"Do Not Neglect Hospitality" - Part One

Harry Murray on the sociological relationships within Catholic Worker houses of hospitality

St. Joseph’s House of Hospitality Distributes Groceries, September 2020

During this upcoming month, Roundtable will serialize a chapter from Harry Murray’s “Do Not Neglect Hospitality: The Catholic Worker and the Homeless” in our CW Reads section.

Murray is an emeritus professor of sociology at Nazareth College in Rochester, New York. “Do Not Neglect Hospitality,” published in 1990 by Temple University Press, shares Murray’s sociological research embedded in three different Catholic Worker communities from 1982 to 1984.

Murray opens up his book with a personal story of his first visit to St. Joseph’s House of Hospitality in New York City in 1976. What he encountered offered a hint of how rich a house of hospitality could be for a study of social relationships. During their visit, Murray and his friend tried to figure out “who was actually running the place.”

When I asked the people who were sitting around who they were, they replied, ‘We’re Catholic Workers, helping those people over there.’ The response became bewildering, for when I talked to ‘those people over there’ they too replied, ‘we’re Catholic Workers helping those people over there,’ and would point to the group I had just come from."

In his first two chapters, Murray offers a summary of the history of how houses of hospitality became a part of the Catholic Worker movement and cross-cultural perspectives on hospitality as the practice appears in Greek mythology, Hebrew Scriptures, and Islamic cultures.

In the book’s third chapter, Murray shares some of the insights from his unorthodox methodology in taking up a dual role in the communities as both Worker and researcher:

There are many arguments against using this approach, but most focus on either the biasing effect of one's emotional reactions or on the reactive nature of participation. Emotional reactions can lead to bias. However, if recognized and reflected upon, your emotional reaction can be a valuable source of data. You don't fully understand the life situation of a Worker in the New York house until you come back from a night spent away from the house only to be told that your bed was given out to someone from the streets last night and ‘you'd better check it because he was really filthy and probably had lice.’

Murray humbly calls his book “the worst-selling book on the Catholic Worker,” but he is perhaps one of the most dedicated Worker-scholars who has given serious study to what Catholic Workers truly speak about when they speak about “hospitality.”

Murray began this research project as part of his dissertation. One member of his dissertation committee was Jerry Berrigan—Dan and Phil Berrigan’s younger brother—whom Murray continued to collaborate with and protest with for many decades. Murray was a long-time editor of the newspaper at St. Joseph’s House in Rochester and ran their Saturday morning meal. Murray has continued to get arrested protesting drones and other machines of war at Hancock Air Base throughout his career as a sociology professor and director for the Center for Peace and Justice at Nazareth University.

The Maurin Academy has been hosting Harry Murray this year for the “Harry Murray Sessions.” Murray sprinkles his lectures with similar insights from his protests and his sociological observations of the carceral system he witnessed during his arrests and jail stints. But, in this book, Murray leaves aside these other stories to focus on the challenging and mystifying practice of hospitality.

Hospitality, Murray says, “might be one way of attempting to recapture the capacity for truly human relationships, a capacity that so many of us fear is being lost.”

These words, written 35 years ago, seem more prescient now than ever in our increasingly technocratic, digitized and isolated society. Although none of the Catholic Worker communities neglect hospitality (as the Letter to the Hebrews and Murray’s title commands), as “Do Not Neglect Hospitality” demonstrates, there are a nearly infinite number of manners and modes through which hospitality is practiced. And his stories of the rules, regulations and idiosyncrasies of human behavior are a master class in what it means to actually practice true human relationship and the “harsh and dreadful” love of community.

peace,

Renée

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St. Joseph’s House of Hospitality, September 2020

“Show No Partiality”: Arriving at St. Joe’s

Excerpted from the chapter “The Flagship,” on St. Joseph’s House of Hospitality in New York City, from Do Not Neglect Hospitality: The Catholic Worker and the Homeless

By Harry Murray

From the moment I knocked on the door at St. Joseph's House, I encountered the egalitarianism of Worker hospitality. Early in December I took the subway from Grand Central Station to Houston Street and stepped into the Lower East Side for the first time since my visit to the house in the mid-1970s. Although the neighborhood had become increasingly gentrified over the last few years, it still bore traces of its proximity to the Bowery, two blocks to the west. Shadowed by abandoned buildings, a small group of men huddled around a fire in a garbage bin. Two blocks to the east is an area well known as an illegal drug market. The Municipal Men's Shelter, Maryhouse, and the Hell's Angels' local headquarters were two blocks to the north, on Third Street.

The house was located on First Street, on a block that was generally quiet, although I once saw dozens of people literally running amok when drug dealers set up shop for the day in an abandoned building on the other side of the street. The block consists mostly of row houses, most residential, but some abandoned or commercial. St. Joseph's House itself was a narrow five-story row house.

