The Catholic Worker in Africa
Plus: Peter's vision of communitarian living; new CW communities; a "liturgy of repentance"; and why we cannot stay silent in the face of war.
The Diversity of the Catholic Worker Movement
The last few months, it seems like every time you turn around, someone’s launching a new Catholic Worker community; this issue tags two of them: a farm in Wisconsin and an arts-focused, family-run CW in Kansas City, Missouri. Then there’s the new Quaker Catholic Worker in Tombstone, Arizona, another new community in Georgia, one in the works in Ireland…am I missing any? We’re also pointing you to Theo Kayser’s excellent interview with Josh and Elisabeth Armstrong of the Mustard Seed Community in Luleå, Sweden—not a new CW community, but an example of how the Movement continues to be expressed in new forms around the world.
For all the diverse forms Catholic Worker communities take, though, they still tend to be started by White people in affluent countries. That’s why, when I learned about Michael Sekitoleko’s truly remarkable 12-year commitment to the Uganda Catholic Worker, I knew I wanted to find out more about his story. What might the Catholic Worker look like in an African setting?
I interviewed Michael over Zoom back in August, and I’m pleased to be sharing the first part of his story with you (finally!) this week. You’ll find the teaser below, and the full story at CatholicWorker.org.
Warmly,
Jerry Windley-Daoust
P.S. Oh yeah…welcome to our second issue! If you missed the first issue, you can find it here. And if you like this newsletter, please share it with a friend!
FEATURED
Featured reads on CatholicWorker.org.
The Catholic Worker in Africa: ‘We Need It Now More Than Ever’
Since founding the Uganda Catholic Worker with two university friends in 2011, Michael Sekitoleko has experienced hunger, malaria and typhoid, evictions, skeptical Church officials, and a brutal COVID lockdown that filled his house of hospitality to capacity and killed one of his guests. He’s also been arrested by the police—not for some act of civil disobedience, but for bringing lawyers to meet with rural villagers who were about to lose their homes in an illegal land grab.
He didn’t have to choose this lifestyle. Raised in a middle-class family, he is college educated with a bachelor’s degree in business computing. But for Sekitoleko, being a Catholic Worker is a vocational calling. A devout Catholic who isn’t shy about his faith, Sekitoleko at one time planned to enter the seminary to become a priest. Instead, he spent more than twelve years providing shelter and help to convicts, abandoned children, HIV-positive people, victims of domestic violence, and refugees. He embraces the Catholic Worker vision of a society radically re-ordered around love, mercy, and justice, and he has ideas about what that might look like not only in Uganda, but for the African continent.
“With the troubles that we have, Africa, and Uganda specifically, needs the Catholic Worker more today than it has ever needed it,” he said.
Over more than eight hours, Sekitoleko told me his story and his vision for the future of the Catholic Worker in Africa. Read part one of “The Catholic Worker in Africa” at CatholicWorker.org.
Peter’s Vision Calls All Christians to ‘Communitarian’ Living
Peter Maurin’s communitarian vision was not meant to be an alternative to Christian life, Colin Miller (The Maurin House Catholic Worker, Columbia Heights, Minnesota) writes. Instead, he wanted communitarianism to become the default way of life for the whole Church: the shared practice of the works of mercy, regular meetings for discussion and reflection, shared meals, the pooling of resources:
By “communitarian,” then, Peter didn’t have in mind any political party, then or now, that might go by that name. Rather, he wanted to distinguish the Catholic Worker from “communism” on the one hand (which was a live political option at that time), and from the normal “individualism” of American life on the other. He was emphasizing the Church itself as a distinctive way of life, a live alternative to others on offer.
Read the whole essay at CatholicWorker.org.
CW NEWS
CW organizes "Liturgy of Repentance” in front of White House
The Dorothy Day Catholic Worker (Washington, D.C.) sponsored a “Liturgy in Repentance for Complicity in Genocide of the People of Gaza” in front of the White House on Saturday, shortly before the National March on Washington for Gaza. The liturgy took place next to a display of 1,000 stuffed animals representing the thousands of children who have been killed in Gaza since Oct. 7. Organizers said they hoped Catholic bishops would hold a Mass of Repentance “begging” for an immediate ceasefire.
New CW will nurture creativity and ‘a listening society’
A new Catholic Worker community in Kansas City, Missouri, will focus on hospitality, nurturing creativity, and “building a listening society,” according to founders Wilhelm and Sally Höjer.
