must confront. Community is essential when taking on the impossible. There is no other explanation for how St. Joe’s stays standing. It is a community of people who love the work they are doing. They love each other and the people they serve. They love life so much they have dedicated theirs to taking care of others.

Nonetheless, the work at St. Joe’s is often referred to as a band-aid by those who have done it for a long time. The soupline is two hours of an open kitchen door, breakfast, coffee, and a place to hang out for a little bit. But then at eleven the kitchen closes, and everyone who came in for soup has got to leave and go somewhere else. There is always more work to be done. If St. Joe’s House was big enough to house the entire population of unsheltered people in New York City, then it surely would. But St. Joe’s is not that big.

Working on the margins means accepting limitations. You want to win? Become a politician. You want to follow Jesus? Well, Dan Berrigan says you better be prepared to look good on wood.

Between crucifixion and running for office, neither option really sounds appealing to me. Death is scary and painful. Politics is hypocritical and soulless. But death and politics go hand in hand, and they are all you ever see if you pay attention to the news.

On the other hand, the Works of Mercy are being performed all around us. Every day, people are putting in the work to help other people. St. Joe’s is one of those places where good work happens. It’s not flashy, perfect or ever finished. But it’s honest work. It’s necessary work. It’s work I was honored to take part in.

Thanks for all the lessons, Catholic Workers. When I figure out what they were, I’ll be sure to let y’all know.

By Louise Zwick

One would expect that the social and economic situation today should be very different from that of the 1930s when Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin started the Catholic Worker movement. Or different from difficult and turbulent times in other centuries. It was the Great Depression when the Catholic Worker movement began. The poor, the homeless, including new immigrant families, struggled even to survive. Threats against various groups and threats of war resounded in the world.

It is striking to note the similarities in our time to that of the Depression. Dorothy Day wrote of the Robber Barons and contrasted their lives of extreme wealth with the lives of the poor. The “one percent” of wealthy and powerful today are the Robber Barons of yesterday. The contrasts in what is available to the average or poor person with that of the oligarchs are more than notable; the injustice of the economy is staggering. As during the Depression, even some young college graduates cannot find jobs.

The historical perspective does not help us to accept, but perhaps to perceive, the implication of a world in which there are few funds to feed poor children and a lack of a desire to build an economy that will bring relief to struggling families, but billions are available to carry out massive deportations of people of color, and wage wars around the world.

In the face of current devastating realities, the serious question is how can the Gospel enter more into our lives and our culture today? What can we do when the patterns of our everyday lives often have little to do with the Gospel, when even those who have little are held captive by consumerism and materialism?

What can we do when our country turns to war to implement what some consider our manifest destiny to impose our system on the world, or find violence an acceptable way to defend possessions or a style of life?

Pope Leo XIV, Hans Urs Von Balthasar, Oscar Romero, Gustavo Gutierrez, Jon Sobrino

I want to refer here to several sources for a renewed vision, beginning with the Gospel.

My husband Mark and I were inspired life of Dorothy Day, with the emphasis on Matthew 25 and the creation are ultimately grounded in Sermon on the Mount, and Peter Maurin’s teachings on the history of the Church, the prophets of Israel, the Fathers of the Church, on an economics that gives opportunities for all.

We read the authors Dorothy and Peter read and tried to share their insights in this newspaper and in our books. We also read theologians from the last century, especially Henri De Lubac, Louis Bouyer, and Hans Urs Von Balthasar, as well as Latin American theologians. During our time in El Salvador, we heard Oscar Romero speak to his people every day on the Catholic radio station in San Salvador. Now we are very moved by Pope Leo XIV and his perspective from the Gospel throughout the Church’s history and for the world today, especially on the option for the poor as outlined in Dilexi Te. We know that the time he served in Latin America enriches his teaching.

Our Freedom Within the Sovereign Freedom of God

I recently read Todd Walatka’s book, Von Balthasar and the Option for the Poor: Theodramatics in the Light of Liberation Theology. Balthasar’s concept of the living out of the drama of salvation, in which we are called to participate, seems to be closely related to the communitarian personalism that is so much a part of the Catholic Worker movement.

Balthasar teaches that every Christian must play a part in the drama of salvation. This role is urgent. Balthasar tells us: “Now that His word and example have been among us, active human love—individual and social, personal and acting through structures—cannot be postponed.” What an encouragement to know that our humble efforts, joined with the Lord, may contriube to the salvation of the world and the carrying out of God’s plan.

According to Walatka, “Balthasar insists that at the core of existence, the human person has genuine freedom. Indeed it is only the presupposition of freedom that life is truly dramatic…But it is within the sovereign freedom of God that “Creation, the election of Israel, the incarnation and hoped-for eschatological transformation of creation are ultimately grounded in the sovereign freedom of God.” (p.107)

Both theodramatics and personalism emphasize the freedom of the human person within the plan of Divine Providence, to “decide for or against God and for or against the welfare of others” and to act on that decision. (Walatka, p. 95-96)

Walatka shovs that the cry of the poor and the call to reform structures is written into Balthasar’s theology, although not in detail. Walatka combines the teaching of Gustavo Gutierrez, Oscar Romero, Jon Sobrino and others to spell out the implications of Balthasar’s writings for social and political liberation for the poor of the world.

In his book, Walatka shares some important insights from the theologians of the South:

Gustavo Gutierrez: “Unless it stands against the forces of death. including persistent structural violence, terrorist violence of various kinds, and the violence of indiscriminate repression, the Church cannot be a visible sign and effective servant of life.” (p. 206)

Not mentioned in Walatka’s book, but a significant quote from Gutierrez’ book The Power of the Poor in History, challenges the Church and all of us: “’The poor are a by-product of the system, in which we live and for which we are responsible…Hence the poverty of the poor is not a call to generous relief action, but a demand that we go and build a different social order.”

“This preference of Jesus for the poor stands throughout the Gospel. It was for them that he worked his cures and exorcisms; he lived and ate with them; he united himself with, defended, and encouraged all those who, in his day were on the margins of society, whether for social or for religious reasons: sinners, publicans, prostitutes, Samaritans, lepers. This closeness of Jesus to those who were marginalized is the sign that he gives to confirm the content of what he preaches: that the Kingdom of God is at hand.” (p. 113)

Jon Sobrino points out that the drama of history toward the reign of God is not an easy path:

"History is marked by a struggle between the Kingdom and the anti-Kingdom, between the God of life and the idols of death; history is not "a simple onward human march without powerful forces of opposition.”

Walatka points out that “Sobrino sees the focus of the anti-Kingdom first and foremost as personal and structural realities that generate oppression, unjust violence, and outrageous inequality…although Sobrino clearly recognizes moral ambiguity among the poor and the responsibility of perfectly distinguishing the just and the unjust in history.” (pp. 107, 187)

Walatka, with Balthasar, shows that the Church is a Sacrament of Salvation: “...once one recognizes in the social and structural forces resistance to oppression that are part of [the drama of salvation], the life of discipleship must be inclusive of social and structural resistance to oppression. Yet given that these are social forces arrayed against Christ in history, it is important that Christians face and oppose these forces as a social body—namely the Church.” (p. 200)

Pope Leo XIV—Dilexi Te—I Have Loved You

The option for the poor is an important teaching of the Magisterium. In his Apostolic Exhortation Dilexi Te, on Love for the Poor, Pope Leo XIV brings together the teaching and history, the great Tradition of the Church on God’s love for the poor, beginning with the history of Israel in the Old Testament, then featuring the teachings of Jesus in the Gospel, and the examples of the lives of the Saints in caring for the poor.

The Holy Father makes it clear that we cannot love the Lord without loving the poor. As he wrote in Dilexi Te: “Jesus’ teaching on the primacy of love for God is clearly complemented by his insistence that one cannot love God without extending one’s love to the poor. Love for our neighbor is tangible proof of the authenticity of our love for God... The two loves are distinct yet inseparable.” (#26)

Together with the Latin American theologians, the Holy Father recognizes the unjust structures and economic policies that oppress the poor and ask us to change them. He makes it explicit that Catholic Social Teaching is not an optional add-on to our faith, but central to the way we live as Catholics.

“All the members of the People of God have a duty to make their voices heard, albeit in different ways, in order to point out and denounce such structural issues, even at the cost of appearing foolish or naïve. Unjust structures need to be recognized and eradicated by the force of good, by changing mindsets but also, with the help of science and technology, by developing effective policies for societal change. It must never be forgotten that the Gospel message has to do not only with an individual’s personal relationship with the Lord, but also with something greater: “the Kingdom of God• (cf. Lk 4:43) [DT §97].

Each Person’s Destiny

Peter and Dorothy recommended that our lives as Catholics be spent doing the 14 Works of Mercy instead of the works of war. The Catholic Worker Program emphasizes houses of hospitality for those in need, voluntary poverty, communitarian personalism, theway of non-violence, workers and scholars sharing and working together including manual labor and agriculture, study of early and late church theologians and the writings of the saints, and an economic system that serves all. Life at the Catholic Worker was undergirded by a participation in the liturgy, including at least some of the hours of the Divine Office, and spiritual reading.

At that time, as now, some said that the Church is oppressive. With Dorothy and Peter we find it to be the opposite, that it provides the faith, the strength, the ideas to live out the freedom of the Gospel. The example of Peter Maurin and Dorothy Day gives us permission to live in a different way at Casa Juan Diego together with others who come to share in our work of hospitality to immigrants and refugees.

The freedom we have been given is a great gift to create alternatives in the culture. Alternatives to institutions and bureaucracies which inhibit vocation and destiny. Alternatives to false gospels, such as the one which makes economics, wealth, and possessions the first religion, and turns love of country into an extreme ideology.

The more we read Dorothy, the more we realize she was Catholic to the core. Dorothy had more problems with the state than she had with the Church, as a matter of fact. She was very concerned about state control and preferred that individuals take responsibility for the poor instead of the government doing it. She always recommended that it would be better to listen to Holy Mother the Church rather than Holy Mother the state.

Many ask the question, how has the Catholic Worker been able to combine its spiritual outlook with its social witness in a way that testifies to the autonomy and priority of faith, yet remain fully engaged with the most difficult and controversial issues of public life? This was the genius of Dorothy Day’s Catholicism. The answer lies in her commitment to holiness and her commitment to the poor and workers.

The Catholic Worker was a sign of hope during the Depression and later during world wars. Its vision continues to provide a potential powerful witness from the Gospel.

We present to new Catholic Workers at Casa Juan Diego some examples of how we can live out our freedom as children of God. We are free to:

• Free to wash the feet of others

• Free to be poor, not to purchase expensive cars and houses and goods

• Free to turn the other cheek.

• Free to work to share burdens, free to share work in community

• Free to go the extra mile

• Free to give up all to serve

• Free to resolve conflicts without violence

• Free to make sure sick people get to see the doctor

• Free to work for economic and social justice

• Free to care for the stranger, the immigrant, the refugee

• Free to follow and live out the will of God

Dorothy and Peter presented a different view from the prevailing ideologies. They spoke of vocation, destiny. Rather than cutting the bonds that confine us, they said, we need to be attached to our destiny. They spoke of the primacy of the spiritual, of personalism, personally acting in the world, not always waiting for the government to act, but responding personally as Christians. They insisted that Matthew 25 and the Sermon on the Mount be taken seriously.

You all know Matthew 25. It is the only place we see in Scripture that tells us how we are going to be judged on Judgment Day. In Matthew 25 (verses 31 and the following), our Lord says he will separate us into the ignoring the plight of the sheep and the goats, sheep on the right and goats on the left. To on the right he will say, Come ye blessed of my Father in heaven, into the kingdom prepared for you from all eternity, for it was you who gave me food, you gave me drink when I was thirsty, naked and you clothed me, sick and in prison and you visited me. And they will say, when, Lord, did we do that to you? And the Lord will say, what you did to the least of my brethren, you did to me. Those on the left were doomed to everlasting hellfire. It’s what happens to those who haven’t fed the hungry, clothed the naked, and visited the sick and imprisoned.

With our personal and theo-dramatic role in history, we hope not to be like the rich man who did nothing for Lazarus sitting at his gates, the rich man who hoped to be admitted to God’s heaven after ignoring the plight of the poor man at his gates. As the Scriptures tell us, if we ignore the cry of the poor, they may cry out to the Lord, and we will incur guilt. May we all take the words of the prophet Zephaniah (2:3) as our guide:

“Seek the Lord, all you humble of the earth, who have observed his law; seek justice, seek humility; perhaps you may be sheltered on the day of the Lord’s anger.”

Louise Zwick is the co-founder of Casa Juan Diego. She is the author, along with her late husband, Mark Zwick, of The Catholic Worker Movement: Intellectual and Spiritual Origins and a book about Casa Juan Diego, Mercy Without Borders (Paulist Press, 2010).

This article was originally published with the title “A Catholic Vision for Today’s World” in the Jan-Mar 2026 edition of the Houston Catholic Worker. Republished here with the author’s permission. Read more on Casa Juan Diego’s website.

References:

Apostolic Exhortation Dilexi Te of the Holy Father Leo XIV to all Christians on Love for the Poor. October 4, 2025.

Melissa Moscella, “He Who Spends Too Much Is a Robber”: Natural Law’s Stringent Norms Regarding Ownership and the Use of Property,” The New Ressourcement, Vol. 2, No. 4, Winter 2025.

Todd Walatka, Option for the Poor: Theodramatics in the Light of Liberation Theology. The Catholic University of America Press, 2017.

Texas Jesus

By Herman Sutter

Texas Jesus
walks across borders
bootless and bare
footed, face brown as leather,

He walks from Brownsville to
Amarillo on bruised heels
and blistering toes,

carrying with Him
His only tools: rough
hands and a will to walk,

El Paso to Beaumont, leaving
footprints everywhere.
Have you seen Him?

Feet still wet from the Rio,
still bloody from the
barbed wire and scrub
brush of Laredo, the barren

emptiness beyond Eagle Pass.
Have you seen Him standing at the corner

Long Point and Pech
waiting for lights to change,
waiting for cars to pass

wondering: What happened
to the Kmart? And waiting
for someone to stop

and say: Are you
okay? I saw Him once
holding a sign, asking

for work, asking for
food, asking for change.
What will you dare

when you find out
all this time He’s
been standing there

waiting? What will you do
when you find out
everywhere He went

He was always
looking for you?

Why are you still reading this?

He’s waiting.

Go.

Herman Sutter (poet, playwright, & volunteer hospital chaplain) is an award-winning essayist and poet. He is the author of the chapbook Stations (Wiseblood Books) and The World Before Grace (Wings Press) and a long-time reviewer for Library Journal. This poem was written as part of the Texas Poetry Assignment. First published online by Texas Poetry Assignment.

When we were young, the Lydia’s House co-founder, Meridith and I took a road trip up the East Coast to visit intentional Christian communities and imagine our futures. Our journey included Jubilee Partners with their care for refugees, The Simple Way with their love of water ice and street carnivals, a weekend with Liz McAlister-Barrigan with debates about the role of Christian Peacemaker teams, and time with the Baltimore Catholic Workers at Viva House. It was at the Baltimore domicile that we delighted in a mural on the side of one of their buildings pronouncing, “The World Will be Saved by Beauty.” We learned that the quote, originally attributed to Dostoevsky, was a favorite of Dorothy Day. The mural was homemade, not particularly precise and already fading, but that image is a page in my formative memory box. It left an impression that Christian redemption would not, could not, be accomplished without the beautiful.

A theme of my life lately has been holding more than one feeling, almost more than one reality, at once. Life can be awful or just mid in its exact details, and screaming behind every thought of late is war and rumors of war, forced detention, crucifixion. This past week has been a complicated one in my nuclear family: we’re navigating my 16 year old Annie’s disappointment about her schooling, my 13 year old Sam’s newly broken wrist (which may end his soccer season), and the cessation of my cancer med with support from my doctor, noting that migraines it caused aren’t really a sustainable side effect. In southern Ohio, the weather has vacillated between near summer heat with humidity that called forth baby flowers and, then suddenly, roaring storms that ripped the nascent magnolias off the tree that frames my entry door, plunging both me and the tree back into winter.

