A Christ Room in Every House
Realizing Peter's vision of universal Christian hospitality. Plus: Pax Christi, LACW receive awards; Gaza protests in Des Moines and Christchurch; London CW on refugee crisis.
Making Room for Christ
In the 13 years since my father passed away, my mother has “rented” a room on the lower level of her house to people of limited means she has met at church. I put the word rented in quotes because the rent is not market rate; it is what they can afford. Besides providing my mother with a small source of extra income, it avoids turning the transaction into an act of pure charity, with all the pitfalls that come with it. If I remember correctly, she has had two single women and a single mother and her teenage son, each of whom stayed with her for several years.
Since the beginning, the Catholic Worker has advocated the practice of Christ rooms, rooms set aside in people’s homes for just this purpose. The idea never really took off in a big way. On the other hand, as my mother’s story illustrates, there are people who offer hospitality in their own low-key, informal way. Usually, they go unnoticed, which is probably the way it ought to be.
This week and next week, we’ll be looking at Christ rooms. This week, we focus on a project launched by Casa Alma Catholic Worker in 2016: the Christ Room Network. Next week, I’ll share interviews with people who have kept Christ rooms in their homes.
By the way, if you have kept a Christ room in your home—or extended hospitality to someone in need of shelter—write to tell us about your experience. Send your letters to jerry@catholicworker.org; use “Christ room” or similar in the subject line.
Jerry
FEATURED
Casa Alma’s Christ Room Experiment
Houses of hospitality are such a defining feature of the Catholic Worker Movement that it is easy to forget that Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin, the movement’s cofounders, envisioned something more: that every Catholic parish would have its own house of hospitality, and that every Christian home would have a “Christ room,” a room set aside to house those in need of shelter.
“People with homes should have a room of hospitality so as to give shelter to the needy members of the parish,” Peter wrote in “Parish Houses of Hospitality,” undoubtedly using the term “parish” according to the canonical definition that encompasses all the people within a parish’s boundaries, not just the Catholics. “The remaining needy members of the parish should be given shelter in a Parish Home.”
Dorothy often appealed to readers of The Catholic Worker in a similar way: “When we succeed in persuading our readers to take the homeless into their homes, having a Christ room in the house as St. Jerome said, then we will be known as Christians because of the way we love one another,” she wrote in House of Hospitality.
She made a more extended appeal in a May 1947 column:
One does not necessarily have to establish, run, or live in a House of Hospitality, as Peter named the hospices we have been running around the country, in order to practice the works of mercy. The early Fathers of the Church said that every house should have a Christ’s room. But it is generally only the poorest who are hospitable. …
Every house should have a Christ’s room. The coat which hangs in your closet belongs to the poor. If your brother comes to you hungry and you say, Go be thou filled, what kind of hospitality is that? It is no use turning people away to an agency, to the city or the state or the Catholic Charities. It is you yourself who must perform the works of mercy.
Despite this repeated call, though, the idea was never widely implemented.
At least one Catholic Worker community set out to change that. In the early 2010s, Casa Alma Catholic Worker (Charlottesville, Virginia) began investigating ways to promote Christ rooms within their extended community. After several years of research and reflection, Casa Alma launched its Christ Room Network in 2016, a support system for individuals and couples willing to open their homes to those in need. By 2019, four hosts had provided Christ Rooms to five guests, offering them a safe and stable environment to heal, save funds, and prepare for the next stage of their lives.
The initiative was shelved during COVID, but the community decided to collect the fruits of its experience, research, and reflection into a 28-page guide that other communities could use to launch their own Christ room networks. That guide is now available on CatholicWorker.org.
What would it be like if even a fraction of Christian households adopted the practice of opening up a room to someone in need? Generally, people object to the idea on practical grounds. And it’s true that there are risks and sacrifices involved, which is why Peter always used to emphasize that doing the works of mercy must come at a personal sacrifice. And yet, some people have taken the leap and found the experience to be deeply enriching and rewarding, if not always without its stresses and problems.
Next week, I’ll share my interviews with some people who have opened up their homes to those in need. This week, I’d like to share an excerpt from Casa Alma’s excellent resource that sets out a spiritual framework for keeping a Christ room.
