CW Farms Gather to Celebrate and Reflect
Plus: Iowa City rallies against anti-immigrant legislation; CWs join Day of Action for Gaza; Day Center dedicated; Peter Maurin begins summer school; and a new reader poll.
What Does It Mean to be a Catholic Worker Farm?
In his now-legendary Catholic Worker Primer, Chuck Trapkus poked gentle fun at his Catholic Worker farmer friends. The Primer, a visual (and often humorous) crash course in the Movement, depicts in one panel a farmer holding a chicken as he/she declares, “We’re Catholic Workers, too, don’t you forget it!” The running text, meanwhile, explains, “While many CWers run houses of hospitality, many others think they’re CW snobs (in the politest sense of the word) and embrace a broader vision of the CW as a ‘Green Revolution,’ ‘a society where it is easier to be good,’ ‘a path from where we are to where we should be,’ even as their ‘agronomic universities’ are choking from too many weeds and not enough human contact.”
It was all in good fun…but it also touched on a real tension in the Movement at the time. If Catholic Worker farms weren’t doing hospitality, were they really Catholic Workers? Some even questioned houses of hospitality having backyard gardens: Why expend time and energy on a garden when cheap food could be “rescued” from grocery stores and restaurants?
With the sixth biennial Catholic Worker farm gathering this past weekend, it’s safe to say that Catholic Worker farms (and urban gardens) are here to stay. But as we learned in our coverage of the gathering, CW farmers are still wrestling with the question: What does it mean, exactly, to be a Catholic Worker farm?
You can find out how some of the participants begin to answer that question in the story below.
Warmly,
Jerry Windley-Daoust
QUESTION OF THE WEEK
Inspired by some of your responses to our reader poll (results next week), let’s experiment with a quick reader poll. If you all like it, we’ll make it a regular feature, and maybe come up with a better name.
If you’d like to send us a short story (a few lines) about your first encounter with the Catholic Worker, reply by email; please change the subject line to read CW poll (or something similar). We’ll include a sampling of responses in the next newsletter, if we get any.
NEWS
Catholic Worker Farms Gather to Learn, Celebrate, Reflect
People from ten different Catholic Worker farms from across the Midwest gathered for the biennial Catholic Worker Farm Gathering in Platteville, Wisconsin, last weekend. The weather was cold and windy, but participants warmed things up with singing, dancing, discussion, prayer, and even a hog roast, courtesy of Lincoln Morris-Winter, who roasted a hog for the final lunch together on Sunday to send everyone off.
This is the sixth Catholic Worker Farm gathering since their initiation in 2011. The St. Isidore Farm community near Cuba City, Wisconsin, hosted the gathering. The community is made up of Eric Anglada and Brenna Cussen-Anglada and Mary Kay McDermott and Peter Yoches with their two children. The community members are veteran hosts. They hosted the second gathering in 2013 at New Hope Farm outside Dubuque, Iowa, and again in 2017, shortly after they founded St. Isidore Farm in 2016. This year’s was the first in five years–the gatherings were suspended since 2019 because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“It was just amazing to come together after five years,” said Anglada in a phone call. “We shared laughs, fellowship, and food––a reconnecting of friendship and shared bonds—it was great to just rekindle those connections through this network of the Catholic Worker Movement.”
A nearby church hosted the communal gathering where participants talked, sang, and prepared meals. About 40 people from ten Catholic Worker farms participated this year, Anglada said. That number included some new communities: the St. Louis Catholic Worker and The Great Turning Catholic Worker (an urban farm in Madison, Wisconsin), both located in urban areas, as well as Ozark Foothills Catholic Worker Farm (Catawissa, Missouri) opened by Ellen and Shane Hughes, and Little Platte Catholic Worker, which is working on acquiring land near Prescott, Wisconsin.
Other farming Catholic Worker communities attending included Anathoth Community Farm (Luck, Wisconsin), White Rose Catholic Worker Farm (La Plata, Missouri), and Common Home Farm (Bloomington, Indiana).
Betsy Keenan of Strangers and Guests Catholic Worker Farm (Maloy, Iowa) said attendance was lower than in past years. On the other hand, she was cheered to see more “novice” Catholic Worker farmers who are just getting going with their operations. Even better, they have what they need to get started.
For Paul Freid of Lake City Catholic Worker in Minnesota, the roundtable discussion that stood out most was one that dealt with some more philosophical questions about identity.
“People are really interested in thinking about what it means to be a Catholic Worker farm?” he said. “What do we stand for? And what are we about?”
Although that conversation only scratched the surface, Freid said that participants agreed that engaging with the margins was an important aspect of Catholic Worker farming identity.
“So that can be in different ways, right?” he said. “Living with people on the margins through hospitality, living on the margins by living under the taxable income level. So, there’s a desire to engage with the margins”
You can read the entire story, see photos, and watch a video of participants singing “stacked songs” at CatholicWorker.org.