As I’ve mulled on the horizontal meeting the vertical, two worlds intersecting, I’ve had occasion to contemplate what makes up the plane of the everyday, pondering the question with my new spiritual director, Father Del. The altar of daily life can include failed cancer meds and broken bones, but I’m leaning into the idea that the foundation of the human experience is the good, the true and the beautiful. I’ve already dedicated one week to contemplating goodness, so this week I’ll pay tribute to Dorothy by turning to beauty.

Outside my office window, the daycare kids have come to play on the meticulously constructed Amish “farmhouse” style play set, a new love of all Lydia’s House diaspora children. They sit on the adjacent deck, the daycare director Amandsa between them, allowing them to indulge their toddler addictions to fruit snacks and uncrustables, like adults sneaking a glass of wine at Friday lunch. Just behind them, the driveway mural is a painting backdrop for a Seurat impression, the Norwood edition, with bright blue and red shapes and similarly vibrant flowers meeting the preschool picnic. The sun is shining, itself a simple shot of sublime, noting it’s March in Ohio and our preferred spring tone is typically gray.

A couple of Thursday nights ago, we had a leave-taking celebration for a guest who got an apartment. A new and enthusiastic meal volunteer brought a dinner that had a salad that presented as a design of food, crafted such that we wondered if it was really meant to be eaten: radish leaves interspersed with crispy romaine, peppered with tiny carrot slices. She even brought a cylinder of the “good ranch dressing.”

The guests exclaimed over the whole meal, fit for a banquet, but it was just our weeknight shelter offering. Above the buffet line and tables set with engraved napkin rings, our new “celebration banner” swayed down over babies bouncing balls and a scattering of iridescent magna-tiles. The banner’s colors are rust and aubergine, mustard and mint, thoughtfully chosen to complement the dining chairs painted navy blue, moss green and rose pink. All these colors interact with the deep-tonal hued door murals and the floral-framed “community affirmation,” an artistic offering that our German volunteer Hannah inscribed on the western wall of the dining room last summer.

Because the banner hangs low enough for a seven-year-old to grab it, we dared not risk letting it hang up over the weekend. After dinner, Meridith and I wrapped it back on its storage reel. Slowly taking down each piece, chatting as we put colorful circle after colorful circle back to rest, we were almost dancing with the floor sweeper and dishwasher, everyone working to complete the after-dinner tasks. The banner is so long, like a gangly string of three-dimensional pearls, and its care to put up and take down demands it be noticed, whispering “you can’t have something this fragile if you don’t tend to it.”

Last week, a friend dropped off soda bread at my office. I came home briefly before taking my nine-year-old Jacob to confession and laid it out next to Sam’s latest sourdough, an art he’s realizing with greater perfection weekly, today’s offering complete with petals carved into its skin, sprinkled with flour to highlight the contrast of crust and bud.

The breads made up our dinner, noting that Fridays in Lent are fast days, and life without meat at our house is, honestly, mostly carbs. When I got back from Mass, I put butter on a piece of soda bread, dotted with raisins and dried fruit pieces and plated it next to a piece of Sam’s creation. Sam pulled out a mason jar to peel off a bit of his starter, a gift for our teenage neighbor Karis, who asked for a share in this precious ransom.

Not satisfied with bread alone, Sam requested transportation to the church fish fry. I drove up and, as I walked in, I stood back from the building to look at it: its mid=century elegance with large stone portions and a terracotta roof was suddenly stunning, perhaps because of the surprising sun beams. Inside, naive style paintings of Pope Francis and the Black Jesus greeted us, as did a slew of human greeters, and an intricately crafted table of pop cans, maroon Dr. Pepper adjacent to deep brown Root Beer. The giver of drinks was an elegant, older woman with a skin tone that matched the Root Beer, her hands moving quickly to replace peeled-off drinks, intent on maintaining a visual balance in each precise line.

I’ve been grateful to Renée Roden’s Jesuit Media Lab reading group for introducing me to the early Commonweal Essays of Dorothy Day. Not typically about houses of hospitality, these pieces are slices of life from her travels and friendships. In them, one can see that the (now) servant of God appreciated life unfolding around her, in dinners and celebrations, births and funerals. She loved meeting new people, listening to music, eating delicious food, and returned to these joys even as she accompanied people in their lowest times and experienced her own “long loneliness.” She wanted to see life as beautiful, so much so that she called delight “a duty.”

I know we all hit dark nights of the soul, low points that we might blame on the devil, imbalanced mental health, cancer or, lately, Donald Trump. I’m also wondering if noting beauty is really a matter of choice and posture; if just as the universe tends toward chaos it also tends toward beauty? If even our most ardent efforts to pave paradise are always counteracted by creating visual rows of soda cans or observing the constellation of children at the playground? Is the work, then, to cultivate eyes that see, because the reality can’t help but continuously present itself, fighting through the awful, saving the world in some small way every day, compounding toward Parousia by the force of beauty’s totality— sunset upon sunset, mural upon mural.

Given the options, doesn’t it seem a better one to be attuned to this treasure in the field, looking for it even if most people don’t know or care that it’s there?

My cancer-induced headaches have lessened to not daily and mostly dulled to manageable. This week, the work is to look for beauty.

If I could, I’d time-travel and interrupt my past self in the midst of community discernment. I would point out the red flags dangling in my face. “Abby,” I’d say, “did you hear what they said?!” But past Abby had the most important prerequisite for community living: idealism. Intentional communities are utopian projects; hopefully they don’t claim to actually create utopia, but they’re meant to usher us from the world as it is to the world as it should be. And there’s no better way to crush an idealist than to plop her down in the middle of a deeply dysfunctional community.

In truth, all communities are somewhere on a Christmas-y spectrum of red to green. And everyone has different standards and deal-breakers in their assessment of a community’s health. There are questions, though, that community newbies are less likely to ask. And they need to ask. So if you want to judge the relative health of a community, here are my top red flags.

Red flag #1: Hazy governance and decision-making models.

At a conference, I once chatted to a guy who’d lived in a well-known, decades-old community. “What’s the governance model?” I asked. “They’re figuring it out,” he said. Massive red flag. What was underneath his answer? In its “un-governed” years, how had power operated in the community?

When I moved into a young community, I got the “figuring it out” answer. At the time, I was satisfied. A healthy community doesn’t need to have everything figured out, but if they’re “figuring it out,” a prospective resident ought to ask follow-up questions about how the community functions right now, in practice. Like: Who owns the building, or who’s on the lease? Who holds the money? How do house meetings run? Can you tell me about a time when the community navigated a crisis?

A sub-category of this red flag is when a group claims to use consensus but can’t define an effective consensus process. People have vague notions that consensus is the right way for communities to make decisions… but consensus is decision-making on hard mode. It takes longer and doesn’t make power dynamics disappear. Sadly, I’ve never seen consensus done very well. I know it can be done well, but if a group wants to center consensus decision-making, it must invest energy in group development and individual development.

Red flag #2: Poorly-defined leadership.

Who’s in charge? Now, it’s not necessarily bad to have a leader, especially an elected leader. It’s bad when a community claims that it doesn’t have a leader or hierarchy… but obviously does. This leader is often the founder, founding family unit, longest-tenured, oldest, or most experienced resident. I wrote about this in a piece for U.S. Catholic last fall.

Another version: It’s a red flag if a community has a semi-identified leader but downplays their influence. Many community houses are owned by one of the residents. This is a position of power. When push comes to shove, they’re the landlord. The buck stops there. I’d start to worry if I heard something like, “Susie owns the property and she’s been the only constant here over the past twenty years, but don’t worry, she’s only in charge on paper. We all have an equal voice.”

Again: If Susie is the leader of the community, that’s okay – as long as it’s official. You can decide whether to join a community with one or two designated leaders. Sometimes this makes sense, like when a couple establishes a Catholic Worker farm. They may host a series of short-term Workers, but in the end, they own the farm and a resident who stays for six months doesn’t get an equal say. But if Susie doesn’t hold any official power, you have more questions to ask. What does this say about power, communication, and governance? And you may wish to know, why has Susie been the only constant over the past twenty years?

Red flag #3: “We never fight.”

If your eyebrows go up when someone says they never fight with their significant other, your eyebrows should shoot up past your hairline if you hear this about a community. More people = more relationships. If someone says that their community never fights, they’re lying or obfuscating.

I once lived in a dysfunctional Catholic Worker house that needed more residents. It felt like we’d never get un-stuck if we didn’t find fresh blood, so we were tempted to paint ourselves in the best possible light. I had moved into the house under those shady circumstances: I was given an incomplete accounting of the house’s issues and had to unearth the rest of the mess on my own time, by which point I was in too deep. I got bitter, sure, but at that point I had motive to replicate the cycle.

When one prospective resident visited, I told him: “This place has a lot of interpersonal and organizational problems. I’m here and trying to make it work, and if you want a project, this could be a good fit. You could join and help problem-solve and rebuild. If you want to move into a functioning community where you can slot right in, though, don’t come here. Check out the other Catholic Worker houses.” He didn’t move in. A few years later, I ran into him and he thanked me.

Communities should never, ever bring in residents under false pretenses. I say this with tremendous empathy; I don’t blame the housemates who didn’t tell me every detail, because they were between a rock and a hard place. I’ve now been on both sides of that dynamic. But with the benefit of hindsight, I’d rather see a community end than draw out its miserable life through half-truths. As one of my housemates likes to say, “clear is kind.”

But you don’t want to air the dirty laundry too early, and you need to be careful of your own bias in describing community problems. If someone tells prospective residents, “Our problem is that Susie is an asshole,” that’s a red flag. If someone says, “the community is dealing with conflict about residents’ expected levels of commitment,” that’s a greener flag.

You can’t know if that’s a reasonably objective account of the community’s challenges, of course – it might leave out something important – but this description suggests an ability to describe a group dynamic without condemning one’s housemates. It creates an opportunity to ask follow-up questions. Just like in a job interview, a prospective resident should interview the community right back. Don’t be shy. If a community can’t describe a conflict with respect, how can it navigate conflict?

Red flag #4: No onboarding/orientation for new residents.

I’m not saying you should never move into an intentional community without a strong orientation process, because if I followed that advice, I never would’ve moved into any of my four communities. But a healthy community will have at least some degree of onboarding.

Catholic Workers have told me that the LA Catholic Worker has a strong summer internship program through which Workers gain both experience and education in Catholic Worker values. People enter the movement with wildly different ideas about what it means, and a basic grounding in the Aims & Means – and Catholic Worker history – helps build shared purpose and values.

One summer in grad school, I lived at a Catholic Worker house with two college interns. On July 4, the interns got the idea to decorate the dining room with patriotic garlands. When long-time Catholic Workers saw the American bling, they were livid. But the interns had no idea. No one had ever explained that patriotism, nationalism, and all their militaristic and imperial associations would be anathema to these Catholic Workers. The interns had never received any spiritual or moral formation in that part of the Catholic Worker tradition. The older Catholic Workers were wrong to blame the interns. Shared values are important, and they don’t fall from the sky.

Most of my communities have assigned a “point person” or guide for new residents. At the Fireplace, a point person has a checklist to go through with a new resident. We have shared resources like a Google Drive and a binder. Some things are labeled. A point person is on call to help their mentee learn to use the washing machine or find the Band-Aids.

New residents won’t learn everything at once. There’s a tremendous amount of information to absorb, and stuff like “where’s the bathroom?” will inevitably take precedence over shared ethics. That’s why I’m convinced that Peter Maurin’s emphasis on “clarification of thought” is so important. He’d have Catholic Workers gather weekly to learn, discuss, debate, and clarify their shared values. All communities need shared, ongoing practices that facilitate growth, bringing members closer to one another.

This list is inevitably incomplete. Red flags are sneaky, varied, and diffuse. Last summer, I appreciated this “Red flags in intentional community” piece. Check it out for more questions to ask if you’re exploring community life.

My favorite line is: “Don’t rely on vibes. Get it in writing.” If I had to identify the most toxic trend in intentional communities and other utopian projects, it’s what I like to call the vibes-based fallacy. The vibes-based fallacy will eventually get a post of its own. For now: Be an idealist who asks probing questions!

Abigail Rampone has worked as the Ministry Coordinator for Vincentian Service and Immersions at DePaul University since June 2022. In her role, she coordinates immersions that engage students in social justice, service, and community-building – locally, nationally, and internationally. Abby holds a BA in Comparative Literature from Williams College and an MDiv in Interreligious Engagement from Union Theological Seminary. She has lived at a number of Catholic Worker communities and now lives at the Fireplace Community, an intentional community on Chicago’s South Side.​

This post was originally published on Abigail’s Substack “Love in Community” with the title “Intentional Community red flags.” Subscribe to Abby’s Substack below:

Love in Community

Intentional community and religion.

By Abby Rampone

By Lincoln Morris-Winter

Paul asked me about raising children on a Catholic Worker farm and finding joy in the darkness. Not that I actually had a TED talk ready—I can riff. Those things are definitely related—very much one and the same in our lives at Little Platte Catholic Worker Farm. Dorothy Day told us you shouldn’t have kids in the Catholic Worker Movement. It seems like people, including Dorothy, went with it anyway.

I was thinking about all the anecdotes of Dorothy becoming overwhelmed and driving to the wilderness to find reprieve and solace and solidarity from the work of being on the interface of injustice and pain every day. I think there is something of a working metaphor there for at least one role that Catholic Worker Farms might be able to play—not only in the Catholic Worker Movement, but also in the intersections of all the different movements toward justice that are happening right now: in offering a space for the nervous system to decompress, in offering a space for life to flourish, for people to find reprieve.

I know so many folks here are growers or farmers or involved with raising crops or plants for food. I’m sure we have a mutual experience of people constantly barraging you with questions about how you grow things. I’ve noticed over the years that there is a real irony: people will come up to you at the market stand and say, “Oh, you know, I have my tomato and it’s just not looking the way I want it to look—it’s wilting, it’s wilting. I did this research and a guy told me maybe it’s the addition of this micronutrient or this micronutrient or this thing.” And then you respond with, “Okay, did you plant your tomato plant where it will receive adequate sunlight?” And they’re like, “Oh no, maybe—it’s kind of behind, it’s on the north side of my deck and it gets two hours in the afternoon. That’s pretty good, right?” And you’re like, “Well, that’s your problem.” And they say, “No, no, it’s probably definitely the molybdenum or some weird element that I don’t even know how you would put that back in your soil.”

All I’m trying to say is people will approach me all the time and they are so unsatisfied with the answer to their growing pains being something as basic as sunlight or water or soil that is not just gravel. They seem to be fixated upon some esoteric bit of permaculture knowledge that they need to implement.

It’s so ironic to me, because the work of gardening—it’s not difficult. The difficult part is doing the easy things every single day. When I think about finding joy in the darkness, I think of similar questions. Like, how many hours do you spend on social media every day, just exposing your nervous system to the pain and the darkness of what is happening around us? When’s the last time you were outside? Are you eating decent food?

And it makes me think about the children. So we have my family—we have two small children—and my sister’s family has two small children. So at our farm we have ten people living in a house, and four of those people are four years old or younger. So it’s crazy—you can imagine, it’s just insane. We’re only a year and a half old as a farm, but the intricacies of how our lives are formed around our children’s lives is pretty astounding.

People are kind of shocked when they come and find that out. And in addition to our two families, we have Grace and another friend, LaKiah, who are living with us. They came to us and said, “No, no, no, I want to do childcare for you voluntarily on a weekly basis.” It’s the most incredible gift you could have ever asked for.

But in so many ways our lives are revolving in different capacities around these four young beings. And the labor for us is not the labor of finding a way. People are always like, “Oh, you must be curating such a special life for your children.” And the reality is there’s nothing special about what we’re doing, because our work is letting them be themselves. And their work is the work that their little bodies are absolutely designed to do—the work of learning and observing and loving and growing and responding to some of the same stimuli that the plants around us need.

So for me, there is this irony: the labor is not how hard we are working to either shield our children from the knowledge of the violence perpetuated by their ancestors and those around them, or to know when to give them little bits of information that we know they can metabolize, and someday hope that they can put these pieces together to understand the pain and the brokenness in the world. Mostly, it really is like looking in a mirror and learning from the life of a young, healthy body what is an appropriate and proper way to look at and ask honest questions about the world.