Here it is:
A Spiritual Framework for Christian Hospitality
“True hospitality is a spiritual practice, a religious practice. Like meditation or prayer, hospitality connects us with a deep truth and compassion that transcends ourselves. Our sense of isolation and individualism is an illusion that cuts us off from what is real, true, loving, and sacred in life.”
—Peter Morales, “Religious Hospitality: a Spiritual Practice for Congregations”
As a Catholic Worker community, Casa Alma is rooted in a spiritual tradition that instructs us to welcome the stranger in need, to shelter those who are homeless, and to provide food to those who are hungry. We understand these acts of hospitality as spiritual practices, stemming from what we believe is true and real. In this section, we present an overview of the spiritual framework of our Christ Room effort and invite you to consider the ways in which your own faith lineage or spiritual practice would similarly inform your practice of hospitality.
The term “Christ Room” was first used in the 4th century by St. John Chrysostom when he said, “Every family should have a room where Christ is welcome in the person of the hungry and thirsty stranger.” This references the Christian scriptures and these lines from the Gospel of Matthew:
“Then the righteous will answer him and say, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you drink? When did we see you a stranger and welcome you, or naked and clothe you? When did we see you ill or in prison, and visit you?’ And the king will say to them in reply, ‘Amen, I say to you, whatever you did for one of these least brothers of mine, you did for me.’”
(Mt 25:37-40)
In our practice of hospitality at Casa Alma and in our Christ Room effort, we are oriented toward welcoming others because we are oriented toward welcoming the Divine. We extend welcome and assistance especially to those who are poor and marginalized, who are God’s beloved, trusting that God is already at work in their life, that we can learn about God through them.
In Making Room: Recovering Hospitality as a Christian Tradition, Christine Pohl writes, “The practice of hospitality forces abstract commitments to loving the neighbor, stranger, and enemy into practical and personal expressions of respect and care for actual neighbors, strangers, and enemies…. Claims of loving all humankind, of welcoming ‘the other’ have to be accompanied by the hard work of actually welcoming a human being into a real place.” (p.75)
Later in the book, Pohl asserts, “A first step in making a place for hospitality may be to make room in our hearts…welcome always begins with dispositions characterized by love and generosity.” (p.154) We believe that this disposition of love and generosity mirrors the reality of a bigger Love. Our hospitality to someone in need is the smaller story within the bigger story of God’s great welcome and unconditional love for us.
Hospitality undertaken as a spiritual practice is also grounded in humility. We are neither saviors, nor experts. Guests who receive hospitality may leverage the experience and exit into market-rate housing, and some may leave the valuable respite only to return to housing instability. In our Christ Room effort, we believe that providing hospitality, even for a short time, is a concrete practice of faith, a way of being and living. As such, we recognize that we will never be fully prepared or equipped to embark on this journey, and that is alright!
“In hospitality the stranger is welcomed into a safe, personal, comfortable place, a place of respect and acceptance and friendship…Such welcome involves attentive listening and a mutual sharing of lives and life stories. It requires an openness of heart, a willingness to make one’s life visible to others, and a generosity of time and resources.”
(Pohl, p.13)
Casa Alma’s entire Christ Room Network resource can be found under Communities > Christ Rooms at CatholicWorker.org.
Pax Christi USA Honored by Dorothy Day Guild
Pax Christi USA is the first recipient of the Dorothy Day Guild’s Dorothy Day Peacemaker Award, both organizations announced on Monday. The purpose of the award is “to honor the heroic witness of Servant of God Dorothy Day by celebrating an individual or group who exemplifies her lifelong commitment to peacemaking and Gospel nonviolence,” according to press statements released by the groups.
“For over 50 years, Pax Christi USA has been an important voice for peace, justice, and nonviolence in the Catholic community,” said Kevin Ahern, co-chair of the Dorothy Day Guild’s executive committee. “Their recent work with others in the Catholic Nonviolence Initiative, for example, has significantly deepened the conversation within the church on Gospel nonviolence. In this work, they embody in a special way the prophetic vision of Servant of God, Dorothy Day.”
