"They keep coming": Essays from the London Catholic Worker
Two (more) essays from the London Catholic Worker's Lent/Easter newsletter
We wanted to share two more highlights from the London Catholic Worker’s Lent/Easter newsletter.
For today’s CW Reads, Martin Newell, one of the founding members of the London Catholic Worker, reflects on the comings and goings of Workers and immigrants.
In a second essay, another volunteer at the house, Thomas Frost, reflects on humility as a necessary practice when giving out social aid. Humility, he says, means being of the earth, staying close to the ground. When it comes to distributing resources, connecting abundance and surplus to need needs to happen, he says, at a grassroots level, practicing the essential Catholic Social Teaching principle of subsidiarity.
But Frost notices a tendency toward power and control in all of us that stymies our efforts. Frost writes:
The desire to be the one to solve the problem and the concomitant desire for control are temptations which run right through all charities, from professionalised institutions down to small volunteer-organised teams, and is probably a large part of why ‘charity’ has acquired such a bad name. I expect that we have all done some sort of harm, to some extent, for these reasons.
Frost’s insights are an incarnation of what Harry Murray wrote about yesterday about his observations about the difficulties of decision-making in an anarchist community and in being flexible in an older community, making changes to address the real, urgent needs of the real people who come to the house for aid. Read Murray’s chapter from yesterday’s CW Reads here.
peace,
Renée
Reading the Signs of the Times
Originally published under the title: “Hope in Spite of Present Difficulties” in the Lent/Easter edition of the London Catholic Worker Newsletter.
By Martin Newell
We seem to be constantly living with the contradictions of hope and difficulty here at Giuseppe Conlon House. Usually, it is a long, slow grind for those who are guests living here with us, but in the last year, six of the men living with us were granted ‘leave to remain’ and were able to move on with their lives, despite the roadblocks of bureaucracy, the housing crisis, and the ‘hostile environment’. And we were able to help one to get compensation from the Windrush scheme [a reparative act to compensate immigrants to the United Kingdom who have suffered losses due to not being able to prove their immigration status].
Lots of work on our buildings has also created a more pleasant, safer house to live in, thanks mostly to Tom, Richie, and Francisco, as well as Jurgen’s team. Tom and Natalie moved into their own home so they could welcome their baby, Silas, after a year and a half of marriage and a real health scare. At the same time, we have a great new team of Catholic Workers who have joined us in the last few months. Francisco, Moya, and Dottie have joined myself and Thomas.
Together, these changes have enabled us to re-open the night shelter in the hall, at the same time as continuing to welcome guests into the community house. We welcomed our first guests into the shelter when I started writing this article a few weeks ago. We will soon be full again, with a house abuzz with life, grace, blessings, and challenge.
In the Catholic world, 2025 is a Jubilee Year of Hope. Pope Francis is trying to remind us of the importance not of superficial optimism, but of hope as an active and theological virtue: a deep trust that God is good, that God is love, and that Love has come into the world, and continues to do so with each child born and each act of generosity, care, or tenderness. These are truths we witness in the midst of struggle in a house of hospitality, where we might be ‘entertaining angels without knowing it’ (Hebrews 13:2).
At the same time, living among refugees and asylum seekers, the fate of those trying to get to the UK and the EU is never far from our minds. We remember and pray for those who have lost their lives trying to cross the Mediterranean and the English Channel, in particular during our monthly prayer and protest vigil outside the Home Office. And Thomas has recently pointed out that according to the UN, more people are now dying in the Sahara than in the Mediterranean, at least in part due to EU and UK funding for North African ‘border forces’, who often simply take migrants out into the desert and leave them there to die. It can be hard for us to reconcile times that seem good for our life and work, but are also times of sadness, loss, tragedy, anxiety, or anger elsewhere.
Recently, the Tottenham Refugee Alliance had to give up on finding a house to rent locally where they could sponsor and welcome a Syrian refugee family. The rents are just too high: it was impossible for them to find anywhere within the Local Housing Allowance (or Housing Benefit cap, in ‘old money’). As a result, we have received a good share of what was left of the money raised for that project. We are sad that they were unable to find a house, but grateful to receive the resources they had collected.
Reading the Times
I went on retreat at the start of Advent. It was a challenging and fruitful time, as I pondered where God has brought me to and where I am being led, in the midst of so much uncertainty, as so often seems to be the way with Catholic Worker life. Of course, the uncertainty is not just about our life here in the house. It feels like we are living in a world of so much uncertainty right now.
Jesus tells us to read the times. Reading our times at this moment in history makes me aware of the apparently powerful gods, idols, and demons of the new world order who blasphemously demand our allegiance, or at least seek to determine our futures. Uppermost in my mind right now are AI (artificial intelligence), the climate and environmental emergency, and Donald Trump and his allies both in the US and elsewhere, ‘moving fast and breaking things’ (or more accurately, breaking people), and his frenemies like Vladimir Putin, playing chicken with nuclear threats and preparations for war that should be no more (Isaiah 2:4). The times feel very dangerous as well as uncertain. We all are being played in a high-stakes game of Russian roulette. The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists recently moved the hands of the Doomsday clock to 89 seconds to midnight, the closest it has ever been. We will write more about this in our next newsletter, when we have had more time to reflect on what is happening.
When I was a teenager, I told my Dad about a news story reporting that the Soviet countries would not let their people leave. I said, “That’s terrible isn’t it.” He replied, “Well, if they did let them leave, we wouldn’t let them in”.
These seem prophetic words today, revealing that it is not human nature that has changed, but the situation.