We put on a participatory theatre event, “Brigid’s Flame: A Tale of Spring,” in cooperation with St. Isidore Catholic Worker Farm, and others in our community. It was the brainchild of Mary Kay McDermott, who lives at St. Isidore. It was a seed Mary Kay planted and the soil of our community is where it grew.

The reality is we live in a culture barren of meaningful rituals and meaningful ceremony, barren of joyful, creative events like Brigid’s Flame—bringing light to the dark winter of the year. We’re living in a culture that is haunted by the pain of our white settler genocide, our history of trauma. That is the culture that we inherit in this country.

And it is true that—I guess Martín Prechtel says that grief and praise are different sides of the same coin. And there are things that we do intentionally. We have a robust and beautiful practicing faith community, and we have in our community women who are leading us in the practice of grieving in a way that metabolizes this pain and this sickness and allows us to return to our joy and to enter into that joy in new and beautiful ways.

And it is a mystery—a holy mystery in that way. Because, like someone said earlier—I forget who it was—one of their friends was kind of freaking out because the world was falling apart. And they said, “Well, we’ve been actually living like the world’s been falling apart for our whole lives. And it’s nice that you caught up.” It’s actually a lot easier to digest when you live in a day-to-day way.

You know, life on a farm is life and death happening simultaneously and overlapping in really mysterious ways. And in similar ways, our culture cannot hide from the grief, because the grief is literally haunting us. It is making itself known. And those ancestors will not go away. They need to be honored. They need to be addressed. And grieving needs to happen. That’s a process.
I wanted to share one thing, and I asked permission to share it. It’s very nice to talk about the joy of raising small children and living on a farm, and those who have walked that path know that it doesn’t always feel that way—and it’s never going to always feel that way, and it is oftentimes a lot more complex. There are feelings like resentment and anger and pain that also happen on a day-to-day basis.

But Grace lives with us and has been an incredible co-conspirator in our community. She introduced us to a whole network of friends, and one of them was her friend Lyd. I just want to read this. Lyd left us this letter a while back. They live in Minneapolis and have been involved in a lot of the violence that is happening there right now. And they left us this note—it just blew me away:

Dear all at Little Platte, thank you all so much for continually welcoming me into your communities, routines, projects, passions, labor, learnings, and your sweet hearts. I am enlivened in new ways with each visit here, and I’m extremely grateful to be building relationships and care with all of you. I have lived in and out of intentional community spaces since 2021, and I have realized the importance of such spaces and opportunities for connection since.

The added joy and energy of being in community with children is new to me and is very easily a highlight of my year—and that’s just from one year of knowing you. I really admire the way all of you parent, and it has opened and expanded the way I see my own future. I guess I never really saw kids in my future in a serious way, and that outlook is shifting. I also have not been in proximity to religion and faith in a way that feels freeing and expansive in the way I see and feel it alive here. Lots and lots of newness and gratitude since meeting you all. Thank you, much love, and see you soon.”

I just want to share that with you all, because for everyone who is living in community in this way, there are people who are having those sentiments about you—maybe even right now, or who have in previous times experienced that love. And it’s easy to continue forward and not take the time to hear those words. I just hope the same for all of you as well.

Lincoln Morris-Winter is a co-founder of Little Platte Catholic Worker Farm, a land-based intentional Christian community in Platteville, Wisconsin, living on the ancestral land of the Ho-Chunk and Sac and Fox Nations, modeled after Peter Maurin’s “Agronomic University,” living into our covenantal values of spirituality, community, hospitality, right relationship with the land, simplicity & homemaking, non-violence, education, decolonization & anti-racism, and creativity.

Editor’s Note: This essay is from January, before the Trump administration and Israel together dropped 2,000 bombs on Iran. Claire is writing another essay on the necessity for Catholics to re-engage with the tradition of conscientious objecting as the Trump administration threatens to escalate the conflict in the Middle East. Keep an eye out for that essay in the next issue of the Radical. You can subscribe to the Radical by writing to the Ss. Francis and Thérèse Catholic Worker at theresecw2@gmail.com.

Claire writes:

The US/Israel war in Iraq is an extension of the Gaza genocide, the inevitable logic of our decades-long, heretical devotion to the gods of metal, an idolatry that now has the whole world by the throat. But God is not mocked. May God forgive us Americans for our destructiveness. May the Church, in action, as well as word, become the Eucharist we need for this hour. May the Holy Spirit guide us as we organize, resist and refuse cooperation with the killing machine.

By Claire Schaeffer-Duffy

Somewhere in my basement office are notes from an interview I conducted with an Iraq combat veteran after his talk at Yale University on war and moral injury. The US was two or three years into its war on Iraq, and I was researching combat trauma.

The soldier had manned roadblocks. He said the protocol the military employed to reduce civilian casualties sometimes proved useless, and there were occasions when troops shot at vehicles transporting fleeing families, because the drivers hadn’t understood the Americans shouting commands in their rudimentary and perhaps mispronounced Arabic.

I can’t remember the combat veteran’s answer to my question, “Why not shoot at car tires instead?” But I remember the dark circles under his eyes and his talk of using alcohol and pills to sedate his moral distress.

Prior to the Yale conversation, I interviewed Kevin and Joyce Lucey, parents of a 23-year-old Marine reservist who committed suicide less than a year after his return from Iraq. Jeffrey Lucey was with the 6th Motor Transport Battalion of New Haven, CT, in the vanguard of the March 2003 ground invasion then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld ordered.

Lucey drove a truck transporting Iraqi POWs. Early in the invasion, he joined a detachment from 6th Motors which accompanied the 29th Marine Expeditionary Unit into Nasiriyeh. The Iraqi Army’s 3rd Corps was headquartered there, and resistance in the city was fierce. Truck drivers from the 6th Battalion provided cover for the “grunts” during fire fights and joined in house-to-house searches for Iraqi soldiers.

“I have done so much immoral shit that life is never going to seem the same, and all I want to do is erase the past month, pretend that it never happened.” Lucey wrote in a letter to his girlfriend. Lucey returned from Iraq an altered man. It seemed “like a hole had been blown out of the center of him,” said his therapist. Lucey told his parents he shot two unarmed Iraqi POWs at close range. Under orders. Kevin Lucey said his son saw the humanity of his victims– the eyes of one reminded Jeffrey of his uncle – and their deaths haunted him. “Don’t you know I am a murderer,” he screamed to his sister on Christmas Eve. By June, he was dead.

“There is within most people an intense resistance to killing other people,” writes Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, a military psychologist. “A resistance so strong that, in many circumstances, soldiers in battle will die before they overcome it.” A military study of US combat soldiers in World War II found that only 15 to 20 percent shot at German or Japanese troops. Even when soldiers came under heavy fire, that percentage didn’t increase.

Grossman’s article, entitled “Hope on the Battlefield,” cites the World War II study and subsequent others that showed soldiers often act as “conscientious objectors” on the battlefield. Those findings give reason to be optimistic about human nature, he notes. Yet academia, psychiatrists and psychologists have largely ignored them. Not the US military. “Since World War II, a new era has quietly dawned in modern warfare,” Grossman writes, “an era of psychological warfare conducted not upon one’s enemies, but upon one’s own troops.” He describes the multiple methods used to overcome a soldier’s innate resistance to killing: desensitization, classical and operant conditioning, denial defense mechanisms, and repetition. At boot camp, one is trained to make killing part of muscle memory.

Grossman’s article, which he wrote in 2009 (He too was interested in combat trauma.) includes a disturbing observation from US Border Patrol agent Bill Jordan, described as “a veteran of many a gun fight.” Jordan acknowledges the natural disinclination to pull the trigger. To overcome it, he advises willing yourself “to think of your opponent as a mere target and not a human being.”

Like Lucey, Jonathan Ross, the ICE agent, who killed Renee Good in Minneapolis on January 7th, was an Iraq war veteran. He was twenty when he deployed as a gunner with the Indiana National Guard in 2004, one of the most violent years of the war. He obtained a college degree when he returned to the US then worked eight years for US Border Patrol before joining ICE in Minnesota.

Good was a poet, mother of three, and widow of an Iraq combat veteran bedeviled with PTSD. On the morning of her death, she and her partner Becca had stopped to support immigrant advocates publicly decrying yet another ICE arrest in the city. Video footage of the killing shows an unidentified ICE agent ordering Good to get out of her car, while Ross walks around to its front, filming both women with his cellphone. As Good slowly reverses and turns the car’s wheels away from him, he fires his fatal shots.

Within hours of the murder, the Trump administration accused Good of domestic terrorism, claiming she weaponized her car. But it was Ross who had been weaponized, his war-time conditioning chillingly evident that morning. Three shots. Two aimed at Good’s head. It took him just six seconds to extinguish her well-loved life.

The chickens have not merely come home to roost, they have come to claw at us as the country marches hellbent on the path of forever war. We know its landscape—another generation of militarized and mangled men walking among us and everyone—children in Gaza, migrants at the border, fishermen in the Caribbean, the poor, the undocumented, and the compassionate moms and poets who defend them—deemed an “illegal” or “terrorist.” In this fascistic time of lies and de-humanization, even the gunned- up men are victims, conditioned to kill for the powerful. Ross “followed his training,” DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said of Good’s murder.

A makeshift memorial marks the spot where Good was killed. The crosses, votive candles, and photos of her perched atop heaps of flowers reminded me of similar memorials that filled the streets of lower Manhattan in the days following the plane strikes on the World Trade Towers. What a different present we might have if the US had not rushed to war in the aftermath of that devastation.

Minnesotans have held several prayer vigils at the Good memorial. In these times, all of us need to pray ceaselessly. On our knees and in the streets. The violence that has burdened Americans of color and the many countries we have bombed over the decades is choking the life out of our democracy. Few can breath. O Lord, deliver us from the murderous way and lead us to the path that gives life to all. Ω

Claire Schaeffer-Duffy is a Catholic Worker at Ss. Francis and Thérèse Catholic Worker in Worcester, Massachusetts. This article will appear in the October/November edition of The Catholic Radical. Subscribe to The Catholic Radical online.

By Art Laffin

Despite numerous calls for a diplomatic solution to the conflict between the U.S. and Israel with Iran—even before the June 2025 attack on Iran by Israel and the U.S.—the Trump Administration, without Congressional approval, has initiated a war against Iran. No matter the shifting justifications for this war given by the Trump Administration, or what one thinks about the Iranian government, this war is an unspeakable affront against God and a crime against humanity, which must be absolutely condemned and stopped now!

In talks held between U.S. and Iranian officials prior to the war, the Trump Administration called on Iran to capitulate to U.S. demands or face military reprisals. U.S. officials were not pursuing a true diplomatic solution, but instead seeking their own ambitions, and the imperial ambitions of the nuclear-armed state of Israel.

The jointly initiated U.S.-Israeli war against Iran resulted in the deaths of Iran’s supreme leader and other military officials. To date (March 11) more than 1,300 Iranians have been killed, including 175 school children and staff who died on February 28, 2026, from the U.S.-Israel bombing of the Shajarah Tayyebeh girls’ school in Minab, Iran.

More than 5,000 sites have been struck, and more than 10,000 civilian sites across Iran have been damaged in U.S.-Israeli attacks.

Numerous people have been injured and displaced. Iran has responded with retaliatory strikes in the region. Casualties also include: eight U.S. soldiers, thirteen Israelis, fourteen from different Gulf states, and over 570 in Lebanon.

As a result of Israeli and U.S. bombings of oil depots, Tehran residents have reported toxic air and soot covering streets and cars. These toxins have caused throat pain and burning eyes. “Damage to petroleum facilities in Iran risks contaminating food, water and air — hazards that can have severe health impacts especially on children, older people, and people with pre-existing medical conditions,” the director of the World Health Organization said.

The financial cost of the war is staggering: the war is costing up to an estimated $1 billion a day.

Instead of heeding United Nations and papal appeals, the calls of other nations and various faith leaders, peace organizations, and people of conscience to stop the war and pursue a diplomatic solution, the Trump Administration and Israeli government have rather intensified it.

This war has now escalated into a wider Middle East conflict, and Israel has expanded its military intervention in Lebanon. The Trump Administration has called for the unconditional surrender of Iran and has warned that “Iran may face complete destruction and certain death.”

Secretary of War Hegseth asserted that the Department of Defense will continue its relentless bombing of Iran: “Death and destruction from the sky. All day long.” U.S. pilots “have maximum authorities granted personally by the president and yours truly.” ...Rules of engagement “are designed to unleash American power, not shackle it...We can sustain this fight easily, for as long as we need to...We will take all the time we need to make sure we succeed.”

The Pentagon and Israeli military are also now considering deploying special forces into Iran to secure its stockpile of highly enriched uranium.

Christian Nationalists have cited biblical justification for what is described as a “Holy War.” A combat-unit commander told non-commissioned officers at a briefing on March 2 that the Iran war is part of God’s plan and that President Donald Trump was “anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth,” according to independent journalist Jonathan Larsen, as published on Substack.

The Military Religious Freedom Foundation, an organization that has been working against religious extremism in the United States military for two decades, has reported more than 200 new complaints since the initial strikes against Iran, with members across all services claiming that high-ranking officers are tying the mission overseas to fulfilling a Christian prophecy. That complaint was made by a non-commissioned officer and provided to the Military Religious Freedom Foundation. More than 95% of the foundation’s members are Christians.

On March 5, 2026, some pastors and faith leaders were hosted by the White House to pray for the president and military as they wage war against Iran.

To be clear, there can be no Gospel justification for this war. It is a heresy to claim so. Jesus commands His followers for all time to reject all that is contrary to God’s commandment to love our neighbor. Moreover, He commands us to love our enemies and never to kill, forever put away the sword, to renounce idolatry and empire, and resist all violence and killing.

Furthermore, Jesus commands us “to take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your neighbor’s eye.” As the only country who has ever used nuclear weapons, and which has since threatened to use them again against its adversaries, the United States must take the log out of its own eye and repent for the nuclear sin and its warmaking. The U.S. cannot legitimately call to account the wrongdoing of others until it first repents for its own wrongdoing.

In the words of Pope Francis, “war is a sacrilege.” Pope Francis also asserted that the very possession of nuclear weapons is immoral.

In light of the perilous Iran war, the words of Pope Francis need to be heeded by all people of faith. In April 2022, Pope Francis published his book Against War: The Courage to Build Peace.

In the introduction, Francis writes:

War is a sacrilege that wreaks havoc on what is most precious on our earth: human life, the innocence of little ones, the beauty of creation...war is madness, war is a cancer that feeds off itself, engulfs everything... Every war represents not only a defeat of politics but also a shameful surrender in the face of the forces of evil...

I have spoken of World War III, saying that we are already living it, though only in pieces. Those pieces have become bigger and bigger...So many wars are going on in the world right now...

When people allow themselves to be devoured by this monster represented by war everyone loses...we destroy God’s creatures, we commit sacrilege and prepare a future of death for our children and grandchildren...Greed, intolerance, ambition for power, violence are motives that advance the decision for war, and these motives are often justified by a war ideology that forgets the immeasurable dignity of human life, of every human life, and the respect and care we owe it...War is pure madness, its only goal is destruction, and it develops and grows through destruction...If we had memory, we would know that war, before it reaches the front lines, must be stopped in hearts. Hate, before it is too late, must be eradicated from hearts. And in order to do so, we need dialogue, negotiation, listening, diplomatic capacity and creativity, far-sighted politics capable of building a new system of coexistence that is no longer based on weapons, on the power of weapons, on deterrence...There are millions of people who do not aspire to war, who do not justify war, but ask for peace...Wars must be stopped and they will only be stopped if we stop “fueling” them.

U.S. military and nuclear policy endanger the world, not Iran’s potential nuclear capability, which the Trump Administration uses to justify its military actions and claims to have “obliterated” after its attack last June. The Trump Administration’s military action against Iran marks yet another deadly chapter of U.S. aggression in the Middle East, and has striking similarities to the war the U.S. has previously waged against Iraq. In both instances, false claims regarding potential nuclear threats posed by Iraq and now Iran were used to justify the attacks by the U.S. Administration. These are manufactured wars based on fabricated justifications.