“Dorothy’s influence on Pax Christi USA was profound from our very beginning, including her close friendship with one of our co-founders, Eileen Egan, and her witness continues to be an inspiration for our members in their gospel-based work for peace with justice,” said Johnny Zokovitch, Executive Director of Pax Christi USA. “So many in Pax Christi USA, myself included, were formed in the Catholic Worker tradition and strive to live out Dorothy’s commitment to personalism, nonviolence, and the works of mercy in our everyday discipleship.”
You can read the press statement from Pax Christi here and the press statement from the Dorothy Day Guild here.
CWs Among 100 Protesters at Des Moines Gaza Protest
Catholic Workers and members of various peace organizations, including the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), and the Des Moines Solidarity Movement (DSM) were among 100 people who participated in a protest outside the federal building in Des Moines on May 9 to demand an immediate cease-fire in Gaza. The protest, dubbed “Emergency—Cease Fire Now,” was marked by chants, songs, and noise-making to draw attention to the ongoing violence in Gaza.
Protesters set up by the building’s protective overhang as Homeland Security personnel and Des Moines police monitored the event. Participants read the names of children killed in Gaza over the past months, followed by moments of silence and loud demonstrations designed to alert the Senate offices of Senators Chuck Grassley and Joni Ernst of the Gaza emergency.
A group of ten protesters delivered the names of Gaza victims and flowers to the senators’ office representatives, only to receive responses echoing continued support for Israel. Five protesters staged a sit-in at the senators’ offices and were later ticketed for disturbing the peace.
You can see coverage of the protest at KCCI, the Des Moines Register, and the Iowa Capital Dispatch.
THE ROUNDUP
“A few weeks ago, a group of pregnant women were driven into the desert by Tunisian authorities and abandoned there. Their phones were stolen, and if the Tunisian authorities followed their usual practice they were left with little or no food or water. If they were not beaten and tortured in detention as Black African migrants in Tunisia often are, that was the extent of the concessions.” So begins an essay by Thomas Frost in the Easter issue of the London Catholic Worker newspaper; the article was recently posted on their website. Frost took a call from a man seeking help for the woman. Such inhumane treatment is funded by EU taxpayers, Frost said. Read the rest of his essay at the London Catholic Worker: What Your Right Hand is Doing.
The Los Angeles Catholic Worker was awarded the Fourth Annual Berrigan – McAlister Award for the Practice of Christian Nonviolence at De Paul University in Chicago on Monday. LACW co-founder Jeff Dietrich received the award on behalf of the LACW and gave a presentation that you can watch here, beginning at the 21:00 mark. Dietrich spent almost his entire presentation reading stories about his life and work at the LACW to the audience.
“(Catholics) are seldom taught from pulpit or pen that our faith calls us to shape an economy—from the Greek word oikonomia, which means household management—in any sphere beyond sexual ethics,” Roundtable contributor Renée Roden writes in a new piece for U.S. Catholic. “But, in case you are still unsure if a financial system of pursuing profit and increasing dividends for shareholders at the expense of the dignity and livelihood of the worker is antithetical to the Catholic faith, the following authors make clear that it is.” The piece recommends several books worth reading on the subject. Read the essay here: Is the church becoming a chaplain of capitalism?
New Zealand Catholic Workers were part of a group that gathered at the Cenotaph war memorial in Christchurch on April 25, Anzac Day, reports The Common Good, newsletter of the Christchurch Catholic Worker. (Anzac Day honors members of the Australian and New Zealand armed forces.) Other articles in the April edition of the newsletter include “Nature’s Future – Our Future” by Des Casey, which discusses the environmental crisis and the need for integrating ecological consciousness into all professions; “Israel’s Oil Expropriation,” an editorial exploring the role of oil and gas reserves in the geopolitical dynamics of Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories; and a biography of Dorothy Day by Rosalie Riegle.
