Survivors of Sexual Exploitation Find Community and Hope at St. Bakhita CW
Survivors of Sexual Exploitation Find Community and Hope at St. Bakhita CW
Plus: New foundation aims to help CWs stay open; the death of creative work; "civic courage" training in Sweden; CW families; and... a goat-worshipping CW cult?
The Voluntary Simplicity of the Eucharist, the Rich Young Man, and the Catholic Worker
This is Scarlett Rose Ford’s last week with us as she prepares to return to her studies. We wish her well and thank her for her contributions to Roundtable this summer!
The end of the summer is always bittersweet. So much beauty awaits as the leaves redden and a small breeze flutters through the air, but this comes with the inevitable sadness of another summer passing by. Many things change as the school year starts back up, but one thing remains constant: the Eucharist.
This summer, Mass has been the one thing that has kept me grounded in a haphazard ‘schedule’ (if I can even call it that). A strong calmness veils me as I receive the simple Host containing Jesus, a sentiment that Dorothy Day echoes in From Union Square to Rome.
Dorothy writes, “...By daily going to Him for the gift of Himself as daily bread, I am convinced of [God’s] love. I have the Faith that feeding at that table has nourished my soul so that there is life in it...”
This Monday in Mass, I heard the famous — and often uncomfortable — parable of the rich young man, which ends: “Jesus said to him, ‘If you wish to be perfect, go, sell what you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.’ When the young man heard this statement, he went away sad, for he had many possessions” (Matthew 19:21-22).
This parable is uncomfortable because it goes against many ideals of society. We are told to strive for opulence and financial prosperity, never poverty or simplicity.
In 1953, Dorothy wrote the article “Poverty Is the Pearl of Great Price” about choosing this simplicity. She writes, “The fundamental means of the Catholic Worker are voluntary poverty and manual labor, a spirit of detachment from all things, a sense of the primacy of the spiritual, which makes the rest easy. ‘His praise should be ever in our mouth.’”
Choosing simplicity is crucial. In the Eucharist, Jesus comes to us in the simplest matter of bread and wine. We, too, are called to go into the world simply: We go as we are with what we need to share His love with others — nothing more, nothing less. This is the voluntary simplicity of the Catholic Worker.
—Scarlett Rose Ford
You’ll find a longer excerpt from Dorothy Day’s “Poverty Is the Pearl of Great Price” at the bottom of the newsletter. Word art from that essay, designed by Monica Welch, appears throughout this issue.
Correction
In the August 18 issue, we incorrectly stated that Sister Barbara McCracken spent ten years at Shalom Catholic Worker House in Kansas City before joining the Benedictine Sisters of Mount St. Scholastica. In fact, she joined the order in 1961, well before her time at Shalom CW.
FEATURED
At St. Bakhita Catholic Worker, Survivors of Sexual Exploitation Find Community and Hope
Earlier this month, Joan Bamberek traveled to Milwaukee to visit with Anne Haines, founder of St. Bakhita Catholic Worker, a community devoted to helping women who have experienced human trafficking and sexual exploitation. Here’s an excerpt from her article:
In the late 2010s, Anne Haines began to occasionally join a group called the Franciscan Peacemakers on their pre-dawn lunch deliveries to women on the streets of urban Milwaukee.
“It’s extremely surprising to people how many women are on the streets at five, six in the morning,” Haines said.
Haines was already familiar with the challenges faced by many of the people living in the area where the Franciscan Peacemakers conducted their ministry to trafficked and sexually exploited women. As the Respect Life Director for Urban Ministry for the Archdiocese of Milwaukee, she worked on racial justice and incarceration issues in the Amani neighborhood, made famous by the 2016 film titled Milwaukee 53206.…
But the plight of the women on those streets made a particular impression on her. “Meeting them out on the street…really moved me,” she said. “There’s so many people who are survivors of sexual exploitation, and my heart is really with people who are survivors.
“It just seemed like an area of need,” she continued. “Catholic Workers, what they do is start up when they see a need, and that was something that really resonated with me.”
Haines, who had visited or volunteered with several Catholic Worker communities in her 20s, left her position with the archdiocese in 2021 to open a Catholic Worker community devoted to serving those women. She opened the house in an old convent in 2022 and continues to partner with the Franciscan Peacemakers to help the women recover, heal, and begin life again.
“We are a community of women living together and supporting each other,” Haines said.
You can read much more about St. Bakhita Catholic Worker at CatholicWorker.org.