Iowa City Catholic Worker in Solidarity Against Anti-Immigrant Legislation
The Iowa City Catholic Worker (ICCW) along with advocacy group Escucha Mi Voz, have become centers of resistance against a slew of anti-immigrant bills in the Iowa General Assembly. The proposed laws would restrict undocumented people’s access to secondary education, welfare benefits, and employment, as well as authorizing Iowa law enforcement to act as federal immigration agents, as reported by the Catholic Messenger, newspaper of the Diocese of Davenport. The ICCW, along with Escucha Mi Voz, has organized worker meetings and testified at the state capitol about the would-be effects of the bill:
“This touches me as an immigrant,” said Mujica, who has lived in the U.S. for 14 years but still has family members living in her native Venezuela. “I am a naturalized citizen and my children are citizens. I thank God I have everything set up.” She worries about laws that could tear apart families of mixed immigration status and prevent heads of households from traveling to their jobs for fear of being pulled over by police or sheriff’s deputies. “Keeping families together – we know at the Catholic Worker that they do way better when they are kept together,” said Emily Sinnwell, co-founder of the Iowa City Catholic Worker.
Read the entire piece in the Catholic Messenger and consider the call to action provided by ICCW co-founder David Goodner: Inform friends and family, sign the petition against this legislation, sponsor a bus seat for an immigrant worker who can’t afford the ticket, or attend this Zoom update and planning meeting this Friday night at 7pm.
CWs Plan to Join Day of Action
Catholic Workers across the country will be participating in a Day of Action on March 18 organized by the group Christians Against Genocide.
The group is planning a nationwide day of Christian-led actions at the offices of elected officials with the goal of calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, the group said in its event announcement. “On this day of action we will use our public voice and our collective power to advocate for peace and demand an immediate ceasefire. In the face of Christian Zionism using our faith to cheer on this genocide, Christians have a responsibility to use our voices as powerfully as possible for the cause of peace and justice.”
You can learn more at the Christians for a Free Palestine website.
London CW Protests Immigrant Deaths
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Zwick: Voluntary Poverty, Eucharist are Antidotes to Forces of Destruction
“As the glory of the cosmos reflects God’s glory, surely our love for God and all that God has created should follow,” Louise Zwick writes in the lead article for the latest edition of the Houston Catholic Worker newspaper. “Instead, we sometimes seem to be trying to destroy the world and its creatures.”
Prompted by the Houston Catholic Worker’s communal study of Pope Francis’ Laudate Deum (a sequel to Laudato Si, his encyclical on the environmental), Zwick turned to Louis Bouyer’s Cosmos: the World and the Glory of God to help her see the light of God’s creation amidst threats to our physical world.
While contemplating the cosmos, Zwick grapples with the mystery of iniquity: “How there can be so much destruction of persons, of creation, so much evil and suffering… ‘Why are we and the universe with us under the sway of the powers of evil?’”
Zwick and and her fellow Catholic Workers were struck by Bouyer’s advice on how to navigate the mystery of iniquity: “Man can recover true life and preserve the cosmos only by rediscovering that a certain voluntary poverty is the condition for possessing the world in a way that will not reduce it to ashes.” Zwick sees a parallel between Bouyer’s words and the vision of voluntary poverty promoted by Peter Maurin, a vision that stands against the avarice that leads to the destruction of the cosmos through pollution, the development of weapons, and the exploitation of workers and the earth itself.
Zwick cites Pope Francis’ warning against systems of thought that assume that “reality, goodness and truth automatically flow from technological and economic power as such.” Such ways of thinking logically lead to the pursuit of “infinite or unlimited growth.” Instead, it is the Eucharist that is “the living center of the universe” wherein “the whole cosmos gives thanks to God.”
Read Zwick’s entire piece on the Houston Catholic Worker website.
Social Justice Movements Envision a New Role for Religion in Public Life, Professor Says
The Catholic Worker Movement is one example of diverse religious movements that are re-framing traditional understandings about the relationship between theology and politics, according to Rosemary Carbine, a professor of religious studies at Whittier College. Carbine was recently interviewed by US Catholic magazine about her new book, Nevertheless, We Persist (Orbis), in which she examines the public theology of those movements.
Carbine says that this public theology goes beyond words but includes prophetic actions like storytelling, speeches, and nonviolent protests:
For example, Dorothy Day approached social change and social justice by focusing the Catholic Worker around the rhetorical work of journalism and autobiography but also by introducing new theological symbols. Through prophetic action such as nonviolent antiwar protests, she changed the understanding of Christology and the imago Dei by stressing that all of life cocreates itself in relationship. She embraced a more personalized and politicized understanding of love rooted in this radicalized practice of the works of mercy.
All of these practices aimed to criticize the confluence of poverty, militarism, and racism and formed the basis of the Catholic Worker Movement. And today more contemporary movements, such as Valarie Kaur’s Revolutionary Love Project, radicalize and amplify the Catholic Worker’s message into a broader ethic for justice.
[...] While Kaur operates from a Sikh, religiously pluralistic perspective, she brings a different sort of religious basis to this radical kind of love for justice that carries forward some of the ideas from the Catholic Worker in a 21st-century way. God in these movements cocreates with public actors to birth a more just world. And, in a way, these practices themselves are responding to an ongoing divine presence in the world that lures us toward a more just future.