During the first Trump Administration, the U.S. withdrew from the Iran Nuclear Deal and the INF Treaty with Russia. There would never have been a manufactured crisis of the U.S. attack against Iran last June, or now, if the Iran Nuclear Deal had still been in place.

Moreover, in its 2019 Doctrine for Joint Nuclear Operations, policymakers from the Trump Administration declared that a limited nuclear war could be waged and won. This doctrine was the latest manifestation of a long-held existing Pentagon policy positing that the U.S. must be prepared at all times to use whatever military force is necessary, including nuclear weapons, to protect its vital interests in the world.

On March 5th, a prayer service calling for an end to the war against Iran was held outside the Cannon House Office Building across from the U.S. Capitol (see attached photo). During the service, two veterans spoke: Anthony Aguilar, a retired Army Lieutenant Colonel and Special Forces Officer with the Green Beret who served for 25 years, and Josie Guilbeau, a former Army All Source Intel Analyst who served for 17 years. As Catholics, they both condemned the war against Iran as immoral and illegal and demanded that the U.S. and Israel stop it immediately.

On March 7, Chicago Cardinal Cupich issued a statement criticizing a social media video posted by the White House Friday featuring footage from the ongoing war in Iran spliced with scenes from action movies. He stated:

A real war with real death and real suffering being treated like it’s a video game — it’s sickening.” He also noted that the “moral crisis we are facing is not just a matter of the war itself, but also how we, the observers, view violence, for war now has become a spectator sport or strategy game.

And on March 9, Washington Cardinal Robert McElroy asserted that war in Iran is not “morally legitimate.”

The Iran war is immoral and illegal and Christians should not participate in it. They should heed the command of Jesus and follow the example of St. Maximillian and St. Oscar Romero. March 12 marks the martyrdom of St. Maximillian, a 21-year-old North African who refused to serve in the Roman army because of his faith and was beheaded in 295 AD. March 24 marks the martyrdom of Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero.

In his sermon on March 23, 1980, the day before he was assassinated while celebrating the Eucharist, Archbishop Romero proclaimed: “...Against any order a man may give to kill, God’s law must prevail, “You Shall Not Kill.” ...No soldier is obliged to obey an order contrary to the law of God. No one is obliged to obey an immoral law.”

We need to act on St. Romero’s admonition. Moreover, soldiers should refuse to fight and kill and disobey immoral and unlawful orders, especially now regarding the Iran war.

Christians, Muslims and Jews are all descendants of Abraham and children of God. During this Holy Season of Lent and Ramadan, and as the Holy Days of Passover are approaching from April 1-9, peace should be waged, not war. Church leaders and all people of faith and conscience must urgently demand that the Trump Administration and those members of Congress who support war and regime change in Iran stop the war now and, along with Israel, pursue a path of peace with Iran.

Dr. King exhorts us: “The choice today is...either nonviolence or nonexistence.”

Art Laffin is a member of the Dorothy Day Catholic Worker, WDC and a Pax Christi USA 2016 Teacher of Peace. He is the author of the new edition of “The Risk of the Cross: Living Gospel Nonviolence in the Nuclear Age.”

An edited version of this piece appeared on Pax Christi USA, with the title: “Stop the US-Israeli war against Iran.” It appears here with the permission of the author.

“Women have always been part of the Jesus movement,” said Michelle Sherman, director of Pax Christi USA. Sherman was one of the panelists at the Dorothy Day Guild’s International Women’s Day panel on Sunday, March 8.

Moderated by Magdalena Muñoz Pizzulic, the Research Fellow for the Dorothy Day Guild and a member of the St. Peter Claver Catholic Worker community in South Bend, the panel discussed the witnesses of “the women who stayed”: Catholic women working for justice all over the world.

Sherman shared a quote from the April 2021 statement “A Feminist Vision of Genuine Security,” by the International Women’s Network Against Militarism:

We define militarism as a system of beliefs, political priorities and economic investments. Militarism includes the activities of corporations that produce and sell weapons, the role of state militaries–including state-sanctioned violence, martial law, repression, extra-judicial killings, military coups, and military dominance within governments–as well as non-state militias. Militarism is shored up by patriarchy and reinforces violent masculinity. Military sexual violence is a manifestation of this synergy between militarism and patriarchy. […] Genuine security requires the following guarantees: that the environment can sustain life; people’s basic needs are met; human dignity is respected; people’s sovereignty is assured; and society is organized so as to prevent avoidable harms.

More than 200 participants logged in to listen to Sherman, Sr. Helen Prejean, a death penalty abolition advocate and two Catholic Workers share their stories of living as women in a patriarchal world and working for peace, justice, and equality—often inspired by their fellow women. Sr. Prejean spoke about her prolific ministry on death row, dramatized in the 1995 film “Dead Man Walking.”

Sr. Prejean spoke out against the conditions of women in prisons and on death row, and told the story of a woman whom she had been corresponding with on death row for nearly two decades. She spoke out against the “designer death penalty,” where the death penalty is legal in some cases. She said that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states unequivocally in Article 3 that “simply by being a person we have an inalienable right to life.” The State, Sr. Prejean said, had no right to chip away at that innate dignity, and that we could not let fellow humans get cordoned off into disposable persons by the state: “We can never give [the state] that power,” she said.

Clare Grady, of the Ithaca Catholic Worker and a Plowshares peace activist, talked about organizing with Native women in Upstate New York on mining, environment and the nuclear weapons. “On the western door of Haudenosaunee territory is the Seneca people, and I’m grateful to know two Seneca women, Agnes Williams and Maria Mabie, who have been working to clean up West Valley, the nuclear storage place that was put in by our federal government back in the 60s,” Grady said. The West Valley nuclear site was leaking radioactivity into the surrounding waterways, leading to high rates of cancer among the Seneca people there.

In response, the Seneca Nation began an annual earth walk, and began an Indigenous Women’s Initiative. “We’re all affected by radioactivity, but Indigenous people are on the front line of that,” Grady said.

Grady talked about her nuclear activism, but how, for her, the word activist does not resonate as much as the word “organizer.” She described her first Plowshares action at Griffiths Airforce Base in 1983 as “a chiropractic alignment” on a spiritual level. “My relationships to the weapon, the wicked systems that they enforce, and my creator,” changed. “My heart knew that this would be, like, the end of creation as we knew it,” she said.

Sitting in trial with her sister and brother, she shared her realization that “the role of the courts was to defend, protect the weapons.” She was labeled part of a “terrorist organization” for her participation in the action. Her second Plowshares action came 35 years later, at Kings Bay Naval Base in St. Mary’s Georgia. One of those Trident subsmarines with their nuclear payload could kill millions, billions of people, she said. “I understood it differently as a woman in my 60s that these weapons are not just deadly if they’re used, if they’re launched, but I really appreciated Daniel Ellsberg image of how these weapons are used every day, just like a cocked gun,” Grady said. “If you hold a gun to someone’s head, even if you never pull the trigger, you are using that gun. That’s how those weapons are used, and that’s what we can see right now. It’s… we are the number one bully on the planet. We are the number one gangster, is how I call it”.”

Grady described her actions as “manifestations,” sacramental acts of faith that echoed her own transformed understanding of nuclear weapons and the world. “All the women I’ve ever been in prison and jails with are living the legacy of the big crimes of genocide, enslavement, and capitalism. So… That is an internal spiritual adjustment. No one becomes my project then. I’m not here to just help you get like I’m in prison for one thing, to learn and to experience what it’s like to be treated less than human.”

So, these kind of things in this day and age, you know, just this word solidarity is very significant. It’s like, I’m… my body and my heart and my soul and my children and my… it’s just a little bit closer if… because I live in this white skin and so much privilege.

that I don’t have to have had that experience, or that live in this geography right now. But that’s what nuclear… non-violent symbolic disarmament, uh, has meant for me.

And, um… Thank you. And so it brings me into community and different… I would say better relationship with my sisters that are in prison. And then when I come out, that’s part of what the organizing that I do today. Thank you.

Brenna Cussen Anglada of St. Isidore Catholic Worker Farm in Cuba City, Wisconsin, spoke about her solidarity witness in Palestine last fall for five weeks with the International Solidarity Movement through Meta Peace Team.

Her first time in Palestine was over 20 years before with a group of other Catholic Workers. She had returned several times over the subsequent five years, but she had not been back to Palestine since 2009.

Nevertheless, part of her inspiration to living in the Catholic Worker farm was the Palestinian farmers she met in the early 2000s. “I saw communities, families, men, women, children, who so identified with the land that they loved—they were the land, the land was them,” she said in the Zoom panel. “The land was someone they were willing to defend: they were the land, the land was them,” she added, she was inspired by their commitment to resisting displacement and loss of land “at great cost to themselves,” she said.

“I had never experienced a love for place like that,” Cussen Anglada said. She shared how Palestinians are resisting the occupation through sumud_{, or} steadfastness. She shared the story of one Palestinian woman living in Hebron, Al-Kahlil, in Arabic, meaning city of friendship.

There’s Israeli settlement right in the heart of Hebron. The Palestinians who live inside this restricted area are forced to walk through military checkpoints just to get to school, work or grocery shopping. “They’re not allowed to drive cars in their own neighborhood, even though it’s their own neighborhood,” Cussen Anglada said, because of the militarized border, soldiers with machine guns, and checkpoints around and above their homes.

She met an artist and a resistor to the occupation, living in her house in the middle of the checkpoints with her husband and their three children. Fifteen years ago, her husband was killed when Israeli soldiers fired so many tear gas canisterrs in the home that he died. “Since then, she’s received many threats, death threats, she’s received offers of large sums of money to leave,” Cussen Anglada said.

“Israelis want to make it so awful for us here that we choose to leave. They want to make our lives so difficult for us that we choose to leave,” Cussen Anglada said that Paletinians told them.

We’re not leaving. You can offer me as much money as you want, and threaten me, and we are not leaving, and… I might have to wait at a checkpoint for an hour every day, both in and out, um, and you might harass me and make my life and I’m not leaving, because this is who I am, this is my home, this is my land, and I’m staying, and she’s an incredible artist, and she welcomes internationals into her home to tell her story, and there’s countless women like this.

Women like this one in Hebron brave administrative detention, where Israel’s government can hold a Palestinian in jail for six months without charge. In prison, they are at extreme risk of physical and sexual abuse, the United Nations, Israeli human rights organization BTSELEM, and the Committee to Protect Journalists have reported.

“She’s not going to demonstrations or going out there and making her voice loudly heard, but she is not leaving,” Cussen Anglada said.

Cussen Anglada described their participation in solidarity witnesses at Palestinian olive harvests. She described the violence of the Israeli military against unarmed observers. “There were 60 of us solidarity activists,” she said. “We’re just there to harvest our olives in solidarity with Palestinians and the soldiers tried to stop us using tear gas and sound bombs,” Cussen Anglada recalled. “Then we were ambushed by several dozen masked settlers who just opened live fire with automatic weapons on all 150 of us who were out there, Palestinians and solidarity activists alike.”

She told the tragic story of Muhammed, a 9-year-old boy shot point-blank by Israeli snipers as he was playing soccer. They met his mother, living in a village near Hebron. Despite this horrendous injustice and the mother’s grief, Cussen Anglada said, she also felt Muhammed mothers’ steadfastness, sumud, her desire to share her son’s story, to share her grief.

Cussen Anglada recommended learning more about Palestine and what you can do at the Palestinian-led International Solidarity Movement. Several voices in the chat also recommended Christians for a Free Palestine.

But in the United States, Cussen Anglada lifted up the example of women who are working on land justice and trying to repair the catastrophic human and environmental devastation of 500 years of genocide and destruction colonizers in the United States inflicted on Native Americans.

Cussen Anglada highlighted the work of religious sisters who have emphasized their identity as the church to repair the sins caused by the church. Even though the Vatican officially repudiated the Doctrine of Discovery—which supported the colonization of the Americas—in 2023, “that doesn’t undo the damage that’s been wrought for 500 years,” Cussen Anglada said. Religious communities like the Sisters of St. Joseph in Brentwood, New York, who partner with the women of the Shinnecock Nation to clean up their water and the Franciscan Sisters of Perpetual Adoration in La Crosse, Wisconsin, who returned land to the Lac du Flambeau Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians in northern Wisconsin are examples of religious women putting the verbal rejection of the Doctrine of Discovery into action.

As women in the Catholic Church, Cussen Anglada said that “we could leave […] or we could stay and say that we need to be part of the repair that happens.”

The following text is taken from a talk given by Dan Gunther at the February 2026 Catholic Worker Farm Gathering in Luck, Wisconsin. Dan and his wife, Margaret, have been long-time friends and collaborators with Mike Miles and Barb Kass of Anathoth Community Farm in Luck, Wisconsin. For nearly four decades, the Gunthers have “walked a parallel path” with the Catholic Worker on their own land, bridging the gap between faith-based justice and regenerative agriculture.

In his address, Dan reflected on the “war on the land” and the quiet colonization of rural America. He also offered a “roadmap for repair,” calling on us to cultivate communities of hospitality and resistance as the only meaningful response to our current ecological and social crises.

By Dan Guenthner

I attended the last time Barb and Mike hosted this event a few years ago. The stories I heard that day from the Valve Turners and others were so inspirational and gave me courage to work harder for peace within my own life and community. I have so much admiration for all of you and for what you are doing. As Catholic Workers, you are immersing yourselves in a life of community, hospitality, and peacemaking. You are helping to create new and lasting alternatives to the dominant culture. Thank you for your example and witness.

The timing of this gathering could not have come at a more important moment in our lives and in the civic life of our country. I can’t remember another moment that has been filled with both overwhelming sadness and disbelief, and also a moment that has revealed so many daily acts of mercy, love, and compassion for others.

So here we are together, trying to make sense of what to do knowing what we know about our world. So many lines have been blurred and erased, so many preconceived notions of civility and order have been challenged, so many fears and questions have been left unanswered. Yet, amidst all of the cruelty unfolding before our eyes, this moment has also shown that the light will find the cracks.

The crisis in the Twin Cities and throughout Minnesota has clearly demonstrated for me that things that we take for granted can so easily be taken from us, and our only response is to take a stand for what is just and right. The community response to this crisis—through singing resistance, candlelight vigils, marches, and mutual aid to our neighbors—is in many ways creating some much-needed clarity on what we are called to do at this moment. This crisis is teaching us what ultimately matters is how we treat each other and that peacemaking is believing, against all odds, that there is another way.

Margaret and I are walking a parallel path with all of you. For the past 37 years, we have dedicated ourselves to many of the same tenets that have guided the Catholic Worker Movement for the past ninety years. Our farm grew out of the Community of St. Martin, a Minneapolis-based Lutheran peace and justice community rooted in simplified living and advocating for nonviolent action. Our farm has been a place for not only growing food for our members, but also for those in our community who do not have access to food grown with care. We have dedicated ourselves to creating a place for experiencing community and beauty. We have tried to nurture a deeper connection to the earth by hosting young interns seeking a life that is more grounded. We have worked hard to create a place that welcomes the stranger. Daily we strive to be more intimately connected to the life forms, both seen and unseen, that make up the ecological web of life around us. I can’t think of a more necessary and worthy calling than to immerse ourselves so deeply in the work of healing the earth.

The world is in need of so much healing if we are to counter the constant weight of militarism, consumerism, and the erosion of our democracy, civic institutions, and the fraying social fabric of our country. We don’t have to look far to see the many faces of injustice, discrimination, and neglect around us.

Some injustices, however, are not so easy to recognize.

The war on the land is an example of a low-intensity conflict being waged against nature and the biological foundations of life on this planet.

The war on the land is cloaked in the narrative of “feeding the world.”

The war on the land is hidden behind patented life forms, intensive synthetic inputs, and the illusion of abundance.

The war on the land is waged through the inhumane treatment of animals.

The casualties of this war on the land are often unseen and out of sight.

We are experiencing an unprecedented decline in global insect populations due to the indiscriminate use of systemic insecticides, with native pollinators and beneficial insects seen as mere collateral damage.

Or undocumented workers who live and work in the shadows with limited rights and few options for living a life of dignity.

Or the injustice of an economic system that keeps farmers buried in debt in support of our cheap food policy.

The battleground for this war is increasingly being waged in rural communities across this country. As retired agricultural economist John Ikerd writes, “We are the only country on earth that has colonized ourselves.”