The San Sebastian Catholic Worker aims to counter “the disintegration of community, the rise in loneliness and the lack of beauty and art in our world,” the Höjers said in their appeal letter. They hope to open an art studio and a music studio to nurture local artists and musicians. In addition, they plan to provide overnight hospitality and monthly village prenatals for expectant mothers.
Plans for the community were shaped by the decade the Höjers spent exploring various communal living situations and Catholic Worker houses.
They hope to raise nearly $200,000 to launch the community. Read their appeal letter at CatholicWorker.org.
New CW farm in the works in Wisconsin
The Little Platte Catholic Worker Farm, a new Catholic Worker community, is seeking financial support through donations and interest-free loans to acquire a 37-acre property in Platteville, Wisconsin.
Inspired by Peter Maurin's Agronomic University, this initiative is the culmination of nearly two years of planning by community members. The farm will focus on several key areas: fostering a land-based community life, practicing regenerative agriculture and ecological restoration, providing spiritual retreats for activists, and offering educational programs. Additionally, the project will emphasize land-based crafts and art, the use of appropriate technology, and collaboration with the nearby St. Isidore Catholic Worker Farm (Cuba City, Wisconsin).
Individuals and organizations interested in learning more about the Little Platte Catholic Worker Farm can visit their website, which provides access to the community covenant and online giving options.
Mustard Seed Community brings Catholic Worker vision to Sweden
Elisabeth and Josh Armstrong, co-founders of The Mustard Seed Community Catholic Worker in Luleå, Sweden, shared their story with Theo Kayser on episode 21 of “Coffee with Catholic Workers.”
After meeting at Cherith Brook Catholic Worker in Kansas City, the couple married and moved back to Sweden, where Elisabeth was born and raised. They settled in Luleå in northern Sweden and eventually began organizing community meals and showers for homeless Roma people at the Lutheran church they attended.
This initiative evolved into the Mustard Seed Community, with the Armstrongs (and various other community members over the years) moving to the church’s campground just outside of the city. There, they grow vegetables, raise chickens and bees, hold weekly prayer services, and provide hospitality. They cooperate closely with the Lutheran church that rents the space to them; the church and the Mustard Seed Community have continued to sponsor a weekly meal in the church basement.
Luleå is home to an Air Force base as well as NATO military exercises every two years. The community protests the exercises, holding an alternative event called the Arctic Peace Challenge. Josh served in Iraq with the U.S. military before coming to the conclusion that his military service and Christian faith were incompatible, leading him to file for conscientious objector status, a background that makes Josh especially passionate about promoting peace.
The couple have two young children and are looking for new community members to join them. If you can’t make it to northern Sweden, though, you can listen to the interview or read Theo Kayser’s account of his visit to the community in the summer of 2023.
QUICK TAKES
Planning is underway for renovations at the Dorothy Day Hospitality House (Rochester, Minnesota), according to the organization’s annual newsletter, which also highlights its partnership with local medical clinics to provide basic medical care to guests for free. The organization is celebrating its 40th year this year.
Dorothy Day and St. Elizabeth Ann Seton had a lot in common, according to an essay at the Seton Shrine website: “They are both known as doers—Dorothy Day for social activism and caring for the poor and forgotten, and Mother Seton for schools and hospitals. But neither one of them could have accomplished what they did without their deep inner lives of prayer, knowing that Jesus was their strength.”
Rosette Neighborhood Village at Amistad Catholic Worker in New Haven, Connecticut struck a tentative deal to connect its tiny homes to city electric services as a winter cold front brought temperatures below freezing through the Midwest and parts of the Northeast. The electricity was connected on Monday. Read the full story of the Catholic Worker tiny home project at the Yale Daily News here.
The Maria Skobtsova House in Calais, France (the only house of hospitality in Peter Maurin’s home country) was featured in an article in The Christian Century. The house was co-founded by Catholic Workers Patricia McDwyer-Wendzinski and Brother Johannes along with the Rev, Simon Jones, a Baptist minister: “People come and they go. Volunteers and refugees alike arrive, make coffee, play chess and Legos, pray, wait, try to imagine the unimaginable and control the uncontrollable; they plant seeds in containers on the patio or water those seeds that they likely won’t be around to see flower or fruit.”
In its latest newsletter, the Winona Catholic Worker eulogized longtime friend and volunteer Anne Pellowski, who passed away over the summer. A widely respected expert in children’s cultures and storytelling, Pellowski was a children’s librarian for the New York Public Library and traveled the world for UNICEF, UNESCO, the World Council of Churches and other international organizations. She also made elaborate Polish meals for the weekly community meal at the WCW.