Read the entire interview at US Catholic.
BRIEFLY
"If I had my way, we'd call this a refugee camp because that's what they are. Every neighborhood in New Haven has refugees, and neighbors have a right to take care of refugees" Amistad Catholic Worker Mark Colville told the New Haven Register in a recent article covering the continuing gift of hospitality that the Colvilles are offering in their backyard.
The Dorothy Day Center at Manhattan College was officially dedicated on Thursday with a blessing by Cardinal Timothy Dolan, a reading from Day’s writings by her granddaughter, Martha Hennessy, and a panel discussion that featured Mark Colville, founder of the Amistad Catholic Worker community in New Haven, Connecticut, among others. Read about the event at Manhattan College’s Facebook page.
Faith leaders, and Catholics in particular, should step up efforts to abolish nuclear weapons, Archbishop John Wester of Santa Fe, New Mexico said in a Nov. 29 sermon at the Mass for the Abolition of Nuclear Weapons sponsored by the Dorothy Day Guild. Wester addressed the immorality of nuclear weapons and the moral imperative to abolish them. Speaking on the anniversary of Dorothy Day’s death, he cited her early condemnation of nuclear weapons and the concept of deterrence. The entire sermon was reprinted in the January-February issue of The Catholic Worker; if you don’t receive the paper, you can read the sermon on CatholicWorker.org.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has sued to revoke the license of Annunciation House, a Catholic nonprofit that has been providing aid and shelter to migrants since 1978; a similar fate could meet other organizations in the state that do the same work, including the state’s four Catholic Worker communities. Annunciation House responded with a statement that they “(have) done this work of accompaniment out of the scriptural and Gospel mandate to welcome the stranger.” Read more about this story from NBC News or Common Dreams.
The Los Angeles Catholic Worker will be presented with the fourth annual Berrigan-McAlister Award at DePaul University on May 13. The award was created to honor those whose commitment to ‘gospel nonviolence’ resists injustice, transforms conflict, fosters reconciliation, and seeks justice and peace for all. It is named after Daniel Berrigan, S.J., his brother Philip, and Philip’s wife Elizabeth McAlister. Learn more at the event page.
Embracing Repair is a new newsletter from Eric Anglada (St. Isidore Catholic Worker, Cuba City, Wisconsin), launched “to get out word about events and writings on themes of land and spirituality, Wild Church and community, Catholic Worker and justice, farming and soil, decolonization and reparations, colonialism and Indigenous history.” You can read it and subscribe on Substack.
APPEALS
Mustard Seed Community Farm & Catholic Worker Seeks Interns, Community Members
New Kansas City CW Will Nurture Creativity and ‘a Listening Society’
Newly Formed CW Farm Seeks Gifts & Loans to Purchase Property in Wisconsin
CALENDAR
February 27 | Virtual event sponsored by Maurin Academy
Growing, Fermenting, Canning & Why
March 3 | Virtual event sponsored by the Dorothy Day Guild
Dorothy Day Guild Book Study
March 13 - March 24 | Scotland
Martha Hennessy Events in Scotland
March 18 | Various locations
Christians Against Genocide Day of Action
March 23 - March 29 | Nevada
Sacred Peace Walk (Nevada Desert Experience)
April 12 - April 15 | Kansas City, Missouri
Midwest Catholic Worker Faith & Resistance Retreat
A FEW GOOD WORDS
Peter Maurin Begins Summer School
From Peter Maurin Begins Summer School
by Erwin Mooney, in The Catholic Worker, August 1940
Peter Maurin initiated his summer school with a group of about ten young men and women who wanted the intellectual background that would enable them to understand more clearly our social, economical and cultural life and its relationship to a reasonable norm.
Peter planned to read nine books during the course of the school session, reading from three each day. In the mornings he had discussions from nine till [sic] eleven o’clock; in the afternoon, from three till five, and in the evening from seven till nine. But before many days had passed it became quite apparent that such a schedule was too tedious.
Consequently, Peter has formulated a new plan for next summer. He says he will have the school last all summer and only have one class each evening. In that way he can more adequately fulfill his “Scholar-Worker” program whereby scholars become workers and workers become scholars.
Even this summer the ‘Scholar-Worker’ program was not completely neglected. Some of the men who are permanent members of the farming commune came to discussions and took an active part in them, and at the same time, when there was a great deal of work to be done quickly, the scholars stopped classes to work. We pitched hay, picked cherries and berries, washed dishes, and did numerous other little chores around the farm, and because of our study we did these chores readily because we were impressed with something too much forgotten today–the dignity of work.
Read the entire essay at the Catholic News Archive.
Thanks to Renee Roden (see her Substack, Sweet Unrest), Zak Sather, and Rosalie Riegle for their help with this week’s newsletter. Thanks also to the National Catholic Worker E-mail List team, whose work provides the leads for many of our items.
And a special thanks to our paid subscribers, who make this newsletter possible; shout out this week to Kerry M., Leah A., and Corey S.