This past November, we witnessed this colonization firsthand as we drove to New Mexico to visit Margaret’s longtime friend and college roommate. As we drove through one dying Western Kansas town after another, we began to ask, “Where are the people, the schools, the churches that once made these towns so vibrant and alive?” We saw enormous mounds of corn piled on the ground from yet another bumper crop, yet the farms looked tired and poor and the towns looked neglected and hollowed out, with the capital and wealth that was generated having gone elsewhere.

The natural world and the biological systems that support life are beginning to show increasing signs of strain and abuse. The longer we farm, the more it becomes clear that we are not going to bioengineer our way out of our current ecological crisis. Feeding ourselves will require learning that the health and wellbeing of all humanity is directly tied to the health and vitality of the soil.

We are being called to create a new way of feeding ourselves and our communities without further diminishing the regenerative capacity of Earth.

It is not just the biological systems that are frayed and stretched to their natural limits. Countless stewards of the land who have dedicated their lives to living closer to the ground are also under considerable stress.

Where are the Rural Chaplains of America when we need them most? This non-denominational group grew out of the need to address the staggering number of farm foreclosures brought about by the farm crisis of the 1980s. They created rapid-response teams across the Midwest and elsewhere who were available to listen to the stories of those in crisis. In some cases, they were able to offer limited financial assistance. But their mission was to rekindle a sense of hope in the hardworking farm families who fell victim to economic forces beyond their control. The Rural Chaplains of America disbanded more than two decades ago. I think it is time to train a new generation of listeners to address climate anxiety and the fallout from the continued economic collapse of rural communities across this country.

So let us roll up our sleeves and set about the work of repair. I believe what many of you are doing through establishing Catholic Worker farms across the Midwest and the country can be a model for healing our planet and our communities. I know that the work is often daunting and challenging. But I see your example as a beacon of light that is reaching others who are looking for a lasting alternative for right livelihood and peaceful resistance.

With the historical example of the Catholic Worker Movement as a foundation, together let us put down deeper roots and create new ways of relating to each other and the earth. We have a 90-year roadmap for how to live lives rooted in the Gospel—lives of healing and compassion, lives of action and vision.

Here is some of what we know about what healing and repair might look like:

Repair is easier within the context of community. Few things are as counter-cultural at this moment than establishing physical communities where we can live, work, and worship together. Working together is our only hope for combatting the forces that daily divide us from each other. Many people are looking for community in the wrong places. I believe that the Catholic Worker model can offer meaningful alternatives for lasting connections rooted in community.

Repair and healing have always been rooted in hospitality. Few things break down barriers and contribute to healing more than sharing a meal with someone who shows up unexpectedly at our door. The Gospel message is so clear that our purpose here is to be Christ for each other. Let love and compassion counter the forces at work in our country and world that require proof of citizenship for those seeking relief.

Repair will require new expressions of spiritual practice. As mainline church attendance continues to decline, we know that many people are looking for new spiritual practice and expression to make sense of the world around them. Catholic Worker communities are offering a language for how to talk about spiritual needs in new ways. We need new rituals, new songs, and new ways of living sacramental lives in service to others.

Repair will require us to continue showing up and shining the light of truth on injustices and economic domination in our communities and around the world. Rural people are beginning to find their voices through “No Kings” rallies and standing with neighbors on sidewalks in small towns to quietly offer an alternative voice to accepting economic injustices and continued colonization of their communities. As Catholic Worker members, you are playing an important role in helping to empower this growing movement of resistance.

Few forms of repair are more urgent than finding ways to address climate change in real and meaningful ways. Rejecting consumerism is an important first step to learning how to live within our planet’s biological limits. We can offer an alternative for how to create a more grounded and meaningful life through unburdening ourselves from the unnecessary clutter that distracts us from addressing the planet’s most pressing needs.

Repair will require us to decouple militarism from food production. Our food system is in urgent need of repair. We need more gardeners and farmers who are able to offer an example that we can feed ourselves without poisoning our environment. We need to inspire others to seek out alternative food sources and reject the idea that an industrialized food system is the only option.

It is easy to be overwhelmed with the weight of the world at this moment. But being here with you, celebrating 90 years of the Catholic Worker Movement, reinforces for me that dedicating ourselves to peacemaking has been, and will continue to be, our only hope.

You can learn more about Common Harvest Farm or reach out to Dan at the farm’s website.

The 2026 Catholic Worker Farm Gathering in Luck, Wisconsin included a panel discussion. Among the presenters was Sara Freid of the Lake City Catholic Worker. Sara and her husband, Paul, have raised three girls on the farm and have been joined in community by a number of other Catholic Workers as well as some long-term guests. Although the farm supports itself in part by growing the ingredients for their homemade kombucha, Sara’s talk focused on the challenges and joys of doing guest hospitality in a farm context.

What follows is a lightly edited transcript of her talk.

By Sara Freid

I’ve heard from a lot of people already this weekend—people who do hospitality, people who offer hospitality, and people who are interested in doing that. Hospitality is something that’s integral to the Catholic Worker. Paul and I have found that it’s really core to who we are.

We lived at the Winona Catholic Worker for three to four years, and now we’ve been at our Lake City Catholic Worker for almost 20 years. We have been doing hospitality all of that time—even before then—offering space for people who need a place to stay. I want to share a few stories about what doing hospitality looks like on our farm, because doing hospitality on a farm is very different than doing it in a house of hospitality in the city.

When folks stay with us, most often they stay for longer than a year. At that point they become part of our family. They become integrated into our farm life.

We’ve heard people talk about this idea of tension within the Catholic Worker—tension between hospitality, community, and resistance or peace work. They kind of pull at each other, right? If you’re away from the community doing peace work, then other people are picking up what you would be doing at the community. If you are offering hospitality, it affects different things. If somebody’s staying at your house, are you going to go to a peace vigil? Those different things are held in tension.

I would say that at our farm, we hold those things in tension—specifically community, hospitality, and then farm work being the act of resistance. Because growing things, growing food, good food, and taking care of the land is an act of resistance. Those three things are held in tension.

There’s a story that exemplifies this to the utmost. Sundays are our family days. We hold them pretty sacred. This particular Sunday, a number of years ago, Paul was meeting with somebody to do some marriage prep. So that goes along with our community work, right? He’s doing marriage prep.

Then along came our goat, who decided to give birth on this very day. So myself and the girls are out helping with the birthing of two beautiful little goats. We didn’t know how long this was going to take. Paul is over there talking about marriage prep for this wedding coming up. We’re over here doing birthing of goats.

The third one—hospitality—comes along when a mother dropped off her twenty-year-old son at the end of our driveway and said, “They’ll help you,” and then drove away.

Now, this was a mother who had called us, and Paul said very specifically, “We need to talk to your son to make sure he wants to stay here. Don’t just drop someone off. We need to talk to the person directly.” Well, she ignored that and dropped him off on the day that Paul’s doing marriage prep, I’m helping birth these goat kids, and here comes this twenty-year-old down the driveway with his big backpack saying, “Um, I’m supposed to stay here?”

And we’re like, “Okay, alright.” So, there’s this tension. He ended up staying with us for probably nine months. We try to do months to a year, and we figured it out. We figure those things out—not in the very prettiest way, but they get done. And that’s just part of what we do. That was an example of all of that tension.

We’ve done a lot of different kinds of hospitality. Another story: a police officer from the local community was working with this gentleman who had just gotten out of jail and was helping him try to figure out what he was doing next. No apartments would take him because he had just gotten out of jail. So he was living in his car. This police officer knows us and what we do and said, “Can he come and stay with you?” Absolutely.

We talked to him on the phone directly, and then he came and stayed with us. He arrived on Good Friday. Well, on Good Friday at our house, we don’t use electricity. So he got there and we were eating supper in the dark, with candles on our table. Imagine this, right? Eggs, salad, and chips with a family or a group of people you have never met in your life. And somebody said, “Oh yeah, this place is a great place for you to stay.”

We laughed about that a lot afterward. He ended up staying with us for two years. I give him lots of props for being courageous, for sticking around.

During those two years, we also picked up somebody who was walking down the middle of the road. Paul and our two youngest were driving back home, and Paul saw this guy walking in the middle of the road and thought, “Hmm, something’s wrong with this guy.” We pulled over and said, “What’s up?”

He said, “I just don’t know what to do. I want to die. I hope a car will hit me.”

Paul said, “Hop in the car.” We brought him to our barn, and bless this gentleman who was staying with us—he was the one who gave him the most hospitality. He was the one who reached out to him and said, “Hey, these guys are safe. These people are not crazy.” After this man had sat with us in the dark with candles, our guest was the one who was able to extend that hospitality. So it was really a beautiful thing. This guy stayed with us for just a few hours. That’s all he needed, I think. He just needed to be safe and with us.

We have another woman staying with us who we’ve known and who has stayed with us three times in the last seven years. She came to us—everything has gone wrong, a lot of abuse in the past—and she just needed to get a foothold. So she stayed with us for a little while, went off someplace, came back. Then she got married, and she asked Paul to walk her down the aisle, which was a beautiful thing. I had COVID during that time, so I couldn’t even go to the wedding.

I tell you this because people who stay with us become intertwined with our family. She is unfortunately divorced now, but back with us again, dealing with a brain aneurysm, dealing with the aftermath of an attempted suicide, and in a very good place right now. I’m just going to let that one sit like that.

We’ve also done hospitality for a gentleman who was living in a trailer of his own, staying at a piece of property. The person sold the property and said he needed to be out within three days. He had a lot of medical issues, so he had been in and out of the nursing home for rehabilitation. The hospital and nursing home reached out to us and said, “Do you have space for this trailer to come out there?”

So he came out, saying he was going to stay for maybe a month or two. He ended up staying in his trailer for approximately two years. Then he got diagnosed with cancer and needed to go through cancer treatment. His sister, way out of town, had health issues and couldn’t help him. His half-brother said, “I’m not going to”—they had that past. His kids were estranged.

We said, “Well, we can handle that. Move into the house, though, because we can’t care for you in this trailer.” So he moved in. Through cancer treatment—and he had another heart attack and other things—he and his doctors decided that he would enter hospice care.

Once again, there was nobody to do hospice care, and we weren’t going to send him back to the nursing home or the hospital to do hospice. So, we decided as a family—though our kids probably just got dragged along—that we were going to provide hospice care for this gentleman.

Before they decided to do hospice care, the care we were providing was like nursing home care at our farm. Remember the tension of hospitality, community, and farm work? We looked ahead to the next year and said, “If this is the only thing we do this next year—brew kombucha and usher [our guest] into the next chapter of his life—then that would be a success.” And that was the year we had to decide about that tension, which one was going to give.

He passed away in February of that year, so he was in hospice for just a couple of weeks. But it felt like a lot longer before then. He would fall asleep on the phone when he was calling the nurse. There was a lot of management. But I will also say it was very beautiful and challenging.

The day that he died, his family was there. We were able to provide a neutral space for them to work through things. We were setting up for the kombucha stand, and Paul was helping someone who had driven down the snowmobile path thinking it was a driveway. Esther made a sign to let people know, “Be gentle with us.” It was a challenging day, but also a joyful day, because [our guest] had been accompanied.

I’ll end by saying that my mom and dad moved in a year and a half ago. They’re in their 80s. They sold their house and built an addition onto our house, so that is another way of offering hospitality. My mom had some small strokes this last summer that we carried through, and my dad had some medical issues that we had to carry through. Multiple, multiple ways of offering hospitality. Hard, difficult, but worth it—so, so worth it to do that kind of work.

I love talking about hospitality. I love sharing my experiences. If anybody is interested in any of these different ways, I’m happy to talk more about that. And I’ll just say, as a little note, the hospice part of it has really got me thinking, and that is something I am considering moving forward—to do more hospice.

If you haven’t visited the Lake City Catholic Worker Farm website, you should click on over there to see some of their many very cool projects and initiatives. Under “About Us,” visit the “Cool Projects on the Farm” section, or visit the “Farm School” section to learn more about their educational outreach.

By Mattie Jenkins

“Love for the Lord, then, is one with love for the poor. The same Jesus who tells us, ‘The poor you will always have with you’ (Mt 26:11), also promises the disciples: ‘I am with you always’ (Mt 28:20). We likewise think of his saying: ‘Just as you did it to one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did it to me’ (Mt 25:40). This is not a matter of mere human kindness but a revelation: contact with those who are lowly and powerless is a fundamental way of encountering the Lord of history.

In the poor, he continues to speak to us.” This comes from the fifth paragraph of the recent apostolic exhortation by Pope Leo XIV, Dilexi te (meaning, “I have loved you”). The whole document is timely, convicting, and splendidly clear about God’s heart for the poor. There is no need to repeat what Pope Leo and his predecessor Francis have already said, so what follows from me here is mostly a reflection on what God has spoken to me in my attempts to love the poor recently and at some point I may get around to some kind of appeal or practical application for you (the reader). The title may seem confusing at first (especially given my attitude toward fast food) but you will understand it if you stick with me until the end.

In the third chapter of the book of Acts, the apostles Peter and John encounter a man, crippled and begging. The scene the author paints is familiar to many of us, I’m sure. The man asks them for money, but rather than ignoring him or giving him what he asked for, the apostles respond in a remarkable way: they look directly at the man, and ask him to raise his eyes to them in return.

Peter says, “I have no silver and gold, but I give you what I have; in the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, walk” (Acts 3:6). Peter’s response offers the beggar something more than money; it offers him dignity in the knowledge that he is seen and loved by God, through His apostles.

What did Peter have that he gave this man? The obvious answer is his faith in Jesus. But what else did he give this beggar, who had interrupted him on his way into the temple and asked for something Peter did not have? Eye contact. It is so simple yet so striking; the same faith which leads Peter to speak powerfully into the man’s physical suffering and heal it also leads him to connect with him as more than a beggar, more than a nuisance or an interruption. Peter’s faith in Jesus the poor Messiah makes it possible to see the dignity of the person before him. And he invites the overlooked, physically marred man to do the same.

It seems like this kind of charity was a response to something more than material poverty. Material poverty is disturbing because we know that it is not how we were made to live as beings created in the image of God, and because it divides the human family along material lines: poor and rich, haves and have-nots, better- and worse-off.

This is not to say that we should disregard our brothers and sisters’ material needs; Jesus is very clear in Matthew 25 that we love Him when we feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and shelter the homeless. And in doing so, we must recognize our kinship as God’s beloved, and our need to be rescued from spiritual poverty—all of us. The Gospel is a story of reconciliation, and liberation from the oppression and slavery of sin (selfishness, greed, etc). We must recognize that while granola bars, blankets, and bars of soap can in some sense bring dignity to the poor, these material goods alone do not satisfy all the needs of our brothers and sisters.

Pope Leo XIV, writing to Catholics around the world, clarifies in his exhortation that “...there are many forms of poverty: the poverty of those who lack material means of subsistence, the poverty of those who are socially marginalized and lack the means to give voice to their dignity and abilities, moral and spiritual poverty, cultural poverty, the poverty of those who find themselves in a condition of personal or social weakness or fragility, the poverty of those who have no rights, no space, no freedom.” (para. 9, emphasis added).

Later, Pope Leo quotes Saint Teresa of Calcutta as saying, “‘We are wanting to proclaim the good news to the poor that God loves them, that we love them, that they are somebody to us, that they too have been created by the same loving hand of God, to love and to be loved. Our poor people are great people, are very loveable people, they do not need our pity or sympathy, they need our understanding love. They need our respect; they need that we treat them with dignity’” (para. 77).

The most life-changing conversation that I have ever had with a homeless person began with an insensitive but wholly sincere question: “How did you end up here, man?” That one conversation changed the trajectory of my life because it was the first time that I encountered a “poor person” on the basis of their humanity. I had no material goods to offer him, only my conversation.

Yet, when I left after an hour and a half, Dylan thanked me (again, for the third time) for listening to him. He owned up to his mistakes, he didn’t need my “righteous indignation” to try and take responsibility away from him. He just needed someone to listen, to see him for the beloved child of God that he is, regardless of the choices he had made. Six years have passed since that conversation, but the more involved I have become in working with poverty, the more overwhelmed I have felt, and the more overwhelmed I have felt, the more I am tempted to shoulder not only the real, material needs of my brothers and sisters, but also the spiritual burden of their guilt as well.