APPEALS
Mustard Seed Community Farm (Ames, Iowa) is actively seeking interns and community members to live and farm with them for the 2024 season.
St. Louis Catholic Worker is holding a pizza and beer fundraiser on Feb. 3 at Sophia House; donations will go toward the fund to purchase a house.
The newly formed Little Platte Catholic Worker Farm is seeking gifts and loans to help them purchase a 37-acre farm near Platteville, Wisconsin.
Tombstone Quaker CW (Tombstone, Arizona) is seeking a live-in volunteer.
Bloomington Christian Radical / Catholic Worker (Bloomington, Indiana) seeks new live-in volunteers.
CALENDAR
January 27 | Virtual event
Building a World Without Nuclear Weapons: An Urgent Imperative
February 2 | Virtual event
Committed Together: Raising Kids in Community
February 16 – February 18 | Platteville, Wisconsin
National Biennial Catholic Worker Farmer Gathering
Mar 3 – Mar 24 | Virtual event
Dorothy Day Guild Book Study
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
We Cannot Keep Silent
From “Why Do the Members of Christ Tear One Another?”
by Dorothy Day, in The Catholic Worker, February 1942
One reader writes to protest against our “frail” voices “blatantly” crying out against war. (The word blatant comes from bleat, and we are indeed poor sheep crying out to the Good Shepherd to save us from these horrors.) Another Catholic newspaper says it sympathizes with our sentimentality. This is a charge always leveled against pacifists. We are supposed to be afraid of the suffering, of the hardships of war.
But let those who talk of softness, of sentimentality, come to live with us in cold, unheated houses in the slums. Let them come to live with the criminal, the unbalanced, the drunken, the degraded, the pervert. (It is not decent poor, it is not the decent sinner who was the recipient of Christ’s love.) Let them live with rats, with vermin, bedbugs, roaches, lice (I could describe the several kinds of body lice).
. . . . .
Then when they have lived with these comrades, with these sights and sounds, let our critics talk of sentimentality.
“Love in practice is a harsh and dreadful thing compared to love in dreams.”
Our Catholic Worker groups are perhaps too hardened to the sufferings in the class war, living as they do in refugee camps, the refugees being as they are victims of the class war we live in always. We live in the midst of this war now these many years. It is a war not recognized by the majority of our comfortable people. They are pacifists themselves when it comes to the class war. They even pretend it is not there.
Many friends have counseled us to treat this world war in the same way. “Don’t write about it. Don’t mention it. Don’t jeopardize the great work you are doing among the poor, among the workers. Just write about constructive things like Houses of Hospitality and Farming Communes.” “Keep silence with a bleeding heart,” one reader, a man, pro-war and therefore not a sentimentalist, writes us.
But we cannot keep silent. We have not kept silence in the face of the monstrous injustice of the class war, or the race war that goes on side by side with this world war (which the Communist used to call the imperialist war.)
. . . . .
Perhaps we are called sentimental because we speak of love. We say we love our president, our country. We say that we love our enemies, too. “Hell,” Bernanos said, “is not to love any more.”
“Greater love hath no man than this,” Christ said, “that he should lay down his life for his friend.”
“Love is the measure by which we shall be judged,” St. John of the Cross said.
“Love is the fulfilling of the law,” St. John, the beloved disciple said.
Read the last discourse of Jesus to his disciples. Read the letters of St. John in the New Testament. And how can we express this love–by bombers, by blockades?
. . . . .
“Love is an exchange of gifts,” St. Ignatius said.
Love is a breaking of bread.
Remember the story of Christ meeting His disciples at Emmaus? All along the road He had discoursed to them, had expounded the scriptures. And then they went into into the inn at Emmaus, and sat down to the table together. And He took bread and blessed it and broke it and handed it to them, and they knew Him in the breaking of bread! (St. Luke, 24, 13-35.)
Love is not the starving of whole populations. Love is not the bombardment of open cities. Love is not killing, it is the laying down of one’s life for one’s friend.
Thanks to Renee Roden for her help with this week’s newsletter; subscribe to her newsletter here. Thanks also to the National Catholic Worker E-mail List team, whose work provides the leads for many of our items.
I loved reading about the Catholic Worker in Uganda, and watching Michael’s video about what it’s like. Very inspiring.