The door was locked. An elfin woman with snowy white hair answered my knock. I told her I was the researcher they were expecting. She told me to wait and called Peter, a bearded, soft-spoken man in his thirties. I explained myself again. Peter said, "Oh yeah, you're coming the first. I had forgotten that was today." He invited me in and I followed him around as he answered questions from the dozen or so people sitting around the dining room.

He steered me to a table where Jack, a middle-aged black man, was sitting. Peter said to me, "He's coming in tonight too, so we may as well do this together." He turned his attention to Jack, "So you need to stay a week." “Right, I work at the Human Resources Administration, but I'm off for this week." "That's good because after a week I'll need the space again." Peter then spoke to both of us. "There's not much to explain here. Everybody does what they want in terms of helping." Jack said, "Good, I need something to do this week. I’ll be willing to help out." I also expressed a willingness to help. Peter told Jack, "I'm not sure if I'm going to put you on the third floor or on the fifth. Harry will go on the fifth." Jack asked, "Is there a difference?"

"No, just space. Why don't you come up and I'll check out the third." On the way upstairs we ran into Harvey, a thin white man with unkempt gray hair, standing on a landing, talking engagedly to himself. Finally noticing us, he asked, "Which way do you want to go?" We said up, and he moved out of our way, talking to himself all the while. Jack, looking somewhat taken aback, observed to Peter, "You've got quite some people here."

Peter looked into the third-floor dormitory, decided it was already too full, and guided us to the fifth, where he gave Jack the bed of a Worker who was away for "awhile" and gave me a folding cot placed in front of the closet. He gave me clean sheets and a blanket and told Jack that the sheets on his bed, though a bit rumpled, were clean.

Here I was, a sociological researcher, arriving to study the Catholic Worker movement, and I was treated simply as one more person needing a bed. To the Workers, Jack and I had the same status and were treated essentially the same way. As happens disturbingly often at a Worker house, one could see the words of the New Testament enacted literally (in this case James 2: 1-4):

My brethren, show no partiality as you hold the faith of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Lord of glory. For if a man with gold rings and in fine clothing comes into your assembly, and a poor man in shabby clothing also comes in, and you pay attention to the one who wears the fine clothing and say, "Have a seat here, please," while you say to the poor man, "Stand there," or "Sit at my feet," have you not made distinctions among yourselves, and become judges with evil thoughts?

Although I hardly came in fine raiment, I did come with the social and educational credentials that often serve as its functional equivalent in our society. These made no difference in my reception at the Worker. Indeed, for the first week or so, my closest friends and companions were Jack and "Gimbel's Irv," a man who arrived seeking shelter around the same time. We were the newcomers, and that, rather than our reasons for coming, determined our status.

This is not to say that there were no permanent status distinctions in the house. Status was quite problematic, as I will explain later. Nevertheless, the house was a very serious effort to reduce status differentials between the rich and the poor—an effort that often succeeded in dramatic ways.

However, I was not too concerned with the issue of equality at that point. Despite the fact that I had lived at three other Worker houses by this time, I was a bit awestruck at being here, at St. Joseph's, the "original" Catholic Worker house, the direct successor to the Teresa-Joseph Cooperative described in the previous chapter.

Physically, of course, the house has had numerous incarnations—on Fifteenth Street, on Charles Street, on Mott Street, on Spring Street, on Chrystie Street, and, since 1968, on East First Street. Nonetheless, as a social entity, this house was "the original."

Strictly speaking, St. Joseph's House was only part of the original Catholic Worker community. In the mid-1970s, the New York Worker established Maryhouse two blocks away, on Third Street, as a shelter for homeless women. Dorothy Day moved from First Street into Maryhouse after it was opened and died in her room there. Also part of the original Worker community almost from the beginning was the Catholic Worker farm, which has also been at various locations—Easton, Tivoli, and, currently, Marlboro, New York. Finally, there was a beach cottage on Staten Island. These enterprises together constituted the original New York Catholic Worker community.

It has been this community that has produced the Catholic Worker paper for over half a century, that sent Workers to protest Naziism and assist in the Seamen's strike in the 1930s, to side with the gravediggers against the Diocese of New York in the 1950s, to be arrested protesting the nuclear air-raid drills in the late 1950s and early 1960s, to join in the civil rights, anti-Vietnam War, and Farmworkers' campaigns in the 1960s and 1970s. (Such activities continue today. While I was there, the editor of the paper left for six months with Witness for Peace in Nicaragua.) It was the house where Dorothy Day, Peter Maurin, Stanley Vishnewski, Ammon Hennacy, Michael Harrington, and many others have lived and worked. It was the example that has inspired all other houses. I was anxious to see what it was like in the 1980s.

Harry Murray is a professor emeritus of sociology at Nazareth University in Rochester, New York. He spent two years at Unity Kitchen in Syracuse in the late 1970s. He ran the Saturday meal and St. Joseph House in Rochester for over thirty years and was incarcerated in the Salvation Army with Peter DeMott for three months for protesting the Gulf War.

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