The last time that you saw someone panhandling, what did you think? What did you feel? I usually feel pity. And sometimes that pity moves me toward a response that looks something like handing a bottle of water out the window, spitting out “take care, have a good one,” and then quickly rolling my window back up before I have to look the person in the eye. When I feel pity, I want first to distance myself and then take responsibility for the suffering that I see. If I can somehow re-shape the situation in my mind to understand my fault in putting the person and the cardboard sign where they are, then I have some edge, some way to control the outcome and make it different. If my choices led them there, then my different choices can save them, right?

The problem with this is that I am assuming my neighbor bears no responsibility for their current situation. We cannot ignore the fact that many of our neighbors find themselves in material poverty due to their own choices, because they run with the wrong crowd or use their God-given wills to choose laziness and indulgence or routinely elect their chosen means of escapism rather than face tough realities. This is one of the most disheartening truths of working with the poor: in many cases our neighbors owe their condition to personal or generational sins.

Scripture gives us a touching example of a dignifying response to the morally poor. When Jesus encounters an adulterous woman in John 8, she has been sought and corralled by her city’s religious and civic leaders. They are—rightfully, according to the Law—going to stone her for her choices. But Jesus steps in, and His response does not absolve her of her guilt nor ignore her sin. He simply offers her mercy instead of condemnation and love instead of judgment.

We cannot act as though poverty is an inescapable, inanimate monolith which crushes otherwise virtuous persons. No, the reality I have seen is that many times those living in material poverty do in fact choose it, but it is a choice usually made in ignorance or fear, which is not true freedom.

It is akin to the choice I might make to eat McDonald’s because it is late and I have no food at the house, so the only viable alternative to skipping dinner is a 10 piece chicken nugget. Of course, it is my choice, no one is forcing me to eat dressed-up prison food, but the “best” or “right” choice is enough small, wrong decisions behind me to feel out of reach and impossible.

It seems that in the United States at least, material and moral impoverishment go hand in hand. I have come to understand that my response to those living in such poverty must try to make the right choice easy and the wrong choice hard.

Work—according to ability—is essential to human flourishing; therefore, to build up my poor brother or sister, I can encourage and even help them seek out a job, provide accountability to them, and/or offer them reliable rides to work. This response calls my brother or sister to exercise their free wills and God-given abilities, which goes farther as a response to poverty than mere handouts. But it also asks more of me than handing out cash or sack lunches; it asks me to lean into a relationship with the Holy Spirit and beg for His guidance to respond to the person in front of me, specifically, rather than responding with a formula or program or quick solution.

All of the great stories and mysteries of our faith—Salvation History, the Incarnation, the Passion, the Resurrection—point to a God who pursues us in our poverty and invites us into personal relationship with Him and one another. Yet I have seen that our fast-paced, convenience-driven, industrialized society has infiltrated how we love our neighbor.

Thanksgiving Day this year in Wichita saw at least four different events for the homeless in the downtown area, one of which the Romero Catholic Worker helped organize. Of course, this is an encouraging response to need in our community, and I applaud the volunteers and businesses for their goodwill. But the only aspect that seemed to resemble what I know of Thanksgiving was the ubiquitous presence of turkey, and the amount of food. We care so much about the homeless knowing that they are cared about that we forget hardly one of us has ever spent Thanksgiving at a drive-thru.

The problem isn’t that we serve the meals or hand out the goody bags soup-line style; the problem is that we expect that drive-thru meal alone to be sufficient as an answer for people who are ravaged by loneliness and self-hatred as much as hunger. Meals without fellowship will almost always be unsatisfying. That’s why I mostly try to avoid drive-thrus and eating alone.

But why didn’t I join my brothers and sisters in the line and share the meal? The underlying issue is that our relationships with the homeless and poor are usually one-way relationships of exchange. We provide a good or service, they take it and go on their way. It seems like we have grown accustomed to giving and receiving love with the same hastiness that finds us eating on the go. In general, this is a shared responsibility; that is, the consumerism and convenience of our society shape all of us, rich and poor alike.

Money or material goods are generally the easiest option, for our neighbors and ourselves; they are the quickest route to the satisfaction of an immediate need. While the easiest route is not always wrong, to choose efficiency means that I am likely prioritizing a person’s problem over the person themselves.

What would it look like to make choices that prioritize communion and relationship? Perhaps we choose to frequent a gas station or coffee shop in the downtown area and become familiar and even friendly with the homeless who frequent the same places. Eventually, we may build enough trust to invite someone to share a meal with us.

No matter how grand or simple our acts, no matter even the time invested, I think it fundamental to ask the Holy Spirit to teach us how to respond to the person in front of us, not only their problem. Even if this is only taking the opportunity to look someone in the eye, this is an act of affirming their God-given worth. Love does not require us to ignore sin; we can acknowledge—with compassion—the foolishness of our neighbor’s choices and remind them that they are made for more.

Pope Leo XIV’s exhortation in Dilexi te makes our task as the Body of Christ simple: to remind the poor of their dignity and worth in the eyes of God. I hope that if I can so easily scorn industrialism and consumerism and fast food and the like, that I can as easily scorn a kind of charity that resembles it.

In a society that is efficiency- and consumption-driven—where we seek solutions to needs that are fast and cheap substitutions at best and downright unhealthy at worst—I’d like to attempt to practice a different kind of charity, one that is inspired by Peter and John in Acts, and Jesus in the Gospels. One that looks beyond outward appearances, one that seeks solutions which are intentional rather than easy and honest rather than excusing, one that is founded on an understanding of the inherent dignity of my brothers and sisters, whatever form of poverty they experience.

Mattie Jenkins came to the Catholic Worker Movement via Casa Juan Diego in Houston, TX, and is now a member of the Romero Catholic Worker in Wichita, KS.

Originally published in the Winter 2026 issue of Radix under the title “Burger King Charity.” Subscribe to Radix here.

For decades, singer and songwriter Steve Jacobs has been a fixture at Catholic Worker gatherings and protests, often playing one of the dozens of folk songs he has written over the years. He likes to say that he would have written more, if it hadn’t been for the Catholic Worker.

“I blame the Catholic Worker for me being interrupted every time I sat down to try to write a song,” Jacobs jokes. He and some Newman Center friends co-founded the St. Francis House Catholic Worker in Columbia, Missouri, in 1983. “But eventually some of the songs did get through despite all the various phone calls and door knocking and stuff like that.”

Now Jacobs is working on what he calls his “magnum opus”—a double album featuring 30 to 35 songs written during his four decades in the Catholic Worker movement.

“I thought it would be good to pass on some of those songs to the younger generation,” he says. “And that way, you know, I could still attend a demonstration after I’m dead.”

Jacobs calls himself a late bloomer when it came to music, since he didn’t start playing guitar well or writing songs until he was in his thirties. But once he started, the songs emerged from the very fabric of his Catholic Worker life—protest anthems about the School of the Americas, ballads about refugees crossing borders, and tributes to fellow activists like Roy Bourgeois. Just as Ade Bethune brought her iconic art to the pages of The Catholic Worker, Jacobs has spent a lifetime crafting a soundtrack for the Catholic Worker movement.

From Navy Corpsman to Conscientious Objector

Jacobs’s path to both the Catholic Worker and music was circuitous. Born in Jacksonville, Florida in January 1955 to a Navy family, he followed his father into military service, becoming a hospital corpsman after high school. He was trained as a psychiatric nurse and sent to Subic Bay Naval Base in the Philippines in 1975.

Before he shipped out, he and some buddies went out to a bar in Charleston, South Carolina, that was having an open mic night. Everyone performed one song on their own musical instrument; the winner got $50 as well as an invitation to come back and play an hour’s worth of material.

Jacobs won. He pocketed the $50 but never returned to play his material—at that point, he didn’t have any material. But it was enough to inspire him to purchase his first guitar. Once he got to the Philippines, he practiced the guitar in the barracks: James Taylor, Cat Stevens, John Prine.

At the same time that he was taking his first tentative musical steps, he also began his turn towards pacifism. Falling back on his Catholic roots, he began to understand Jesus as a “radical Catholic messenger who warned people not to use violence to try to negotiate their world through life.” Besides reading the Gospel, he also read the Pentagon Papers—the classified study leaked by Daniel Ellsberg that exposed decades of government deception about the Vietnam War—which “really opened up my eyes.”

“I realized that I was morally opposed to being a member of an organization that uses violence to solve the world’s problems,” Jacobs said. After applying for conscientious objector status and being interviewed by several officers, he was discharged and sent home to Missouri.

His parents didn’t object to his move despite his father’s 20 years of service in the Navy. In fact, when he returned to his parents’ home in Columbia, he found that they had taken in some Cambodian refugees.

Jacobs enrolled in the University of Missouri, where he began hanging out at the Newman Center. It was there that he met Philip Berrigan, the former priest and prominent Catholic peace activist who had been imprisoned for burning draft files with the Catonsville Nine in 1968 and who co-founded Jonah House, a resistance community in Baltimore. When Berrigan came to speak on campus, Jacobs drove him to his next speaking engagement in St. Louis.

“I said, ‘Phil, I’ve come back from the Navy and I come to the Newman Center. Everybody’s four years ahead of me, but where are all the pacifists?’” Jacobs recalls. “He said, ‘Well, we may not have them here, but they’re scattered in communities all over the place. Do you know about Dorothy Day?’

“I said, ‘No, not really.’ He said, ‘Well, you check them out.’”

That conversation set Jacobs on his path. He and the woman he would marry, Lana, attended Faith and Resistance retreats at Jonah House and participated in demonstrations. During a protest at the Pentagon, he was arrested for throwing blood on the building.

After 30 days in a D.C. jail, he returned to Columbia where, through connections at the Newman Center, a group started a soup kitchen in 1982. The following year, they founded the St. Francis Catholic Worker community.

What’s a Protest without Music?

Jacobs’ musical influences have been diverse. As a kid, he would play his father’s country and western records—Hank Williams, Flatt and Scruggs—when no one was around. Marty Robbins’s “El Paso” made an early impression, too.

As he became more involved in peace and social justice work, his musical focus turned toward protest music: John Denver, John Prine, Bob Dylan, and Phil Ochs. “Your Flag Decal Won’t Get You into Heaven Anymore”—John Prine’s satirical anti-war song—was “a big influence on me,” Jacobs says. “I used to listen to that in the barracks in the Philippines.”

“The anti-war tunes really got me because as a conscientious objector, there aren’t that many of us,” Jacobs says. “We’re a minority in this country. Even amongst other people of faith, pacifists are a minority.

“People like to persecute pacifists by putting them in jail because they refuse to harm other people, which seems sort of ridiculous when you think about it. Why are you going to persecute people who aren’t going to go after you and try to seek revenge? Because they’re pacifists, they can’t do that. So why put them in prison in the first place?”

The persecution of pacifists has ancient roots, he notes. Early Christians faced execution in Rome for refusing to pledge allegiance to the emperor. “They knew that Christians had a different kind of allegiance. They wouldn’t give allegiance to Rome or to the emperor... only to Jesus,” Jacobs explains. “And they were threatened by that. And so I assume that’s why governments persecute pacifists—because they’re questioning our allegiance to their authority.”

His first overtly political song adapted the old folk tune “Columbus Stockade Blues” to address the School of the Americas, the U.S. military training facility in Georgia that became a focal point for Catholic Worker protests. From there, more songs followed: “Cross the Line,” about civil disobedience at military bases; “Ballad of Roy Bourgeois,” honoring the Maryknoll priest and School of the Americas activist; “Adios Amigos,” about refugees. More recently, he has written “Genocide Right in Your Face,” a song about the plight of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, and “American Mercy,” a song about borders and immigrants that he recorded with the Mere Mortals of Missouri:

The only border when this world began
was where the water washed upon on the land.
There were no boundaries and no border lines;
there was nobody saying all this land is mine.
When there are hungry and refugees from war,
would you deny them any open door?
Put them in prison camps for being poor?
Where’s your American mercy anymore?

Besides writing social justice folk songs, for 28 years, Jacobs has had a side gig hosting the “Sunday Night String Bender Show” on KOPN 89.5 FM, Columbia’s volunteer-run community radio station, playing bluegrass and “songs of social justice.” The show reflects his deep dive into acoustic music after returning to Columbia—he collected some 400 LPs over the years, starting with a Flatt and Scruggs album he bought at the Navy Exchange in Guantanamo Bay in 1968.

His own music may not be played on radio stations, but for decades he has been performing live at Catholic Worker events: Faith and Resistance retreats, demonstrations from SAC air bases to nuclear weapons facilities, and Catholic Worker gatherings from Worcester, Massachusetts to Decorah, Iowa. Some Midwest Catholic Workers who’ve heard him perform now sing along when he plays “Cross the Line” at actions.

Music can bring a new dimension to protests and demonstrations, he says, helping to create a sense of unity and lifting spirits. Not all of his songs are designed to be sung at protests, but some are. “I’ve got one called ‘What a Day That Day Will Be’ that’s singable… I’m hoping that that one lives on because I think it’s a song that you can take to a demonstration that has a lot of different meanings.”

‘My Gift to the Movement’

At 70 years old, Jacobs suspects his songwriting days might be winding down. But even if that’s true, like the music of Woody Guthrie, Jacobs hopes that his own music will continue to make the world a place where it’s easier to be good long after he’s stopped writing.

Now, with his fourth recording project nearly complete, Jacobs is preparing to share his life’s musical work with the movement he loves. The album, titled “Songs for Catholic Workers: Songs that Afflict the Comfortable and Comfort the Afflicted,” will be released as a double CD. The first disc contains twelve new songs; the second compiles the social justice and anti-war songs from his three previous projects.

He hopes to send copies to Catholic Worker communities around the world. And despite admitting he’s “a terrible promoter” who’s “not good with electronics,” he’s open to making the music available online so it can spread beyond physical CDs. Once the project has been mastered, CatholicWorker.org will post the songs for download, along with printable lyrics.

“It’s my gift to the movement,” Jacobs says. “I love this movement. I adore the people that make it up. It’s my intentional family.”

To pre-order copies of the double CD, reach out to Steve Jacobs at St. Francis House Catholic Worker. In the meantime, you can listen to his previous work on Bandcamp or YouTube. You can also catch “The Sunday Night Stringbender Show” every Sunday between 7 and 9 p.m. Central Time on KOPN 89.5 FM at the station website: http://www.kopn.org. The station also has an archive of past shows you can listen to.

Bonus: Steve Jacobs and Michael Sprong vs. the Air Force

In the 1980s, Steve Jacobs and Michael Sprong and some other Catholic Worker activists planned an action at an Air Force base. Steve told the story of what happened at the 2025 Sugar Creek Midwest Catholic Worker Gathering during a tribute to Michael Sprong, who had passed away recently. What follows is a cleaned-up transcript of his story.

We had obtained a map and discovered this lake—about five or six acres—right next to the Air Force base’s fence, on the outside of the boundary. You could rent canoes and pontoon boats there, take them out with outboard motors and float around.

We had planned this action for a year, talking about how great it would be if we all swam out to the lake with supplies in a little rubber raft, declared the base a nuclear-free zone, and refused to come in when they came to arrest us. We got very excited about jumping in the water and refusing to come out when they tried to remove us. But during our discussions about how much legal trouble we might be in, we decided against the “jumping in and not coming out” part. We did agree, though, that we should all swim out to this little island—only about a hundred yards from shore.

We got all our supplies, piled out of a big hippy wagon, and started running onto the recreation property that base officials had set aside. The lake hadn’t opened for the day yet—it opened around 10 o’clock for families to rent boats. But we showed up about nine o’clock.

There was a guy walking along the shore with a litter bag and a pointed stick, picking up trash. He saw seven hairy protesters—hippy types, that was us—come running toward him with a big rubber dinghy and a tire floaty. Air Force people didn’t have really long hair like we did back in 1984. Those were simpler times. We didn’t get our hair cut very often.

He seemed awfully surprised to see us running toward him. He shouted, “The lake’s not open yet! You can’t go swimming!” But we ran right by him, jumped in, and started paddling toward the island. We had a watermelon in our rubber raft because we hoped to stay there for a long time and attract attention. We had a banner with us—”Nuclear-Free Zone”—that we planned to hang on the little chicken wire fence out on the island.