Dorothy Day Foundation Seeks to Help CW Communities Stay Open
After helping one Catholic Worker community obtain funding to purchase a second house and then learning about the closure of other communities, Michael Doyle began wondering how he might help CW communities stay financially viable.
The result of that wondering, the Dorothy Day Foundation, launched this week with a starting fund of $20,000. Matching grants of $500 to $2,500 are available to CW communities actively engaged in a mentor relationship with the foundation.
Doyle is also the co-founder of the Tampa (Florida) Catholic Worker and the Tampa affiliate of LOVE, Inc., with his late wife Ann. He told Roundtable’s Scarlett Rose Ford that his experience helping other Catholic Worker communities inspired the idea for the foundation.
“The most joy I’ve had is helping others flourish using our skillset,” Doyle said.
The new foundation operates under the umbrella of Dorothy Day Tampa Catholic Worker, a tax-exempt nonprofit organization, with separate bank accounts and books. Communities receiving grants do not have to be tax-exempt, however.
Dorothy Day forcefully rejected the idea of the Catholic Worker applying for tax-exempt status, telling The New York Times that “an application for tax exempt status would mean an endorsement of the Federal Government’s military spending and continuation of the (Vietnam) war.” The New York Catholic Worker was eventually granted tax-exempt status by the IRS, according to the Times, even though it hadn’t applied for it.
Today, most Catholic Worker communities do not have tax-exempt status. Even so, dozens of U.S. CW communities have been designated tax exempt by the IRS, with some arguing that tax-exempt status diverts money from the military to the poor and that the designation does not amount to seeking permission to do the works of mercy.
You can read Scarlett’s story about the new foundation at CatholicWorker.org.
The Death of Personally Satisfying, Creative Work
When Fredrick Taylor pioneered the science of workflow management, he could never have imagined how fully his ideas would take over the workplace. Today, work is quantified, analyzed, evaluated and then manipulated to maximize profitability. In the process, Colin Miller says, we’ve lost touch with the personally satisfying nature of creative work.
Miller has been writing a series of essays for The Catholic Spirit, the newspaper of the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis, explaining the Catholic vision for society through the lens of the Catholic Worker tradition. He is a member of the Maurin House Catholic Worker in Columbia Heights, Minnesota, and director of the Center for Catholic Social Thought at Assumption in St. Paul. Here’s an excerpt from the latest essay in his series:
Each smallest move in Taylor’s factory is quantified, analyzed, evaluated and then manipulated to maximize profitability. The factory is thus one always-evolving machine, and the workers are just one part of it. Personal creativity and intelligence are minimized, and only allowed as they serve the ever-tightening canons of efficiency, defined by the bottom line.
Today, we have not moved beyond Taylorism, we have just totalized it. Our computer-based industrial economy is Taylorism beyond Taylor’s wildest dreams. Precision, calculation and surveillance are now possible at a level increasingly coextensive with society itself.
Yet just like in a factory, the first casualty is the personally satisfying character of work itself. The standardization required for mass production — of services and information as much as wares — still means that laborers become extensions of the machines and systems they serve. We are rarely free to be truly creative, because our goals are always defined by efficiency, defined by maximum profitability. Intelligence is reduced to mere calculation. Such present day “factory work” — even when it is done at home on our laptops — rarely calls for the full engagement of our God-given personal genius.
The farmer or craftsman is always in large part artist, impressing the stamp of her personality, and therefore the very image of God which she bears, on her work. She can look upon her garden, a table, or the shirt she made, and with deep satisfaction say, “Ah! I did that. And it’s beautiful.” Industrial products, on the other hand, are impersonal. They would turn out that way whether you were there or not.
But the farmer or craftsman also lives from what she has made. She, in part, sustains her own life and that of her family and community by her own two hands. She is surrounded each day by a personal world. Not only is this satisfying and comforting, but it creates a lively sense of independence and competence. It actively develops the virtue of prudence and creates a people capable of ordering their lives and becoming masters of the art of living well.
We, however, rarely touch anything we have personally made. We are dependent upon the standardized outputs of a system, and our life becomes passive consumption of these goods and services. We lose the ability, Peter Maurin said, of organizing ourselves, and learn to demand that institutions manage our lives for us. Our applied intelligence and creativity — work — should be the unifying center of our lives. But today, to make money, we are forced to devote it to causes that have nothing much to do with the things that really matter to us.
You can read the entire essay at CatholicWorker.org.