The Maurin Academy for Regenerative Studies is presenting a four-week course beginning Monday: “More Real Than the World: Ancient Insights into the Nature of God” is billed as a thought-provoking series led by Laurie M. Johnson on Mondays at 7 p.m. Central Time, from May 20 to June 10. The event will explore the integration of Greek philosophy, especially Platonic ideas, into early Christian theology, highlighting the valuable contributions of ancient philosophers to Christian thought. Participants will receive short readings and engage in open discussions. For more details, visit pmaurin.org or join via Patreon at patreon.com/maurinacademy. Catholic Workers can email maurinacademy@gmail.com for access.
Free mammograms and health screenings are being provided by Mercy Medical Center in partnership with St. John of the Cross Catholic Worker House (Cedar Rapids, Iowa). “A lot of [people without homes] are underinsured, some of them don't have insurance, like myself,” Larissa Ruffin, house manager, told local television station CBS 2 recently. “Right now, we're just really happy to have them have a place to go to get their mammogram, to get a breast exam, just to get the connection with health insurance, everything.”
Fiddling on the (Mustard Seed) Farm
CALENDAR
June 3 - June 7 | Cuba City, Wisconsin
Stories of the Land: Decolonization, Earth Regeneration, & Spiritual Ecology
September 12-15 | Sugar Creek, Iowa
Midwest Catholic Worker Gathering
A FEW GOOD WORDS
My Path Was Clear
by Dorothy Day, in The Catholic Worker, November 1951.
In the last two months I have visited twenty-seven cities, journeying from Fall River, Massachusetts, as far west as Fargo, North Dakota. I have been bone-tired and mind-tired. I have slept like a log on busses and on trains, on boards and on beds, in rooms with babies and little children, in dormitories, and in single splendor. I have eaten in homes where elegance is the rule and at houses of hospitality with men from skid row. I have met old friends, and many new ones and have encountered some bitterness but on the whole the trip was one of the best I ever had. More and more, I have found people sympathetic to the fundamental idea of The Catholic Worker. And what is the fundamental idea? That man is made to love God and to love his brother. And when we say that all men are brothers, it means that the love we feel stems from the love of God.
We talk about love and we write about love, and love means that we must give and we must suffer. Who is not poor and we are not poor, who does not suffer, and we do not suffer? Love means embracing voluntary poverty too. We have got to begin to be poor. If we try to be poor, we will try to strip ourselves and put on Christ.
Love of our brothers, and voluntary poverty. Those are the things I began to talk about, and those are such fundamental topics that one could not talk about them without getting on to the subject of the modern State and war. The paternalistic state, the servile state, the coercive state that tries to do away with personal responsibility, that builds great institutions to take the place of the family, the parish. The coercive state whose prosperity is founded on preparations for war rather than on work to supply human needs.
. . . . .
One reason for the breakdown of the family of course is that there is no longer the home big enough for all, and there is not enough homes to go around.
Martha House
The last thing I saw in Detroit, so that I left it weeping, was the thirteen children under six years old at Martha House, at 1818 Leverette St. St. Francis House is just around the corner a couple of blocks, and Louis Murphy and the men there try to do everything possible to make Martha House warm and comfortable for the families sheltered there. There are the three girls there too, Delros Espy, Ruth O’Rourke and Betty Hogan. They share the parlour in that too small house and the four mothers and their thirteen children are crowded into three bedrooms upstairs. There is a sitting room and a dining room and kitchen.
With all our institutions, with all the wealth in the city of Detroit, charitable bureaus, travelers’ aid, the police, hospitals, priests, – all turn again and again to The Catholic Worker, for help in emergencies.
“And for every family we take in, we have to turn ten way,” one of the girls said sadly.
“And where do they go? They sit up all night in stations, in movie houses, in parking lots,” Lou Murphy said. And after they have been referred around sufficiently and still don’t get lost, some agency, or the city, rents a room for them for twelve or fifteen dollars a week,— one room for a family of ten, perhaps,—eight children and mother and father. Of course the only place they get such a room is in a slum.
It is the same in New York. The influx of Puerto Ricans in our lower East side has meant the growth of rooming houses where whole families live in one room and cook, eat and sleep. There are no apartments so the city has to put its welfare clients in these hovels.