We swam out there, got all our stuff out of the raft, climbed up on the island, and sat down laughing. Things were really going according to plan.

Then Mike told me, “Hey, they’re starting to gather over at the office where you check out the boats.” We all marveled as an Air Force van full of Air Force policemen pulled up. They came out of the office, and we could see them from about a hundred yards away, planning how they were going to remove us from the island.

They pulled aside three boats. One was a pontoon boat that could hold about ten people safely, but they put ten Air Force people on it. The lieutenant running the operation was in another boat by himself with one guy running the outboard motor. The third boat had a guy with a video camera to document the entire episode.

They started up their outboard motors and began chugging toward the island. I was saying to the guys, “Three little boats come floating in. Now I know how the Native Americans felt when the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria came to evict them from their own homes.” To me, that was profound.

As they approached, the lieutenant told the video camera operator, “I don’t want you guys to get off the pontoon boat and arrest them until the video boat goes around the entire island.” They landed the pontoon boat and shoved it up against the island while the guy floated around with the video camera, filming us from all angles for evidence.

Then they all got off the pontoon boat and came up on the island. We immediately offered them some refreshments—we had watermelon, and my friend Jeb offered them bran muffins. We knew they weren’t going to accept, because everyone knows you can use bran muffins to make magic brownies and stuff like that. We wanted to seem hospitable, like the Native Americans when the Spanish came to seize their islands. But they weren’t impressed with our generosity at all.

They said, “We want you people to get on the boat.” My friend Bob said, “Hey, we noticed that when you guys came over on that boat, it was riding really low in the water. You had ten policemen on that boat, and if we all get on, it might not make it.” The lieutenant said, “Shut up and get on the boat.”

So we did what we were told because we knew we were wet and the Air Force guys were not. We got on the boat, they started up the motor, and we began chugging toward shore where they had a van waiting to process us.

As we were chugging along, the pontoon boat was very low in the water. Mike Sprong said, “Hey, you know, this boat is pretty low.” They were going very slow because the faster they went, the more water came over the bow and got their shoes wet.

The guy leading the operation said, “This is taking forever. Let’s get to shore and speed up the motor.” When he did that, water started coming over the bow and getting in the Air Force policemen’s shoes. They didn’t like having their shoes wet.

So the guy made a command decision: “We’re taking on water in the front. I want everybody to get toward the back of the boat.” Everybody came and stood by the back where Mike Sprong and I were standing. We had a little rail, and we were looking at each other, smiling broadly and thinking, “Oh, this isn’t good.”

When everybody went to the back of the boat, it tipped so much that the outboard motors went underwater. When they went plop, plop, plop, plop and stopped, Michael and I just looked at each other and lost it. We couldn’t control our laughter.

The guy running the boat said, “Oh my gosh, the boat is sinking. I’m getting off!” And he jumped. He wasn’t in the Air Force—he was just a guy hired to rent boats. When he came up, his glasses were missing. He said, “Oh, my glasses!” and went diving, trying to find them. Of course, we were howling with laughter. I looked at Mike, and he had tears running down his face.

The lieutenant said, “Everybody to the front of the boat!” That tipped it the other direction. Finally, one of the other Air Force people said, “Well, how about if we just spread out?”

Michael piped up: “You know, we’re already wet. We could just jump in, and that way there would be less weight on the boat.” The guy said, “No, no, no, you can’t do that.”

Meanwhile, there’s a guy with a video camera in another boat filming this whole crazy scene.

Once they spread out on the boat, some of the water went off, but it was still riding pretty low. They tried to get the motor started, and it wouldn’t start. So the guy with the video camera got the third boat to come up and throw a line to the pontoon boat—he was going to tow us to shore with this little one-outboard-motor boat.

When he came to attach his boat to the pontoon boat, he stopped his motor. And when he tried to restart it so we could be towed to shore, he couldn’t get it started. Every time they’d pull the cord, we’d just howl. We couldn’t control ourselves. It was so funny. But the Air Force guys weren’t finding it amusing, and that made it even funnier for us.

Finally, the third boat, which had a functioning motor, started towing us toward shore. We got closer and closer, and then Mike and I jumped out and pulled the whole pontoon boat to safety.

They said, “OK, get up next to the van because we’re going to search you and put you in the van.” As they started patting us down, I turned and said to them, “You know, if you guys had joined the Navy instead of the Air Force, this would never have happened.”

Steve concluded his story by playing “What a Day That Day Will Be.” And an epilogue: everyone involved in the action was acquitted after the video evidence was “lost.”

The past few months have been particularly dark and intense for anyone concerned with justice, peace, and human dignity. Catholic Workers have always been particularly attuned to injustice, of course. And when about 60 of them gathered in Luck, Wisconsin, last weekend for the Catholic Worker Farm Gathering, they brought the weight of it all with them: the oppression of immigrants, the attacks on the people of the West Bank, the politics of division and hate.

But then they did what Catholic Workers have always done. They fed one another, made music, danced, prayed, and shared stories of hope and encouragement—practicing, as Dorothy Day often recommended, the “duty of delight.”

When they gathered in the West Denmark Lutheran Church Parish Hall, there were veterans of the movement alongside people just starting out, farms a year and a half old alongside one that’s been going 39 years, a man who helped start a community in the 1950s sitting in the same room as people hoping to start brand new Catholic Worker communities. They brought children and teens, too—about a dozen of them, although it was hard to get a count since they were always on the move.

Barbara Kass and Mike Miles of the nearby Anathoth Community Farm (and members of the West Denmark church) were the primary hosts of the event, assisted by folks from St. Isidore Catholic Worker Farm and the Lake City Catholic Worker Farm.

“We Will Remain Here”

The weekend began Friday evening with a talk by Brenna Cussen Anglada, a member of the St. Isidore Catholic Worker Farm community who spent time in the West Bank as an international solidarity volunteer. Her talk, “We Will Remain Here: Palestinian Resistance in a Time of Genocide,” focused on Palestinians’ determination to remain on their land in the face of violence from the Israeli military and settlers.

Anglada described accompanying Palestinians to an olive harvest that turned dangerous when settlers firebombed a vehicle and soldiers fired live rounds at the group. When the shaken international volunteers finally reached safety at the bottom of the hill, their Palestinian hosts moved through the crowd distributing hot lamb pita pockets they had prepared for the day. “That shows just how hospitable they are,” Anglada said. “It also shows how used to this they are.”

She also told the story of Mohammed, a nine-year-old shot and killed by an Israeli army sniper while playing soccer in a schoolyard. The army initially claimed he had been throwing rocks; surveillance footage showed otherwise. “They didn’t hold the soldier accountable,” Anglada said. “Soldiers continue to kill lots of Palestinian children, and none of them are held accountable.”

Despite everything, she closed on a hopeful note. That very morning she had spoken to two high school classrooms and been mobbed afterward by students with questions. Attitudes are shifting, she said — especially among younger people. “I’m just really buoyed — encouraged — by the new responses that are happening.”

Farms from Near and Far Share Their News

A long-standing tradition of Catholic Worker gatherings is circling up for introductions. Whoever is running the event typically admonishes people to keep it brief, in the interest of time. And typically, this admonition is quickly dispensed by the gathered anarchists.

This was mostly the case on Saturday morning.

Most of the communities in attendance came from the Upper Midwest. The hosts, Mike Miles and Barbara Kass, have been operating Anathoth Community Farm 14 miles from Luck for the past 39 years. The community practices rotational grazing and raises pastured chickens and pigs alongside a large garden; community members Lindsey and Steven recently built a Mongolian yurt on the property that, by the time of the gathering, had already survived a Wisconsin winter.

Also from Wisconsin were two farms that collaborate extensively: St. Isidore Catholic Worker Farm, which turns ten years old in May, and the year-and-a-half-old Little Platte Catholic Worker Farm. Both are located near Platteville in the Platte River valley. Two weeks before the gathering, the two farms co-produced “Bridget’s Flame,” a community performance weaving together story, song, dance, and silence. Little Platte, a community of ten — including four children under the age of four — runs a sliding scale CSA, raises organic vegetables, and keeps a small goat herd.

Kassandra McKinnon, a friend of Mike and Barb at Anathoth Farm, also attended; she and her husband run Whetstone Farm in Avery, Wisconsin. “We have cattle and sheep and 100-person CSA,” she said. “We homeschool four to eight kids during the week. And we’re really interested in community, working with our friends and our neighbors, getting more people on the land, finding alternatives to capitalism, getting rural housing established.” They also run a small seed company, Cultivating the Commons.

Several former members of the Winona (Minnesota) Catholic Worker were present, including Mike Abdoo, who recently moved to the nearby Zephyr Cooperative in the hope of raising cattle and sheep, and singer-songwriter Mike Munson. Farther up the Mississippi River from Winona, the Lake City Catholic Worker was represented by members of the Freid family. They raise llamas and goats and run John the Baptist Beverage Company. They brought five varieties of kombucha to share at the gathering’s afternoon happy hour, including a raspberry jalapeño that is Paul Freid’s favorite.

Representatives of Church of All Nations in Columbia Heights, Minnesota, also attended; the congregation is not a Catholic Worker community but owns land adjacent to Anathoth Community Farm in Luck; Mike and Barbara are mentoring their nascent farm operation. The 22-year-old multicultural congregation spans 25 nations, cultures, and ethnicities, owns ten community houses clustered near its church building, and — just one month before the gathering — formally departed the Presbyterian Church to pursue its own theological path. Their native elder, Brian Dunn, prays with the community daily in the Ojibwe tradition.

Members of the Mustard Seed Community Farm and Catholic Worker came all the way from central Iowa, near Ames; Alice McGary was cheered by attendees when she announced the revival of the community’s Catholic Worker farm newspaper, likely out later this year.

St. Francis Catholic Worker was represented by Daniel Delapava, who explained that the community opens its doors twice weekly to neighbors living in tents and parks for meals, coffee, showers, and time simply to be off the street. A friend of the St. Francis Catholic Workers, Gabriella, said she has been working toward starting a Catholic Worker in Grand Rapids, Michigan, “for quite a while” and came to the gathering seeking inspiration and connection.

Also coming from Illinois were Venus and Justin Wozniak and several community members from Nativity House in Lockport. Now thirteen years old, Nativity House sits along Route 66 outside Chicago on five acres, with goats, chickens, ducks, bees, and a working CSA in which members earn their shares through labor rather than money. Venus and Justin are oblates at St. Procopius Abbey (where Dorothy Day herself was an oblate) and now manage its farm garden in addition to their own. The community offers hospitality to pregnant women experiencing housing insecurity and hosts a large annual harvest festival they call the Farm to People Celebration.

Common Home Farm in southern Indiana recently learned it will serve as the anthropological field site for a Cambridge PhD student and his fiancée, who plan to spend a full year studying the community — a prospect Laura Lasuertmer admitted was “a little terrifying.” She said that the farm owes its start in part to the quiet, sustained support of the Bloomington Catholic Worker (which closed last year). Laura is also the Minister of Record for a death row inmate in Terre Haute, Indiana.

Chris Colvard, formerly from the Bloomington Christian Radical Catholic Worker Community, reported that he and his wife continue to discern a land-based project outside of Bloomington, where for the past few years they have been walking the land, foraging, and doing some maple syruping.

From Colorado, David and Kyna represented the Boulder Catholic Worker, which operates on a floor of a building owned by the Colorado Coalition for the Homeless.

Maria Berg came all the way from Naples, New York, where she is in the early stages of establishing Naples Valley Community Farm. Her first farming season was marked by a drought, a record-breaking rainy stretch, and a bear that came through and destroyed one of her cold frames. “I calculated for the deer and the rabbits,” she said, “but not the bears.” Maria is a former member of the Lake City Catholic Worker.

Larry O’Toole gave a plug for Peter Maurin Farm, located about sixty miles north of New York City. Larry spent much of last year working on the farm and helping Monica Cornell in the last weeks of her life; he extended an open invitation on behalf of the community to anyone interested in coming to spend time at the farm, which could use the help. At the moment, Larry is part of the Saint Francis Catholic Worker community in Chicago.

Finally, the gathering welcomed new and emerging communities. Love and Dishes, formed by Paul Gallagher (of St. Jude Catholic Worker in Champaign-Urbana) and Beth Preheim (Yankton, South Dakota), is a newly formed Catholic Worker that got its name from a happy accident: the founders had intended to call it “Loaves and Fishes,” but autocorrect intervened and offered “Love and Dishes” instead, and the name stuck. (Beth and Paul became engaged during the farm gathering, to everyone’s delight.)

“One thing that’s always been very important to me is that we are Catholic Workers. We are not farms or houses or anything. So Love and Dishes joins with the Yankton (South Dakota) Catholic Worker,” Beth said. “I really wanted to put forth for all of you that don’t connect to a house or a farm that you can still be a Catholic Worker. You can still name yourselves and be part of (the movement). That’s really important.”

Beth took time to remember Michael Sprong, who died a year and a half ago, and Dagmar Hoxie, who died recently at the age of 98. “She would have just loved to have been here,” Beth said. “She dragged me out across the world because she was visually impaired and couldn’t drive and just kept saying, ‘Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go!’”

Greg and Heather McAvoy-Jensen came from Sacramento, California, where they are working to establish a new Catholic Worker community on the site of a former diocesan summer camp. Greg and Heather are working with others to purchase the camp and transform it into a Catholic Worker farm and camp. They feel optimistic about the possibility and asked for prayers “that God will inspire gentle personalism to flourish into a community.”

Catholic Worker Kids Point the Way to Joy

The children and teens didn’t participate in the introductions; they were off holding their own rambunctious gathering, but their (mostly) joyful presence was widely appreciated.

“Dorothy Day told us you shouldn’t have kids in the Catholic Worker Movement; it seems like people, including Dorothy, went with it anyways,” noted Lincoln Morris-Winter of Little Platte Catholic Worker Farm during his talk reflecting on “raising children on a Catholic Worker farm” and “finding joy in a time of darkness,” topics that he said are “definitely related.”

“I was thinking about all the anecdotes of Dorothy becoming overwhelmed and driving to the wilderness to find reprieve from the work of being on the interface of injustice and pain every day,” he said. “I think there is something of a working metaphor there for at least one role that Catholic Worker Farms might be able to play…in offering a space for the nervous system to decompress, in offering a space for life to flourish, for people to find reprieve.”

He described how people often come up to him at the farmer’s market with questions about why their tomato plants aren’t growing well. Often, they’re convinced that the source of the problem is something exotic, like a lack of a certain micronutrient, when in fact the problem is usually something like they planted their tomatoes on the north side of their deck where they only get two hours of sunlight a day.

Similarly, many of us spend too much time seeking exotic solutions to our despair.

“The work of gardening,” he said, “is not difficult. The difficult part is doing the easy things every single day. When I think about finding joy in the darkness, I think of similar questions. Like, how many hours do you spend on social media every day just exposing your nervous system to the pain and the darkness of what is happening around us? Or like, when’s the last time you were outside?”

The two families who live at Little Platte Catholic Worker Farm don’t do anything complicated around raising their children other than letting them be themselves, he said, and by being themselves, they offer a sort of template for how to live with joy in the world. “Mostly, it really is like looking in a mirror and learning from the life of a young, healthy body what is an appropriate and proper way to look at and ask honest questions about the world.”

‘Called to Heal the Earth and Find New Ways of Feeding Ourselves’

Lincoln offered his insights as one of four panelists during an afternoon session. Other panelists included Mike Miles, who offered reflections on “sacramental agriculture”; Hikari Nakane, representing the Church of All Nations, followed him with an account of her community’s experience of the ICE raids in Columbia Heights; and Sara Freid of the Lake City Catholic Worker Farm closed with stories about doing long-term guest hospitality on the farm.

Keynote speakers Dan Guenthner and Margaret Pennings of Common Harvest Farm—recipients of the 2024 Hawkinson Fund for Peace and Justice Award—opened the Saturday sessions with a talk that framed the crisis in agriculture as nothing less than a quiet, hidden war. Industrial farming, they argued, hides its violence behind the comforting narrative of feeding the world: behind patented seed varieties, synthetic inputs, and the illusion of abundance. Its casualties — collapsing insect populations, undocumented workers with no labor protections, farmers buried in debt by a cheap-food economic policy — rarely make the news.