THE ROUNDUP
“For most of history, around the world, children were raised communally,” Cassidy Klein writes in the August U.S. Catholic; now, though, birth rates are falling, in part because parenting became an exhausting “solo adventure” as intergenerational and communal support for parents collapsed. But the crisis presents an opportunity for churches to “step into these spaces of building intergenerational and community support networks,” Klein writes. Catholic Workers feature prominently in the piece; Klein interviewed Los Angeles Catholic Worker Matt Harper, who organized online roundtables on the topic this past spring. Also featured are Frida Berrigan, who grew up in a communal setting, and Rozella Apel-Hernández, who was raised in Beatitude House Catholic Worker (Guadalupe, California). “It was really a wonderful way to grow up, because I was exposed to so many incredible people [and an] extended community that was really invested in my upbringing,” Apel-Hernández said. Read the article at U.S. Catholic.
For a while, Sarah Scull was convinced that her local Catholic Worker community was a cult. “When I started asking around about it, the responses were varied and teeming with local lore. Some people described it as a commune, others as a group of activists, and a few townsfolk referred to it as a gaggle of goat worshippers. The more outlandish the rumors, the more intrigued I became (because of course I did). Who were these people, really? And why did they draw such curiosity and speculation?” When she and her friend finally worked up the courage to visit in person, she found something different: “That evening turned out to be one of the most meaningful experiences I’ve had since moving to Iowa…. That night I was welcomed with open arms by a group of people who, despite their different backgrounds and beliefs, shared a commitment to living out the principles of social justice, hospitality, and peace. We shared a meal, sang songs, and for the first time in years, I felt a sense of belonging that I hadn’t realized I’d been missing.” Read her essay and find out which community she thought was a goat-worshipping cult over at Piecemaker. (Or read to the end of this newsletter for the community reveal.)
Mustard Seed Catholic Worker (Luleå, Sweden) on Thursday co-sponsored practical training on how to confront and respond to injustices such as sexism, violence, and homophobia in everyday situations. The session on “civil courage” was organized in collaboration with Luleå Pride, Rättighetscentrum Norrbotten, and Kristna Freds (Christian Peace). Led by experienced trainers from Kristna Freds, attendees engaged in dialogue exercises, role-playing, and discussion groups, all designed to instill the principles of civil courage into their muscle memory.
The San Diego Catholic Worker eulogizes Tony di Meglio, a longtime supporter and peace and justice, in its summer newsletter. Di Meglio died on April 20, two weeks short of his 100th birthday. A conscientious objector during World War II, he was sent into enemy territory as a scout ahead of the armed troops. After the war, he became involved in the Young Christian Worker Movement, and later was involved in the Mexican American Neighbors Organization. “He was our strongest supporter in all our work, helping the needy on the street as well as educating people about finding ways to make life better for all. He was the person in the front row of every social justice gathering, offering his kind, thoughtful and experienced ways to help others understand where to start and how to move ahead. He would show up unannounced at every event and once you met him you would forever call him your friend.” You can read much more about his life in the newsletter, which also includes an essay on applying St. Therese’s “Little Way” to the Gaza crisis.
Miki Shiverick of MVM Farm in Bergholz, Ohio, has been clearing ten acres of former salvage yard land and is seeking urgent financial support. She needs $2,000 to pay property taxes, $6,000 to repay neighbors who helped her purchase the eight-acre woods and pit pond, and $30,000 to complete payment to the property's previous owner. Additionally, she requires a reliable vehicle to safely attend farmers markets and generate income. You can reach out via the contact information in the Catholic Worker Directory.
Paul Campion (Emmaus House, Chicago) was first introduced to the intersection of Catholicism and social justice while attending Gonzaga College High School in Washington, D.C.; while there, he attended the Ignatian Family Teach-In for Justice (IFTJ), and now he regularly serves as a facilitator for the Ignatian Justice Summit. One reason he keeps helping out at the weeklong event is to give students tools and frameworks to be more effective change-makers, he told Ignatian Solidarity Network in a recent interview. “My hope is that this week is a formative time where people leave feeling more empowered to be able to make the kinds of changes that they dream about,” he said. Read the interview at the Ignatian Solidarity Network.
“Jeffry Odell Korgen’s new graphic novel, Dorothy Day: Radical Devotion…brings a fresh perspective” to Dorothy Day’s life, writes U.S. Catholic in a recent review. The review notes that the book includes “an obscure anecdote about the appearance of poet W. H. Auden on a literary game show in order to donate his winnings to cover the Catholic Worker’s unpaid bill.” Roundtable interviewed Korgen in the July 7 edition.