Hospices
Of course when I talk of our houses of hospitality everyone thinks right away that what I mean is that he should start a house of hospitality in his city or parish. People start to look uncomfortable and people talk about guilty consciences for not doing more for the poor. I always speak too, of how these duties are laid down for us in the 25th chapter of St. Matthew and that our salvation indeed depends on them—prayer, and fasting, and the alms which we would have to give as a result of fasting (whether that fast be in terms of food, or drink, theater or television or new car or a certain neighborhood to live in).
But I try always to explain that it is not just in terms of Peter Maurin’s program of Round Table Discussions, Houses of Hospitality and Farming Communes that I am speaking. He said at the very beginning that the way to reach the masses of people, the poor and the destitute who did not know Christ (if they did they would be rich) was through the works of mercy, practiced by each one of us, “at a personal sacrifice,” he always added.
Christ Rooms
And since it all does depend on each one of us, that means that we must each try to have a Christ room in our homes where we can shelter others. Better still if there were an extra floor in our house (Oh those lucky people who live in houses!) that could be turned into a little apartment for a family. The fact of the matter is that so-called Christian people will not rent to families any more. No children allowed! Let them get in a housing project! Let the state, the city, bring that pressure to bear on them to limiting their families!
One woman looked at me sadly as I talked one afternoon, and said that she had four bedrooms and two baths in her house. And another said ruefully, “we are always on the receiving end, never the giving.”
Difficulties
I can well see all the difficulties. A husband cannot impose such a charitable custom on his wife, as sheltering the harborless, without her consent and cooperation, nor the wife the husband. But they can begin to talk over these things together, to explore the possibilities. People could begin to think about these things. When they build or when they rent, they can get a bigger place and sometimes the bigger houses are cheaper since people want small, compact places nowadays when there will not be so much to do, nor so much trouble in heating. But they might begin to think in terms of community! After all community can be in the city as well as in the country.
One friend I visited in Chicago had an apartment that was large, light and airy, surrounded by a garden and trees, with a back porch and a front porch, with heat and bath and hot water, all for forty dollars a month. This was because she put up with the railroad trains down the street, and gas tanks in the rear.
She was definitely on the wrong side of the tracks. Downstairs there was another large apartment divided into two. Negroes were beginning to move into the neighborhood. In this section of the south side there was not that mass movement out of a neighborhood when Negroes moved in that has marked some of the districts in Chicago. All around the Chicago University, another friend who teaches there reports, there have been a steady influx of Negroes, who have taken run down property and improved it and since there is good supervision to prevent dividing and overcrowding slum conditions did not begin to be built up.
The friend with the beautiful apartment said that there was a possibility of the building being sold. It had not occurred to her to try to buy it. Poor teachers usually do not have down payments. But given the down payment, most people could keep up payments, what with one job or another in a big city. They would be willing to make many a sacrifice to keep their own home, especially such a one as this. She could even rent to Negroes and so have an interracial house, or she could divide the house so that it was cooperatively owned. I had heard that Fr. Lux, the Dominican, when he was stationed in Chicago, had seen to it that an eight-apartment house was bought cooperatively by Negroes and reconditioned. So much could be done in the way of housing if people had vision. So much misery could be alleviated.
The children of this world are wiser in their generation than the children of light. They build up fortunes and lose them. They bring pipe lines from west to east. They put up gigantic skyscrapers, they build factories, they venture much, not for the common good but for profit. And why not these risks for the common good?
There is a new book out by Allan Watts, called The Wisdom of Insecurity published by Pantheon Press in New York, which sounds fascinating. We children of light, who have everything to gain, hang onto our husks and our potage as though this were to be all for this world and the next.
Hierarchy
The statement of the hierarchy of Australia last month made my task of talking about the poor and the destitute all the easier.
“To the north of Australia lie a thousand million people suffering from a dreadful poverty which must be seen to be realized,” the statement reads. “How was it that a few million Australians maintained their independence and their comfort in the fact of such a set of circumstances?” And the answer made by the Archbishops was, “militarism, colonialism, exploitation.”
The recent Popes have talked of an attack on poverty, before they speak of attacking Communism. “Go to the poor,” Pius XI cried out. All the saints have begun their mission by seeking Christ among the poor.
Read the full essay here: On Pilgrimage – November 1951.
Great stuff ... keep it up!