It is tragic that so many have to flee poverty, violent conflict, and persecution, which are fed by such things as the arms trade and climate change. On the other hand, at least they are allowed to leave and have the resources and ability to be able to flee. The poorest still do not have that ‘luxury’.
And it is the same ability to travel fast and cheaply that so many Brits take for granted when going on foreign holidays that enables many from the global south to at least aspire to follow the wealth and the work to where it has been taken. Rich countries like ours are like King Canute, trying to hold back the tide of human movement. As we tell our house guests, if you look at the Earth from space, there are no lines around it. Borders that keep the poor out are not God’s creation or will. Nor are the injustices and suffering that both push and pull people to move. We pray that refugees are welcomed here. And equally, that they will not have to leave home in the first place and travel safely when they do, as we wish for our own family and friends.
Martin John Newell is a Passionist priest, anti-war campaigner, social activist and a founding member of the London Catholic Worker.
The Humility of Grassroots Hospitality
Originally published under the title: “Tea, Coffee, Cocoa” in the Lent/Easter edition of the London Catholic Worker Newsletter.
By Thomas Frost
For a long while now, I’ve spent a few hours every couple of weeks giving out food with a few different organisations. On a recent shift I saw something unusual: in the long queue were a couple of families with children. The temperature was close to freezing and children were standing with their parents on a dark pavement next to a busy road junction so that they could get a hot meal. I was distressed by the fact that children have to do such a thing in a wealthy country, and maybe more so by the thought of their parents having to explain it to them. I have seen worse things, but this upset me because it was something new and I am not yet used to it. It reminded me of how I felt when I started doing this sort of work, and, for the first time in my relatively sheltered life, coming into contact with human need so directly. Not that the first few times were particularly emotionally difficult – serving a long, fast-moving, and sometimes impatient queue from tables set up on a pavement is exciting, and I imagine excitement will be the dominant emotion for most people at first.
The difficult thing is not that visitors come, but that they keep coming. It is not difficult to serve at a soup run just once, because that first time you are thinking only in terms of the immediate need you are resolving: the people in front of you need food, and you are giving it to them. What is difficult is serving the same queue week after week, with many faces becoming familiar, and starting to think of hunger itself as a continuous problem, persisting over time, which you are unable to resolve. In this sense it does not matter that you are giving out food now – the hunger will still be there next week. This is easy to understand in the abstract, but harder to take when it is your own work being flung against the intractable problem, and those affected are in front of you.
We all want power. The least of us are not very different from the great in this way. Parents want the power to feed their children, the hungry want the power to feed themselves, politicians want the power to enrich or aggrandize themselves. People who perform the works of mercy generally want the power to relieve the need they see. I would like to be able to resolve the problem of poverty by waving my hand. I wonder whether I am more distressed by seeing the suffering of others or by the consciousness of my impotence to resolve it. This is a sort of arrogance which is perhaps difficult to distinguish from altruism, and ironically is likely to reduce our usefulness still further. The people I want to help are often able to do far more for each other than I do for them. I have seen people in precarious situations, with very little energy to spare, devote all of it to helping the people around them, and doing so very effectively because, sharing similar experiences, they know what they need. Usually, the most useful role those of us who are relatively privileged can perform from outside is to facilitate solidarity without imposing ourselves too much, but the more obsessed we are with the restrictions on our own agency the more we’ll struggle to do so.
Over the course of a cold winter, we have seen this tendency play out lethally in London through the disorganisation of council-provided “severe weather emergency protocol” (SWEP) shelters. Beds have remained unoccupied while people have remained outside in the freezing cold because councils have insisted on assigning beds through their own small internal referral teams rather than utilising the knowledge of the many dedicated grassroots organisations, which know who needs shelter and where they are, to say nothing of the experience of rough sleepers themselves, who of course know perfectly well that they need to be indoors on freezing nights. The desire to be the one to solve the problem and the concomitant desire for control are temptations which run right through all charities, from professionalised institutions down to small volunteer-organised teams, and is probably a large part of why ‘charity’ has acquired such a bad name. I expect that we have all done some sort of harm, to some extent, for these reasons.
These reflections make me more and more convinced of the importance of humility, which used to be regarded by Christians as a great virtue. The word comes from the Latin humilitas, derived from humilis, the quality of lowness, itself derived from humus, meaning ‘earth’, giving the word the additional sense of ‘groundedness’. One who is humble is close to the earth, and thus aware of their limitations as an earthly creature. Reflecting on my limitations is a great consolation because, without reducing my motivation to do what I can to work against problems, it undercuts the sense of frustrated omnipotence which makes me want to eliminate them all myself. It also helps me to serve those I serve in a more practical way, by keeping me conscious of the limitations of my experience and the need to defer to those who have more of it.
Humility will help us to avoid doing harm when we think we are doing good.
If we lived in a sane society humility would be regarded as an indispensable virtue in private and public life; it would be taught in schools and there would be a general understanding that the lack of it is both unhealthy and actively dangerous. Of course this will not happen, and of course in my own life I will not succeed in cultivating it as much as I should. But I can work on it. We at least have the advantage of the example of the Cross, on which Jesus exhibited perfect humility, taking on the maximum possible degree of limitation and accepting it, and thus saved the world. We also have the ministry of Mary, who understood and accepted the divine will when nobody else did, because she was uniquely willing to accept just the role she was given in it, and, because of this, received as a spear through her own heart the crucifixion of her son. She was able to participate in the greatest of all human actions just because of her humility. We cannot hope for anything more.
Thomas Frost is a member of the London Catholic Worker.