Zucchini & Tomatoes
CALENDAR
August 27 | St. Louis Catholic Worker, St. Louis, Missouri
Multi-Faith Prayer Gathering
September 6-7 | Chicago, Illinois
Peter Maurin Conference
September 12-15 | Sugar Creek, Iowa
Midwest Catholic Worker Gathering
September 13-14 | Saint Kateri National Shrine, Fonda, New York
26th Annual Kateri Peace Conference
September 21 | Platteville, Wisconsin
Little Platte Catholic Worker Farm Landwarming and Celebration
October 4-6 | St. Francis Catholic Worker, Chicago, Illinois
Catholic Worker National Gathering
October 9 - April 10 | St. Bakhita Catholic Worker, Milwaukee, Wisconsin
Dorothy Day: Patron Saint of Both/And
A FEW GOOD WORDS
Poverty Is the Pearl of Great Price
by Dorothy Day in the July 1953 edition of The Catholic Worker
“When we began the Catholic Worker, we first thought of it as a headquarters for the paper, a place for round-table discussions, for learning crafts, for studying ways of building up a new social order. But God has made it much more than all this. He has made it a place for the poor. They come early in the morning from their beds in cheap flophouses, from the benches in the park across the street, from the holes and corners of the city. They are the most destitute, the most abandoned.
It is easy for people to see Jesus in the children of the slums, and institutions and schools are built to help them. That is a vocation in itself. But these abandoned men are looked upon as hopeless. “No good will come of it.” We are contributing to laziness. We are feeding people who won’t work. These are the accusations made. God help us, we give them so little: bread and coffee in the morning, soup and bread at noon. Two scant meals.
We are a family of forty or fifty at the Catholic Worker. We keep emphasizing that. But we are also a House of Hospitality. So many come that it is impossible to give personal attention to each one; we can only give what we have, in the name of Jesus. Thank God for directing our vocation. We did not choose this work. He sent it to us. We will always, please God, be clambering around the rocks and briars, the barrenness, the fruitlessness of city life, in search of lost sheep.
We are told to put on Christ and we think of Him in His private life, His life of work, His public life, His teaching and His suffering life. But we do not think enough of His life as a little child, as a baby. His helplessness. His powerlessness. We have to be content to be in that state too. Not to be able to do anything, to accomplish anything.
One thing children certainly accomplish, and that is that they love and wonder at the people and the universe around them. They live in the midst of squalor and confusion and see it not. They see people at the moment and love them and admire them. They forgive and they go on loving. They may look on the most vicious person, and if he is at that moment good and kind and doing something which they can be interested in or admire, there they are, pouring out their hearts to him…
The fundamental means of the Catholic Worker are voluntary poverty and manual labor, a spirit of detachment from all things, a sense of the primacy of the spiritual, which makes the rest easy. “His praise should be ever in our mouth.”
The reason for our existence is to praise God, to love Him and serve Him, and we can do this only by loving our brothers. “All men are brothers.” This is the great truth that makes us realize God. Great crimes, it is true, have been committed in the name of human brotherhood; that may serve to obscure the truth, but we must keep on saying it. We must keep on saying it because Love is the reason for our existence. It is what we all live for, whether we are a hanger-on in Times Square or the most pious member of a community. We are seeking what we think to be the good for us. If we don’t know any better, often it is because radio, newspapers, press and pulpit have neglected so to inform us. We love what is presented to us to love, and God is not much presented. It is as hard to see Jesus in the respectable Christian today as in the man on the Bowery. And so “the masses have been lost to the Church.”
We who live in this country cannot be as poor as those who go out to other countries. This is so rich a country that luxury has developed at the expense of necessities, and even the destitute partake of the luxury. We are the rich country of the world, like Dives at the feast. We must try hard, we must study to be poor like Lazarus at the gate, who was taken into Abraham’s bosom. The Gospel doesn’t tell us anything about Lazarus’ virtues. He just sat there and let the dogs lick his sores. He would be classed by any social worker of today as a mental case. But again, poverty, and in this case destitution, like hospitality, is so esteemed by God, it is something to be sought after, worked for, the pearl of great price.
Roundtable covers the Catholic Worker Movement. This week’s Roundtable was produced by Jerry Windley-Daoust, Renée Roden, Joan Bromberek, Monica Welch, and Scarlett Ford.
Roundtable is an independent publication not associated with the New York Catholic Worker or The Catholic Worker newspaper. Send inquiries to roundtable@catholicworker.org.
And the community Sarah visited was Strangers and Guests Catholic Worker Farm in southwest Iowa. Below, one of the goats Brian and Betsy allegedly worship. Photo: Theo Kayser.