“I can’t think of a more necessary and worthy calling than to immerse ourselves so deeply in the work of healing the earth,” Dan said, later adding that “we’re being called to create a new way of feeding ourselves and our communities without further diminishing the regenerative capacity of the earth.”

(Look for the full text of most of these talks in future issues of Roundtable over the coming weeks.)

Afternoon roundtables continued the conversation started by the four panelists. The roundtable on responding to the militarization of immigration enforcement by the current administration was well-attended; many Catholic Worker communities shared ways they are supporting immigrants in the face of the federal government’s mass deportation program. Most communities don’t publicize that work, though, to ensure the safety of the people they are helping.

At another roundtable, Mary Kay McDermott continued the discussion about finding joy in the darkness. Just two weeks before the gathering, St. Isidore Catholic Worker Farm and Little Platte Catholic Worker Farm had joined forces to stage a participatory community production called “Bridget’s Flame.” Community members wrote the script as well as the music and spent months creating giant puppets, costumes, and sets. People from the wider community excited by the project pitched in by offering to help with things like video recording and photography.

Mary Kay explained that the project was an attempt to bring their communities together around what scholars of indigenous culture identify as the four universal healing practices: story, song, dance, and silence.

People were clearly hungry for something like this, Mary Kay said: “It exceeded our expectations.”

Communal Song Heals…and Resists Darkness

But people at the farm gathering didn’t just talk about the healing power of communal song. On Saturday afternoon, they got to experience it firsthand through an hour of song led by Lia Falls and Barbara McAfee — musician, teacher, and one of the founders of the Twin Cities singing resistance movement — and led the room through a series of participatory songs drawn from the tradition they have been building in Minneapolis.

“Singing helps make us feel braver and keeps us breathing and also brings some beauty into a really challenging moment,” Barbara told the group.

The teaching was hands-on from the start. The room was divided into sections, each assigned a different part, each learning its line before the whole was attempted together — a format designed, Barbara explained, for gatherings of people who have never sung together before, but who might need song as they come together in the street to confront violence and injustice.

The session opened with a song by Twin Cities songwriter Sarina Partridge: “In these perilous times, we need to be / In each other’s company.” That theme was carried on by the rousing lyrics of another song, sung in a round: “No one is getting left behind this time; no one is getting left behind! / We get there together or we never get there at all.” (See Venus Wozniak’s Instagram video clip of the song.)

The session’s emotional center was a song Barbara had written herself. “So many of us are in the dark right now,” she said, offering the song as a salve. The song is structured as a dialogue — the lament of a seed buried in winter ground, and the answer spoken back to it. Half the room learned the lament: “Oh, the darkness has swallowed me whole / And I cannot remember the light.” The other half learned the response, which Lia Falls helped carry in harmony: “You are a seed. This is the waiting time. You hold a dream of green / That will call you to the sky.” When both parts came together, the room held grief and hope in the same breath. The song is available on Barbara’s website for anyone who wants to bring it home to their own community.

The session closed with a short chant in Spanish, learned in minutes and repeated until it settled into the bones: Juntos hacemos la liberación. No estamos solos. (“Together we make liberation. We are not alone.”)

When the hour was over, Barbara offered some background about the Singing Resistance movement, which has grown into something larger than anyone anticipated, with thousands of people singing in the streets and in churches. At a single song-learning event that drew 2,000 participants, people donated $70,000 for rent assistance. Groups in Wales and Scotland and around the world have been singing the songs in solidarity. Downloadable songbooks have circulated widely. “It’s catching fire,” she said, “and this is not going away any time soon.”

“Something’s Going On”

Sunday morning, most people attended the worship service at West Denmark Lutheran Church. The service was led by a Luther Seminary faculty member from Nigeria and was filled with song; Beth Preheim even brought out her violin for the closing hymn.

Many people headed home after the church service, but about a dozen people drove out to Anathoth Farm for a tour. Many stayed overnight in order to make a Monday morning pilgrimage to Minneapolis, where they visited three memorials — George Floyd Square, the Rene Good memorial, and the Alex Pretti memorial — stopping to sing and pray at each one. The singing was led by members of St. Isidore and Little Platte, drawing on the short, repetitive, meditative songs they bring to their own liturgies. When they arrived at each site, people were already there; when they left, others were coming. “People are being moved by the sacrifice of those three individuals,” Mike said afterward. “It’s hopeful.”

In an interview a few days after the gathering, Mike reached for something larger to describe what the weekend had meant to him. “I really am feeling that something’s going on with the presence of God in the world right now that we have to be attentive to,” he said. What struck him most was the enthusiasm in the room — the sense that people had not surrendered to the weight of the moment. “Instead of despair, it’s like — yeah, it’s really tough right now, but doggone it, we are here. The Catholic Worker is alive and well, and Catholic Worker farms are coming more and more into their own.”

In a short article from 1952, which became the postscript to her book “The Long Loneliness,” Dorothy Day stated:

The most significant thing about The Catholic Worker is poverty, some say. The most significant thing is community, others say. We are not alone anymore. But the final word is love.

Dorothy Day and others at Catholic Workers throughout the years have tried to show more than human love, but the love of Christ to others. They have attempted to care for others as if they were caring for Christ Himself.

It is incredibly easy to have devotion to a cause, a place, or a group of people while not having love. It is incredibly easy to feel compassion for others while not truly loving them. One can want to help groups of people while not wanting to hug them, welcome them into their homes, or be friends with them.

I realized this several years ago and recognized my own shortcomings, even if I did not try my hardest to overcome them. Even when I worked at Hildegard House in the summer of 2023, I recognized that I fell far short of the love that Christ demands of us. I initially left Hildegard House in August 2023 after a summer internship there.

I returned home to Alabama, where I hoped to eventually join the Franciscans. However, after attending a Franciscan “come and see” weekend and having some deep conversations with a friar, I realized that I was uncertain if the vowed religious life was right for me. However, I knew for certain I did not want to stay in Alabama.

I truly fell in love with Minnesota during my three months there. So, I decided to return to Duluth in August 2024. Initially, I lived in an apartment and worked a full-time job. However, in April 2025, I felt this deep calling to return to Hildegard House. This was due both to a desire to devote more of my life to service and to how much I missed living in a community. So, at the end of April, I returned to the Worker.

At Hildegard House, we have three workers and three guests. Michele and Greg run the house, and I help out in whatever way is needed. Things are certainly busier in the warmer months—we have three main garden plots and do a lot of weeding and gardening in the spring, summer, and early autumn.

As for life at the house itself, a different person cooks dinner each night for five nights of the week, then we have “free for all” dinners two nights of the week (usually leftovers, sometimes pizza).

I usually cook on Monday evenings and help with the dishes on other evenings. As for other activities, Greg and I go to the Damiano Center (a local social services center), often with another friend, to mend clothes for anyone who needs it. I do simple hand stitching and patching to mend tears and holes, then Greg will often use a sewing machine for more complex mending. On the fourth Sunday of every month, Michele and I help prepare and serve dinner at the Damiano Center’s community kitchen.

Since returning to Hildegard House, I have tried to improve myself in showing the love of Christ to others. I hoped I might notice some obvious improvements, but I never did.

However, as I helped dry and put up dishes after a typical dinner at the house on January 15, I felt a love so overpowering that I was nearly brought to tears—in fact, I was brought to tears only minutes later, after I had returned to my room. I realized that this overpowering love which I felt for everyone at the house, both worker and guest, did not come from my own attempts at improvement but was a gift from Christ Himself.

Shortly after returning to my room, when I considered this, I was reminded of the words of Thomas Merton in his book Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander. He was on a trip to Louisville, Kentucky, and he said,

In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. … This sense of liberation from an illusory difference was such a relief and such a joy to me that I almost laughed out loud. … I have the immense joy of being man, a member of a race in which God Himself became incarnate. As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now I realize what we all are. And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.

While my experience was not identical to Merton’s—he felt this love for a large group of complete strangers while I felt this love for five people with whom I live and work—I believe we felt the same love. It is a spiritual love that passes beyond understanding.

In the days following, I was also reminded of Dorothy Day’s quote, “Everybody wants a revolution but nobody wants to do the dishes.” I couldn’t help thinking of the significance of experiencing a revolution of the heart while doing the dishes! During these dark times, it can be difficult to maintain any semblance of joy and to show Christ’s love to others.

This love can be expressed in so many ways and can be felt at the most unusual of times. It could be experienced through aiding immigrants who might be in danger of ICE raids, or it could be experienced through drying dishes! No matter what ways one attempts to maintain that joy and love, it is so important to never give up.

To quote Psalm 30, “Weeping may linger for the night, but joy comes with the morning.” (30:5b)

Mabon Finch was raised in north Alabama, attending a Southern Baptist Church. He received both his BA and MA in History from the University of North Alabama. He lost his faith in 2011, but returned to Christianity in 2021, after reading works such as “The Irresistible Revolution” by Shane Claiborne and “Loaves and Fishes” by Dorothy Day. He initially converted to Catholicism, due to his love of the Catholic Worker Movement, but has since become a Quaker. He taught history in Alabama, at Northwest-Shoals Community College, for four years, but now lives and works at Hildegard House Catholic Worker in Duluth, MN.

Justin and I first met at Dolores Mission Church here in Boyle Heights sometime last year as our scrappy young adult group began to form. A self-professed “short king” with a brilliant smile and colorful tattoos lacing his arms, Justin had a story I wanted to hear.

It came to me in bits and pieces as we began to spend more time together. “In the same way that the Air Force Academy taught me war, I feel like the Catholic Worker is teaching me peace,” he said once during a post-Mass discussion. His words confused me. What had my bubbly, friendly, creative friend been doing in the Air Force?

Last week after Mass, Justin and I sat down with aguas frescas and I prompted him, “Start from the beginning.” So he did.

One of several children in an Eagle Rock Filipino family, Justin had always longed to live a unique life. Torn between his desire for adventure and his unwillingness to be a financial strain on his family, he followed his father’s footsteps and joined the Air Force Academy right out of high school.

“My dad was always a big proponent of it,” he explained. As immigrants, he went on, his family had always valued a sense of structure and routine in their new country. Why risk everything when you had already risked so much in order to start a new life? The Air Force gave Justin a taste of both things: adventure, but within a framework that promised security and discipline.

“At this time, I wasn’t religious,” he said. His teenage years had been a kind of rebellion against what he saw as a hypocritical set of Catholic rituals. “At Loyola [High School], I learned more about the origin of our rituals and I could respect that, but I didn’t know how to actually be faithful.” He stopped going to church with his family, much to his parents’ chagrin.

The exclusionary attitude of the church frustrated him. If he wanted to include everyone, he reasoned, but the church seemed not to share that attitude, how could he profess to believe in it? The hierarchy of the military promised a kind of flow of authority that was easier to understand. “My general became my god,” he said. He became an air advisor, a trainer of foreign military personnel in the strategies and structures of the Air Force.

But even this top-down human authority began to chafe. The adventure was there, yes—Justin spent four years in Eastern Europe after graduating from the Academy in Colorado Springs—but relinquishing power to the man-made order of command in the Air Force proved difficult. He prided himself in doing things differently, in going out of his way to be there for his subordinates when they needed him, even if it went against the cultural norms of the Air Force. “I always wanted to take care of my people, even beyond the rules of the military structure,” he confessed. “I grew to really resent those above me in the hierarchy. It became toxic.” This resulted in a lot of warnings and talking-tos as he struggled to reconcile his caretaking nature with the boundaries and rigidity required of him.

As he grappled with this resentment, the military’s casual relationship to violence also began to trouble him. “There's this obsession with ‘the enemy,’” he explained. “Where they sleep, where they go—it’s like a twisted kind of love.” This fixation, combined with the strategic distance that modern warfare allows, meant that eradicating the “enemy” could be justified as a simple necessity, no more morally complicated than exterminating an infestation of bugs in your kitchen so your family can cook. “When we watched airstrikes, people would cheer like it was a football game,” he recalled. “The Air Force pride themselves on being the scientists of the military. We spend so much money to kill the enemy so efficiently—there’s so much we could be doing with that money and intelligence instead.” He described a growing sense of emptiness. “Whatever God wanted me to be doing, it wasn’t there.”

At this point in our conversation, I grew to wonder how a self-professed teenage atheist, Air Force air advisor, disillusioned Filipino Catholic, music-loving artist, came to feel God in a way that he hadn’t before. What changes had happened in his heart?

I knew something of this mysterious transformation myself: the subtle ways in which God calls you to something different. I found myself simultaneously frustrated by and marveling at the inadequacy of language to express this slow change. Even as Justin sat before me in a yellow plastic chair on the Dolores Mission plaza, explaining his life, that subterranean growth of God in his spirit remained invisible to me. Or rather—I couldn’t see God Himself, but I could see His movement in my friend’s life, the way a strong wind blows leaves off of a tree.

“How did you finally leave the military?” I asked Justin.

“I had to look in the mirror and surrender,” he said simply. He described how the pandemic at first gave him a chance to rest, but how this silence soon gave way to a cacophony of voices in his head. “I had lost that sense of security and structure. I didn’t even know what would happen to me tomorrow.”

Alluding to veteran suicide, he expressed his understanding that anyone faced with similar internal conflict would contemplate such an option. “But I had the support of friends and family. I had all the philosophy I had read as a teenager. Suddenly it all made sense to me.” Again I saw the quiet workings of God at hand, the ways in which seeds planted early in Justin’s life could only begin to grow once his heart was ready.

Justin mused on Kierkegaard, naming the “leap of faith” required of him, rather than one of reason or logic. “I had been trying to reach out and ‘get’ God, but He was already here,” he said. “God’s not acquired, He’s someone to be realized.” We spoke more slowly now. “God was looking for me.”

He described his life since leaving the military as a series of trying different things to find his place. A lifelong lover of music and art, his creativity provided a sense of comfort during this time. He became a Confirmation teacher and started working more on his music and DJ skills. “I think God wants me to share stories,” he said. “How do you know God doesn’t want you to go through the things you go through? To be a Christian is to be with people on their journey, not to convert others.”

I recognized the truth in this statement immediately. I thought about how my own conversion journey has never been about becoming someone different. Rather, it’s been about becoming more of whom God wants me to be: a deeper version of myself. I heard Justin’s deeper self speaking out to me during our conversation. Hearing Justin’s story reinforced a belief I had been nurturing for some time—that the journey of conversion resembles nothing so much as a stripping away of everything that keeps us from God and each other.

Like the Scripture that tells us that the kingdom of God is “at hand” (Mk 1:15), our deeper selves are right here, immediate, accessible, requiring nothing more than a willingness to turn back towards ourselves, our own hearts. Perhaps in that way it is also like Ellen Bass’s tender poem “The Thing Is,” which ends with “Then you hold life like a face/between your palms, a plain face/no charming smile, no violet eyes,/and you say, yes, I will take you/I will love you, again.”

Our hidden selves are not so hidden after all. They reside at the heart of our very nature, longing to help us live the life we are called to, if we can only accept and love this deepest self in the same way God loves—unconditionally and with great playfulness and joy.

At the end of our conversation, Justin identified this exact kind of unconditional love. “If you can’t love yourself, what kind of love are you really showing to others?” he said. “Jesus was always hanging out with hood-ass fools.” We laughed in the late winter sunshine, two hood-ass fools irrevocably loved by Christ.

Justin Domingo can be spotted in the wild mashing up classic disco, feel-good tunes, and the unmistakable Filipino pop sound alongside his buddies in the aptly named Manila Sound DJ collective. If you're in LA, holler and Claire will take you to one of their epic intergenerational dance parties.

Originally from the Midwest, Claire Lewandowski is a teacher, writer, and organizer whose travels have led her to various Catholic Worker communities. She is a current resident of the Los Angeles Catholic Worker and splits her time between their Hippie Kitchen on Skid Row and teaching middle school theology and history at Immaculate Heart School. You can find her (infrequent) writings at talkandwork.substack.com.

Originally published as “UNLEARNING WAR, LEARNING PEACE,” in the April 2025 issue of The Catholic Agitator. Read the issue online here.